Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Across the square, Em Nesbitt had the window open in the telephone exchange upstairs over City Hall. “What’s going on out there?” she called. “What was that noise?” Em had a clear, strong voice, a good singing voice, and it carried like an aria on the cold air of the morning.

  “We’ve had an air attack, Em. Sound the fire siren,” Tunstall Renfroe called back.

  “A what?”

  “An air attack. Turn on the siren.”

  Em disappeared from the window, and in a moment the siren on the roof of the fire station on the opposite side of the square moaned to life. The siren was new — an electric device that could be triggered by switch from the telephone exchange. Rosh Benefield had gotten it through some connections at the air base north of Taylorsville a few months before. It replaced the old hand-cranked siren, and it cut a good ten or fifteen minutes off the response time for the volunteers. Already it had saved the Methodist parsonage. Now it wailed like a banshee across the town.

  Tunstall Renfroe and Fog Martin headed for the fire station, and in a moment, the big front door of the station rolled up with a clatter and the fire truck rumbled out of the gaping maw of the bay, Fog at the wheel and Tunstall beside him on the front seat. Tunstall was wearing the extra pith helmet he kept at the firehouse and Fog had a strip of white cloth wrapped around his head to stop the bleeding from the cut on his forehead. Fog turned on the truck’s own siren, a low, throaty growl.

  Hilton Redlinger appeared in the open front door of Brunson’s Cafe, the big Colt revolver in his hand, just as the truck, gears clashing, pulled up in front. “What the hell’s going on?” he said, gawking at the truck and the growing crowd spilling out across the sidewalk and the street, perhaps fifty or so now. People were arriving in cars and on foot, most of them men, several armed with rifles and shotguns. One man carried a huge double-bitted axe.

  Tunstall stood up in the front seat of the fire truck, yelling over the wail of the fire siren, “Now everybody go home! This is folly, standing around here in a crowd. We’re sitting ducks! Everybody, go home and fill your bathtubs with water. Ollie,” he called up to the radio station, “you get that on the radio, you hear? Tell folks to stay home and fill up their bathtubs.”

  “Right, Tunstall,” Ollie yelled down. “Folks …”

  “Now wait just a damn minute!” Hilton Redlinger bellowed. “Ollie, you just hold your horses.” Ollie stopped in midsentence. “You trying to start a panic here, you and Tunstall? Stop broadcasting about that airplane right this minute. Put some music on or something. Put Ideal Benefield back on. No, don’t do that. Put some music on.”

  “But Hilton,” Ollie protested, “we’ve got to let folks know what’s going on.”

  “Hell, we don’t know what’s going on. Now you put some music on that radio station or I’m coming up there and shut it down and arrest you for creating a public disturbance.”

  Ollie disappeared inside the radio station.

  “Hilton, you’re making a serious mistake,” Tunstall protested from the fire truck. “You’re taking a chance with people’s lives here. We’ve got to alert the town.”

  “To what?” Hilton moved through the crowd to the fire truck, waving his pistol and clearing a path.

  “The air raid,” Tunstall said. “My God, man, are you blind?”

  “One airplane, Tunstall. One goddamned airplane,” Hilton glared up at him.

  “But what about the damage?”

  “What damage, Tunstall? We’ve got a car run up on the courthouse lawn and a window busted out.” Hilton grabbed a man next to him. “Run over to the telephone exchange and tell Em Nesbitt to cut off the fire siren.” He gave the man a shove in that direction and turned again to Tunstall. “Now you fellows take the fire truck back to the station. Fog, get that thing out of here.”

  “Right, Hilton. How about I take a turn around town on the way to see if there’s any more damage?”

  “Fine, but keep the siren off,” Hilton said. “Tunstall, you go with him. Survey the damage and give me a report.” He grabbed another man standing in the crowd. “And you go get Doc Ainsworth. We can’t reach him on the phone. His line’s busy. Tell him Biscuit’s had a little spell here. I think the excitement just got to him.”

  The phone was ringing inside the cafe and Hilton went back inside to answer it.

  Across the street on the courthouse lawn, Lonnie Tibbetts was tugging at Jake’s sleeve.

  “It was one of ours,” Lonnie said.

  “What?” Jake stared at him.

  “It wasn’t no Jap or German. It was a Curtiss Stearman.”

  “What the hell is a Curtiss Stearman?”

  “It’s a training plane. It ain’t even got any guns on it.”

  “How do you know?” Jake asked.

  “I know a Curtiss Stearman when I see one. I was looking straight at it when it flew by. I got a good look. Besides, I know all the silhouettes of the Jap and German planes. Mr. Renfroe let me look at them when I was helping him on lookout. It’s a Curtiss Stearman. Honest.”

  “You sure?” Jake asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Hey, Hilton,” Jake yelled across the street, just as the wail of the fire siren died, leaving the square strangely hushed. Hilton stuck his head out of the gaping hole of Biscuit’s window. “Lonnie here says it’s a Curtiss Stearman,” Jake said.

  “A what?”

  “It’s one of ours. A training plane. It’s unarmed, that’s what he says.”

  “Well, who shot out the window?” Tunstall Renfroe shouted, still standing on the seat of the fire truck. “Just tell me that. If it was an unarmed airplane, who shot out the window?”

  “Chief Redlinger must have done it,” Lonnie said.

  “Lonnie says Hilton shot out the window,” Jake called across the street.

  Hilton stared at the Colt revolver in his hand and shoved it into his holster. “I didn’t shoot out the goddamn window,” he said hotly. “I didn’t fire a shot until the window was already gone.”

  Fog Martin started backing the fire truck out of the crowd. “Hold up, Fog,” Hilton said. “Let’s try to figure out what the hell’s going on here.”

  A man next to Hilton stuck his head out of the window of the cafe. “Hey, Jake Tibbetts,” he called, “you got a telephone call in here. It’s your wife.”

  “Lonnie,” Jake said, “go see what Pastine wants.”

  Lonnie trotted across the street to the cafe. “It was a Curtiss Stearman,” he said as he passed Hilton Redlinger.

  Ideal Benefield called down from the radio station, “The mayor will be right here, Hilton. I just talked to him on the telephone. He says to keep everybody calm.”

  “Is Ollie playing music up there, Ideal?” Hilton asked.

  “The Radio Luxembourg Orchestra,” Ideal answered. “It sounds like funeral music.”

  “Tell him to put on something cheerful. And see that he doesn’t say anything else about an air attack.”

  Lonnie dashed out of the front door of the cafe and pushed his way through the crowd across the street to where Jake was finishing his interview with the woman in the Chevrolet.

  “Mama Pastine says a plane just landed on the road in front of our house,” he said breathlessly.

  “Christ Almighty,” Jake said.

  A moment later there was a whole fire-truck-load of them — Hilton, Tunstall, Biscuit (pale but recovering), Fog, Jake, and Lonnie — headed out Partridge Road at full speed with the siren whining WOOOAHHH, WOOOOAHH. They stopped briefly at City Hall while Hilton ran in and got the Thompson submachine gun he had kept locked away since the city bought it back in the early thirties, when desperate men were knocking over banks like bowling pins. Hilton sat up high on the long folds of hose on the back of the truck with the tommygun nestled in his lap, wiping off the Cosmoline with a rag. Lonnie huddled beside him, teeth chattering from the excitement and the biting wind. They almost ran over Mayor Rosh Benefield as they turned the corner from the cour
thouse square onto Partridge Road, Rosh massive and lumbering with steam rising off his overcoated body from the Saturday morning bath that Ideal’s frantic call had summoned him from. His eyes bugged in terror as the truck, wailing like Judgment Day, rounded the corner and bore down on him. He lurched to the side and the truck swerved away and then squealed to a halt. They pulled Rosh aboard and now he sat up front on the wide red leather seat with Tunstall and Fog, thin strands of black hair plastered wetly against his skull. They all felt better with Rosh there because he was a solid man, unflappable, quick-witted — a wiry, sharp-minded man tucked away inside the body of a hippopotamus. Rosh was the only man in town that Jake Tibbetts did not consider to have a touch of the fool in him, and that said a lot.

  The truck slowed as they approached the Tibbetts house and Jake, standing on the rear platform, leaned around the side to see what was ahead. But there was no airplane there, no sign of Pastine, either, and he wondered for a moment if she had been snatched up and taken away. Then he thought how foolish that was, how foolish and absurd the whole business was, the thought that they were under enemy attack, here at the end of the war, with the Japanese and the Germans all but defeated and the continental United States unscathed through the entire affair. But then he thought how the war had changed everything, had in fact made almost anything possible if you turned the world upside down and shook it enough. There was of course no enemy aircraft on Partridge Road this cold Saturday morning, the day before Christmas. But there could be. And the possibility of it made them dash about like characters in a Buster Keaton movie, dead serious, grim with the fear that turned slapstick into drama into slapstick. There was a fine line there. And he, Jake Tibbetts, who of all men loathed feeling foolish, whose job it was to examine the foolishness in men and events, was smack-dab in the middle of it. He could at least appreciate the irony.

  They heard it before they saw it, the angry whine like a sawmill gone berserk. They passed Jake’s house and rounded the big curve in the road and there it was, sitting sideways in the road, nose pointed toward Tunstall Renfroe’s house, engine roaring, propeller kicking up a hurricane of dust and leaves. The pilot was standing up in the cockpit, yelling something at the house. Marvel Renfroe and Alsatia were on the wide banistered front porch and Alsatia was yelling back. Then the pilot turned and saw the fire truck bearing down on him and he sat down in the cockpit and revved up the engine and spun the plane around so that the whirring blade of the propeller was pointed toward the approaching truck.

  “Stop!” Hilton yelled, and Fog mashed down on the brakes and they all pitched forward, holding on desperately as the truck squealed to a halt about thirty yards from the airplane.

  “See, I told ya it was one of ours,” Lonnie Tibbetts cried. “It’s a Curtiss Stearman.” It was, indeed, clearly marked with stars and bars on the wings and fuselage.

  “A spy!” Tunstall yelped. “Shoot out his tires, Hilton, so he can’t get away.”

  “Nobody’s shooting anybody,” Rosh Benefield ordered, heaving himself upright in the cab of the fire truck. “That’s my boy there.”

  They all stared at the plane, past the silver blur of the propeller blade, and yes, they could see that the young man behind the leather helmet and goggles was indeed Billy Benefield. He cut the engine back to a throaty idle, but when they all clambered down from the fire truck and started toward the plane, he gunned it and then let out on the brake just a touch and eased the plane toward the advancing crowd to let them know he was holding them at bay and would not be trifled with. They stopped in their tracks with Rosh Benefield’s massive bulk in front and Hilton Redlinger at his side with the tommygun in his arms and Jake Tibbetts right behind, wishing to hell he had had time to grab the Speed Graphic from the Free Press office because this was a picture story if he ever saw one, a story that cried out for evidence against disbelief.

  Then all of a sudden Tunstall Renfroe broke from the pack and sprinted toward the house, skirting wide around the plane — yes, actually sprinting, a figure of lithe grace where they would have expected to see a bouncing scarecrow, arms akimbo, legs lurching. But Tunstall’s wing-tipped feet seemed to barely touch the ground and his elbows were tucked in close to his sides like a fleet young foot racer’s. It was marvelous, and Jake thought instantly about how he would write a sidebar to this story, a little piece about the elegant poetry of Tunstall Renfroe’s bold dash to protect his home and his women, about how he defied age and gravity and was, at least this once in his life, unselfish and courageous — and about how there was that capacity in every man to take up his life in his own hands and shake it for all it was worth.

  Billy Benefield stood up in the cockpit and screamed at Tunstall, but Tunstall didn’t falter. He reached the broad front steps of the house and stopped and turned and faced the airplane, feet planted wide, face defiant, with his women behind him up on the porch. “Beautiful,” Jake muttered to himself. “Beautiful.”

  “Billy, what the hell is going on here?” Rosh Benefield thundered over the roar of the Pratt and Whitney.

  Billy yelled back, “I’ve come for Alsatia.”

  He turned to look at her and she cupped her hands around her mouth and called down to him, “Fool!” and Billy flinched as if he had been shot. “Fool!” she called again, “go away.”

  Alsatia was a straight-shouldered, sturdy-legged young woman with clear skin that gave off a glow of fresh-scrubbed ruddiness and a strong voice that pealed across the yard like the bell of the First Baptist Church. “You’re crazy, Billy Benefield.”

  “I did it for you!” he yelled, waving his arms.

  Alsatia threw back her head and laughed lustily. “I know. It’s wonderful!” She clapped her hands in delight.

  Billy bowed from the waist. “Come on, then.”

  “I don’t go flying with fools,” she called back. “Go away. Come back when the war is over.”

  Billy’s face fell. “You won’t go?”

  “No. But you’re marvelous.” She blew him a kiss.

  Jake Tibbetts looked back and saw that a big crowd had gathered behind the fire truck. People had come by cars in twos and threes, so excited they had left their cars in the road with the doors open and engines running, rationing be damned. Guns bristled in the crowd, muzzles skyward like stubble in a cornfield.

  “Billy,” Rosh Benefield called. Billy jerked his head around and stared at his father. “Billy, I’m coming around to talk with you.” He turned to the rest of the crowd. “Stay here. Let me take care of this.”

  Jake bristled. “The hell with that. I’m coming, too.”

  “All right. But the rest of you stay put.”

  Rosh and Jake walked around the plane’s wing and stood on the ground just under the cockpit, looking up at Billy with the dust of the road swirling up around them. The thin strands of Rosh’s hair had dried and were billowing in wisps around his head.

  After a long moment, Billy said, “I guess I screwed up.”

  Rosh said nothing. Billy looked around at the crowd in the road, at Marvel and Alsatia standing on the porch, at Tunstall planted at the bottom of the steps with his arms folded across his chest.

  “I guess the shit’s gonna hit the fan,” Billy said. Billy raised the goggles off his face and shoved them up on his leather helmet, leaving big white circles around his eyes.

  Still, Rosh was silent for a long time while Billy looked at him, waiting. Finally Rosh sighed — a great, body-shaking sigh — and said, “I’ll see if I can fix it. Jake, let me talk to you.” He turned on his heel and the two of them walked twenty yards or so off to the side of the road and stood in the grass.

  “Don’t print it,” Rosh said to Jake.

  Jake’s mouth fell open.

  “I’m asking you,” Rosh said. “Don’t print it.” Rosh blinked his small bright eyes, small eyes in a large face in a huge body, a big, proud, solid body. Rosh was a tough man. Jake had seen him in a courtroom literally strip a witness of his composure and confid
ence with his stare and his quiet, unrelenting voice. But there was no malice in him. He was also proud in the way a man ought to be proud. He knew himself and gave himself no quarter and measured up to his own stern yardstick. He did not ask easily, and he rarely blinked those small, bright eyes.

  Jake looked over at the plane, still kicking up a cloud of dust and leaves, Billy standing in the cockpit, the engine a steady idling roar. He thought how events often dragged men in their wake, making fools of them all.

  “They’ll find him out,” Jake said after a moment.

  “Maybe not.”

  “There’s the radio. It’s been all over the radio.”

  “So, who believes the radio? It’s here one instant and gone the next.”

  “Somebody’ll tell,” Jake said, thrusting out his jaw. The whole business offended him. Especially this.

  “Maybe not,” Rosh said. And Jake realized, as crazy as it was, he might just be right. That was the thing about this goddamned town, you didn’t mess with it if you were an outsider. And you didn’t mess with Rosh Benefield, who was liked better than any man in town. And too, the town had raised Billy Benefield, the way a small town raises all its young, watches them, brags on them, kicks their butts when they need it. This town might do this thing for Rosh Benefield. They might help him work it out, even with Ollie Whittle’s hysterical broadcast and Biscuit Brunson’s smashed window and all the rest. Unless Jake ran the story in the paper. Then the jig was up. Rosh was right about the radio. But once it was in the newspaper, it was real.

  Jake glared at him. “I’ve been in the newspaper business forty-odd years and I’ve never pulled a story. Not one goddamn story. I’ve been offered bribes, I’ve been threatened with bodily harm and worse. But I’ve never pulled one goddamn story. Now what the hell makes you think I’m gonna pull this one?”