It's Wednesday.
Chapter 4 : The Piano Box
BETSY AND Tacy soon had places which belonged to them. The bench on the hill was the first one. The second one, and the dearest for several years, was the piano box. This was their headquarters, their playhouse, the center of all their games.
It stood behind Betsy’s house, for it had brought that same piano on which Julia practiced her music lesson and which Betsy’s mother had played for Betsy’s party. It was tall enough to hold a piano; so of course it was tall enough to hold Betsy and Tacy. It wasn’t so wide as it was tall; they had to squeeze to get in. But by squeezing just a little, they could get in and sit down.
Julia and Katie couldn’t come in unless they were invited. This was Betsy’s and Tacy’s private corner. Betsy’s mother was a great believer in people having private corners, and the piano box was plainly meant to belong to Betsy and Tacy, for it fitted them so snugly. They decorated the walls with pictures cut from magazines. Tacy’s mother gave them a bit of rug for the floor. They kept their treasures of stones and moss in a shoe box in one corner.
One side of the piano box was open. As Betsy and Tacy sat in their retreat they had a pleasant view. They looked into the back yard maple, through the garden and the little grove of fruit trees, past the barn and buggy shed, up to the Big Hill. This was not the hill where the picnic bench stood. That was the little hill which ended Hill Street. Hill Street ran north and south, but the road which climbed the Big Hill ran east and west. At the top stood a white house, and the sun rose behind it in the morning.
Sitting in their piano box one day, Betsy and Tacy looked at the Big Hill. Neither of them had ever climbed it. Julia and Katie climbed it whenever they pleased.
“I think,” said Betsy, “that it’s time we climbed that hill.” So they ran and asked their mothers.
Betsy’s mother was canning strawberries. “All right,” she said. “But be sure to come when I call.”“All right,” said Tacy’s mother. “But it’s almost dinner time.”
Betsy and Tacy took hold of hands and started to climb.
The road ran straight to the white house and the deep blue summer sky. The dust of the road was soft to their bare feet. The sun shone warmly on Betsy’s braids and on Tacy’s bright red curls.
At first they passed only Betsy’s house and her garden and orchard and barn. They had gone that far before. Then they came to a ridge where wild roses bloomed in June. They had gone that far, picking roses. But at last each step took them farther into an unknown country.
The roadside was crowded with mid-summer flowers…big white daisies and small fringed daisies, brown-eyed Susans and Queen Anne’s lace. On one side of the road, the hill was open. On the other it was fenced, with a wire fence which enclosed a cow pasture. A brindle cow was sleeping under a scrub oak tree.
“Just think!” said Betsy. “We don’t even know whose cow pasture that is.”
“We don’t even know whose cow that is,” said Tacy. “Of course it might be Mr. Williams’ cow.”
“Oh, no,” said Betsy. “We’ve come too far for that.”
They plodded on again.
The sun seemed warmer and warmer. The dust began to pull at their feet. They turned and looked back. They could look down now on the roofs of their homes, almost as they had done the night they rode the feather.
“We’ve come a dreadful way,” said Tacy. “If we were sitting in our piano box, we could see ourselves up here.”
“We would wonder who were those two children climbing the Big Hill.”
“Maybe we ought to stop,” said Tacy.
“Let’s go just a little farther,” Betsy said. But in a moment she pointed to a fat thorn apple tree on the unfenced side of the road. “That would be a nice place to stop,” she suggested. And they stopped.Under the thorn apple tree was a deep, soft nest of grass. The two little girls sat down and drew their knees into their arms. They could see farther now than the treetops of Hill Street. They could see the roof of the big red schoolhouse where Julia and Katie went to school.
A squirrel whisked down the tree to look at them. A phoebe sang, “Phoebe! Phoebe!” over and over again. A hornet buzzed in the noonday heat, but did not come too near.
“Let’s live up here,” Betsy said suddenly.
Tacy started. “You mean all the time?”
“All the time. Sleep here and everything.”
“Just you and me?” Tacy asked.
“I think it would be fun,” said Betsy. She jumped up and found a broken branch. “This is the front of our house,” she said, laying it down.
Tacy brought a second branch and laid it so that the two ends left a space between. “This is our front door,” she said.
“This is our parlor,” said Betsy. “Where this stone is. Company can sit on the stone.”
“And this is our bedroom,” said Tacy. “If your mother will let us have her big brown shawl to sleep on, my mother will give us a pillow, I think.”
They worked busily, making their house.
“But Betsy,” said Tacy after a time. “What will we have to eat?”
Betsy looked thoughtfully about her. “Why, we’ll milk the cow,” she said.
“Do you think we could?”
“’Course we could. You hold him and I’ll milk him.”
“All right,” said Tacy. “Only not just yet. I’m not hungry yet.”
Betsy rolled her eyes upward. “We can have thorn apples too,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Tacy happily. “We can have thorn apple pie.”
They started picking thorn apples. But after a moment Betsy interrupted the task.
“And I like eggs,” she said.
Something firm and determined in her tone made Tacy look around hurriedly. Betsy was looking at a hen. It was a red hen with a red glittery breast. It had wandered up the hill from some back yard in Hill Street, perhaps. Or down the hill from the big white house. Betsy and Tacy could not tell. But Betsy was looking at the hen so firmly, there was no mistaking her intention.
“We’ll catch that hen,” said Betsy, “and keep him in a box. And whenever we get hungry he can lay us an egg.”
“That will be fine,” said Tacy.
They began to hunt for a box.
With great good fortune they found one. It was broken and old and water-soaked, but it was a box. It would hold a hen.
“Now,” said Betsy, “we have to catch him. I’ll say, ‘Here chickabiddie, chickabiddie! Here chickabiddie, chickabiddie!’ like I’ve heard my Uncle Edward do, and when he comes right up to my hand, you grab him.”
“All right,” said Tacy.
So Betsy called, “Here chickabiddie, chickabiddie! Here chickabiddie, chickabiddie!” just as she had heard her Uncle Edward do. And she called so well and made such inviting motions with her hand (as though she were scattering feed) that the hen came running toward her. And Tacy swooped down on it with two thin arms and Betsy bundled it up in two plump ones. Somehow, although it flapped and clawed, they got it into the box.
But the hen was very angry. It glared at them with furious little eyes and opened and shut its sharp little beak and made the most horrid, terrifying squawks.
“Lay an egg, chickabiddie! Lay an egg, chickabiddie!” said Betsy over and over.
But the hen didn’t lay a single egg.
About this time voices rose from Hill Street. “Betsy!” “Tacy!” “Betsy!” “Tacy!” One voice added, “Dinner’s ready.”
“I don’t believe he’s going to lay an egg,” said Tacy.
“Neither do I,” said Betsy. “He isn’t trained yet.”
“Maybe,” said Tacy, “our piano box is a nicer place to live after all.”
Betsy thought it over. The hen kept making that horrid, squawking sound. Probably there would be strawberry jam for dinner, left over from what went into the jars. And the piano box was a beautiful place.
“Our piano box,” she agreed, jumping up, “has a roof for when it rains.”
So they ran down the Big Hill.
“We climbed the Big Hill,” they shouted joyously to Julia and Katie who had been doing the calling.
“Pooh! We climb it often,” Julia and Katie said.