The Fires of Spring (43 page)

There was another silence and then Vito asked, “Is that what you say?”

“Oh, that and some other stuff,” Jensen replied. Then a happy thought struck him and the truck veered off the road again. “And by the way, you sawed-off Casanova. Any time you want the truck and the broom, it’s OK. You don’t fool me a bit.”

But the talk and the jokes and the friendship could not erase one fact. When the little girls came to see Vito there was a terrible moment, as if the world stood still, and it was a moment that men David’s size would never know.

The Gonoph was shameless in her love for David. By talking of him incessantly to Cyril and Mona, she picked up odd bits of information about him and these stray tags of intelligence came to have much meaning for her. She discovered, for example, that he liked jelly beans; and even though Easter was long since past she searched for the cheap confection as eagerly as Jensen searched for little girls forty-one inches high. Finally she found a bagful, held over in a store that had bought unwisely. She brought them triumphantly to the tent.

“Look what I found!” she said.

“They’re jelly beans!” David cried with the pleasure of a boy. She watched admiringly as he munched a few and then began nervously to eat them herself as she talked. She ate so many that she got sick and belched onstage. David could see Cyril Hargreaves grow furious at the Gonoph. Between acts he fined her five dollars, and this agitated her so that
in the last scene she called David by his real name instead of Wayne.

When the curtain fell Cyril stormed at her and would have fined her another five dollars for such a breach of acting, but David interfered and said, “Let her alone!” whereupon Mr. Hargreaves looked down his patrician nose at David and said, “Are you her champion?” and David shouted suddenly, “Yes! And I don’t go sneaking down hotel corridors to get in her room, either!”

Mona gasped at this, and Jensen hurried between the actors. “Take it easy, Dave!” he cautioned.

“I won’t take it easy!” David cried. “I’m sick and tired of this pompous bag of wind. Every summer he picks out some girl and gives her the big rush!” Words spurted from his lips, words he had never intended to say.

Mona reached across Jensen’s restraining arm and slapped David’s face. Then the Wild Man had the good sense to clap his hand over David’s mouth and drag him offstage. As they drove westward into Illinois, Jensen made David ride up front with him. “You’ll only get into trouble, Dave, acting that way,” he cautioned. “If I seen it once, I seen it a hundred times. Never interfere with an old man and his love.” He slumped over the steering wheel and laughed. “When my old man was over sixty he got a new housekeeper. She wasn’t good-lookin’ and she wasn’t bad-lookin’. He cottoned up to her something disgraceful, and I decided I’d show him a lesson, so I took the housekeeper out, and when I got back my old man was waitin’ for me with an axe handle. He like to killed me. I had to run away from home, and that’s how I come to the university. No place else to go.”

“He ought to lay off Emma,” David replied.

“She’s really pretty dreadful,” the Wild Man observed.

“Sure she is!” David agreed. “But he could speak to her in private.”

“Why are you so interested?” Jensen asked.

“You know why!” David snapped. A few more questions, and he would want to fight Jensen, too. “I heard you explaining it all to Vito the other night.”

“Oh!” the Wild Man grunted. “Well, what I said is true.” He spoke the words in rude challenge.

“You want to stop the truck and make something of it?” David asked.

There was no reply. Then the Wild Man said, “You better take it easy, Dave. Besides, I could massacre you.”

“I’m not so sure!” David grunted, and slumped back in his seat. He was twisted up, and the agitation of life was bending him this way and that. He wanted to be a full man like Jensen, rough and ready, loving and brawling across the countryside. But at the same time he had a poet’s ear for the Gonoph’s strange chatter. He loved the places she spoke of, the distant, beckoning cities of the Western world: St. Paul, Bismarck, Cheyenne, Tallahassee. And he had grown to like her as a person, exactly as he had grown to like anyone he had ever met, if only he met that person often enough.

He was disturbed that anyone should have the courage to love as openly as she did. The cast ridiculed her, but she did not care. She was twice David’s age, but that did not matter. She was fat and plain and graceless and ugly, and no doubt she often wept because of those afflictions, but the important thing that summer was that she loved a sandy-haired young man. Shamelessly, shamelessly, she loved him.

David’s temper had by now subsided and he said frankly to the Wild Man, “What do you make of the Gonoph? Actually?”

“This is the last,” he said. “Last play she’ll ever be in. You’re the last guy she’ll ever dare to love.”

“Is it so terrible?” David asked. “The last of a thing, I mean?”

“It’s pretty bad,” Jensen insisted. “My old man lost his power for a couple of months at age fifty-five. Christ, you’d a thought he’d gone plain crazy. Stormed about Eastern Kansas shootin’ at people and raisin’ hell. An old nigra figured what was wrong and give a real smart yaller gal four bucks to fix the old man up. Hell, he came home three days later a-singin’ like his heart was gonna bust. He give Mom sixty dollars and told her to buy any damned thing she wanted in the Monkey Ward catalogue.”

Because of this explanation, David became most considerate of the Gonoph. He made it a point to talk with her each day about the various tours she had made, cataloguing in his mind her vapid observations. “Cornstarch is fattening,” she said of blanc-mange. “Until I was thirty-five I watched my figure. Then I said to hell with it.” She thought that Richard Mansfield was worth a dozen Cyril Hargreaves, and she confessed, “When I’m wrong I’m the one to admit it. I was pretty snooty when I told Miss Meigs that sleeping with Sir Cyril got nobody a job on Broadway. Well, he
signed her up for a position in his repertory company next winter! You know what I think? He’s getting so old he’ll do anything to hold onto a girl!” The look of dismay that came into David’s face made her truly sorry for him and she asked softly, “Were you, if you’ll excuse the word, lovers?”

The warmth with which she asked this question inspired David to confess. “And that’s what makes this summer so very rotten,” he said.

The graceless woman bit her big underlip and said, “I got a way figured out that you could cut Sir Cyril’s throat and have a fine time with Miss Meigs the same night!”

The offer was so appalling to David that he would not reply. He could not comprehend the monstrous things people did in the guise of love. Cyril cooked up some trivial job so that he could hold onto Mona. Little Vito stared at the audiences in hope of seeing one small girt. The Wild Man caroused from town to town, to find what? And he himself refused to go with Jensen’s pigeons because he felt somehow attached to the lumbering Gonoph. Who could understand a life force that produced such wanton results? In utter confusion David changed the subject and asked, “Emma, what’s New Mexico like?”

“It’s empty,” she explained.

“This is some country!” he replied, meaning: “Who can understand people?”

“It’s real big,” she agreed.

America creeps quietly upon the objects of its love. The sense of its grandeur and vastness comes slowly to its citizens, so that no one can say, “This morning I discovered what America is.” David, wandering westward, gained an increasing awareness of his land.

That summer he saw the steaming restaurants at four in the morning, the black ribbon of road becoming the gray ribbon of dawn, the churches, the ugly schools, the white fences, the gentle hillsides and the sweeping pastures. These things began to be a part of his thinking. No longer was Indiana merely a word on the map. It was a place of homes and dimensions. In one of the towns there had been a murder the day before Chautauqua arrived. At a filling station Jensen had become involved in an argument over gasoline, and elsewhere the state was green, or black, or reddish, or a woman had given them coffee and doughnuts. As long as David lived, the word Indiana would have meaning.

Slowly David began to fashion a picture of his land. It was a country of opportunity. Take his own case! A poorhouse crum pulled from impossible surroundings and offered the world, if he wanted it. Or look at Jensen! A tough kid from Kansas, fairly good in football, and now he made as much as a thousand dollars a month playing the stock market. In America there was plenty for everyone. All you had to do was reach out and grab your share.

That summer there were moments of unforgettable beauty. David did his driving at dawn. He would scramble out of bed and change places with the Wild Man. The sun would break over his shoulder, creeping down green valleys and prying its way under bridges. The birds of summer would sing and an early farmer would whip his horses through the dewy meadows. It was a magnificent country, this America, grand and lovely to the eye.

There were sights David would never forget: the tragic, lonely square of Greencastle, Indiana, waiting at two in the morning as if for a messenger from the Union armies; the rich flow of the Mississippi, the bridges of Pittsburgh and the steel mills of Youngstown, belching in the night like overfed merchants; the red soil of Southern Illinois; the waters of Lake Erie pounding at weirs. Again David felt as if each nerve of his body lay exposed to the impressions about him and he experienced a perceptiveness that made any ordinary trip of fifty miles a journey into the heart of meaning. “What a land!” he cried to himself as he drove.

But there was one night in which the spirit of America seemed to ride his truck, like an evanescent wonder miraculously perceptible. Jensen was driving from Pittsburgh to Charleroi. He got lost and finally wound up on a side road that ran along the Monongahela River. As he rounded a corner he found standing in the path of his bright lights two girls. One was crying. He stopped the truck and spoke to the girls. Then he called back and wakened David.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Two girls in trouble. Make room for ’em.”

David kicked open the door and the girls crawled in. The younger was about fourteen. They were sisters, and before long it was apparent that they had gone to a roadhouse with two men. They had made love for several hours and got drunk, too. Then, in fear and shame, they had run away from their men. They were headed back home to Monongahela City—Mon City, they called it.

The younger girl would not stop crying. She wept as if there were no controlling her tears. Vito rose to comfort her, but when the girls saw that he was a dwarf, each screamed. The crying became worse. Finally David knocked on the panel. “You better come back here, Wild Man. Let me drive.”

They changed places and David drove toward Mon City. The road was narrow and mean. Black houses and slaked furnaces crowded each intersection. This was the dismal part of America, the home of the black workers whose skins were white.

The girls cried for some time and then David heard Jensen reasoning with them. “So what if you did?” he argued. “It’s maybe a sin, like the priest says, but it ain’t no crime. Maybe you didn’t like it. Maybe it wasn’t any fun. But you can bet a dollar that every human bein’ on this earth started that way.” The youngest girl was now sniffling. Her sister had stopped altogether.

“It’s like this,” Jensen reasoned. “Sometimes it’s fun. Sometimes it ain’t fun.” He paused, then added, “Mostly it’s fun. You’ll find a nice boy some day, and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll have kids, too. Each of you, maybe three kids apiece, and if they’re girls the day’ll come they’ll all find out what I’m sayin’ is true.”

Now they were in Mon City. The streets were dark and grubby. “Where do you get out?” David asked.

They directed him to an intersection. A hill rose steeply to the right. When they stood in the roadway saying good-bye Jensen advised, “Now sleep till about noon tomorrow. You’ll forget all about it!”

“We work,” the eldest said. “In a mill.”

“Fourteen? And you work? I thought there was a law?”

“There’s ways,” the girl said. They started up the hill, but when the younger saw the familiar houses she began to cry again. Her sister hushed her at first and then joined in.

The three men in the truck felt strange and torn about. But the impact fell most heavily on David. Driving southward through the murky night he perceived that America was not merely the green fields and opulence of rural life, nor the magnificence of beautiful cities. It was also the hunger, the yearning, the will to happiness of all the people in all houses. It was the young girls crying, too.

Up to this summer David had lived upon the discoveries
of others. In the poorhouse Uncle Daniel had begun to arrange life for him. At school Miss Clapp had read aloud the fine stories that ignited his imagination. Miss Chaloner had taught him what order was, and he had borrowed freely from the experiences of other friends: Joe Vaux, Mr. Stone, and the fat Texan, Doc Chisholm. But this summer David made three discoveries for himself. The first had come when he found the meaning of America.

The second came with the tornado. Bellehaven lay outside the tornado belt, so that when the big Chautauqua tent started to creak at the ropes in the late afternoon no one bothered much. There was an average, wind-blown audience that night, but Wild Man Jensen sensed that something unusual was about to happen. He was driving twin sisters to the play when an extraordinary gust came whipping past.

“Looks like the beginnin’ of a tornado,” he said.

“We never have tornadoes up here,” the twins explained.

“Could be!” Jensen replied.

The tent captain lashed down certain ropes and loosened others. Through years of experience Chautauqua hands had learned how to “let the wind blow through” without damage. Like a whip in a summer meadow, the dry canvas cracked over the heads of the audience.

In the men’s dressing room Mr. Hargreaves sniffed the air. “I’ve heard tents crack a lot louder than this,” he mused. “Just a good blow.” In the women’s tent the Gonoph was nervous. “There’ll be thunder and lightning,” she sniffed. “I know there’ll be.”