The Fires of Spring Read Free

no books, no maps, no album of stamps, no baseball glove, no winter overcoat, no collection of bird eggs.
    But when David entered the darkness of Door 8, the room seemed all aglow. His heart and his mind were simply bursting with emotion. To see the world! To talk with a president! To read all the good books! Oh, the illimitable world that lay ahead! The glory and the wonder of it, the variegated charm, the endless invitation to far thoughts, deep wells of beauty, and strange sounds! How could a poorhouse or a prison or handed-down clothes or barren rooms contain such a boy?
    He went to the gaunt window of his room and looked out across the snowy fields and up to the crystal heavens. There were the stars that Old Daniel had traced out for him: “Since the world began they’ve been there. When you and I have been dead a thousand years they’ll still be there. That’s Andromeda you’re looking at.” A room might be swamped in bug juice, but the fathomless universe came crashing in nevertheless. “It’s pretty nice out there,” David mused. Then he thought of Old Daniel. “It’s pretty nice in here, too.”
    Then came a knocking at his door! That would be Toothless Tom with some food. Eagerly David ran to the door. “Here’sthe waiter!” the toothless old man joked. “A little something from the kitchen.”
    Like David, Toothless Tom was always hungry. He was a lean fellow from Solebury. Once he had owned a farm. Now his nephew owned it. Something had gone wrong, somehow, and Tom’s nephew owned the farm. Tom was in the poorhouse, and he was always hungry, but he would never eat alone. Not when a growing boy was about!
    Tonight Toothless had an apple, fresh and cold from the apple barrels of some farm. He had begged it that afternoon from a trucker. “You done pretty well this month,” he said in the darkness. “Studyin’ is a fine thing for a boy, David. Never forget that. If I had of done a little studyin’ …”
    Toothless never finished sentences beginning with
if
. In the poorhouse such clauses were constant currency. They filled the long hall like dead leaves clogging an alley in autumn, and whenever the old men talked to David, the sentences with
if
broke forth in profusion. The men would see his frank freckles, his eyes popping with delight at the prospect of extra food, or his eagerness to understand the ways of life, and they would cry, “If I had told Crouthamel
‘No’
when he suggested a mortgage …” “If I had only of finished high school …” “If I had had the operation when the doctor said …” “If … If … If …”
    Toothless alone refused to finish those sentences which ride the lonely winds of a poorhouse. He alone had the honesty to realize that even if he had studied, his particular nature was one which ends its day in a poorhouse. Defeat and poverty were the destiny of the kind of man he was. His nephew was much smarter than he, a better farmer, too. Were the old days miraculously restored, were Tom to have his teeth and his farm once more, he knew in his heart that sooner or later his nephew—or some clever man like his nephew—would somehow or other get that farm.
    “Gee!” David confessed, “I ate almost all the apple, Tom.”
    “You’re a growin’ boy, ain’t you?”
    “Tom! You’re very kind. I swear on a Bible, next time you get more’n half.” Positively, absolutely, next time Tom must get his share. David spit on his finger and crossed his heart. Of course, he had made this solemn promise at least sixty times before, but this was the first time he had ever spit on his finger, too.
    The toothless old man gummed the last of the core and raised David’s window to throw it away. “Say!” he whisperedin a farmer’s speculative voice. “Spring’s comin’.” He sniffed the air. ‘Sure’n shootin’, spring’s comin’.”
    David stepped beside him and like a little farmer sniffed at the air. It was very cold, and he could perceive no