The Fires of Spring (12 page)

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.

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 body around toward his visitor. “Y’re a young lad,” the judge said, “Are y’ strong?”

“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.

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.

“Thank you, Judge!” he said in great excitement.

“I hope y’ll want to thank me ten years from now,” the judge said. At the deaf home across the beautiful street two mutes were arguing about a lawnmower. In fury, one pushed the other. They struggled for a moment, and in the hot summer air David and the judge could hear the weird, ghostlike mouthings of the mutes. David looked at the judge and shivered. The fat judge swallowed hard. In eighteen years of listening to that strange penetrating sound of mutes quarreling he had never grown accustomed to it. He wiped his face and signified by his scowl that David was to be gone.

David hitch-hiked to his first job. A big Packard pulled up and a man with a cigar invited him to jump in. “Where y’ off to, son?” the man asked with real interest.

“I’m getting a job,” David replied as nonchalantly as he could.

The man tilted his cigar into an imperative angle and studied his passenger. “Well! What’s a little twerp like you good for?” When David grinned, the business man asked seriously, “Do ya smoke?”

“No.”

“Do ya gamble? Spend a lot of money? Get drunk?”

“No,” David reported proudly.

“How about women? Do ya chase after every skirt ya see?”

“Oh, no!”

“Well!” the man shouted, banging the steering wheel and roaring with laughter. “Ya may be goin’ to a job, but ya could never work for me!”

“Why not?” David asked somewhat crestfallen.

“I’ll tell ya why! I run a real tough business. Competition! Terrific! I got to have men who are in trouble, men with two or three women their wife don’t know about. Heavy drinkers, gamblers. Especially men who play the horses. Because a man in trouble has damned well gotta work.”

“How can you trust men like that?” David asked.

“Ya can’t!” The big fellow chuckled. “But ya’ watch ’em like hawks so they don’t steal ya blind, and ya just work ’em till they collapse. Because when they make money, you make money!” He looked suspiciously at David and concluded, “So maybe what the Sunday-school teachers has been tellin’ ya is a lotta bunk! Be a bum and be rich! That’s the new rule!”

When the Packard stopped at Paradise the talkative business man grabbed David’s arm. “Son,” he whispered, “I just give you ten thousand dollars’ worth of advice. Now I’m gonna give ya some more. Likewise free. Son, you’re goin’ in to ask for your first job. Here’s a buck. Get yourself a haircut. A shoe shine. Smile. Look neat. Make folks think you’re prosperous. When ya smoke, smoke cigars. Because everybody loves the poor but honest farm boy. But nobody hires him. And right now, son, you look like a farm boy.” The big car whirred away, and before the dust had settled, David was in search of a barber shop.

“You like me to fix your hair up real nice?” the barber asked.

“Yes,” David replied. When the job was done—shine, facial, singe, shampoo—the barber said. “That’ll be a dollar and ten cents.”

“Whew!” David whistled.

“You got that much, ain’t you?” the barber asked suspiciously.

“I got it.”

The barber breathed more easily and said, “And I may say that you got in return just about the finest all-in-one special we ever turned out. Look at him, Oscar!”

In an aura of sweet smells and high hopes David entered Paradise Park and sought out the manager. He remained in a kind of twitching daze until he heard the wonderful words, “Well, Mr. Harper! You’re hired!”

A guide was dispatched to take him to his job. No sooner had they left the office building than the guide whispered, “Boy, are you lucky!”

“I know,” David replied, for he knew how lucky he was to have a man’s job at fourteen.

“What I mean is,” the sharp-eyed guide explained, “you’re gettin’ the one job where you can steal as much as you want.”

“Steal?” David repeated.

“Ssssh!” the wiry guide cautioned. “See that big skinny bastard? He’s a stoolpigeon. Watch out for that one!”

“What do you mean, steal?” David pursued.

“Here we are!” the guide announced, leading his charge into a grove of pleasant trees. “You’re a lucky dog!”

A ruggedly built man in overalls stepped out from a little building that looked like a railway station and reached for David’s hand. “Glad to see ya, kid. You ever run one of these things?”

The
thing
was a miniature train for children, the Pennsylvania and Reading Rail Road. It consisted of an electric locomotive, a coal car, six gondola passenger cars, and a caboose. There was much gilt, a powerful headlight and a whistle. “It runs by electricity,” the man in overalls explained. “It’s a lot of fun. You oughta pay for this job. Now this handle works exactly like a motorman’s control on a trolley. Four speeds ahead. Two back. No brakes, so you got to judge things carefully. Because every time you jump the track we fine you one buck. Let’s take a spin.”

By this time nine passengers were seated in the train, and the locomotive started slowly on its beautiful trail through the grove of tall trees. It passed among shadows and out into
the brilliant light along the lake. Then it darted among the thrilling jungle of props and spars which held up the Hurricane. High aloft a carload of screaming girls sped over the violent dips of the great ride. The railroad left the tortuous trestles and crept back among the delicate shadows, around a bend, up a tiny hill and home to the station. The passengers left and others climbed aboard.

“Now you take her around!” the man said.

“Not yet!” David protested.

“Well, you’re goin’ to!” the man said. “Wait’ll I get the fares.” He grabbed an alligator bag and cried, “All fares on the Pennsylvania and Reading Rail Road. Everybody pay up, or out you go. There’s no foolin’ on this line.” He treated the grown-ups like children and the children like grown-ups. Then he shouted “All aboard!” raising his voice on the
board
the way real conductors did. “Take ’er out!” he commanded imperiously.