The Fires of Spring (6 page)

As the car made its last turn before it was free of the wailing woman, Erma leaned out, her neck swathed in black, and hissed justification of herself: “She ain’t one of us. Dirty old whore.”

David had not heard this word before, but the manner in which it struck across the faces of the poorhouse people lived with him for many days. But to Mrs. Krusen not even the word mattered. She made a last effort to reach the car and stumbled finally to the roadway, covered in dust.

Luther Detwiler picked her up. David saw that even in the Dutchman’s strong arms the woman struggled and wept. Luther carried her over to the women’s porch, where Aunt Reba was waiting. “Lay her dahn!” Reba commanded with bitter contempt. Luther did so, and three old women gathered about their stricken friend, but Aunt Reba was relentless. “Let her be!” she warned. “She wasn’t married to him.”

That night it became apparent to the men on the long hall that Old Daniel was dying. The pains that racked him had become so frequent that no man of seventy could long resist them. David, having yet had no real experience of death, could not interpret the signs, but he noticed that from the day Mrs. Krusen was left behind, Old Daniel lived and spoke with a sense of great urgency.

When David asked, “Why was Aunt Reba so mad at Mrs. Krusen?” he replied. “Your aunt’s not a bad woman, David. It’s just that she wants to be good. And she doesn’t know how.”

“But why does her wanting to be good make her mad at Mrs. Krusen?”

The old man became quite eager in his explanation, and he explained the anomaly this way: “You must talk to Mrs. Krusen some time. Tell you what, David! You get up real early tomorrow morning and pick the biggest bunch of flowers you can find. Then you take them up to Mrs. Krusen’s room.”

“Aunt Reba would beat me,” David protested.

“So what does that matter?” the frail old man asked. “David, it’s important to you and to Mrs. Krusen both.”

“How could it be important to me?” the boy asked, and then something in the thin face staring at him warned David that he must ask no more questions.

Early in the morning he rose and sneaked out of the long hall. In the damp woods he collected a large bouquet of spring flowers. Joe-pye weed and violets and lilies-of-the-valley filled his arms when he crept back to Daniel’s room. The old man had found an empty jar that could almost have been a vase, and he got Toothless to arrange the flowers so that they looked large and important. Then mad Luther Detwiler was sent to ask Aunt Reba a question while David slipped into the women’s building through the back.

“Where’s Mrs. Krusen’s room?” he asked in a whisper. The old women, pleased with any conspiracy against Aunt Reba, led him to the right door. He knocked softly and a low voice said, “Come in.”

David stepped into the room, and he was unprepared for what he saw. Mrs. Krusen had lived there only a few days, but already it was a fine, clean room, different from any he had previously seen. There was no smell of bedbug juice. Instead, some kind of sweet smell dominated. About the windows were small strips of colored cloth, tied back in bowknots. Over the bed there was cloth of another color, and on it rested a pillow with a knitted cover. The bed was very neat, and above it on the wall were four colored pictures from the
Ladies’ Home Journal
.

“I brought you some flowers,” David said.

The little old woman rose and curtseyed. “Thank you,” she said. With three or four touches of her fingers she made the flowers look different, more spread out, perhaps.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” the boy added. “I’m sorry for you, left behind.”

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.

“Day
wid
!” 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
Day
wid 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.” Then the frail hands beat unmercifully upon the bed, and the old man cried, “But you must never forget that evil men don’t get into this poorhouse of ours because they live forever in a miserable poorhouse of their own spirit. All their lives!

“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.