The Fires of Spring Read Online Free PDF

wife’s in Delaware.”
    A sudden breeze swept up from the grove of oak trees. This was spring! Spring, as only it can be, a quiet, searching, overwhelming thing, sweet with lilies-of-the-valley and dogwood.
    “That smells like lily-of-the-valley,” Luther said. The men stopped talking as the perfume of spring, like that of a delicate woman, passed them by, and every man thought of what paradise, great or small, he had lost.
    David never forgot that moment. Luther was the first to speak and he droned on about his cigar factory: “I lost my factory. I lost my house. I lost my wife. I never should of signed them papers Mr. Crouthamel give me.”
    Nor did David ever forget that when poorhouse men speak of the worlds they lost, they speak always of those distant worlds as they were in spring. It was the barges of spring that Daniel recalled. Other men remembered their homes surrounded by spring flowers, or that memorable spring when ice stayed in the Delaware through April. They thought of the plowing, not the harvesting, the thawing of earth, not its freezing. They remembered the branches of their trees twisting in the agony of blossom-birth: they did not boast of the many apples they had picked.
    David also noticed that old men who came to the poorhouse in spring were inconsolable. A man might enter inJanuary and praise the warmth of the long hall, but the men who came in spring could praise nothing. Then the poorhouse was a prison terrible to the spirit. Spring men often ran away, and the two men whose dangling bodies David had found in the barn, they were spring men.
    There was little surprise, therefore, when an old man from Bensalem reached the poorhouse one Saturday in late March and disappeared the following Monday. For two nights he had lived in Door 10. Endlessly he had walked up and down, an old man of seventy-three walking up and down.
    David went in to see him on Sunday and said, “Would you like to come to church with me this afternoon? It’s the Baptists this week. They sing fine.”
    “Get out of here!” the old man snapped. “Leave me alone.”
    In a way, it was good for David that the old man did run away. For the next occupant of Door 10 was an interesting man. He was younger than most of the occupants, less stoop-shouldered, and possessed of his own teeth. On the second night, that was Wednesday, he gave David a chocolate bar. On Thursday he gave the boy two apples. Late that night, after Toothless had visited with some cheese, the stranger tapped lightly on Door 8.
    “May I come in?” he asked.
    “Yes,” David cried eagerly. “Thanks for the apples.”
    “Did you like them?” the man asked. His face was clean and bright in the candlelight.
    “They were good,” David beamed.
    “Well, I know little boys like apples,” the friendly man laughed, sitting on the edge of the bed. “They tell me you’re pretty good in the games at school.”
    “I like to play basketball,” David admitted. “But I’m too short right now.”
    “You’ll grow!” the man assured him. He leaned forward and felt the muscles in David’s arm. The boy’s small arm had goose pimples from the chill air. “You’d better cover up,” the man said very quietly. He snapped the meager poorhouse covers over the boy in such a way as to extinguish the candle. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have no matches.”
    “There’s some over there,” David said eagerly.
    “Never mind,” the man reassured him. Gently he forced David back onto the pillow. “You must be sleepy.” He stroked David’s forehead, and then his cheek.
    “I guess I am,” David said. He felt funny. The man’shands smelled funny, like that soap they used at Paradise Park, where the band played.
    “You go to sleep, David,” the stranger said, “and when you grow up those arms will be fine for basketball. Your legs, too.” Gently, he tested David’s muscles through the thin sheets. “Get some sleep now,” the soft voice repeated. “You’ll