The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
Night fell before he reached the poorhouse. Deep in the west his old friend Orion waved a last farewell. The air was colder now, and the fields were no longer soft beneath his feet. He climbed the last hill and there below him gleamed the lights of the poorhouse.
His heart dancing with energy, he hurried across the remaining fields. He hid in shadows as the old women returned from supper to their own building. He saw one of them stop, sniff at the air and try the ground with her finger. He watched another kick at the earth of the sleeping flower beds. Then Aunt Reba, thin and angry, appeared and hurried the old women to their hall.
The sight of Aunt Reba made him shiver, and he realized that he was both hungry and cold. He would slip in the back way, and Aunt Reba need never know. But there was no such luck. Miss Clapp had already reported him by telephone. The truck was running up and down the road looking for David Harper. In Doylestown the policemen were doing the same. “Here he is!” cried an old woman.
“Catch him!” Aunt Reba yelled. She dashed across the open space between the buildings and grabbed her nephew. “So, ve got to run avay from school, yet! Look at them shoes. Them pants, yet. Look at Mr. Smarty!”
Mumbling with rage, she dragged David into the pantry and grabbed a small board from the top of a flour barrel. Stretching the boy across her lap, she did not whip; she beat him. With a fury born of desperation she beat David until, indifferent as he was, he had to scream for mercy.
“Vell!” the frantic woman cried above his noise. “So it’s trouble in school, yet!” And she beat him still harder. On the long hall the men, hearing David’s screams, were ashamed and did not look at one another.
Finally David could bear the pain no longer. He wrenched himself free, and in doing so he stumbled. Like a swift cat, his frenzied aunt was upon him, thrashing him wherever she could land a blow. The board caught him on the head, across his cheek, in the back, on the legs. He scrambled to his feet and dodged the frantic blows until he made his way out of the pantry and up the dark stairs.
“Komm back here, you!” his enraged aunt bellowed. But he was safe. He stopped on the dark steps and listened to his aunt puffing. He saw her peer into the stairway, her face flushed and furious. Then she threw the board down and left.
For a long moment David stood in the darkness. He was ashamed to enter the hall where the men might speak to him. He touched the blood on his cheek and felt sick. Then he hoisted up his pants. Mortified, he entered the hall, and to his great joy there was no one there to watch him. Daniel had herded them to their rooms. They listened as he plodded down to Door 8. They heard him stand for a moment by the threshold of his room and cry defiantly to no one at all: “She can’t hurt me!” The door slammed violently, and the hall was empty.
Inside his barren room David kicked off his muddy clothes and grimly arranged them along the floor. Then he picked up his stubby pencil and sat at the washstand, his tablet of stolen paper before him. He sucked his pencil for a long time and then began to write. A great, inconsolable rage welled up within him. But Aunt Reba had nothing to do with it.
When Toothless brought him a sandwich, he refused to let the old man in. Someone else knocked, probably Daniel, but he too was ignored. When lights went out he lit his candle. All day Saturday he worked, and Sunday, too.
On Wednesday night he finished writing. With a grandiloquent flourish he signed his name and walked to the end of the hall, where Old Daniel and the men were waiting. “You been workin’ a long time,” the mad Dutchman said.
“I’ve been writing,” the little boy said.
“What?” Luther demanded contentiously.
“A poem!” David snapped.
The mad Dutchman nodded. “Writin’ pomes is wery hard,” he said.
Old Daniel took charge. “If it’s a poem,” he said, “it should be read. Would you like me to read it?”
“I’ll read it,” David said. A place was made for him on the bench, and about him stood a circle of wondering old men. The boy’s eyes flashed as he started his new version of the Iliad. At lights out he was only half finished, and his audience crept into the light of Daniel’s candle.
David had now reached the part about the death of Achilles, and for a moment he had to pause, for the candle in Daniel’s hand wavered, wavered in the night. The great pain was upon the old man, the pain that tore at one’s stomach as if the vultures of Prometheus were come back, and once the candle almost went out. Then Tom took it, and David killed the matchless Achilles, and Ajax, and Agamemnon. Hector
“… lit a fire beneath the horse
And burned up every Greek.”
His voice was quivering with joy at wrong righted, David finished his poem. Not seeking admiration—for he had modestly established his own—he looked up at the old faces in the candlelight. Toothless was rapt in admiration. “We ought to send that right in to The Intelligencer,” he said.
When the men were gone Old Daniel asked, “Why did you write it that way?”
“It was wrong the other way,” David explained.
“But you can’t change things like that,” Daniel argued.
“If it’s wrong you can.”
“We better go to bed,” Daniel said, but before David left he confided, “Some things happen the way the teacher read.”
“You mean killing people by tricks?”
“Tricks? Yes. That’s why some of these men are in the poorhouse, David.”
“Well, then they oughtn’t to be!” the boy cried impulsively.
“But the good people don’t always win, David.”
The little boy stuck out his chin. “When I write a story, they win,” he said defiantly.
Spring in a country poorhouse is a time of pain. Then hearts break and overflow into the somber faces of the defeated. The men, gaunt from their long surrender, look at the stirring earth and compare their present lot with what they had hoped for. In the evenings they stand along the walls and watch the fresh-plowed hilltops. It is different from summer, this watching at dusk, for the men do not await refreshing breezes. They await the haunting memories of their youth.
When David was eleven, even Old Daniel, suspecting that this was his last spring, grew reminiscent. “When I was a boy,” he mused, “there were sometimes as many as forty barges a day, passing up and down the canal. Bells on the mules tinkled merrily along the towpath, and bargekeepers blew their winding horns to warn the lockmen of their approach. David, you could hear the horns for more than a mile!”
“What were the barges like?” David asked.
“They were like ships at sea. They were truly glorious, when I was a boy.” As he recalled the happy days, pain attacked, and he shifted his body into various positions until he found one that was comfortable. His silence gave the mad Dutchman a chance to speak.
“They had fancy barges for picnics,” Luther explained. “When I bought my cigar factory we hired a barge. To Erwinna we went. Oh, the pretty girls that day! Then we took a hayride home. Wery nice, the barges!”
“Did you ever ride the barges?” David asked Old Daniel.
“Did I ever!” the frail old man glowed. “The bargemen knew me well.”
“Warious people lived right on the barges,” Luther explained.
“There was one family,” Daniel mused. “They were gypsies, we claimed. I rode up and down the canal with them all one summer. I wanted to marry their daughter.”
“I never got married,” Toothless Tom said.
An old man interrupted. “On a farm women are good. In a city, no.”
“I got married,” Luther Detwiler said. He scratched his mad head. “My wife …” He looked beseechingly at David. “Where …” Then he grinned. “My wife’s in Delaware.”
A sudden breeze swept up from the grove of oak trees. This was spring! Spring, as only it can be, a quiet, searching, overwhelming thing, sweet with lilies-of-the-valley and dogwood.
“That smells like lily-of-the-valley,” Luther said. The men stopped talki
David never forgot that moment. Luther was the first to speak and he droned on about his cigar factory: “I lost my factory. I lost my house. I lost my wife. I never should of signed them papers Mr. Crouthamel give me.”
Nor did David ever forget that when poorhouse men speak of the worlds they lost, they speak always of those distant worlds as they were in spring. It was the barges of spring that Daniel recalled. Other men remembered their homes surrounded by spring flowers, or that memorable spring when ice stayed in the Delaware through April. They thought of the plowing, not the harvesting, the thawing of earth, not its freezing. They remembered the branches of their trees twisting in the agony of blossom-birth: they did not boast of the many apples they had picked.
David also noticed that old men who came to the poorhouse in spring were inconsolable. A man might enter in January and praise the warmth of the long hall, but the men who came in spring could praise nothing. Then the poorhouse was a prison terrible to the spirit. Spring men often ran away, and the two men whose dangling bodies David had found in the barn, they were spring men.
There was little surprise, therefore, when an old man from Bensalem reached the poorhouse one Saturday in late March and disappeared the following Monday. For two nights he had lived in Door 10. Endlessly he had walked up and down, an old man of seventy-three walking up and down.
David went in to see him on Sunday and said, “Would you like to come to church with me this afternoon? It’s the Baptists this week. They sing fine.”
“Get out of here!” the old man snapped. “Leave me alone.”
In a way, it was good for David that the old man did run away. For the next occupant of Door 10 was an interesting man. He was younger than most of the occupants, less stoop-shouldered, and possessed of his own teeth. On the second night, that was Wednesday, he gave David a chocolate bar. On Thursday he gave the boy two apples. Late that night, after Toothless had visited with some cheese, the stranger tapped lightly on Door 8.
“May I come in?” he asked.
“Yes,” David cried eagerly. “Thanks for the apples.”
“Did you like them?” the man asked. His face was clean and bright in the candlelight.
“They were good,” David beamed.
“Well, I know little boys like apples,” the friendly man laughed, sitting on the edge of the bed. “They tell me you’re pretty good in the games at school.”
“I like to play basketball,” David admitted. “But I’m too short right now.”
“You’ll grow!” the man assured him. He leaned forward and felt the muscles in David’s arm. The boy’s small arm had goose pimples from the chill air. “You’d better cover up,” the man said very quietly. He snapped the meager poorhouse covers over the boy in such a way as to extinguish the candle. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no matches.”
“There’s some over there,” David said eagerly.
“Never mind,” the man reassured him. Gently he forced David back onto the pillow. “You must be sleepy.” He stroked David’s forehead, and then his cheek.
“I guess I am,” David said. He felt funny. The man’s hands smelled funny, like that soap they used at Paradise Park, where the band played.
“You go to sleep, David,” the stranger said, “and when you grow up those arms will be fine for basketball. Your legs, too.” Gently, he tested David’s muscles through the thin sheets. “Get some sleep now,” the soft voice repeated. “You’ll be all right.”
There was a sharp sound at the door. David heard the stranger hiss air between his teeth. The door wrenched open. In the candlelight the old men of the hall looked into David’s room. Old Daniel cried, “Why, you …”
Toothless Tom was first to reach the stranger. He lunged awkwardly forward, missed him, and plunged across the bed. David saw the stranger’s face in the shadows. It was ugly and distorted.
Now Luther grabbed the stranger. In a brutal Dutch grip he hauled the man from the corner and out into the hall. David, not wanting to miss anything, pushed Toothless from on top of him and scrambled out of bed to see what was happening.
“Boy!” Toothless roared, his mouth slobbering because he had no teeth. “Close that door!”
David did so, but as he stood shivering in his skimpy nightshirt, standing with his hand in Tom’s, he could hear the old men of the poorhouse beating up the stranger. He could hear that soft voice whining, pleading, screaming, and cursing while the poorhouse men, silent, breathed hard.
Door 10 slammed shut. David could hear the bed creak heavily. Then there was silence. His own door opened. It was Old Daniel, oh, how thin and tired. Toothless rose to leave. “You stay!” Daniel ordered.
“I never been married,” Toothless protested.
“Sit down!” Daniel commanded. The two old men put David, who felt fine, tenderly to bed. In the candlelight they stood over him, Toothless shifting from foot to foot, Daniel talking.
The astonishing things David heard that night would probably have perplexed him for a long time except that early the next morning the wardens found the runaway man from Bensalem. They found him floating face downward in the big tank on top of the women’s building. And this was the tank from which all the drinking water came.
Before breakfast three doctors from Doylestown rushed down to the poorhouse and inspected the tank where the man’s bloated body had contaminated the water. The poorhouse people were called into the mess hall, wardens and everybody. A new man stumbled and knocked over a bucket of water. As the clear liquid ran onto the floor, a woman got very sick. She rushed out and David could hear her vomiting in the flower beds. Aunt Reba followed her out, commanding the woman to stop.
“We don’t think there’s anything wrong,” the overseer said reassuringly.
“We’ll give everybody two pills,” a fat doctor said. “For safety!” he joked.
“We tested the water and it’s all right,” the overseer cajoled. But another woman started to vomit and rushed out.
“So everybody line up!” the fat doctor laughed. “Here!” he said to the overseer. “You’re first.”
The overseer grinned broadly and picked up his two pills. Then the doctor handed him a glass of water. Instinctively the overseer shuddered, and the poorhouse people laughed nervously. “This water’s from the Barish farm!” the overseer explained. With exaggerated gestures he swallowed the pills and stared happily at the doctors. “I took ’em!” he cried proudly. “That wasn’t bad!” But another woman had to leave, all the same.
When David took his pills he tasted the water carefully to see if he could detect any difference between it and the contaminated poorhouse water. Later, on the playground, he announced judiciously to Grade Five that he couldn’t taste the dead man. A little girl got very sick.
At that moment David saw a housewife walking down Court Street with a basket of spring vegetables, scallions and lettuce. And suddenly for the first time in his life David saw a woman as a woman. She was clean, wore good clothes, walked straight. She was not old and faded like the poorhouse women, not stiff and proper like Miss Clapp. She was just a woman, and David thought that women were very funny people. They got sick and had to vomit over a little thing like water. But they never hung themselves in the barn. They did not die of broken hearts merely because they were in the poorhouse, nor did they beat their brains out because they had lost a farm. No, the women went right on living, fighting, being mean, elbowing for the best seats at supper. It was the men who quit and died.
In mid-April Mrs. Moomaugh sent David a large bundle of clothes. Its arrival was a great event, and Old Daniel said that something must be done to fix up the boy’s closet, now that he had some clothes.
So accordingly three men worked all one day building shelves and hammering nails into convenient spots. “I’m going to check this closet every day,” Daniel said. “A bo
It was good to have fresh clothes, especially Harry Moomaugh’s, for they fitted fine, and on Sunday morning David dressed in the choice items and reported to his aunt for inspection “Vhere’d you get them clothes?” she demanded.
“Mrs. Moomaugh,” David explained.
“She should ought to ’ve brought ’em to me,” his aunt protested.
“She brought them to Daniel. Because he asked her for them.” The implied censure angered Aunt Reba and she gouged her finger into David’s ears.
“They clean?” she whined.
“Yes,” David replied. She turned him around.
“Don’t get messed before church, yet,” she commanded. Then she dismissed him, thinking grimly to herself: “Chust vait! He be fourteen soon. Then we see!”
Church in the poorhouse was held in the afternoon so that David had time on his hands. The day was brilliant and warm, and gradually he wandered over to the woods that fringed the poorhouse fields. As he walked he saw birds flying and the nests of field mice. At the stream a lazy carp drifted with the current. Active sunnies darted among reeds, and a few cattails were beginning to show brown stalks. Milkweed was growing, too, and he noted his three spring favorites: jack-in-the-pulpits, skunk cabbage in fascinating colors, and the superb dogtooth violet.
“Lots of stuff out today,” he mused. Upstream bullfrogs leaped from the bank. David never tired of watching the lithe young frogs arching into the sunlight, trailing their legs behind as they flashed noiselessly into the pools. One fellow in particular watched him as he approached and then leaped gracefully into the stream. “That’s nice!” David cried approvingly.
The cool splash of the frog excited him. Looking about, he decided that he was alone, and before he knew what he was about he was naked by the bank. He dipped his toe into the water. It was very cold, but not too cold, he thought. It wouldn’t be so bad if he could leap in all at once, but Toothless had warned about ever doing that in a strange pool. So he drove the frogs before him and edged into the water. “Whew!” he whistled. “This is mighty cold!”