Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Then suddenly he was out of it, bursting into the open at the rear of the pine thicket beyond the barrage, galloping breakneck toward the rise where the battery of field howitzers awaited Captain Finley’s orders.

  A fleck of white caught his eye and he looked to see a handkerchief floating to earth near the farmhouse two hundred yards away. His throat caught. An enemy signal? Federal treachery? He hauled hard on the reins and the chestnut reared on its hind legs, pawing the air viciously. What to do? Take the message to the artillery or warn Captain Finley?

  Lonnie! Hooooooooooo, Lonnnneeeeeeeeeee! The clear voice of Mama Pastine trumpeting across the frozen morning, calling him to breakfast, ended Young Scout’s dilemma.

  “Oh, shit,” said Young Scout.

  “What we need to do is let the churches organize the wars,” Jake was saying. “It would make everything a good deal more civilized.”

  He speared a four-inch-thick stack of hotcakes from the steaming platter in the middle of the kitchen table and dropped it on his plate.

  “Take the Germans in the Middle Ages. They had the right notion. Start a war, and they’d send out a bunch of prelates to oversee the business. They had a thing called the Peace of God where the prelates would decide things had got hot enough and they’d just say, ‘Okay, boys, time to knock off.’ And most times, the combatants would just stop right there and then. But that didn’t always work.”

  Jake poured a puddle of syrup on top of the hotcakes and slivers of brown trickled over the sides of the pile.

  “So they had another trick they called the Truce of God. That’s where the prelates would say, ‘Okay, boys, no fighting between Thursday and Monday.’ And sure enough, the aggrieved parties would cease the hostilities at sundown on Thursday and clean up and go to town and recharge their batteries and take in a sermon on Sunday and then go back to it hot and heavy come sunrise on Monday. Now that’s …”

  Jake forked a hunk of the hotcake pile into his mouth and chewed methodically. Twenty times. Chew every bite twenty times and you’d never have gastric distress, Daddy Jake always said. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, impatient to get on with his story. His cheeks puffed like a chipmunk’s. Then he swallowed and the great bony lump of his Adam’s apple bobbed like a head nodding.

  “… the way to run your wars.” He nodded for emphasis.

  “Pastine” — he held up his coffee cup and waggled it — “could I have another round, my beauty?” Mama Pastine gave the three hotcakes sizzling on the griddle a flip and brought the coffeepot to the table. The coffee was boiling hot and it bubbled in Jake’s cup as she poured it. “What do you think, my darlin’, on the subject? Could we get the churches to take over the supervision of the lists?”

  Pastine speared him with a warning glance. She had small bright eyes that danced when she was in one of her no-nonsense moods. “You blaspheme, Jake Tibbetts. You haven’t darkened the doors of a church in forty years, and you sit there and babble on about churches running wars. The Lord listens and takes note.” She took the coffeepot back to the stove.

  Jake glanced at Lonnie and cocked his head to the side like a small dog.

  “You’d have to take turns, of course. Spread the responsibility around. Give everybody a piece of the business. You could have your Baptist war and your Methodist war and your Catholic war and your Reformed Agnostics and your High Episcopals and your Low Episcopals. And then your Presbyterians would want a piece of the action. Get a good thing going and your Presbyterians will always find a way to get in on it. Then when they do, they sit around and argue with each other.”

  Jake was waving his fork now, the color high in his cheeks, his ears twitching the way they did when he got on a tear.

  “Your Baptist wars would be sort of grim kinds of affairs. No cussing or that sort of thing. Strictly business. The Methodists, now, they would run a loose kind of game, if you know what I mean. Bingo at night, covered-dish suppers, dancing, the like. It would give the hors-de-combat a little spice.”

  Jake chopped off another bite of hotcakes and chewed twenty times, drumming his fingers on the table while he rolled his eyes. The Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “It would give a fellow a choice of wars, too. Take for instance you had a Baptist war coming up. A fellow who enjoyed a little fun along with his combat might say, ‘Well, now, I think I’ll just sit this one out and wait until a good Reformed Agnostic war comes along.’ “

  “For goodness’ sake, Jake!” Pastine turned from the stove and brandished the spatula she was using to flip the hotcakes. “Hush and let the boy eat his breakfast. And you,” she pointed the spatula at Lonnie, “get busy. I’d think you’d be starved half to death, running around in the woods before daybreak on a freezing morning, doing Lord knows what. And then you sit here with your mouth open listening to that old goat” — she waved the spatula at Jake again — “blaspheming and talking nonsense while a good pile of hotcakes gets cold right before your nose. What were you doing out in the woods, anyway?”

  Lonnie ignored the question. He held up his coffee cup and waggled it. “Could I have another round, my beauty?” he mimicked Jake’s raspy voice. Jake guffawed, then ducked his head. Pastine hung fire for a moment, then put the spatula down with a snort and poured a small puddle of coffee in the bottom of Lonnie’s cup, filled it the rest of the way with milk until it lapped at the brim, and dumped in a heaping teaspoon of sugar.

  The kitchen was a warm cocoon against the morning. The Atwater-Kent radio murmured Ollie Whittle’s market and weather reports from its mahogany cabinet on the counter next to the pantry. At the window beyond Pastine’s head the thin edge of frost around the panes glittered with new sun, and the way it fractured the light made her face seem more angular than usual. With the glistening window at her back she seemed to hover somewhere between the table and the frostbitten morning where Captain Finley Tibbetts, Lonnie’s great-great-grandfather, would just now be carving up the Federal infantry in the open field beyond the pine thicket with his glistening saber. In counterpoint to the raging battle, Mama Pastine smelled deliciously of coffee and hotcake batter and the faint aroma of lilac water.

  She gave Lonnie’s coffee a vigorous swish with the spoon, then turned back to the stove, picked up the spatula, shoveled the three hotcakes on the griddle onto her own plate, and placed it on the table at the empty seat. She took a glass from the cabinet and held it under the sink faucet. The water came out with a splat.

  “Jake, get those pipes wrapped today.”

  “Ummmm,” Jake said, his mouth full of hotcake, as she sat down at the table.

  “I mean it.”

  “Ummmmm.”

  “One of these nights, I’ll be lying upstairs on my deathbed with it freezing cold outside and neither one of you outlaws will have sense enough to come in here and turn on the faucet so it will drip, and then the pipes will burst, and come morning, you’ll have a worn-out old dead woman lying upstairs and the pipes spewing all over the backyard.” Pastine poured a thin stream of syrup over the top of her hotcake stack, then cut off a small bite.

  Lonnie thought about the pipes. They had taken out the hand pump beside the kitchen sink and put in running water during the summer six years before, when Lonnie was six years old. Daddy Jake should have done it right. He should have had the plumbers rip out the old sink and put in a new one with faucets built in and the pipes run up through the floor. But no, he told them to just run the pipes under the house and out through the bricks of the foundation and up the backside of the house and into the kitchen just below the window. Lonnie remembered Mama Pastine fussing about it, Daddy Jake saying it was all right, he’d wrap the pipes so that they didn’t freeze. Now the pipes were still bare, and Mama Pastine had to turn on the faucet and let it drip on cold nights so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Lonnie imagined the pipes busting while Mama Pastine lay on her deathbed upstairs, rupturing just at the point where the straight pipe connected to the elbow just below the window, spewing a fine s
pray of water that glittered in the dawn and froze as it hit the nandina bush under the window, turning the bush into a spectacular ice monster like the kind that lurked in the High Himalayas.

  Jake looked up from his plate, now empty. “Well, Pastine, which do you want us to call first — the plumber or the mortician? Are you fading fast, my beauty, or will you last another winter?”

  “Plumber? Who said anything about a plumber?” She pointed her fork at Jake. “You said when you had the plumbers out here to put in the pipes that you could wrap them yourself. If you weren’t going to do it, why didn’t you have the plumbers wrap the pipes, Jake? Or better, why didn’t you have the plumbers run the pipes up through the floor and put in a new sink like you should have?”

  “I’m a newspaperman, not a laborer,” Jake protested. “I deal in words, not monkey wrenches.”

  “Then why …” she began, then tossed her head in disgust.

  Jake took a sip of his coffee. “I have good intentions, m’dear. I simply sin and fall short. My feet are made of clay, I confess it. I’ll get the pipes wrapped today, plumber though I am not. Lonnie and I will stop at the hardware while we’re in town and pick up whatever it is you wrap pipes with.”

  Mama Pastine glared at him and kept eating. She took small bites, chewed them precisely. Lonnie watched, studying her even, deliberate movements as she worked through the stack of hotcakes, washing them down with small sips of water. She was no coffee drinker. She fixed Jake’s coffee every morning, and she would allow Lonnie two cups of mostly-milk on Saturday, because she said if they wanted to rust away their insides, they would have to pay the consequences.

  Jake drained his coffee cup, set it down with a clatter on the saucer, wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin in his lap, and laid it in a heap on his plate. “I wonder who that damn fool was in the airplane?”

  Lonnie’s ears perked. “What airplane?”

  “My Lord,” Pastine said, “you must have been asleep out there in the woods if you missed it. He passed right over the house just before I called you in. Almost scared me to death. Do you suppose they’re having maneuvers?”

  Jake shook his head. “Lost, probably, and looking for landmarks.”

  “You reckon he crashed?” Lonnie asked eagerly.

  “Well, I ain’t seen any debris in the backyard,” Jake said.

  Lonnie thought about it, imagined the plane clipping the chimney with a wheel as it roared over the house, tilting crazily, digging a wing into the big pecan tree in the side yard, spinning and devouring itself as it came to pieces in the limbs of the tree, scattering flaming pieces of struts and propeller and fabric over the backyard as the chickens ran cackling in terror, skittering along with their feet skimming the ground.

  “Godawmighty,” he said softly.

  Mama Pastine looked up at him sharply. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  “I heard you,” she insisted, “I heard what you said.”

  Lonnie cut his eyes over at Jake, who gave him a don’t-look-at-me-buster look. “I’m sorry,” Lonnie said.

  “You should be. And on the day before Christmas. Santa Claus has no truck with blasphemers.”

  Daddy Jake snorted. “Hogwash.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Mama Pastine said.

  “You are confusing Santa Claus with Father Coughlin. Santa Claus makes no moral judgments. His sole responsibility is to make young folks happy. Even bad ones. Even TERRIBLE ones.”

  “Then why,” Lonnie broke in, “does he bring switches to some kids?”

  “Exactly,” Mama Pastine affirmed.

  “Whose side are you on, anyway?” Jake demanded.

  “I’m just tryin’ to get it all straight,” Lonnie said. “I’m all for Santa Claus.”

  Jake tapped his plate with his fork. “This business about switches is pure folklore. Did you ever know anybody who really got switches for Christmas? Even one?”

  Lonnie thought about it. “I guess not. Even Little Bugger, after he set fire to the woods down by the creek, he got a Western Flyer coaster for Christmas.”

  “Right,” Daddy Jake nodded. “I have been on this earth for sixty-four years, and I have encountered some of the meanest, vilest, smelliest, most undeserving creatures the Good Lord ever allowed to creep and crawl. And not one of them, not one, mind you, ever got switches for Christmas. Lots of ’em were told they’d get switches. Lots of ’em laid in their beds trembling through Christmas Eve, just knowing they’d find a stocking full of hickory branches come morning. But you know what they all found?”

  “What?”

  “Goodies. Even the worst of ’em got some kind of goodies. And for one small instant, every child who lives and breathes is happy and good, even if he is as mean as a snake every other instant. That’s what Santa Claus is for, anyhow.”

  “Jake,” Mama Pastine said, “one of these days you are going to talk yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. I just hope I live long enough to see it.”

  “So you can gloat?”

  “No, I’ll probably keel over from amazement.”

  “One of these days, I’ll do it just for your edification, m’dear.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. “Sometimes I wonder if you know the difference between good and evil.”

  Daddy Jake grinned. “I do, but Santa Claus doesn’t.”

  Lonnie savored it, his grandparents’ warm kitchen and the ice-rimmed window, the drip-drip of the faucet keeping time with Ollie Whittle’s soft mutter on the Atwater-Kent, the rich aroma of coffee and hotcakes, Mama Pastine’s lilac water and Daddy Jake’s cigar smell. And secrets. There was the secret knowledge of the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and the two Tom Swift mysteries and the pair of brown corduroy pants and the soft black leather gloves with rabbit-fur lining he had already found stashed away in Mama Pastine’s closet. And that other secret — Captain Finley’s Lighthorse Cavaliers covering themselves with glory out there in the frost-encrusted field.

  The moment hung suspended in Lonnie Tibbetts’s imagination, and then it ended when Lonnie thought, as he so often did, of his father.

  Where, on this fine morning, was First Lieutenant Henry Finley Tibbetts, U.S. Army Infantry? Somewhere in Europe, that’s all Lonnie knew. Mama Pastine told him that — a nugget of knowledge gleaned from some mysterious source she had. She shared only that with Lonnie, and only with him, because Daddy Jake would not allow the mention of his son in his presence.

  This morning, the thought of Henry Tibbetts bubbled unbidden to the surface of Lonnie’s mind — an impression, a feel of Henry more than any specific memory. Lonnie, in fact, could not really remember what his father looked like. He remembered, instead, Daddy Jake’s reaction to Henry, the naked anger, the disgust. Henry Tibbetts was a pariah in his own home. It was the very word Jake had used to describe his son — a pariah. A man who had disgraced the memory of his wife and deserted his son and was now off fighting a damn fool’s war. He was a drunkard, a profligate, a fool. But worst of all, he had violated the basic rule of civilized behavior that says a man cleaves first to his family and forsakes all else in their behalf, no matter what the cost. In Jake’s book, you stood and fought, especially when the enemy was inside yourself. But Henry had cut and run. A quitter. That’s what Daddy Jake had said.

  Lonnie understood all these things, understood that Henry was absolutely taboo in Daddy Jake’s house. But nonetheless he lurked in every corner: a sad, fascinating shadow of a figure just beyond touching. Lonnie felt his presence, but he kept that to himself. As far as Mama Pastine was concerned, Henry was somewhere in Europe. How could you tell her that he was both there and here, that a living man could have a ghost who haunted the house and the person he had left behind? No, you couldn’t tell. It was something you kept in your own heart even though it sometimes made you feverish with wondering.

  “You gonna stare at it or drink it?” Daddy Jake interrupted his thoughts.

  “Huh?” He looked
up and blinked at them.

  Jake laughed. “Where do you go when you wander off like that, boy?”

  Lonnie flushed. “I was just thinking,” he mumbled.

  “Well, finish up. We got things to see and folks to do.”

  “And pipes to wrap,” Mama Pastine said.

  Lonnie picked up his coffee cup and took a final gulp. On the radio, Ollie Whittle was talking about a little town in Belgium. Bastogne, he called it.

  Two

  HENRY WOKE at first light and heard the wind moaning through the tops of the great fir trees and thought for a moment that the wind and light had wakened him. But then he realized how cold he was, much colder than before, and he knew Bobby Ashcraft had died sometime in the night. It had been done quietly. The warmth had simply gone out of him, the warmth Henry had been depending on for … how long?

  Bobby Ashcraft had been the last of them except for Henry, the last of the four wounded men who had crawled under the ravaged tank, its rear end tilted up against a huge rock and its gun muzzle jammed into the snow. They had huddled there for … how long? Living on each other’s warmth and dying one by one until now there was only Henry. It might have been a couple of days, it might have been a week. Probably not that long, though, because they all, except for Henry, had been badly wounded, and it had been awesomely, achingly cold. Men could not live long under such conditions.

  They had all died quietly except for Mazzutti, who whimpered and moaned a lot until Henry stuffed his mouth with rags, crazy with panic that the Germans might hear. Then Mazzutti had shut up and when he finally died, it was with great tears streaming down his cheeks, tears of frustration because they had gagged him and he couldn’t tell anybody what a sonofabitching lousy break it was to die shivering under a bombed-out tank in the Ardennes at Christmastime.