The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
The little woman smiled. “Oh,” she protested. “Don’t be sorry for me. It’s poor Jonas. He’s going to a house with no love. He’ll die. He’ll die.” Tears effaced her smile, and David had to look away.
On the wall he saw a picture of a mill on a hillside with handsome trees about. “That’s a pretty picture,” he said.
“It’s from a magazine,” Mrs. Krusen explained. Then she patted David on the head, although she wasn’t a great deal taller than he. “They tell me you do well in school,” she said approvingly. David grinned, for the little old woman made him feel at ease. “So the boys who do well deserve presents!” And she jumped up on the neat bed and pulled down the picture David had admired. “This is for you,” she said happily, “and here’s the tack, too!”
“I didn’t mean I wanted it,” David protested. Mrs. Krusen rolled the picture into a trim tube and placed the tack inside.
“Now you have a picture, too,” she said. David nodded and-started for the door. “Aren’t you going to say, ‘Thank you’?” Mrs. Krusen asked.
“I forgot,” David admitted. “Thank you for the picture.” He stepped out into the hall and a very old woman hobbled up to him.
“Miss Reba coming!” the old woman whispered.
“Daywid!” came the searching whine.
“Oh, my gosh!” David cried.
“Hide in here,” the very old woman suggested, shoving the boy into her room.
“Don’t bend that picture!” David cautioned.
“Iss Daywid up here, yet?” Aunt Reba probed.
“No,” the very old woman lied.
Reba stormed past and into Mrs. Krusen’s room. “Somebody chust said my boy wass up here,” she whined.
“Now!” the very old woman cried to David. He slipped from her room and hurried downstairs. He could hear his aunt threatening Mrs. Krusen. Carefully he crept behind the milkhouse and through the woods behind the barn.
“Daywid!” his aunt bellowed.
Old Daniel’s window snapped up. “He’s up here, Miss Reba,” the thin voice cried. Breathlessly David dashed down the hall to his friend’s room. Sticking his head out the window at the last moment he cried casually, “You want me?”
“Where you been at?” his aunt shouted.
“Talking with Daniel,” the boy lied.
And when the threat was over he showed Daniel the picture. “That’s by Rembrandt,” the old man explained.
“I’m going to put it over my bed,” the boy replied. Then he shared his bewilderment with Daniel. “I don’t think Mrs. Krusen was sorry for herself yesterday. She was sorry for Mr. Krusen.”
“I was sorry for him, too, David. To turn his back upon an old friend, that’s most evil. Could you deny Toothless or me or mad Luther? No! You’re too much of a man to deny your friends. And did you see the young fool Mr. Krusen went away with? How would you like to live with that one?”
“He said I oughtn’t to be in the poorhouse,” David said, shivering from memory of the ugly, self-satisfied man. “He said I ought to be in a decent home.”
“Like his, I guess!” Daniel snorted. “Did you see his wife? How would you like to live with them, David?”
The boy did not even answer but asked, “Did you ever see the rooms in the women’s building? They aren’t like these. Mrs. Krusen’s was really pretty. And that other old woman who walks with a cane. Even her room was pretty and smelled nice.”
“That’s what women are for, David,” the wasted old man explained. “Over here things are clean, but they’re ugly. I remember when I traveled up and down the canal. Nothing can be dirtier than a barge. And the gypsy barge was dirtiest of all. But the girl had one corner of a room on deck, all to herself. And it was beautiful all summer long.”
“Aunt Reba’s room is never like that,” David said.
“No, I imagine it isn’t,” Daniel agreed. “That’s why I wanted you to take the flowers to Mrs. Krusen. You have a lot to learn.”
As he spoke the pain became too great for him to bear, and he fell to the floor in a faint. David was terribly frightened and called for Tom. The poorhouse men crowded into the room and lifted the small man to his bed.
“It’s his cancer,” Luther Detwiler said. The other men gasped and rushed David from the room. In his own quarters he trembled for a moment and then sneaked across the hall to talk with Toothless.
“Is he going to die?” the boy implored.
“Not yet,” Toothless said patiently. Then he added, “We’re all old men, David. Pretty soon we’ll all die.”
Quietly, and with a heavy burden, David returned to his room. It was Sunday, and he had nothing to do. He was confused, and then at his feet he saw the Rembrandt. Gently he pressed it flat and, with his shoe, tacked it to the wall over his bed. The sunlight illuminated the ancient mill and made it seem alive.
David did not want to think of Old Daniel, lying faint in bed, so he thought of Mrs. Krusen instead: “A nice woman like her. You wait. Some day Mr. Krusen will come back for her.”
But he never did.
Late in the afternoon they carried Old Daniel out of his room and into the sick quarters. Four men came for him with a stretcher, but when they lifted it with Daniel, even David could see the surprise on their faces. And no wonder, for the little old man weighed less than ninety pounds, and of those pounds the cancer weighed one in four.
At every door an old man stood to say good-bye to his stricken friend. And when the stretcher reached the end of the long hall, the bearers paused a moment so that the old man could look one last time at the bench and the afternoon sunlight and the faces of his friends. There was no make-believe on anyone’s part that Daniel would ever return. When old men left the long hall on stretchers they never came back.
In the sick room they placed the little old man near a window. David thought: “You can’t really see outdoors from here. But you can see that tree.”
The dying man looked up and saw his familiar friend. There was the boy’s freckled face, the turned-up nose, the smudge of dirt above the left eye. He was, thought Old Daniel, the inheritor of the earth; and suddenly the frail man burned with energy to tell this boy all the things he knew.
“David!” he cried imperatively. “Listen!” And that was the beginning of the long talks he engaged in as he lay dying. He would brook no interruptions, and often he skipped madly from topic to topic, merely gleaning large generalizations from his rich memory. At times he would stop and beat his hand against the sheets to impress an idea into the boy’s mind. In a final surge of desire to project his spirit into some kind of life after the body’s death, the old man spent his accumulated philosophy upon the boy.
That first afternoon he said: “David, the world is not an evil place. Never believe that. You will see wars and famines and betrayals. But the world itself cannot be evil. It’s just that evil people, having nothing kind within themselves to feed upon, are driven like mad animals to accomplishment. So you’ll always find that one evil person makes more noise than four good men.
“I never found a way to tell a good man from an evil one except by what he did. It’s popular now to say all men are good and evil both. But I don’t believe that. Men are on one side or the other. Of course, sometimes a good man will do an evil thing. But he regrets it. And so will you, whenever you do wrong. And if you do wrong too often, regrets come so easily that you forget what wrong is. Then you’ve become an evil man, and you’re all tied up inside, and you work and fight against others. And do you know why? Because you have no peace in your heart to satisfy you when you are alone.
“I tried to be a good man, David, and I think I was. When you grow up you’ll ask yourself, ‘But why did he wind up in the poorhouse?’ Let me tell you that America is a wonderful country. I’ve seen all the countries in the world, I guess, and there is none to compare with ours. But it’s quite possible for a man in America to lead a good life and die in the poorhouse. It’s pretty hard for an evil man to do that.” Th
“So when you’re thirty years old or forty and you remember your friends on the long hall, don’t jump at wrong answers as to why we were here. The world wasn’t all wrong. America was not an evil place. We were not bad men. It’s …” He looked up at the fragmentary tree. “It’s like the burning of Troy. There is no explanation.”
A terrible paroxysm gripped him. His face became bluish. He clutched at the covers and writhed upon his bed. The sunlight beamed across his forehead and showed sweat standing in tiny balls, like a crown of jewels. But beneath the sheets his knees hammered together until David could hear them.
“Ugh … ugh …” he gasped.
“Daniel!” David pleaded softly. He thought: “If he were dead like the old men in the barn, his pain would stop. But look at his eyes. He doesn’t want to be dead.”
“Oh, David!” the nurse cried, rushing up. “Get out of here!” She grabbed the boy tenderly and led him to the door. But David kept looking back at Daniel, who did not want to die. The boy saw this thing and remembered it.
Daniel did not die that day. David had many more visits with him. As the old man grew weaker, so that even his face contracted, he talked with greater speed. He jumped more in his speech, too, cutting at the topic sentences of his mortal essay: “Lots of people start things in January, with the beginning of the year. But that’s ruling your life by a calendar. Always start things in the spring. Work at them through the summer. Finish them in the winter. Most great men are started in spring. Women carry them through the summer and autumn. That’s why we celebrate so many birthdays in February. People are like the earth.
“You can look at any great man and say, ‘He’s no better than a hog. He eats and sweats and goes to the toilet and some day he dies.’ But you can also say, of the meanest man you ever saw, ‘He is more than an eagle.’
“You can’t save enough money to make sure that everything will turn out all right. Lots of times when you do have money you can’t use it, so what good does it do? But it’s fine to have. I’ve heard fifty ministers try to explain why a rich man cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven, and I’ve never heard an explanation yet. But as surely as I’ve lived, there are other things worth more than money. Again, America is not a bad place. But it’s very hard in America for you to have money and the important things, too. You must decide on four or five things that are of most importance to you. Look at me! They will be more important than money, David, and if you turn your back on those things, your heart will wither and die.
“David, I don’t want to turn you against your Aunt Reba. She’s not evil. She’s stupid. She has lots of money, and she could buy you clothes and books and pencils. But she won’t do it. She thinks she can save that money and spend it on something better than a human being. What, I ask you? What’s better? I sent four boys to college, and if they knew I was here now I think their hearts would break. But I’ve never told them. They weren’t even my sons. Look! If they spent money on me now it would soon be buried with me. But if they do something good for a boy just growing up, it’ll go on forever.”
When the great pain came, Daniel fought with all his frail strength. He turned and threw his skinny shoulders into the chest of the pain, kicked at it, clutched its gray outlines with his bare hands.
“Oh, David!” the nurse cried again. “Please call me when it starts!” Her voice broke and she sniffled. “Why doesn’t your goddamned aunt take you out of here? That old bitch!” As if she were angry with David she thrust him violently from the room.
On Sunday Daniel said: “Reading and travel are the two best things besides people. Travel is best, but some books are very great. You should read all the books you can get before you’re twenty. If you don’t need glasses by the time you’re thirty, you can consider your life wasted. Maybe books are best, because you don’t have to have money to read. And there’s this difference, too. A man can travel all over the world and come back the same kind of fool he was when he started. You can’t do that with books.
“But you needn’t spend a great deal on travel, either. Nor do you have to go very far. Just set out for yourself some day and walk to the canal. I’ve been all over the world, and the canal north of New Hope is the best place of all, because there the land is just the way God made it. But in spring, of course, any place is beautiful, because in spring fires leap from your heart, and you can see things that aren’t there.
“And wherever you go on the face of the earth have the humility to think that a thousand years ago someone pretty much like you stood there and a thousand years from now a boy like you will be there. And in two thousand years boys and places and people will have been pretty much the same.
“A lot of nonsense is spoken about work. Some of the finest men I’ve known were the laziest. Never work because it’s expected of you. Find out how much work you must do to live and be happy. Don’t do any more.
“But thinking is something different, altogether! Think always as if the hot hand of hell were grabbing for you. Think to the limit of your mind. Imagine, dream, hope, want things, drive yourself to goodness. Whatever you do, David, do it to the absolute best of your ability. Never take the easy way where thinking is concerned.
“As for churches, they do much more good than harm, but churches where women are in command are often evil places, for no minister can speak honestly there.”
In these days of monologue David sometimes interrupted with strange questions. He was living in a world of ferment. Outside his window a horse-chestnut tree had broken into handsome pyramids of flowers. All day and through the evening bees gossiped among the stately blossoms until the tree seemed like a village store on Saturday night. There was a glorious ache, a marvelous energy in the world. One night a peach tree would appear frail and green. Next noon it was bedecked with flowers, like a young girl painting her cheeks with abandon in her first attempt.
“Were you ever married?” David asked on the last day.
“Me?” the old man asked, his knees shaking with pain. “Sure I was married.”
“The gypsy girl?”
“No!” the wasted fellow laughed. “No, I married a big woman in Detroit. We had three children. One was a fine boy, like you.”
“Where are they now?”
“I … Well … It’s this way, David. There are many things that can’t be explained. But remember this thing that you can understand. It’s better to marry any woman at all than never to marry. This is what I mean. It would be much better for your withered-up aunt to marry Toothless Tom than to live the way she does. If you tell her that, she’ll fizz up and bust. But it’s true.”
Now sovereign pain gripped at the old man with final fury, for this time there also came the ally death. Daniel must have seen the terrible pair, for he jerked his head back and raised his hands as if to fight once more against them. But now the visitors would not be denied. Shaken in their icy grip, the old man writhed in mortal torment.
David clearly perceived what was happening. He knew that this pain was different from the others. This was all-possessing pain.
“Sam! Sam!” the old man shouted, and the boy wondered: “Who is Sam?”
“Sam! Goddamn you, Sam!” the dying man roared.
Back in some distant passion Old Daniel died. He forgot David, and his pain, and the poorhouse, and all the wonderful things he had seen and read. “Sam!” he pleaded. Then he whispered the word again: “Sam!” Getting no response, he summoned his final energy, raised his gaunt neck and bellowed mightily: “Sam!”
This cry brought the nurse, and David said, “He’s dead.”
“Poor old man,” she said, and methodically she covered up the ancient face.
But the picture of the man was not erased from David’s mind. For a long time he cou
On the day of Daniel’s burial Mr. Paxson said that he would come by for David on Sunday and take him to Quaker Meeting. When David told the men on the long hall about his good fortune, they were strangely silent. He repeated his message and finally one of them asked bluntly, “What are you going to wear?”
“I’ll wash up, and Tom can mend my shirt.”
“But you can’t go to the Paxsons’ that way!” a man from Solebury said. “Why, the Paxsons …”
David interrupted. “I don’t think Mr. Paxson would mind.”
“But look at you!” the man protested. The men of the poorhouse studied the boy. Old shoes, scuffed beyond repair. Harry Moomaugh’s pants torn on a stone fence. A bedraggled shirt, and a mop of untrimmed hair.
“I’ll tell you what!” Tom said brightly. “Old Daniel gimme somethin’ before he died. Said to spend it on you when you needed it. Looks like now’s the time.” He went to his room and returned with a Bull Durham tobacco pouch. Toothless emptied the pouch into his hand. It contained more than two dollars!
“Won’t be enough for shoes, too,” an old man said.
Tom scratched his chin. “Tell you what, David. You go beg some money from your Aunt Reba.”
“Not me!”
An old man said, “You go, Tom. I’ll cut the boy’s hair.” So Tom left while the men made a stool for David to sit on while experimenting barbers trimmed his long hair. At Aunt Reba’s door Tom said, “ ’Scuse me for buttin’ in, but your boy needs shoes.”
“He’s got shoes!” Reba snapped.
“He’s got old shoes, Miss Reba. All wore out.”
“I seen ’em the other day. Nothin’ wrong with ’em.”
“But Miss Reba!” Tom pleaded. “They ain’t good enough for him to go to church in. And maybe the Paxsons’ll take him to they home atterwards.”