The Changeling Read online

  Ivy, who was usually very patient with Martha’s weeping, almost lost her temper. “Stop it, this minute,” she said. “Here, you hold the flashlight while I get the rope around her neck.”

  Martha managed to pull herself together, and the three of them made their way carefully through the stable, past the hitching racks, past the dark shadow of the Smiths’ house, across the yard to the front gate—where suddenly the horrible truth dawned on them. The front gate was closed and locked. The girls had never seen it even closed before, and it had never occurred to them that it would be locked at night. Of course, they could easily climb the fence, but there was no way in the world to get Dolly to the other side. They were still staring at the lock in unbelieving terror when the floodlights went on in the stable yard, and there was Mr. Smith standing close behind them carrying a gun.

  Startled by the lights and the sudden appearance of Mr. Smith, Dolly sidestepped quickly, and her hoof came down on Ivy’s toes. Ivy screamed in pain, and that was the last straw. Martha’s stomach did what it had been threatening to do all evening. The next time Martha looked at Mr. Smith, the gun had disappeared. He’d probably realized that he had enough of an advantage without it.

  Within a very few minutes, Dolly was back in her stall and Ivy and Martha were sitting in the kitchen of the Smiths’ house. Ivy, still angry, beautifully silent, had her shoe off and was soaking her rapidly swelling foot in a pan of water. Martha sat beside her, pale green and saturated with tears.

  Mrs. Smith, whom the girls had rarely seen before, and who never seemed to take much part in the horsey doings of the rest of the Smiths, was bustling around in a bright-colored robe, and across the room Mr. Smith sat at the kitchen table saying nothing at all. Once he got up and came over to look at Ivy’s foot and agree with Mrs. Smith that it was not broken, only bruised. Then he went back to his chair.

  Martha finally stopped crying, and her cheeks were just beginning to dry when she remembered something she’d heard about horse thieves. It hadn’t occurred to her before that that's what they were—horse thieves! A new tidal wave of tears flooded her face, almost drowning her in their hot flow.

  “Now, now,” Mrs. Smith said. “You’ve got to stop that. It’s not so bad as all that.”

  Martha mopped at her sopping face and gasped, “Do—do—they hang you if you’re only eight years old?”

  “Oh, you poor little thing,” Mrs. Smith said, hugging Martha’s bowed head up against her. Then she turned to her husband and said, “Dan, what on earth is behind all this?”

  Ivy spoke then for the first time since they’d been brought into the house. “You mean you don’t know what he’s going to do to Dolly?” she said. “That he’s going to send her away to be killed?”

  “Dan?” Mrs. Smith said in a small, questioning voice.

  “Could you come in the other room a minute, Lil,” Mr. Smith said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  The Smiths both went out, and Ivy turned to Martha. “Do you want to run for it?” she asked. “I can’t, but you could go right out the back door and run home.”

  “No, no,” Martha whispered. “They know where I live, and besides I’m afraid to go over the trail alone.”

  When the Smiths came back into the room, they were both smiling, and everything was suddenly all right. They had decided to drive the girls most of the way home—and not insist on telling their parents—if the girls would in turn promise to give up horse stealing. And about Dolly, Mr. Smith said, “We’ve decided to just turn her out on the winter pasture for the rest of her life. I do sell a horse to the factories now and then, but Dolly’s given more years of service than most. I guess she’s earned a retirement.”

  Then, when it was over and Martha was jumping up and down with joy and relief, Ivy cried. Not buckets like Martha, but just two big tears that glittered in her eyes and turned her heavy eyelashes to thick shreds of wet satin. Ivy didn’t say thank you with words the way Martha was doing. But as she was sitting on the floor putting her shoe back on over her swollen foot, she looked up at the Smiths and smiled; and Martha noticed that the Smiths stood perfectly still looking down at her for a long time, as if they had seen something very strange or beautiful.

  9

  ONE OF THE GOOD THINGS that came from saving Dolly was getting to know Mrs. Smith. Martha and Ivy had scarcely seen her before the night of the kidnapping. They had caught glimpses of her once or twice in the stable, and once they had passed her walking on the trail carrying a metal tool chest and an easel. She was a small slender woman; and, although they knew she was a grandmother, she seemed to be of no particular age at all. She was a painter.

  After the kidnapping incident, Mrs. Smith began talking to Martha and Ivy whenever they visited the stables, and very soon they were good friends. After a while they found out why Mrs. Smith took no part in the stable business. She told them she didn’t really approve of renting horses as a way of earning a living. Mrs. Smith had strange feelings about horses, at least strange for an adult. One day when Martha asked her if she liked horses she said, “I love some of them. Some of them I can’t stand.”

  “Why?” was all that Martha could think to say, but Ivy went further.

  “Which ones do you think are bad?”

  “Well, the big gray, Matador, for instance,” she said. “Matador is cruel. He’d be a killer except that he is also a coward.”

  By then Martha had thought of other questions, but Ivy was nodding her head as if she understood perfectly and agreed. So Martha only asked, “What about Dolly? What do you think about her?”

  “Dolly is beautiful,” Mrs. Smith said. Beautiful was a word that Mrs. Smith used a great deal, about a great many things. Once she told Martha and Ivy that if they had to time to pose for her someday, she would like to paint their pictures. When Martha asked why, she smiled and said, “Because you two are very beautiful.”

  Martha was amazed. She knew that Mrs. Smith used the word beautiful a lot, but still it was a surprise to hear it used to describe Ivy and herself. Ivy often seemed beautiful to Martha, but she’d heard grown-ups refer to Ivy as “unkempt” or “pitiful looking”; and as for herself, Martha had always known she was the unbeautiful Abbott.

  But the picture did turn out to be very beautiful.

  They posed for it in the pasture, near the edge of the lake. Martha stood beside the trunk of a small tree, looking up and with both hands stretched upward on the trunk. Ivy was stretched out on a limb just over her head. Mrs. Smith had them pose for several minutes while she sketched in the picture, and then she let them go away while she painted for a long time. Finally they came back while she put in their faces and hands, which turned out to be just about all of them that showed.

  Mrs. Smith had painted a great deal more tree into the picture than was really there. Limbs and branches came from everywhere filling most of the canvas with mysterious green and leafy swirls. Out of the sea of green only faces and hands stood out plainly, glowing with a strange light that was also faintly tinged with a bright soft green.

  When Martha and Ivy were finally allowed to look at the finished picture, they were amazed and de lighted.

  “We do look beautiful, don’t we?” Martha whispered to Ivy, and Ivy nodded.

  “We look like we were part of the tree,” she said. “I mean, as if we lived up there and never came down to earth.”

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Smith said.

  The game of the Tree People started soon after that, and probably the painting had something to do with it. But if the inspiration for the game came from the painting, the real beginning didn’t come until one afternoon sometime later, halfway up one of the oak trees in Bent Oaks Grove.

  Martha and Ivy had always played in the oak trees. They were perfect trees for climbing, with their wide heavy branches and the easy slope of many of their bent limbs. And, of course, Ivy was already a very practiced tree climber. Aunt Evaline’s house in Harley’s Crossing was right at the edge of a forest, and
Ivy said that she had started climbing trees almost before she had learned to walk. Now, at Bent Oaks, she could walk up sloping branches standing erect, with her arms held out for balance and her bare feet sure and steady on the rough bark. Sometimes she even did a kind of dance on the wide lower branches, bending and swaying easily and smoothly with a control and balance that seemed almost magic to Martha.

  Of course, Martha couldn’t begin to do everything that Ivy did, but she kept trying, and little by little she improved. It became easier as she worked at it, and the fact that she had begun to lose weight helped some, too. Finally she could follow Ivy to most of the special places in the Bent Oaks. All the special places had names by then—The Lookout, Falcon’s Roost, Far Tower, and the Doorway to Space.

  The afternoon that the Tree People began, Martha was swinging in one of the rope swings when she looked up and saw Ivy walking down a limb towards her. She was barefooted and her skirt was tucked into the legs of her underpants as usual, but she had her sweater tied around her shoulders like a cape and her hair was full of leaves twisted into a green crown. But even without the costume, Martha would have known by her face that she was somebody else.

  “Who are you?” Martha called.

  “I am a princess from the Land of the Green Sky,” Ivy said. “I have discovered the Doorway to Space, and any moment now I will be on the Treeway that leads to the planet Earth.”

  “At any moment” was a phrase that Ivy used a lot. She was always saying that “at any moment” this or that might be going to happen. But what Martha and Ivy didn’t realize as they began to develop their knowledge of the marvelous Land of the Green Sky and the people who lived there, was that “at any moment” their time together was going to be over—for two long years.

  One day Ivy didn’t come to play at Bent Oaks when Martha expected her, and the next day at school Martha heard that the Carsons had gone away. And that was all—for two long years.

  The two years when you are eight and nine are two of the longest years in anybody’s life, and they were particularly long for Martha. She still rode, and Mrs. Smith went on being a very special friend; but at home, Martha went back to dead center. At least that’s the way it seemed in comparison to the hurricane existence of the other Abbotts. All around Martha’s quiet dead center of books and daydreams, went promotions to vice president, golf tournaments, projects, campaigns, and social events—along with daily flocks of older boys and girls, friends of Tom and Cath, trailing behind them noisy slip-streams of talk about dances, games, parties and the opposite sex.

  Sometimes Martha made a new friend, but never one who was just right, or who lasted very long. She cried less, those two years, and the dark wasn’t so frightening; but a lot of things that seemed as simple as breathing to other people, still seemed as far away as the stars for Martha.

  The Abbott household was full of stars. Martha’s mother and father had won things and led things and been the best at things, all their lives. Cath, of course, had always shone at everything—and in junior high she was more of a star than ever. She was chosen class president, won first prize in the science fair, and was even the first girl in her gang to get a figure. Tom, besides being absolutely everybody’s friend and favorite person, was a star in little league, and then he was quarterback of the touch football team.

  But even though Tom was just as much a star as the other Abbotts, he always seemed a little more reachable to Martha. There was one day, for instance, when Martha stumbled into Tom lying in the grass behind the garage, with his arms across his face. He looked strange, flushed and puffy. Martha asked him if he was all right.

  “Sure,” he said, turning his face away. “I feel great. Just great.”

  “You don’t look very good,” Martha said.

  “Look Marty. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Martha sat down in the grass beside Tom and waited. After a moment Tom looked at her and grinned a sour kind of grin and said, “That is, there’s nothing wrong with me except I’m probably the world’s worst quarterback. I threw a really stupid pass at the game today, and the coach yanked me out and yelled at me in front of everybody. And he kept me out all the rest of the game, too. And then on the way home Dad read me out all over again.” Tom made a stern face and said, “If you’d just listened to what I’ve been telling you about that play, Son, that would never have happened.”

  Martha giggled at Tom’s imitation, and Tom grinned back. He asked Martha what she was doing, and when she said she was just on her way to sit in the grass and read Wind in the Willows for the third time, Tom asked her if she’d like to play a game of Monopoly. Martha didn’t think she liked Monopoly much, but she said okay. Tom and his friends had a Monopoly fad going and, considering the amount of time they’d been spending on it, Martha thought it must be better than it looked.

  That day she had a run of beginner’s luck and lit on all the right things. She could have absolutely wiped Tom out if she’d tried, but she didn’t much want to. Taking someone’s money and houses away seemed like an awful way to win. When Tom finally lit on her most expensive property she said, “Look, Tom. Let’s pretend that I was out of town and I just asked you to stay there and take care of the hotel, and you didn’t have to pay the rent.”

  But Tom laughed and said, “You are really crazy, Marty Mouse. This game is Monopoly, not Make-Believe. You have to stick to the rules or it spoils everything. Someday you’re going to have to learn how to play some real games.”

  When Martha asked why, he laughed harder; but she really meant it. She really couldn’t understand why it was more fun to always stick to somebody else’s rules.

  After Ivy had been gone almost a year, the Carsons came back to Rosewood Hills; but Ivy didn’t come with them. Instead, Martha got a letter from Harley’s Crossing. Aunt Evaline was better and back at home, and Ivy had gone to live with her again. Ivy never wrote to Martha while she was with her family. She never said why, but Martha suspected that her father wouldn’t let her. When the Carsons left Rosewood Hills, they never left a forwarding address, and there were usually good reasons why they didn’t want to be found for a while. But once Ivy was with Aunt Evaline, she wrote every now and then. Her letters were as strange as she was, with no beginnings and no ends, at least not the kind most people write. Usually they said things like:

  Dear Martha. There is a nest under our table. We think that at least one of the eggs is going to be something very unusual. I will let you know if it does. LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy.

  Martha thought about that one for a long time. She tried to picture a nest under the various tables in the Abbott house and finally decided it must be an outdoor table—Ivy had said that she and Aunt Evaline did a lot of things outdoors. But that still left a lot of questions unanswered; and they didn’t get answered, because the next letter was about something else.

  Hello. I am studying to be a dancer, again. At Last. I know I didn’t finish being a dancer last time because I know I am still one inside. My teacher is very old and once she danced before a king. I will too, someday. LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy.

  Then, at last, after Martha had already started the fifth grade, the phone rang and it was Ivy; she was back in Rosewood Hills.

  10

  IVY WAS BACK BECAUSE Aunt Evaline had been very sick again and had been sent away to a rest home. Ivy wanted to know if Martha could meet her in Bent Oaks Grove. It was a Saturday, so Martha said she was going for a walk and then she ran all the way to the grove. She reached the stone gate towers completely out of breath, but Ivy was there before her.

  Ivy seemed hardly changed at all. Perhaps she was a little taller, and her hair was longer. Instead of flying loose, it was braided in one wide braid that hung down her back so far that she could sit on the end of it. But all around her face little wisps escaped, as wild as ever, making curly black petals for her dark flower face. She was still very thin.

  She noticed that Martha was thinner, too, right away. “You’re much thinn
er,” she said, “and you have bands on your teeth, and your hair is longer and yellower. When your mouth is shut, you look like a Viking Princess.” Martha thought about that every time she looked in the mirror for a long time. No one had ever said anything so interesting about Martha’s looks before.

  “What was it like at Aunt Evaline’s?” Martha asked.

  “Just like always,” Ivy said. “Except Aunt Evaline isn’t very strong anymore. The woods are the same, and the river, and some of our friends. The best new thing was the dancing lessons.” Ivy’s face always seemed to be lit from inside when she talked about dancing. “There’s this old lady in Harley’s Crossing. Aunt Evaline has known her for years and years. Her name is Mrs. W., because nobody has time to say her whole name. Anyway, she was a very great ballet dancer when she was young. She’s too old to even do much teaching, but because of being Aunt Evaline’s friend, she started giving me lessons last year. So now I’m a dancer again.”

  “Again?” Martha asked.

  “In this reincarnation,” Ivy said. “Remember, I told you about how I knew I was one before.”

  “Oh, yes.” Martha said. Then, after a while, she asked “Now that you’re a dancer, are you a changeling anymore?” She was pretty sure what the answer would be, but it seemed important to hear Ivy say it.

  Ivy said, “Don’t be silly. You’re either a changeling or you’re not.” And Martha felt strangely relieved. She didn’t know exactly why, but she knew that that was one thing she didn’t want to change.