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.