The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
The Fires of Spring is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
2014 Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1949 by James A. Michener
Copyright renewed © 1976 by Random House LLC
Excerpt from Centennial copyright © 1974 by James A. Michener
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, in 1949.
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5138-2
www.dialpress.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part 1: The Poorhouse
Part 2: Paradise
Part 3: Fair Dedham
Part 4: Chautauqua
Part 5: The Valley
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Excerpt from Centennial
PART 1
The Poorhouse
David Harper could scarcely sit still. It was Friday afternoon, and Miss Clapp was reading from the blue book. For three weeks now she had been reading about Hector and Achilles. This afternoon Hector would go forth to battle. David, who had been a Trojan for almost a month, shivered with excitement. He knew that when Achilles met a real fighter things would be different.
Then Miss Clapp closed the book!
“What happened next?” David cried.
Miss Clapp smiled primly. “We’ll find out next week.”
“Oh!” David gasped. He was eleven that year, and next Friday was as far away as next year.
Miss Clapp gave a self-contented smile. With her left hand she deftly tapped the pile of brown report cards. “I suppose you know why I had to stop early today,” she said unctuously. Like all teachers, she savored the little climaxes that were permitted her.
“Report cards!” the children in Grade Five chimed.
Miss Clapp smiled warmly, as if her students had mastered the multiplication table. As she called the happy litany of names, each child went forward to receive the decisive card. Returning to their seats, the children stole furtive glances at their grades. Those who were pleased smiled.
“David Harper.”
David rose, sandy-haired, freckled, grinning. Miss Clapp handed him his card. Holding it against his badly worn shirt, he sneaked a quick glance at the grades: “Doylestown Public Schools. Grade Five. English 71. Spelling 82. Geography 74. Arithmetic …” He gasped. There it was again. That horrible mark! “Arithmetic 99.”
“What’s the matter, David?” Miss Clapp inquired.
“Arithmetic!” he blurted out, thrusting his face back toward the teacher.
“What’s the matter with arithmetic?” Miss Clapp asked in astonishment.
“It’s 99 again. I didn’t miss a single question all month.”
“No, he didn’t!” the boys of Grade Five cried, egging their classmate on.
Carefully Miss Clapp placed the remaining cards on her desk. She stood very tall and folded her hands. Then, instead of growling, she smiled softly at David and said quietly, “Of course you didn’t miss any questions, David. But nobody is good enough for 100. Never.”
“But I didn’t miss any!” the little boy argued stubbornly.
“Of course you didn’t,” Miss Clapp reasoned patiently. “But 100, David! That means the very best that anyone could ever do. Ninety-nine means good, but you could do better.”
The incentive was lost on David. He pointed his stumpy nose at the desk and argued, “How could I get more right than all of them? How could I?”
Miss Clapp ignored the boy’s anger. Softly she reasoned, “Were your papers as neat as they could have been? Were your 5’s made with one line? Was your pencil always sharpened?”
The nose dropped to half mast. “Oh,” David grunted. “That’s what you mean?”
“Yes. That’s what 100 means.”
David released a huge grin. “Good! Next month I’ll do all those things, too.”
“And if you do,” Miss Clapp said quietly, “your mark will still be 99.”
David gritted his teeth and stared at his teacher. He was mad, fighting mad. He wished he knew a thousand swear words. Abruptly he went to his seat and shook his head at Harry Moomaugh. “Teachers are crazy!” he whispered. “Especially Miss Clapp.”
The teacher heard this but ignored it. “Gracey Kelley,” she called.
A thin, scrawny girl with red spots on her face rose from the back of the room. She lived in Worthington’s Alley and was almost always dirty. But when she passed David on this day he saw that she was wearing a pretty red dress. She swung her way up the aisle and received her card. Clutching it in her hand, she smiled bravely at the rest of the children. Her marks were poor, but she didn’t care. She had on a good dress.
But from the second row another little girl said in a loud whisper, “That used to be Mary Gray’s dress!”
Right away David remembered. Of course it was Mary’s old dress! But the whisper was so loud that Gracey Kelley heard it, too. The bitter words struck her in the face and in the heart. Dropping her report card, she threw her long arms over her face and broke into impulsive sobbing.
Miss Clapp, unaware of what had happened, left her desk and tried to comfort Gracey. “Don’t cry,” she pleaded. “You’ll get better marks next month.”
Gracey Kelley turned away. “It’s my dress,” she wept. One of the boys laughed nervously and she swung on the class, her eyes deep with hate. “I hate you all!” she screamed. Then she slapped Miss Clapp’s hands away and rushed into the cloakroom. David could hear her sobbing there and kicking at the wall. Miss Clapp hurried after her, and when the teacher came back to the room, she was crying, too. Seeing this, the little girl whose cruel whisper had launched the trouble also began to cry.
David leaned over and whispered to his friend, Harry Moomaugh, “I told you Miss Clapp was nuts.”
“Women are funny,” Harry agreed.
“What’s the matter with Gracey Kelley?” David demanded. “All that fuss about a dress! Everybody knows I wear your second-hand clothes. So what?” The two good friends shrugged their shoulders, but David was disturbed, for from the cloakroom came the inconsolable sobbing of a heartbroken girl.
The poorhouse lay three miles south of Doylestown among the wonderful rolling hills of Bucks County. Hunched up in back of the poorhouse truck, David watched the familiar sights as he sped homeward. Down the long hill, out of town, past the fine, winding bridge at Edison, then up a hill, through some woods, and there before him were the two long, gray buildings of the poorhouse.
To David these bleak stone buildings were not the last stop of the world’s defeated. Not at all! For nearly a month they had been the walls of Troy, and would be for three more searching weeks. Then, although David did not yet know it, the poorhouse walls would become the home of Lancelot. Later, Oliver Twist would live there. Indeed, it was more fun living in a poorhouse than almost any kind of place you could imagine.
But right now David was worried. Because if the poorhouse was truly his castle, he now had the unpleasant job of visiting the witch that lived in the dungeon. As long as he could remember h
Gingerly, he edged his way into the women’s building. The air was hot, smelly with the strong juice they used for keeping bedbugs under control. A very old woman in blue and white denim winked at David and shrugged her shoulder toward Aunt Reba’s door. “She’s in there,” the old woman said with pleased and obvious loathing.
David took a deep breath. “Oh, well,” he sighed, knocking lightly on the door.
From within came a harsh, sharp cry, “Komm in.” Reluctantly David pushed open the door. Before him stood a thin woman of forty. Her hair was stringy and her face was sallow. She didn’t come out in front, the way Miss Clapp did. She never smiled. Her eyes were a watery blue, and never since David had lived with her had her thin lips kissed him. Whatever she did, she did grudgingly as if she wanted to save something of each act for herself. “You’re late” she said, reaching for the pen.
Without looking at the card—for she hated schools—she scratched her obligatory signature on the cover. “You’re late,” she repeated.
“I missed the bus,” David explained reluctantly.
“So!” she mimicked in Pennsylvania Dutch. “I missed the bus, yet.” She spoke in an angry sing-song, accenting the first word of each sentence, singing the last. “It’s wery nice. Spending money, I suppose we were. Yes?”
“I was talking with Harry Moomaugh,” David confessed.
“Talking, was it?” she hissed. “Wery nice, talking when you should be verking, yet.” Angrily she reached out and smashed her hand against David’s ear. He stumbled sideways against a chair.
“Get aht!” his aunt commanded. He recovered his balance and went to the door. In the hallway he was embarrassed by a half dozen old poorhouse women who had been eavesdropping. One of them patted him on the shoulder, but he merely grinned at her.
“She can’t hurt me,” he said.
When David was ten he had moved from the women’s building into a room of his own on the long hall where the most interesting men in the world lived. There had been many bad moments in the poorhouse during the first ten years when he lived with Aunt Reba, but the past fifteen months had been like a wonderful dream. Now, as he climbed the stairs to his own hall, a glow of fine joy engulfed him. One more step, and he would turn to the right, and there would be the long hall with the many doors and the many, many friends. As always, he paused on the top step and closed his eyes. Then he turned and slowly opened them. And there at the far end of the hall, sitting on his bench, was Old Daniel.
“Hello, Daniel!” David cried.
“Hello, David!” the thin old man chirped back.
Happily, the young boy moved down the hall. From every door old men called greetings and some fell in behind him as he moved like a young god to the bench where Old Daniel waited.
“How was school?” Daniel asked. He was more than seventy, a drying-up old man with a full set of false teeth that clicked when he talked. He had gossamer hair, and flint-sparked blue eyes, and a terrible pain in his stomach that never quite went away. “Isn’t this the day for your report card?”
A crazy Dutchman moved in close to David. He was a madman, but not mad enough to be placed in the mad cells. He was harmless, a kind of wonderfully vacant house that had known much fine living. The people had moved away, but the house, like a memory, was left to stand. “Yes!” this eager madman cried. “It’s report time.” He clamped a tremendous hand on David’s shoulder, and when David’s bones began to hurt the boy pulled away and smiled up at the big, mad Dutchman.
“Let’s see your card,” Old Daniel said, reaching out a hand that was mostly bone and delicate fingers. The frail old man tenderly removed the card from its folder and studied the grades.
“Read ’em,” cried a tall, gaunt man with no teeth.
“English 71,” Old Daniel intoned.
“English is wery hard,” the mad Dutchman said.
“Spelling 82.”
“Spelling,” said the madman, “is wery difficult.”
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 we
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.”