The Fires of Spring (10 page)

“I’ll take four loganberries,” David said firmly.

Rapidly the man served four tall glasses of deep red juice. David handed Mrs. Paxson hers, the way the men had said. Then he gave Marcia hers. She smiled and looked very pleased. Mr. Paxson reached for his own. David sighed and took his.

Then he got a real shock. The loganberry was astonishingly good! It was sour, yet sweet, and tasted of berries picked in spring. It had a tingle, too, different from anything he had tasted before. “Say,” he cried, his upper lip covered with pale red foam, “that’s good.”

The sodajerk laughed. “You never try nothin’, you never learn.”

“That
is
good,” Mrs. Paxson said.

Slowly, David drained his ebbing glass of loganberry. Marcia and her father put their glasses down. “That was awfully good,” Marcia said. Mr. Paxson raised his glass again to drain the last drop. David watched him through the rim of his own glass. The boy had a wonderful feeling inside, and it was not from loganberry.

“How’d you like that, sonny?” the little clerk asked.

“That’s some drink!” David said.

“I’ll tell ya what I’m a gonna do,” the man said quickly,
snatching up the four glasses. “We’re innerducin’ loganberry in the East. For you and the young lady, who I guess is your sweetheart, since you’re buyin’ her drinks, I’m gonna give you each a free drink. But the grown-ups is gotta buy their own.” He winked at Mr. Paxson, and before Marcia’s father could speak the little man placed four glasses of loganberry on the counter.

With all his heart, more than anything else he had ever wanted before in the world, David wanted to swagger over to the window and say, “Two more tickets.” But his pockets were empty. Mr. Paxson bought the tickets.

This time David drank his loganberry more slowly. It was, if possible, better than before. Once at Christmas he had eaten dinner at a home in Doylestown and the lady had served mashed cranberries. They were fine that way, about the best thing David could remember eating. Well, cold loganberry juice was twice as good.

“Thank thee, David, for showing us something very nice,” Mrs. Paxson said.

“That’s lots better than rootbeer,” Marcia said, squeezing the boy’s hand.

It was late at night before David got back to the poorhouse. From Neshaminy on Marcia had slept, resting on David’s shoulder. He thought: “It’s the first time today she’s missed anything.” In the driveway she bade him a muffled good night, and he laughed, for he was aware that she did not know who he was.

“Thee’ll have to excuse her,” Mrs. Paxson said softly. “She’s had a wonderful day.”

On the long hall more than a dozen night-shirted figures waited for the boy. They found a candle and huddled together in Old Daniel’s room, and the first thought that David had before he spoke was that it would have been good if Daniel could have been there.

“Paradise Park must be the best on earth,” he exploded, and words tumbled furiously from him, striking sparks of light in old eyes. “You never heard a band like Captain Sousa’s!” he confided. “Everybody up front, blowing his head off! I just …” And the words stopped.

Then, from down the hall, a door creaked, and mad Luther Detwiler, in a nightshirt too long for him, came suspiciously into the circle. “How was the drinks?” he asked probingly.

“It was loganberry,” David replied.

“What’s loganberry?” Luther asked suspiciously.

“It was expensive,” David said, and Luther uttered a sharp cry.

The humped man interrupted. “But was it good?” he asked.

“Loganberry,” David said judiciously, “is about the best drink there could be.”

“Then what are you complainin’ about?” the humped man asked. “What’s money for but to spend?”

David looked at the crippled man’s face in the candlelight, and although it was not a handsome face, there was beauty in it. Suddenly the boy felt the tremendous quality of life, the sweep of it, the grandeur, the twisting, contrary nature of living that made every day a thing of wonder. He sensed the passion with which old people cling to the hopes of young people and he saw for the first time the tremendous dignity of these old men huddled in their nightshirts. His heart was so full of emotion that he wanted to say something to that humped old man, to say some special word about Captain Sousa or the small boats on the lake. But he hesitated, and the chance was gone forever. Luther Detwiler had heard enough.

“The drinks?” Luther demanded. “Was they a nickel?”

“They were ten cents,” David replied.

The crazy Dutchman gave a cry of wounded rage and dashed off toward his room. But as he ran an old warning of his mother’s came back to him. “You wait and see!” he shouted back. “Spendin’ money on girls like it was water. You keep that up and you’ll end in the poorhouse!”

Door 5 slammed with a great echo and soon the men could hear mad Luther smashing his furniture. In a paroxysm of rage he stormed and cursed at David for his prodigality. Tom grabbed David and said, “If he smashes all his stuff they’ll lock him up.”

“Stop him!” David pleaded as the breakage increased.

“Not me!” Tom declined, remembering the gorilla-like strength of the crazy man.

The poorhouse men withdrew from Door 5, and David was left there alone. “Luther!” he called.

“Go away!” the destructive Dutchman bellowed.

“Hey, Luther,” David pleaded at the door, and finally the crashing ceased. There was a long moment of silence and David called, “The loganberry juice you bought me …”

The door opened slowly and revealed a heart-broken crazy man. Luther held in his right hand a chair leg and for a
moment it appeared as if he might strike David with it. Instead, the crazy man stared at the boy with profound reproach. “You spent my two dimes,” he half sobbed. “You little pig! You little glutton! Go to bed!” He slammed the door. Then the violence resumed.

“Luther, Luther!” pleaded the little boy.

The news reached the poorhouse one Thursday afternoon. Like wildfire it swept the dismal halls and evoked passions that had seemingly long since died.

As if the news were indeed a crackling fire of despair, David could hear it pass from room to room. “Oh, my God!” a woman screamed. “I told John!”

“It ain’t true!” a woman from Bensalem cried, and immediately she began wailing across the flower beds to the men’s building, “Henry! Henry! You hear?”

“What’s going
on
?” Aunt Reba shouted at the women. When they explained, she threw her hand to her mouth and uttered a terrible, animal scream. “He wouldn’t do that!” she protested. Then she stumbled back and fell into a sitting position on the women’s porch.

“Get some water!” Mrs. Krusen called.

“It ain’t true!” Aunt Reba sobbed.

But it was true. Shamefully, it was true that from hidden nooks and crannies of Bucks County the respected citizen Crouthamel had stolen more than $200,000. How he had accomplished this mammoth theft, no one would know, for the financier had fled.

Reba Stücke, a warden in the poorhouse, contributed $2,763.28 intended for a home in Sellersville. An old couple in Buckingham gave $4,816.95, savings upon which they had expected to bury themselves after their long lives ended. From New Hope, from Quakertown, Erwinna, Chalfont and Doylestown the vast kitty for this indecent poker game had come. Mortgages had been collected but never paid off. Rent money had been sequestered. Rights-of-way had been purchased but never acquired. The horrible pattern of rural theft, which has scarred one American community after another, was now squeezed down upon the foolish people of Bucks County.

On Monday the dispossessed started arriving at the poorhouse. The first couple came from a farm near Lahaska. For three years they had believed the farm was theirs. Now they knew the truth. The old woman went into the ground-floor
room next to Aunt Reba’s. For the first time in her life Reba Stücke became interested in a woman inmate. Endlessly she sat with the woman and went step by step through the filthy processes whereby Mr. Crouthamel had bedazzled his victims.

“He always dressed so
nice
, yet!” Aunt Reba recalled.

“He give us papers, too. Signed with red wax,” the woman sighed.

By the end of the week Aunt Reba had grown to like this woman from Lahaska. She even suggested to Mrs. Krusen that they get together and try to make the woman forget her misery. Mrs. Krusen said that was a good idea, and she and the warden bought some chintz to brighten up the newcomer’s room.

Two other couples and an old man also reported that week. Their frugal lives, spent lately in a long battle against this very poorhouse, were now ending in the wreckage they had fought to avoid. There was a terrible, spring sadness about these old people, and for the first time David began to understand how miserable the poorhouse must seem—from the outside.

Then his mind was distracted from these sad-faced old men and women, for into the poorhouse came a strange and violent couple. The man was moved into Door 10, and David never forgot that first night. The stranger was well over six feet tall, very thin and with a large Adam’s apple. When the door closed behind him, David, through the thin walls, could hear the tall man fighting with himself: “I’ll kill him. I’ll break out of here and twist his throat to pieces. I won’t stay in a poorhouse!” The man stormed back and forth across his room, crying the great, profane oaths that free men use. At supper time David knocked on the man’s door and cried, “Time for chow!” and the violent man slammed open the door and stared in frenzy at the boy. Catching him under the arms, he swung David into the air. “What are you doing here?” he roared. He peered deeply into the boy’s eyes, and David saw there was no madness in this man’s face, only anger of the kind David had never before known.

Violently, the man tossed David back into the hall and slammed his door shut. He would not eat, and during dinner there was much commotion on the grounds, for the guards caught the tall old fellow and his wife half-running, half-walking across the fields to escape the poorhouse.

On Tuesday the two old people ran away again. That
was when David first saw the tall man’s wife. She, too, was thin. Her hair was almost white, but she seemed scarcely half so tall as her husband. David noticed her particularly, because most poorhouse wives sniffled, but this woman leaped out and hit the guard when he shoved her husband. “It ain’t his fault!” she said with a forceful, low voice. “Don’t you touch him!”

But the guard simply had to push the old man along, whereupon the woman flew upon the guard and slapped his face. “You shan’t touch him!” she said even more quietly. “He’s a good man. This ain’t his fault, and we won’t stay.”

A big lump came into David’s throat when he saw what Aunt Reba did. The mean, thin warden came out wiping her hands on her apron. She and Mrs. Krusen had been making some little cakes. “Come along,” Aunt Reba said to the little woman. “He stole from me, too.”

But the little woman marched along beside the guard, as if daring him to touch her husband again.

The tall man stayed alone in his room that night and swore himself to sleep. That is, David thought he had gone to sleep, but toward morning the guards found him climbing down the waterspout. This time the man was locked into a barred room, but for the rest of that night he and his wife kept shouting back and forth across the garden space between the two buildings. The man swore terrible oaths, and the woman encouraged him.

About ten o’clock the next morning Mr. Paxson, from Solebury, drove up to the poorhouse. He talked quietly with the overseer and with the man’s wife. The little old woman bobbed up and down like a sparrow, trying to persuade Mr. Paxson about something. Soon the tall man was released. Mr. Paxson met him on the long hall, and the tall man stared with bitter hatred at that avenue of cells. “I need men like you,” Mr. Paxson said quietly, looking right at the tall man.

When they left the building, the man’s wife hurried up and grabbed her husband’s hand in a strong, almost manly gesture. David, watching nearby, thought: “I’ve never seen men and women like that.” Their minds and their bodies seemed to clash in midair, violently, as if a mighty gong should have sounded when they looked at each other. David watched them as they went to the car, and to his surprise he saw that Marcia Paxson was watching them, too.

The escaping couple looked straight ahead, grim people,
clothed in purple fury, shining in the morning air like Venus in the dawn. Other people came to the poorhouse because of Mr. Crouthamel. They wept a little, sighed for their lost hopes, and soon fitted into the routine. For a few days the women cried over their husbands, who were undone through an alien agent; or the men felt disgraced that their wives finally fell into the poorhouse. But adjust they did. They did fit in. Within two weeks David could not tell the Crouthamel inmates from the regulars. Only the violent couple had fought against their fate, and they escaped.

In fact, Mr. Crouthamel’s vast theft would certainly have been forgotten had not a trivial incident thrown it boldly into the poorhouse like a ghostly shadow outlining an evil deed done at a distance. In checking Mr. Crouthamel’s papers it was found that a feeble-minded Dutchman from Quakertown, one Luther Detwiler, had paid $2.50 a week for eleven years in the belief that he was buying a cigar factory, which was, in fact, owned by a rich German in Reading. The enormity of this deception so preyed upon the public conscience that a Philadelphia newspaperman wrote the obscene story and flashed it across the country.

The next afternoon a photographer from Trenton came to see the crazy Dutchman and took his picture. Luther was pleased with the attention and explained where his factory was. He was careful to say that he happened to be in the poorhouse right now only because his wife was visiting in Delaware.

But that night after dinner the Dutchman began to brood about this factory which somehow or other he didn’t have, and the wife who was gone, and a feral melancholy possessed him. Somberly he rose and looked at the old men about him. He tried twice to explain to these men about his factory. Then he bowed his head and walked quietly to Door 5.