Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (13 page)

“How can Father
bear
to read all this? I think it would be easier to read Japanese,” sighed Randy.

“I guess he's a pretty intelligent man,” said Oliver.

Their arms ached and their heads hummed with phrases such as “trade cycle” and “economic development,” and the light grew dimmer and the dogs whined to go out and it seemed as if the clue would never, never come to light.

Randy paused unbelievingly to digest the title of one of the books:
Die Politische Oekonomie von Standpunkte der Geschichtlichen Methode.

“Just listen to this a minute,” said Randy, and wildly mispronounced the massive title. “Words like that sound like something you could build a house with.”

“Or sock a giant with,” said Oliver.

Nevertheless it was the pages of this forbidding volume that released the clue; the folded paper fluttered, like a blue butterfly, to the floor. Randy and Oliver fell from the ladder simultaneously.

Randy held the message up to the fading light and read the words:

“Now comes the hour to put the game away.

    
And greet the joyous season of the year.

    
The time of Tree and Star is drawing near;

Forget the search and revel in the day!

“P.S. In other words the search is suspended until after the holidays, when again a clue will come to you by mail.

“P.S. II. And remember, not a word to
anyone!
”

“The joyous season of the year,” said Oliver. “What's joyous about November?”

“You know what
I
think,” Randy said. “I think we've been smarter than they expected. We weren't supposed to get this far in the search till around Christmastime.”

“It must be Mona and Rush and Mark who did it all, then,” said Oliver. “Your own family always counts on you to be dumber than you are.”

“I'm sort of glad it's over for a while,” said Randy. “Now we can concentrate on getting ready for Christmas.”

CHAPTER VII

The Joyous Season

Now comes the hour to put the game away.

    
And greet the joyous season of the year.

    
The time of Tree and Star is drawing near;

Forget the search and revel in the day!

Thanksgiving weekend came and went, but it was too fast. There was no time to catch up. Rush and Mark kept talking about boys at school that no one else had ever heard of and roaring together over private jokes. Mona seemed almost like a stranger, so grown-up, and she had a new haircut (very short, with bangs in front) and openly used lipstick. It was not exactly like old times, and no sooner had they come, it seemed, than they departed, leaving an air of haste behind them. The house was much too large and quiet for comfort, and Isaac was homesick for Rush all over again.

One good thing, though: Father didn't depart.

“And I'm not going to for a long time, either,” he said. “I don't even want to go to Carthage for pipe tobacco. I just want to walk around the place, and talk to my kids, and throw sticks for the dogs and eat everything Cuffy cooks.”

It was wonderful to have him back. Every afternoon when they came home, they knew he would be there, to talk to them and listen to them and help them with their homework. At night he often read aloud for an hour after supper: old favorite stories like
The White Seal
and
The Five Children
and
Castle Blair
and
Tom Sawyer.
If he was busy, it was still comfortable to know that he was there and hear the benevolent woodpecker sounds that issued from his typewriter.

So time, instead of lagging, moved easily toward Christmas, and suddenly they were all back again and there was time to get accustomed to each other, and home was home the way it used to be.

None of the Melendys ever forgot that vacation—in the memory of each those weeks had a shine and glitter that would never grow dim. For one thing the weather was right. December, unlike some Decembers, seemed to have modeled itself on all the Christmas cards in the world. It snowed and snowed, and when it did not snow, the sun came out and the fields sparkled as if they had been covered with granulated sugar. There was hardly any wind, so the trees kept their heavy epaulettes of snow, and the iron deer in front of the house wore big white mobcaps on their antlers.

“I keep expecting the smoke to come out of the chimney and form the words, ‘Season's Greetings,'” said Rush.

The children were in and out of the house all day; nobody's galoshes ever had a chance to dry, and Cuffy just spread newspapers all over the hall and gave up worrying about footprints.

Outdoors the scene was a litter of sleds; Melendy sleds and the sleds of friends, whizzing down the hillsides between the trees, or idle and abandoned on the snowy lawn. Mark and Rush and Dave Addison skied down the east slope (where there were plenty of good hazards), and even Willy Sloper took to snowshoes: he looked like a big web-footed duck as he tracked across the pastures. Oliver and Billy Anton got two dishpans and went spinning, toplike, down the south slope until they were dizzy and sick at their stomachs, and then they'd lie down quietly in the deep cold feather bed of snow until they felt well enough to start spinning again. The dogs had white beards all the time; and the air smelled very clean—so dry and cold that everyone's nostrils felt crackly inside.

Another thing that made them all extremely happy was the fact that Mrs. Oliphant came home with Mona to visit them; they were always glad to see the tall, deep-voiced old lady who was their good friend. Besides being an interesting person—among other things she had once been kidnapped by gypsies—she liked children, and seemed to respect them, so that they in turn liked and respected her. With Cuffy and Mrs. Oliphant both in the house it was like having two grandmothers, Randy said. “Two special, marvelous, made-to-order ones. Better than any real inherited ones that I ever saw.” Undoubtedly her presence contributed to the joyful spirit that pervaded the house.

Indoors, when the day was over, there was an atmosphere of wild festivity. The Office piano tinkled and clanked and thundered under Rush's flying fingers, and everybody was always bursting into Christmas carols.

“The first day of Christmas my true love sent to me

A partr-i-idge in a pear tree.…”

That was all that Oliver could ever remember of the song, but it was enough to suit him, and he droned it over and over again accompanied by sniffles. His nose was always running from the cold.

Randy was haunted by “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” just as she was haunted by it every Christmas, and Rush kept bellowing, “Deck the halls with boughs of holly,” in his terrific new voice. Somewhere between September and now it had undergone, and was still undergoing, a change. When he spoke or sang it was as if some new person, a stranger, had come into the house, but he looked and acted the same as ever.

“And speaking of decking,” he said one day, “we ought to all go out and gather some deck-material from the woods. Mark knows where to find holly.”

This was the kind of errand everyone enjoyed, and in a matter of minutes they were all back in their wet galoshes and steamed mittens, and on their way along the furry, muffled paths. They brought their sleds to carry home the loot and also because it was probable that they would find a good coasting place or two along the way. The dogs bounded and floundered beside them, and Mark led the procession.

It was one of the snowing days. The flakes came down in big soft blobs like pillow feathers. The woods were silent and transfigured.

But the Melendys took care of the silence; they whooped and roughhoused and zigzagged and stopped to coast.… Oliver found himself a house under the bottom branches of a spruce; the snow had covered them and bowed them down, and when he crawled in under them, very carefully, he found himself in a little sweet-smelling igloo. Flakes tinkled delicately on the roof above, and he was very happy.

“Where's Oliver?” asked Mona's voice after a while, and he sat there, close to the tree trunk, listening with pleasure as they called and searched for him. When they began to sound worried he came out and showed them his hiding place and after that, of course, they each had to find one. For a while there was a savage village in the woods, though whether it belonged to Huron Indians or Alaskan Eskimos, no one could agree. Even Mona joined in the game. She had come home immensely grown-up, but seemed to be dropping a year of her age each day, and it was much more comfortable like that. Nevertheless it was she who first remembered about the time.

“Heavens, kids, it'll be dark before you know it!”

“And the place is still about a mile away,” said Mark.

They jog-trotted through the quiet woods until they came to a rocky hillside where the holly trees grew. They looked glossy as jet against all that white, and their berries were like coral beads, but they were very prickly to pick and a lot of shrieking and complaining accompanied the cutting of branches. Oliver just rebelled, though being Oliver he did not advertise it but simply withdrew quietly and began pulling strips of papery bark from a birch tree. He planned to write some letters on it when he got home; the Indian spirit was in his blood.

By the time they had all the holly they needed, and all the laurel and long boas of ground pine, the light was beginning to fade. “We'll have to hurry or we might get a little lost,” Mark said. He, after all, knew this territory better than any of them, having lived in it all his life, and they trotted obediently along behind him, single file, through the pearly dusk. The dogs had gotten bored and chilly and gone home ages ago. The children fell silent; they were tired and had made more than the day's quota of noise already. They could hear the snow, now prickling and whispering, and as the darkness grew the woods seemed strange to them and threatening. They were cold, too, and hungry; longing to get home.

Suddenly with a terrifying crash of underbrush something burst out of the woods to the left and just in front of them: a huge, wild, galloping thing! Mona screamed and so did Randy, and all their hearts lunged in their chests before they realized that the creature which had crossed their path and was now vanishing up the slope to their right was a deer.

“A ten-point buck,” said Mark, in some awe. “And he just about stepped on my boot!”

“Too bad he didn't in a way,” Rush said. “Then when people asked you how you'd hurt your foot, you could kind of yawn and say, ‘Oh, a deer stepped on it in passing. They never look where they're going.'”

“Brother!” said Oliver. “That's the closest to a wild animal I ever was, outside a zoo.”

The deer had broken their mood of silence. Rush, pulling his loaded sled, began to sing “The Holly and the Ivy,” and everyone else joined in.

“Hey, we're not bad!” said Rush, at the end of the carol. “Especially now that my voice has changed and we've got a bass.”

“I was thinking we sounded swell,” said Mark modestly.

“Well, why don't we do something about it then?” suggested Mona, who did not believe in hiding any lights under any bushels. “Have a chorus or give a concert or something.”

“Why don't we go carol singing on Christmas Eve?” said Oliver. “We could go and sing in front of people's houses, and they'd ask us in and give us cake and stuff.” And I'd get to stay up good and late for once, he thought.

To his surprise this idea was greeted with enthusiasm by all.

“We never did it before, at least not seriously,” Randy said.

“There are lots of people we could sing to,” Mona said. “The Cottons and the Wheelwrights; Mr. Coughing.…”

“Mr. Titus,” said Oliver warmly.

“Oh, natch. We'd never leave him out.”

“Let's sing some more right now to practice up,” said Randy. “Let's sing about King Wenceslas.”

Together they sang the nice, good-hearted ballad as they marched through the woods, Mark leading as if he were the King himself and the others treading in his footprints.

*   *   *

On Christmas Eve the snow was still thick on the ground, but the sky was clear and starry. The Melendys, at Father's suggestion, had borrowed back the team of work horses, Jess and Damon, from Mr. Addison. They also borrowed the big old-fashioned hauling-sleigh from his barn, and two of his children, Daphne and Dave, to help with the singing. Cuffy and Mrs. Oliphant refused to be lured away from the warm bright house. “We'll stay at home and welcome Santa Claus,” said Mrs. Oliphant, busily tacking stockings to the mantel. “It's years since I've met an attractive man of my own age.”

Willy drove the sleigh and Father perched beside him on the driver's seat, but the children sat in back of them snuggled into the deep straw that filled the boxlike sleigh.