The Fires of Spring (2 page)

No one made a fool of the Dutchman. They all knew he had never been to school. He couldn’t even sign his name. But when he boasted about his grades in school or about the cigar factory he owned, no one shamed him. That was one of the nicest things about the poorhouse. A man could lie his heart out, could tell in fantastic fables all the things he had dreamed of and never accomplished. No one contradicted him, for all the men in the poorhouse lived their last years with ancient lies, and if you pointed out that Luther Detwiler, the mad Dutchman, couldn’t possibly have owned a cigar factory, somebody might remember that your wife hadn’t really been pretty at all. There was gentle tolerance, and David loved to hear the fabulous stories that this tolerance engendered.

“You always get 99 in arithmetic,” Old Daniel said approvingly.

“Yes!” the toothless man agreed. “Why don’t you try to get a 100?”

“Well,” David explained patiently, “you could never get a 100! That would be perfect.”

“And nobody’s perfect,” the mad Dutchman agreed. “That stands to reason.”

“But this English mark,” Old Daniel said gravely. “That’s a pretty bad mark, David.”

“English is wery hard,” the Dutchman said consolingly.

“It’s sissy stuff,” David explained.

“What do you mean?” the frail old man on the bench asked. The great pain swept over him, and his small body shivered for a moment. At such times it was agreed that the others would look away.

So David stared up at the tall, toothless man and said, “It’s sissy stuff. Like ‘You and I went to the store.’ ” He
spoke in exaggerated accents, like Miss Clapp. The men laughed. “Not, ‘You and me went fishin’.’ ”

Now the pain retreated and Old Daniel resumed command of his body. “What’s funny about learning to speak correctly?” He spoke with a trace of acid in his voice, and the men stopped laughing.

“It’s girls’ stuff,” David argued weakly.

“Oh, no!” the frail old man argued. He leaned forward from his bench and said in a quietly passionate voice, “You were meant to read all the books, David. To study wonderful things. You will wander about the world and see kings and maybe even talk with presidents. You’ll ride on ships and airplanes. You’ll see the deserts and mountains and trees so tall you cannot reach the top. If you study hard, David, all these things will come to pass.” The old man sat with his hands in his lap and stared directly at the boy.

“You’ll go where we neffer got to see,” the mad Dutchman droned.

David grinned at his friends. This was the kind of talk he loved. Lately he had entertained a premonition that he might be called upon to accomplish certain unusual things, and now Daniel spoke of them as if he somehow knew the boy’s secret. “When you grow up, what do you intend doing?” the old man inquired. “You once said you might like to write a book. Or become a lawyer. Or maybe a minister. Do you think you can do those things without good English?” Again the sparkling eyes stared out from the sunken face, and David was somewhat ashamed.

“It’s sissy stuff, I think,” he repeated stolidly, for want of a better argument.

Old Daniel laughed. “Of course it is!” he agreed. “Almost everything worthwhile is sissy stuff. But if you want to be a good man, David, you’ve got to be master of the sissy stuff. It’s all right for Toothless Tom to say, ‘Him and me ain’t here,’ and nobody’s ashamed of Tom because he talks that way.” The tall, toothless man laughed nervously. “But if you want to do the things you say, David, English isn’t sissy stuff. It’s very hard and very important.” He returned the card to David, and just before the lights went out on the long hall he cried, “Oh, the world you have before you!”

In some embarrassment, David went down the hall to his room. He could not know with what encompassing love the old men watched him disappear. He was a young, sandy-haired kid, resolute and kind, and yet as he walked away
from the old men it seemed as if a transubstantiation took place. He was the man! He was the man who would accomplish what they had not accomplished. He was the man who would avoid the terrible errors that had brought them to the poorhouse. And they were the children, looking forward to the distant day that would never dawn for them.

There was a moment of breathless silence in the poorhouse as David went to his room. Old Daniel, the mad Dutchman, Toothless Tom, and all the old men watched the boy. Then the lights went out.

Door 8 was David’s door. Inside the air smelled thick with bug juice. The tiny closet held only eight pieces of clothing, counting socks and underwear and everything. Not one piece had been bought for him. His washstand had a dirty thin towel and no soap. In the darkness David could feel the stub of pencil three inches long and the half tablet of writing paper sneaked home from school. There was no rug on the floor, no paper on the walls, no picture, no mirror, no shade on the window. He had no slippers, no bathrobe, no raincoat, no rubbers. His toothbrush was three years old. He had no watch, of course, no books, no maps, no album of stamps, no baseball glove, no winter overcoat, no collection of bird eggs.

But when David entered the darkness of Door 8, the room seemed all aglow. His heart and his mind were simply bursting with emotion. To see the world! To talk with a president! To read all the good books! Oh, the illimitable world that lay ahead! The glory and the wonder of it, the variegated charm, the endless invitation to far thoughts, deep wells of beauty, and strange sounds! How could a poorhouse or a prison or handed-down clothes or barren rooms contain such a boy?

He went to the gaunt window of his room and looked out across the snowy fields and up to the crystal heavens. There were the stars that Old Daniel had traced out for him: “Since the world began they’ve been there. When you and I have been dead a thousand years they’ll still be there. That’s Andromeda you’re looking at.” A room might be swamped in bug juice, but the fathomless universe came crashing in nevertheless. “It’s pretty nice out there,” David mused. Then he thought of Old Daniel. “It’s pretty nice in here, too.”

Then came a knocking at his door! That would be Toothless Tom with some food. Eagerly David ran to the door. “Here’s
the waiter!” the toothless old man joked. “A little something from the kitchen.”

Like David, Toothless Tom was always hungry. He was a lean fellow from Solebury. Once he had owned a farm. Now his nephew owned it. Something had gone wrong, somehow, and Tom’s nephew owned the farm. Tom was in the poorhouse, and he was always hungry, but he would never eat alone. Not when a growing boy was about!

Tonight Toothless had an apple, fresh and cold from the apple barrels of some farm. He had begged it that afternoon from a trucker. “You done pretty well this month,” he said in the darkness. “Studyin’ is a fine thing for a boy, David. Never forget that. If I had of done a little studyin’ …”

Toothless never finished sentences beginning with
if
. In the poorhouse such clauses were constant currency. They filled the long hall like dead leaves clogging an alley in autumn, and whenever the old men talked to David, the sentences with
if
broke forth in profusion. The men would see his frank freckles, his eyes popping with delight at the prospect of extra food, or his eagerness to understand the ways of life, and they would cry, “If I had told Crouthamel
‘No’
when he suggested a mortgage …” “If I had only of finished high school …” “If I had had the operation when the doctor said …” “If … If … If …”

Toothless alone refused to finish those sentences which ride the lonely winds of a poorhouse. He alone had the honesty to realize that even if he had studied, his particular nature was one which ends its day in a poorhouse. Defeat and poverty were the destiny of the kind of man he was. His nephew was much smarter than he, a better farmer, too. Were the old days miraculously restored, were Tom to have his teeth and his farm once more, he knew in his heart that sooner or later his nephew—or some clever man like his nephew—would somehow or other get that farm.

“Gee!” David confessed, “I ate almost all the apple, Tom.”

“You’re a growin’ boy, ain’t you?”

“Tom! You’re very kind. I swear on a Bible, next time you get more’n half.” Positively, absolutely, next time Tom must get his share. David spit on his finger and crossed his heart. Of course, he had made this solemn promise at least sixty times before, but this was the first time he had ever spit on his finger, too.

The toothless old man gummed the last of the core and raised David’s window to throw it away. “Say!” he whispered
in a farmer’s speculative voice. “Spring’s comin’.” He sniffed the air. ‘Sure’n shootin’, spring’s comin’.”

David stepped beside him and like a little farmer sniffed at the air. It was very cold, and he could perceive no spring in it. But he felt good, standing there with Tom. He took a deep breath. “Say!” he said. “Seems to me you can feel it. Spring’s comin’.”

When Tom left, David lay straight and quiet for a long time. There were so many wonderful things to think about. Hector in Troy. The rotten Greeks. Why you could never get a 100. The strange sobbing of Gracey Kelley. How could a boy’s brain ever stop hammering and let him get some sleep?

There was a gentle knocking at his door. Shivering in the cold night air, he jumped out of bed and admitted Old Daniel. The little old man didn’t have his teeth in. He was in a long nightshirt, and he carried a candle.

“I brought you something, David,” he whispered. He closed the door and cautiously lit the candle. “Sometimes you may want to read,” he said.

“I don’t have any books,” David explained.

“I brought you one,” said the shadowy old man. He handed a well-worn book to David and then stood away from the bed.

David opened the front cover of
Oliver Twist
, and there were the magic words:
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO DAVID HARPER
.

“Oh, Daniel!” he cried, running his fingers along the careful printing. The old man fixed the candle above David’s head and started to leave. “Is the candle mine, too?” the boy asked.

“Of course.” Daniel laughed. “How else could you read in bed?”

David wanted to laugh, too, but tears filled his eyes. There were many things he did not understand about the poorhouse. Twice he had found old men hanging by their necks in the barn, but he had not understood the passionate tragedy that put them there. He had watched an old woman go crazy, one spring, when she thought that the fields of the poorhouse farm were her garden in Doylestown. She had tried to till them all. There were other things, too, that he did not understand, but he did know the meaning of a candle that cost a penny.

In his eleven years he had spent—of his very own money—some twenty-eight pennies. They had not come from his aunt, of course, but from the old men on the hall, and every one of the twenty-eight had represented a real and terrible proportion of the wealth of the man who had given it. Presents
in a poorhouse were not like presents at Christmas, when the kind people of Doylestown brought good things for everybody, and never seemed to miss them in the giving. No! When a poorhouse man gave even so much as a candle that cost a penny, he gave part of his decency, part of the miserable hoard that kept him from being a complete and utter pauper.

The candle flickered and Old Daniel’s white silken hair cast strange shadows on the wall. David rubbed his eyes and began to read, but as he did so the frail old man cried, “It’s so wonderful!”

“What is?” David asked.

“Reading your first book.”

“Why?” David asked, pulling the smelly bedclothes about him.

“It’s so wonderful to begin reading! And so terrible. Do you know what you’re doing? Learning leads only to unhappiness, David. When you start to learn and think and feel … Well, you step blindly into a fight you can never win.”

“I don’t want to fight,” David said.

“Your report card,” the old man said as he opened the door. “You must make it better next month.”

But David scarcely heard him. He was already lying on his stomach, starting that magic journey from which no boy returns the same. He was reading, for the first time in his life, a book which was his own.

It was not because of blindness or insensitivity that David loved his life in the poorhouse. During three seasons of the year, life in the long gray buildings was delightful. The men, no longer having money or position to protect, were kind and friendly.

And there was surprisingly little recrimination—that is, during three seasons of the year. Of course, men who had lost their farms were inclined to blame Mr. Crouthamel, but such gossip against rich men was inevitable. It was the other kind of recrimination that was not heard: the blind railing against fate as such.

Uncle Daniel, for example, found no one to blame. The wispy little old man had been a brilliant scholar in his youth. But the evil thing had happened. One day along the canal he had watched a loaded barge drifting down to Bristol, and like a magnet the barge had dragged him away,
to Bristol, to Philadelphia, and on to Rome and Cyprus, and strange cities and to the Pyramids themselves. He had seen the world, even the Southern Cross. And now he was in the poorhouse.

Toothless Tom accepted his lot without complaint. He was at peace with the world and did not even blame his nephew for stealing the farm. “He’s a better farmer than I am,” the toothless fellow admitted.

Even crazy Luther Detwiler gave no one any trouble. He, like the rest, conjured up a fable that he was in the poorhouse because Mr. Crouthamel had stolen a cigar factory from him, but the mad Dutchman wouldn’t have known Mr. Crouthamel from a butcher boy.

Very occasionally some strange man, shadowy and terrible, would be forced into the poorhouse for a few days. Having lost position and wealth suddenly, he would be unprepared for poverty, and he would skulk along the corridor, stare into his food, and shiver. Young as he was, David learned that such men always followed the same pattern. Either relatives came to rescue these men, or the men sat apart in the poorhouse and shook as if the cold winds of death were upon them. Within a few days they hung themselves.