It was a springhouse, just the kind you read about pioneers having before there were such things as iceboxes or refrigerators. There was a dipper hanging on the wall, made from a gourd, and around a deep dark pool of water were set those same flat stones. The opening where water was dipped up was no bigger than one bucket on its side. All around the edges on clean damp stones were honeycombs and lovely neat, round light-yellow cheeses! There was a big flat pan of milk, too, with a cheesecloth stretched over the top and held down at the sides with stones.
It was like looking at long ago. Marly stooped down and dipped up a dipperful of water. It was clear and cold. Suddenly, just as she was going to drink it, they heard somebody coming down the steps.
"Joe!" Marly's hand trembled and the water spilled all down her front, over her shoes. "What if that's him? And here we—"
He gave her his strongest for-heaven's-sake-shut-up look. And she did. They stood absolutely still, and water went drip-drip, and the steps came nearer. The rocks clicked as if whoever it was had huge nails in his shoes. Marly wished she could shrink away like Alice did in Wonderland so she could hide behind one of those cheeses or behind a stone. Anywhere—
The footsteps stopped. Absolute stillness. Marly held her breath and noticed Joe's deep, steady breathing close beside her. A squirrel ran past the door, which stood half open, then came back and glanced in, and ran off again.
After a long time Marly whispered, "Where did he go? Did he go away?"
She saw Joe swallow. The steps coming were not nearly as bad as the silence since they stopped. Joe looked up as if searching for a window or a crack in the walls, but there weren't any. The only light came from the door. Marly knew why he looked. He felt as she did, as if they were being watched. They waited again. Nothing! Then Joe whispered, "I'll look..." and moved carefully to the door.
He jumped back. She had never seen that look on Joe's face before. "He's standing there, watching. He knows we're here," he said. For once Joe was whispering.
It wasn't at all like Joe not to just walk out and say something. He talked to policemen and bus-drivers and everybody. Marly felt as if her blood had stopped running in her veins. She was shivering all over and still held the dipper in her hand.
"The thing to do is just slip out—and then—"
"What?"
"Then run. Marly, he's got a huge cane." He looked at her. "Can you really run fast for once?"
She wasn't even sure she could move, let alone run. But she nodded. What else could she do? "Oh, Joe, we shouldn't have come and looked like this..." she whispered.
Joe slid toward the door again, beckoning for her to follow. "Now I'll jump out and start down the hill and you come on after, as fast as you can. Don't look up the steps, or anywhere. Just run," he said.
She felt paralyzed. But she found that she could move. She slid after Joe along the cold drippy stone wall, so close she touched him. He got to the door, and she heard him take a deep breath.
Then he leaped out into the sun and ran. She went after him, stumbling and running and half falling down the next steps, which went to a little dam, and then streaking over the meadow.
The hermit shouted after them. At the bottom of the meadow they went under the wire fence. For the first time, then, Marly dared to glance back. There he was, a tall thin bearded man. He was halfway down the steps. He was waving his arms, and he had the strangest thing she ever saw over his shoulders—a kind of yoke, with a bucket hanging on each end. He looked like a gigantic eagle with its wings spread. In one hand was a cane.
"He was going after water and heard us in there, I guess," Joe said. "Come on!"
On their own road, Joe said he hadn't really been scared. It was only that you couldn't tell about people like that. "You hear such queer things. In the newspapers there are all those awful stories, like that old man who went into that trailer in New Mexico." He kept glancing back. "If I'd been alone, I'd have just talked to him. Fritz says he's a queer old man but nice when you know him." He stopped in the road. "Maybe we shouldn't have run like that," he said.
"Joe, we couldn't just stay and have him come in after us. We couldn't!"
"It didn't seem like we could, did it?" Joe looked awfully bothered. "Until after, I didn't think of anything else we could do. But now..." He stood still. "I'm about to go back, Marly. That was a dumb thing to do—just running like that. I was thinking about you." His voice accused her. "Why do you always have to follow along?"
"You would too have run! You were just as scared as I was, and you know it! Besides, it was all your fault, going around looking at everything the way you did. Why, maybe he was right there in his house when you kept looking in!"
"That note on the box said he was gone," Joe said.
"It didn't say what day he was gone, did it? And it didn't say when he was coming back."
He looked at her angrily. "Why didn't you think of that before?" He didn't like the idea of himself peering through that screen, practically right into the face of the hermit himself.
"I'm going back and apologize," he said.
"Joe! Now? By yourself?"
"Well, you don't need to come!"
"I didn't mean I wanted to. I only thought maybe you'd better go back with Fritz or somebody. Joe—the thing to do is to get introduced—"
He looked uncertain. But then he started walking toward home again. "Maybe so," he said.
Goodness, boys were funny! She didn't blame Joe in the least for being scared—who wouldn't be?—and she didn't mind saying she was scared either. But she knew that if she should mention one word about the way they ran out of that springhouse and down the hill, he would hate her for a week, if not forever. She wanted to tell it, making it as gruesome as she could, but she knew Joe would never forgive her if she so much as mentioned it. For the millionth time, she was glad she wasn't a boy. It was all right for girls to be scared or silly or even ask dumb questions. Everybody just laughed and thought it was funny. But if anybody caught Joe asking a dumb question or even thought he was the littlest bit scared, he went red and purple and white. Daddy was even something like that, as old as he was.
At their own lane she said, "Joe, I don't blame you one little bit for being scared. Honest, I—"
"Just shut up about it, can't you?" he said.
She had to hang on to her tongue so hard it practically ached. She actually had to hold the tip with her teeth to keep from telling, especially when Joe went out to work with Daddy at the weeding, and she and Mother were alone with the dishes. Once she started to say, "This morning Joe and I—" and stopped and bit her tongue.
"Did you see Chrissie this morning? She didn't feel a bit well last night," Mother said.
"No. We didn't." If she told this time, Marly thought, she'd never get to go anywhere with Joe again as long as she lived. It was a relief to finish the dishes and go up to her room and shut the door. She read all afternoon so she wouldn't go down and tell. And when it was time to help with supper, Joe was in the kitchen, washing.
He looked at her, hard. "I'll bet a cow you told Mother all about it," he said.
"I didn't! So!"
"Didn't what?" Daddy asked, coming in.
"What you'll do this time is tell on yourself," Marly said to Joe in a whisper, and giggled.
"I'm going over to see Fritz after supper," Joe said.
But as it turned out, he didn't. And Marly didn't have to worry about telling that story anymore, because the only other person in the world to know it, besides her and Joe, came to call right after supper and told it himself.
You could have "knocked Joe down with a canary feather," as Mr. Chris would say it. When the knock came, Joe happened to answer. He stood there, staring. He actually forgot to say, "Come in." Daddy stood up from his chair and took his pipe out of his mouth and said, "Hello! Come in, come in."
When the hermit came in, the whole room was suddenly absolutely thick with the smell of goats, just like Chrissie said. He didn't look very different from any elderly
man, close to, and had a clipped gray beard and his coat buttoned all the way down the front. His hair looked quite combed, and he was tall and thin and carried the same cane he had waved from the steps that morning.
"Good evening," he said.
He sounded polite and special, the way he spoke, not wild in the least, in spite of the wild goat smell all around him. "I went to ask Mr. Chris where the children lived," he said. "I'm afraid I frightened them away." He looked straight at Joe and then at Marly. "I did not know who it was, in my spring-house. I thought it was some bad boys who have come, sometimes, to steal my cheeses. Even, once, they dropped every cheese and poured all my milk into the spring."
Mother and Daddy glanced at each other, and at Joe, and at Marly, questioning.
"In the spring? What did they do that for?" Marly cried. "Why, it's a lovely spring—"
"Were you at his place, Joe? You and Marly?" Daddy asked. "I wondered what you two had been up to today."
The hermit spoke again, quickly, and held out a package in his hand, wrapped in newspaper. "Nothing was harmed," he said. "It is all right. I hope they will come again." He was looking at Mother, and Mother moved to him and took the package from his hand.
"I brought some of my own cheese and honey," he said. "Very good. There is no goat cheese like this except in Switzerland, where I came from as a boy."
"Thank you very much," Mother said.
"If the children will come again tomorrow, I will show them how it is I make the cheese," he said.
"And the chains?" Joe spoke for the first time, eagerly, relieved. "Fritz said you showed him how you make those wooden chains."
The hermit laughed. His teeth were long and brown, but his laugh was beautiful, Marly thought. It sounded pleased. "The chains, they are simple!" he said. "If you have wood and a good knife, I will show you now. Tonight."
Mother glanced at Daddy. Marly knew she was wondering whether Daddy would want this goat-man to stay. He used to object to people coming and staying, especially queer old people who talked and talked. Mother knew all sorts of people wherever she went, it seemed, and they often came to call while Daddy was away.
"Please sit down," Daddy said. "Joe, that one knife we sharpened—"
Whoever would have thought that morning of the hermit sitting that very night in their very own kitchen? He took an ordinary stick of kindling from the box and smelled it and said, "Maple. Good!" and proceeded to make a neat little totem pole out of it. He worked quickly with long, stained fingers. Miraculously the first link appeared, and the second, and the third. He kept having Joe do some of the work, to learn. Joe worked slowly, his mouth pursed up.
"It is rough, this, to show you. It should be done carefully," the hermit said. He stayed for four solid hours! Before the chain was finished, Mother made a big pot of coffee. She let it boil and boil, and it drove some of the goat smell out of the house.
When he went away, the hermit said, "Promise to come back soon. The Father and the Mother, too." He looked at Marly. "I have a telescope. Mr. Chris said you will like to see through it. Not stars only. Small things everywhere. From my hill"—he smiled—"I get acquainted with all the ducks on the pond."
Joe said, not looking at Mother or at Daddy, "I'm sorry I looked into your house the way I did. I thought..."
Marly wondered if Joe was going to tell the truth, that he thought the hermit was away. But he didn't. His voice hung in the air, and the hermit said, "When I am not there, come in and make yourself at home. I am sometimes at the barn, in the woods perhaps, or at the hives." He looked at Daddy. "For a time my own son lived with me here on the mountain," he said. "Now he is gone to be a soldier."
As he went off, Joe sat on the step and watched. For a long time he just sat there, swinging the chain in his hand.
"What on earth will we do with this awful cheese?" Mother said. "Phew! It's strong!"
Joe stood up and went in. He looked just the way Daddy used to look when he was absolutely furious. "It's wonderful cheese!" he said. "And he's a wonderful old man! I'm going to learn how to make cheese and chains and everything and get me a house and live just like him."
He went tramping up the stairs.
"Well!" Daddy said.
9. A Big Decision
The summer world grew and swelled and ripened. Weeds along the edges of the fields and in the rail-fence corners were up to Marly's waist. By the Fourth of July they were beginning to go brown, and Daddy warned Joe and Marly not to toss their sparkler wires too far with the wires hot. At the celebration in town, ice cream dripped before you could get your cone licked even once around. That was really summer.
"Summer," Mr. Chris said that night after the fireworks were over and they were all having homemade ice cream on his front porch, "is fruit time mostly, just the way spring is mostly flower time." Marly could see that it was true. For the rest of the summer it seemed to get truer and truer. Every flower that had bloomed bore some kind of seed or fruit, and it was a surprise to see how the different ones turned out. For instance, the greeny-looking clintonia flower bells became beautiful blue berries, but there were so few of those you could search the whole woods and not find enough to string a bracelet. Rose hips were everywhere, yellow and red, and you could make strings of beads clear to your toes without stirring off the porch. Lily of the valley bore clusters of brightest red; but the false lily of the valley in the woods had berries that were speckled with brown. Solomon's seal had dark blue berries in a neat row where the flowers had hung under the leaves. It was as if all its little bells had run away and forgotten their clappers. The large pale flowers of the mayapple had dropped their petals, and their middles swelled bigger and bigger; Chrissie said she'd good price for a basket to make preserves 9 but it hard to find so much as a pintful on account of the animals liking them so well.
Where trillium had spread its wide white petals, there were now long beads of berries, some red and some black. Twisted-stalk had baubles, little transparent red berries you could see into. Mr. Chris said Dutchman's-breeches had such bad fruit for cows to eat that their summer name was "little blue staggers."
Joe and Marly did so much berrying, what with strawberries and then red raspberries and then blackberries, that Joe said he was absolutely berried-out. But they kept going. Fritz showed them such special blackberry patches that they could fill a quart without taking a single step, and each berry was the size of Mr. Chris's thumb. Every time, too, there was apt to be pie afterwards. And with blueberries or huckleberries, there might be pie and then muffins for breakfast besides and maybe pudding for lunch.
For a while chokecherries were thick on the trees along the lumber roads that had been a mist of white blooms earlier. They meant jelly. So did elderberries, later.
Eat—eat—eat! Not only the wild things but all the things in Daddy's garden got ready for eating about the same time, until Mother said she felt food running out of her ears. She canned and canned and juiced and juiced and sent lots of things to a freezer so they could be used on weekends during winter visits. "I feel like Joseph in Egypt getting ready for the lean years during the fat years," she said.
In August Marly found the oddest berry she had ever seen. Mr. Chris had warned her "never to eat strangers," so she carried a big spray of these to ask him about. Each berry sat on a cunning scarlet flower, which was left behind when the berry was picked away.
"Pokeberries," Mr. Chris said. "Are they ready already? We always made ink out of them for school."
He said she could taste them if she wanted to. And of course she did—once. But she'd as soon drink ink for breakfast.
When Mother saw them, she laughed and said, "Grandma called them inkberries. She was always sorry to see them starting to ripen. They were a sign it was almost time for us to go home again, back to school."
Marly gathered a whole lot of them and made a little dish of ink. Mother said she'd never in her life seen such a big fuss over such a little juice. A whole summer of jellying and juicing
, she said, hadn't made so much mess in the kitchen. Purple stains were absolutely everywhere, on the ceiling and even in drawers that had been a little open. But there was enough in the dish, finally, to write almost a half-page of a letter to Carol. "Imagine—a pokeberry letter!" Marly said. "That's as nice as strawberry bouquets."
The carpets of wintergreen began to show red berries, and Mr. Chris said they'd not stop growing all winter long. "Lost people have been known to brush away the snow and eat those berries to save their lives," he said.
The thick green leaves tasted just like chewing gum. Chrissie served for dessert one night what she said was the "best berry-combination in the whole world"—wintergreen berries and blueberries. Marly didn't say so, but raspberries and currants seemed better to her.
The creatures in the drying ponds sang louder every night; the creatures in the grass and in the fields sang louder every day! Mr. Chris said they knew winter was coming soon, and they had to get all the noise out of their systems.
Then a few leaves drifted down. Winged seeds lay beneath the tulip trees, and all along the roads milkweed pods began to spill white silky threads.
The days seemed to go faster and faster. Mr. Chris looked sad. One night he looked up at the sky and said in the saddest voice Marly had ever heard from him, "When the moon comes full again, there'll be a killing frost."
Chrissie looked sad, too. "I wish you could see the leaves turn, Lee," she said again and again. "After you go, I won't be able to stand looking in this direction at night. It's been so good to have somebody in this house, watching for the light in the evening just the way I did when your grandma was here."
Three weeks—then two weeks until time for school. It seemed odd to Marly how sudden it seemed after the whole summer. Summer looked like forever in front of you, and now it was almost gone. She hated the thought of leaving Maple Hill so much that she even hated the boxes Mother started to pack in. But Joe whistled as he brought them down. He didn't seem to care much about anything, Marly thought.
Miracles on Maple Hill (Harcourt Young Classics) Page 8
