IVA WILD CRAB-APPLE TREE
THAT winter, which everyone called an “old-fashioned” one because the harbor was frozen for miles toward the open sea and the snow blocked the roads in great, curving drifts, they planned and replanned the journey which Mary Christmas would make in the spring. Often in the evening, when the supper dishes were washed and put away, when Mr. Wescott was lost in theMemoirs of P. H. Sheridanand the boys were popping corn over the glowing embers in the deep fireplace, Mrs. Wescott, Mary, and Cynthia would trace her way in the family atlas, which had been purchased at some sacrifice because it featured the State of Maine.
Leaving Portland, her great pack bulging with her wares, she would doubtless take the road to Brunswick, the seat of Bowdoin College, that venerable institution which hadbeen the Alma Mater alike of Mr. Longfellow and of Father Wescott. From thence she would follow the coast, passing through Wiscasset, which held the oldest deed in America in its courthouse, through the friendly towns of Newcastle and Damariscotta, through Belfast and Searsport, once famous for their sea captains and for their gracious, white-winged clippers. The roads that she would travel would be like those they knew—roads that climbed rocky, fir-clad hills and at their summits gave one far-reaching stretches of sea with surf-swept islands and towering white lighthouses; lonely by-roads that led to scraggly farms and gray farmhouses, where lived people who fought a losing fight against the barren land; elm-shaded village roads bordered by green-shuttered houses and by white gates like their own. She would cross the wide Penobscot where it narrowed enough to encourage a ferry, and, passing through Bucksport with its gray fort and old graveyard, would come by easy stages over dark, tumbling hills, on which great shadows alternately marched and rested, to their own village.
“Only you can never be quite sure,” saidFather Wescott, forsaking P. H. Sheridan, “that she won’t come through Castine. With summer visitors there, she ought to sell a lot of that hand-stuff.”
Then Mary Christmas’ route must be retraced just in case she did choose Castine; and they continued to bend over the map until the sharp, warm smell of burned pop-corn arrested their attention.
“Dear me, boys!” cried Mrs. Wescott. “Can’t you manage just one popperful without so many old maids and burned ones?”
Mr. Wescott said nothing, but the face that he again raised from P. H. Sheridan was mildly remonstrant. He was what people called in the nineties “a great hand” for hot buttered pop-corn.
At half-past eight, filled with pop-corn and a drowsy content, they went to bed to dream of Mary Christmas, while the bitterness of the cold made a solitude of the village, and the lighted windows, one by one, faded into the darkness without.
But just before the roads were really dry from the spring mud, before the falling of the apple blossoms told them that theymight begin to watch with some certainty of fulfillment, something happened to the eldest of the Wescotts. It was, in fact, the same curious Thing to which she had been exposed on the day of Mary Christmas’ arrival, but from which she had been saved by the fortunate intervention of her mother’s blue gingham. This time, however, the attack came when she was alone. She had gone into a near-by pasture to hunt for early violets, and on the way home had climbed to the top of a great boulder, from whence she could look far out over the fields and woods. It was a favorite resting-place of hers, and until this particular day she had experienced only pleasure and satisfaction in the exertion of the stiff climb up the rock, in the sense of accomplishment when she had reached the top, when she could rest her warm, tired body against the trunk of a stunted pine and look out over the country. Through a vista in the fir trees she could see a sloping hillside in the vivid green of early spring, and on its summit a wild crab-apple tree, standing against the bluest sky imaginable and flushed with the pink of opening petals.
Then it happened! The beauty of that wild crab-apple, in which for years she had taken only pleasure, began to hurt her with a pain as real and sharp as any other pain. Before this it had been just a lovely thing to which their father had pointed with his cane, so that they might not miss it as they walked on a Sunday afternoon. Now, in one incomprehensible instant, it had become lovely unto tears!
Mary Wescott was almost frightened as she sat on the boulder and looked at the crab-apple tree. She was vaguely fearful lest this sadness which its sudden beauty had made her feel would stay with her and lend an aching loveliness to other long-accustomed, perfectly familiar things. The years from thirteen on seemed all at once dim, perilous ways to her. If one were made to feel pain and sadness by things which had hitherto given only joy, how could one walk safely through the weeks and months to come?
Feeling a sudden longing for the security of the Wescott kitchen and the very tangible occupation of setting the table, she climbeddown the boulder and ran all the way home. She did not say anything to her mother about the crab-apple tree; she was beginning, curiously enough, to understand that there are Things that people do not tell, even to mothers. Mrs. Wescott, however, was a wise woman. Although she brought up her children before temperaments were discovered or Child Guidance Clinics and project methods were invented, she knew perfectly well that Mary’s age was an Age of Discovery; and when she saw Mary’s eyes she gave her an extra dose of sulphur and molasses, and suggested that they spend the afternoon making candy for the church sale.
But when two weeks later the drifting petals and the well-dried roads brought Mary Christmas once more over the hill, and they all ran to meet her with glad shouts, Mary Wescott looked at her with different eyes. For she saw in Mary Christmas what she never could have seen if the crab-apple tree had not finished what the traces of tears had begun.