The Fires of Spring by James A. Michener
In David’s eleventh year summer began in late May. A series of warm days heated the earth, and on Friday morning David asked the poorhouse driver to wait a minute at the bridge. The boy got out, felt the water, swished his arm among the reeds, and grinned. At school he reported, “Felt good today!”
The little girls asked, “Warm … enough, that is?” He nodded.
So on Saturday a crowd gathered at the swimming hole behind the hill. The little girls, laughing merrily, ducked into a wooded cave, where traditionally they changed into their suits. David was swinging high on a limb above the water when they arrived, and he thought their giggling especially silly on that fine day.
“How’s the water?” Harry shouted up to him.
“It’s peachy!” David replied.
“How would you know?” Harry teased.
“Look! My suit’s already wet. I went in from up here a while ago!”
“Do it now!” Harry challenged. David swung back and forth, but suddenly he became frightened and began to laugh nervously.
“I’ll wait,” he said sheepishly. Some older boys along the bank began to tease him when suddenly their attention was diverted from the sandy-haired boy in the tree. From the girls’ cave had come a big, well-rounded girl named Betty.
“Hello!” she cried in a bright, edgy voice. The boys began to cluster about her. “Watch out! Them wet suits!” she squealed. This encouraged the boys, and they grabbed at her, eagerly. She struggled happily with them for a while and then screamed murderously as they mauled her into the chilly water. “My God A’mighty!” she squealed. “You’re killin’ me!” From the bank a boy dashed madly into the air and plunged right beside the struggling group. A spray of cold water deluged the big girl. “Watch out, will ya?” she demanded. Two of the boys began to brush the water off her suit, especially around her chest. She protested mildly, and then uttered a playful scream as another boy grabbed her by the legs and pulled her under the water.
But as she submerged David heard another scream, and this one came not in play. It was a girl’s voice, and she was screaming in the cave. Instantly, David plunged from his high perch, but he was beaten to shore by the strong swimmers who had been grabbing at the girl’s legs. David had to wait till they scrambled out, and then he followed them breathlessly to the cave. Four little girls from Grade Five, two almost undressed, were pointing to the woods.
“A man!” they cried, and they were trembling.
“Just somebody tryin’ to get a peek,” a know-it-all boy said.
“No!” a little girl screamed. “He took his pants down.”
Silently, the big boys looked at the girl. She clutched a petticoat over her body and nodded. “Yes, he did,” she said. In disgust her three companions agreed.
The boys dashed into the woods. One of them—who had himself many times hidden near the caves—cried knowingly, “He’d go this way!” The mob followed him, and soon David heard great shouts.
“Knock him down!”
“Grab his legs!”
“Club his brains out.”
There was a sullen crashing in the woods, and David hurried up just as two stones struck the intruder in the head. He fell to the earth, and two boys jumped on him. His pants were not yet buttoned. “That’s him!” a little girl cried, hurrying up to stare. Four boys slugged at the fallen man. Finally the leader made them stop and roll the trespasser over on his back. It was Toothless Tom.
David felt sick. A little girl from Grade Five took his hand and whispered, “That’s the man, Dave.” But the words came to the boy from far away, filled with strange and horrible loathing.
“Get the cops!” an older boy directed. “You!” he said, pointing to David. “Go out and stop a car.”
Mechanically David started to do so, but he took only three steps. Then he stopped. “Whatsa matter?” the leader asked, standing with a heavy club over Tom’s head.
“Why don’t we let him go?” David asked. A shout of derision howled him down.
“We oughta beat his brains out. Now you scram!” The leader left Tom and shoved David along the path, but the boy would not move. He stuck his jaw out, not much, but some.
“Let’s let him go,” David said quietly. “We already done enough to him.” He pointed at old Tom’s face where a stone had hit below he eye.
“He took his pants down, didn’t he?” the leader demanded, pushing David again.
“We hurt him enough,” David repeated.
He might have won his argument but the big girl now bustled up and stared with disgust at the fallen intruder. “You filthy bum!” she shouted, spitting at him. “Guys like you oughta be shot!”
“Yeah!” the boys agreed, and they began to kick the old man.
“Stop it!” David insisted. His voice rose to a high squeak. The older boys laughed.
“You oughta beat him up some more!” the big girl said, kicking at Tom’s chest.
David leaped at her. “You stay out of this!” he cried. “This is for boys!” The big girl laughed at him and pushed him backwards.
Then she snapped her fingers and cried, “I know you, you little runt. You’re the poorhouse kid! And this old sonofabitch is a poorhouse crum, ain’t he?” The words inflamed the boys and they began to thump Tom again.
“Is he a poorhouse crum?” the leader demanded.
“No!” David said. There was a moment’s pause, but the big girl was beside herself with excitement.
“They oughta operate on a guy like him!” she snarled, kicking at Tom again. The boys would have joined in but David, with tears welling into his eyes, said, “He’s an old man.” In spite of his determination not to cry, tears bubbled onto his red cheeks. He kept his face turned up to the bigger boys, and the unwelcome tears stood like little pools beside his nose. “He’s an old man,” the boy insisted.
There was a moment of long thought. Then Harry Moomaugh, who was bigger than David and therefore more to be respected, said, “Let’s let him go.”
So the bigger boys pulled Toothless Tom to his feet. The old man’s knees actually refused to lock. Pathetically, he slumped forward into the arms of his attackers. Blood from his bruised face stained the naked shoulder of the leader, who snapped back in unhidden horror. David took the scared boy’s place and held Tom up.
“If you ever come back here,” the big girl cried, “we’ll kill you.”
Stumbling and staggering into trees, Toothless Tom left the swimming hole. The little girls finished dressing and came down to swim. The leader of the boys washed blood from his shoulder, and for a while it seemed as if the swimming hole had returned to normal; but David noticed one big difference. Now the big girl was left alone. Boys did not run their hands beneath her swimming suit to squeeze her legs.
As David dressed, on this first day of summer, Harry Moomaugh whispered to him, “He was a poorhouse crum, wasn’t he?”
“No!” David insisted.
“But I saw him down there!” Harry recalled.
“I never saw him before,” David said.
And that evening, walking home across the hills, David tried to comprehend what he had seen. That Toothless Tom had done something very wrong was obvious. But why did the big girl want Tom killed? Why did the boys beat him so hard? And why did the little girls shiver and scream in the cave? And the big girl, too! One minute all the boys were eager to grab at her and wrestle with her. The next, and she was left alone as if they were ashamed.
David paused and in the sweet evening of soft sounds tried to remember what Old Daniel had told him about men and women, that dark night behind Door 8. Apparently Daniel hadn’t told him everything, but there was one incident of that night which David now recalled. It had happened when Daniel had started to speak. Toothless had tried to scuttle from the room. “I never been married!” he had pleaded, and while Daniel had talked, it had been Tom, tall and almost seventy, who had blushed and fidgeted. “I guess it’s because he didn’t get married,” David reasoned. But immed
But on one point there was no confusion. When he reached the poorhouse he would walk right into his room and toss his swimming suit in a corner. Then, as if nothing had happened, he would yell for Tom. When he found the man he would look right at him, like the Quakers, and ask, “What happened to your face?” And that night—he knew—Tom would be ashamed to tap on Door 8, so he, David, would tap on Tom’s door.
With this idea in mind, David slipped into the pantry and begged for two pieces of cheese and some bread. Stuffing the repast into his pocket, he climbed the steps to the long hall. “You can’t run away from a friend,” David muttered. “Not even if he gets into trouble with little girls.”
David did not comprehend the heartbreak and tragedy of a country poorhouse because he had taken his residence upon an island. When he retreated doggedly to that fortress, nothing could touch him, not death nor humiliation nor the visible decay of defeated old men. He was king of his island, its sole inhabitant, the watcher of its hills and the guardian of its sunsets. The moat of his island was the protecting wonder of his vagabond mind that saw tragedy as an invitation to experience. The castle was David’s unfailing belief in himself; and the ultimate sanctuary of the castle was the boy’s quiet love for other people. He lived in a kind of dream world where Hector always won.
It took a shocking experience to blow aside, even for a brief moment, the veil of unseeing from his boyish eyes; and it was this episode that forced him to perceive a vision that was in later years to save him from the folly of his dreaming.
On a hot day in early summer mad Luther Detwiler began to scream for David, and before supper Aunt Reba sought out the boy and commanded him to stay away from the Dutchman. Aunt Reba now had another account book, and she was already well started in accumulating a small fund for a house in Sellersville; and with the slow growth of this money the bitter woman’s hatred of David and the women in her building returned. Naked, she had sought affection; clothed in a few pennies, she could afford to hate once more.
But David ignored her command and went to see mad Luther. He had often been on crazy row and had grown to like some of the fey creatures there: the woman who saw sheep crowding her room, the man who believed himself to be a preacher, the daft man who nodded his head back and forth some thousands of times a day, the mumblers, the slobberers, and those who could not go to the toilet by themselves. Some of them recognized the bright-faced little boy and stopped their nothingness to smile at him.
At Luther’s room the guards were washing the crazy Dutchman and asked David to wait in the hall. Idling there, he stared through the bars at an old mad woman. She sat still and intent. Suddenly her right arm shot out quicker than David’s eye could follow. She had caught a fly. Methodically she ripped off its wings and placed the flightless creature upon her barren table. Then, with a finger of spit, she drew a wide circle about the dismembered fly. Composed, calm, like an Aztec god, she watched the fly as it stumbled about the table top. As long as the fly stayed within its circle, which was ample, the mad woman followed it patiently, with her great eyes rolling this way or that. But when the fly once touched the forbidden line, the old woman’s face clouded like an angry Jehovah. Then she raised her right hand, and with a brutal spatulate finger, crushed the fly.
Then, like a spider, she waited until another fly came into her ken. Flashingly she would snatch it from the air. Wingless, the fly would wander across the surface of his restricted world. It was free until it transgressed the line. Then the horrible forefinger ended all feeble wanderings.
When the old woman had five flies piled one upon the other, she ate them.
Sweating with fright, David stared transfixed through the madhouse bars. For the first time in his life he knew terror, the stark wild terror that invades every room in every house in every town.
“All right, sonny!” the guard said. When he saw how David trembled, he added, “Now you don’t need to be afraid. Luther won’t hurt nobody.”
David shook himself and tried to halt his shivering. Mechanically he moved toward Luther’s cell. He blinked his eyes to bring himself back to a world he understood.
The crazy Dutchman embraced him. “Oh, David,” he sobbed, shedding lucid tears, “you don’t need to be afraid of me. You know I wouldn’t hurt you.”
The frightened boy placed his small hand in Luther’s hairy fist. “I know,” he mumbled. Then he saw, impersonally as if from another world, that his friend’s face was bandaged, his right hand badly bruised, and the sleeve upon the right elbow torn as if from some epic struggle.
All of this happened one spring in the poorhouse near Doylestown. David saw these things, and much more, but he did not understand what he saw. That was to come later.
PART 2
Paradise
When David Harper was fourteen years old his Aunt Reba Stücke got one of the major surprises of her life. She discovered that the laws of Pennsylvania prevented her from taking David out of school and putting him to work at the pants factory in Sellersville.
All of Reba Stücke’s friends had gone to work when they were fourteen, or much sooner. To her frugal German mind it was indecent for her nephew—who was now a big boy—to delay getting about the deadly serious business of earning a living, both for himself and for her. In Reba’s orderly world aunts raised nephews until they were old enough to work, and then the nephews “took care of the old ones.” She could not believe that child-labor laws applied to “sensible people like me and the Schultzes.”
She was somewhat mollified, however, when she discovered that with permission from parents and school a boy of fourteen could work summers. She readily gave her permission and prevailed upon the Doylestown authorities to do the same. David would be sent to Sellersville to learn the rudiments of the pants industry. Then, when he was sixteen, he could start work in earnest “and no more of this education nonsense.”
With the sure insight of a little animal smelling out a baited trap, David sensed that once he put his foot in the Sellersville factory he would never again be free. His aunt would find every reason for him to go on making pants. And where then would be Old Daniel’s vision of learning and travel?
So, with an intuition based upon a flashing memory of rumor heard years before at the swimming hole (“Joe got a good job just by askin’ Judge Harmon”), David went in to Doylestown and sought out the old judge. It was June. Summer was upon the town as David walked out Court Street past the school whose very stones seemed warm and friendly to him. Hot summer lay over Bucks County, and the sweet smell of warm earth was everywhere. A milkman’s horse had urinated in the gutter, and the keen, penetrating odor tingled in the air a moment and was swept aside. In the junkman’s yard, cherry and peach blossoms had long since faded. Tiny fruit, green but with the promise of rare delights, expanded in the sun. It was summer. School was out, and David was applying for his first job.
Judge Harmon sat on the porch watching the mutes at the deaf home clean their lawn. His vast stomach slumped between his knees as he wheezily told David to sit down. “What d’y’ want, son?” he asked, mopping his forehead, “Hot today.”
“I want to get a job,” David said.
“Y’re Reba Stücke’s boy? Yes, I heard about you. George Paxson said you were a good boy. They tell me you’re a good worker.” The fat judge shifted his stomach and turned to look at the boy. David beamed at him, acknowledging that so far as he knew he was a fine worker.
“I’ve been pretty good at school,” he said.
“What kind of job d’y’ want, son?” the judge asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” David replied. “I heard some fellows say that you got Joe Axenfield a job.”
“Joe Axenfield!” the judge said. He scowled and shifted his mammoth bod
“Oh, yes!” David said eagerly. “I play basketball. Against the first team, even.”
“I mean have y’ courage?”
“I don’t know,” David said earnestly. “I been in some fights, but I never do too well. I don’t run away, though.” His frank brown eyes looked directly at the perspiring judge.
“Y’ don’t know what I mean, boy,” the judge said, wheezing heavily. He leaned far over his stomach and pointed a finger at David’s chin. “Are y’ honest? Can y’ stand temptation? Y’re not a weaklin’, are y’?”
“I never been in trouble, Judge Harmon,” David replied. “I think I’m all right.”
“Well, son. The only job I got for y’ needs a strong man. Not a weak boy.” The judge leaned still farther toward his guest. “The boys were right, son. I got Joe Axenfield a job. And a year later Joe got eight months in jail. Now are you another Joe or are y’ a clean, strong young man? Because if y’ get this job, y’aren’t a boy any longer. Y’re a man.”
David heard these rich words with a strong feeling of adventure about his heart. He knew then what he was: a young man, strong and honest. He told the judge so.
“All right, son. Y’ asked for it. There’s a job waitin’ for y’ down at Paradise Park. Bella! Bring me some paper.” The German maid appeared with the judge’s portfolio. He breathed heavily as he wrote a few lines. He folded the letter and was about to place it in an envelope. Changing his mind, he opened the letter again and thrust it at David.
“Dear Lewis:
I am sending you a fine young man of whom I have had excellent reports. Give him some kind of work. He is an honest and deserving youth.
Matthew Harmon”
Solemnly the judge placed his recommendation in the envelope. “Son,” he said. “Don’t y’ ever dare to make me regret those words. This is y’r first job. Remember this. What y’ do on this job will haunt y’ as long as y’ live. Y’re a man now.” The judge extended his wet hand and puffed noisily as David grasped both it and the letter.