Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Jake started to protest that it was his own idea, that his mother wanted him to stay and take over the paper, that she literally begged him with her weary eyes. But he hung fire, seeing for the first time how truly mad Albertis was, and how near death. So Jake ran, lurching with the burden of a deep, pained, irretrievable sense of loss and betrayal. A man owed more to his family than to just give up and take refuge in bedlam. A boy was owed a father. That was the least he could expect.

  Jake spent two years at the university in a state of constant dread, waiting for the inevitable. He learned the art and craft of the engineer, took small refuge in the neat confinement of lines and angles, logic and natural law. But he was certain he would have to give it up. And he did.

  When Albertis died, they discovered that he had been living with a steadily growing brain tumor that had, during the last miserable year of his life, turned him into a violent madman. At the funeral there was a livid bruise on Emma Tibbetts’s forehead, the result of Albertis’s final slobbering paroxysm. Like his father before him, Albertis had become a hard, hard man.

  Jake came home from college and buried his father and took over the paper and wrote his first editorial, then began to discover the soul of the newspaper that Albertis had never known. In the still, quiet hours of the early mornings he leafed through the back pages of the Free Press and found his grandfather, the warrior-editor. By God, the man breathed fire in print. He wrote at full gallop, the flashing silver saber of his wit slicing air and flesh. Finley had left powerful reminders of himself: his words; the daguerreotype; and the saber, which still hung in its silver sheath above the parlor fireplace in the white frame house out Partridge Road that now served as home for its third generation of Tibbettses. Jake lifted the sword from its hanging place, restored its luster with neat’s-foot oil and silver polish, made a weekly ritual of cleaning it. The touch of the cool smooth metal was a physical link with the man who had wielded it in hot battle, as he had later wielded a slashing pen. Jake came to worship him. Captain Finley was the father he would have chosen for himself. Albertis had simply gotten in the way.

  As Jake began to mold himself to the paper, as he remolded the Free Press in Captain Finley’s original image, he discovered painfully how difficult it was to write simply and well, how impossible it was to describe anything exactly or to recount any event with perfect faith. At first, words dumbfounded him. He was a bumbling, inarticulate lout with deadlines nipping at his heels. He cried in frustration, hurled pencils, wadded paper. But eventually, it came to him like some long-neglected animal instinct, the essential secret of all writers: Most of the business involved having something worth saying, and the rest depended on saying it simply. He discovered that his engineer’s love of logic wasn’t entirely wasted on the process, that good writing was the natural expression of an organized mind. A man had to organize his thoughts, get to the heart of things, and not clutter up the place with excess verbiage. After one particularly frustrating bout with the language, the floor about his desk littered with scraps of paper, he composed a line that he typed on a fresh sheet of paper and thumbtacked to the wall above his desk:

  CHEW ADJECTIVES THOROUGHLY AND ESCHEW ADVERBS ALTOGETHER

  and then went on to write a straightforward, unadorned account of the event he had been trying to describe. It made him grunt with satisfaction.

  The paper became a sort of cocoon in which he underwent a metamorphosis from engineer to newspaperman, a tight circumscribed world of metal and ink and words, a world in which a cauldron of heat and light and sound and smell bubbled and stewed and finally gave forth that most marvelous of creations, a newspaper, in which the editor was seer and alchemist.

  Jake came to realize that his genes, however muddled, had done him a favor, that he had that rare combination of skills and instincts it took to edit a weekly newspaper. From Captain Finley (though it took him a while to realize it) he had inherited some talent with words, natural curiosity, innate skepticism, the touch of arrogance that told him he had a right to observe and comment on mankind’s affairs. From Albertis (loath as he was to admit it) he had gotten a mechanical sense, a feeling for the print shop that was the other half of the paper’s personality. A newspaper needed both talents. It had its voice, and then it had its means of mechanical expression. Both masters had to be served.

  In a small town, hundreds of miles from a mechanic who could service a Linotype machine or a Kluge press, you had to be able to fix things yourself, often with makeshift parts and ingenuity. And that was where Jake’s engineering instincts served him well. He had an ear and a feel for the machinery. He could sense the certain, almost imperceptible shudder in the innards of the Linotype just before it belched forth a spurt of hot metal. He could hear the slightly off-key rumble of the big press that let him know when a bearing needed grease. He had an inborn curiosity about how things worked that served him well as both printer and editor. The human machine was messier and less reliable than the Linotype or the Kluge, but it too operated within certain natural bounds, within the laws of push and pull. And a newspaper was one of those pushers and pullers that kept the human machine on track.

  At the turn of the century, Jake had been editor of the paper for a year and he was beginning to admit he liked it. The day came when he was able to dismiss the ill-tempered old printer, Turbyfill. Late in the afternoon, after the man had gathered up his coat and stomped out the door, Jake stood in the middle of the ordered chaos that was the print shop and breathed deeply of the intoxicating richness of smells and said to himself that if he was nothing else, he was, by God, a printer. And he admitted that he might someday be a newspaperman, even a good one.

  The next afternoon, as he was beginning his weekly press run, the first pages of newsprint starting to feed through the monstrous Kluge and stack neatly at the far end ready for folding, the press broke its main crankshaft. The Kluge screamed with a horrific shriek of metal and shuddered to a halt, scaring the hell out of Jake. He looked around wildly for Turbyfill and then realized he was all alone in the grip of more trouble than he had ever known.

  “You sonofabitch!” he bellowed at the press, bringing his mother running from the front office.

  “Jacob, for God’s sake!”

  “It broke!” he cried. He climbed down from his perch atop the press, the small bucket seat where he sat to feed the big sheets of newsprint into the Kluge’s maw. He stalked around the press, trembling with anger and fear, glaring at it, stunned by the way it had turned on him.

  “What the hell am I gonna do now?” he yelled.

  “Fix it, I suppose,” Emma Tibbetts said, and turned on her heel. He could hear her humming at the desk up in the front office while he stomped around, fuming, kicking at the unyielding metal.

  His first impulse was to run for help, and he ran first to the boardinghouse where Turbyfill had lived. The old man was gone, and nobody knew where. Then he stood in the street outside the boarding-house for a moment, thinking where he might turn next. Another editor? They had their own papers to put out. It would be the end of the week before anyone from another paper could come to help. One thing for sure, there was nobody else in this town who knew the first thing about fixing a printing press. Neither did Jake Tibbetts, but it appeared he would have to learn.

  He went back to the newspaper office and rummaged around until he found the diagrams for the press tucked away in the bottom of a drawer, studied them, and tackled the press with wrenches and hammers, still in a hot rage over the machine’s stupidity and stubbornness and his own incredible bad luck. He did everything wrong at first and then had to undo his errors and start again. Eventually, curiosity began to wear at his anger and he became absorbed in the work, the engineer taking over. It was late afternoon before he finally got the crankshaft out. It was deep in the innards of the press and he had to practically dismantle the machine to get at it. He took the broken pieces to the blacksmith shop down the street and paid the man to work into the night forging a shaf
t that would hold until he could get a new one shipped in by train. It was midnight when the smith finished, and then Jake hauled the shaft back to the newspaper office and went at the press again. He put the Kluge back together piece by piece, getting it all wrong again and taking it apart and doing it over until he got it right, learning more about the machine than he could have gleaned from years of studying the diagrams. Jake scarcely noticed as night turned into day and the day wore on to afternoon and evening. At the end, faint with fatigue and lack of sleep, he climbed back up on the bucket seat on top of the press and gave the huge flywheel a vicious turn. The Kluge groaned and shrieked in protest and then, like a dinosaur emerging from centuries of sleep, it began to rumble with life, growling over the way its bowels had been meddled with. Jake started feeding in sheets of newsprint, yelling at the top of his voice, “Go! Go! Eat that newsprint, you sonofabitch! Go!”

  When he finished the press run it was two o’clock in the morning and as he shut down the press he heard the front door slam. His mother leaving. She had come and gone during the two days of his agony, he could hear her humming in the front office, a soft undertone at the edge of his absorption in the job, but she had not spoken to him once.

  He got the papers folded and stuck on the mailing labels, moving like a ghost in a fog of utter exhaustion, then wheeled the bundles of papers in a cart to the post office and left them on the doorstep, where the postmaster would find them when he opened up. Friday was dawning. It had been early afternoon Wednesday when the crankshaft snapped. The Free Press was a day late this week, but it had published.

  Suddenly, he felt a surge of new life, a rush of pride, an impulse to run up and down the street yelling, “I did it! I whipped the sonofabitch!” But then he stopped and reflected soberly on the issue of who had whipped whom, and walked instead to Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s house and bought a fruit jar of whiskey and took it back to the newspaper office. He sat on the floor with his back to the cold metal of the Kluge and toasted the old monster that had owned his body and soul for the past two days. He held the jar of whiskey up to the light pouring in the windows of the front office and watched the way the light made small rainbows through the prism of the strong clear liquid. He thought of his grandfather, Captain Finley, sitting on this same floor years before, after a day of typesetting, drinking this same whiskey. And he thought of his father, gaunt shoulders hunched over the keyboard of the Linotype, bony fingers racing over the keys, oblivious to the rivers of sweat streaming down his neck and making a broad, dark band down the back of his shirt, at peace with his tortured soul for a few moments. For the first time, he linked the two men — his forebears — men so violently different as to defy kinship, but each bedeviled in his own way by the strange alchemy of turning metal into words. He was too tired to hate anymore. He slugged on the whiskey for a while, feeling no effect from it until he passed out. The last thing he remembered was a sense of loneliness, of regretting that he had no one with whom to share his small triumph and his tiny nugget of wisdom.

  Now here he was trying to write his second editorial, at six-thirty in the morning of Christmas Day, 1944, with the light coming strong and gray through the windows of the newspaper office, drained of color, washing out the yellow glow of the single bulb that hung above his typewriter. He thought back to the morning forty-four years before when he had sat on the floor of the print shop, drunk with a mixture of pride and sadness. He thought of another morning, two years after, when he had come here to the newspaper after they had buried Isaac, dead of typhoid. He had sat at his desk with another bottle of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, thinking that now there truly was no one else to run the paper but himself. He had grieved for Isaac, but it came to him in his grief that he and the paper had already formed an unbreakable bond. It was his life’s work. He had grown to fit it.

  But this Christmas morning, he was just a tired old man. His fingers were stiff with cold and he realized that he was still wearing his overcoat, that he had not lit the oil heater when he had reeled in the door five hours before, numbed and driven by his own craziness after the woman — Henry’s woman — had appeared on his front porch.

  Somewhere, a block or so away, he could hear the erratic fevered popping of firecrackers. They must be from some youngster’s secret prewar hoard, because there hadn’t been any firecrackers for a long time. Powder was used these days for bullets and bombs and artillery shells, not firecrackers. They seemed to set off small explosions in his brain and he sat back a moment from the old Underwood, feeling a bit faint and disoriented. He breathed deeply several times.

  Jake felt very much older than his sixty-four years, very much used and abused. And it was a new feeling. He had always appeared older, had cultivated a look of rumpled frumpiness. He wore celluloid collars and garters on his sleeves long after they went out of style. And he kept a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth like a period at the end of a declamation. Nature had given him bushy eyebrows and prematurely graying hair and a short, stocky build. At thirty, he had looked forty-five, and that was fine with him. It gave him the patina of age a man needed if he was to be a wry, detached observer of mankind’s folly. Despite all that, he was vigorous in mind and body. Since he refused to own an automobile, he walked — a mile to the paper in the morning, back home at lunch, back to the paper for the afternoon, and finally home again in the evening. It was an article of faith, weather be damned, done at half-canter, arms swinging, calves pumping, shoulders thrown back to allow his lungs their full extension. Physically, he was sound.

  But this morning, he was whipped. He was driven by things he couldn’t control, and that violated his most basic premise about life. He believed that the one thing a man must do was to TAKE HIS LIFE IN HIS OWN HANDS AND SHAKE IT FOR ALL IT WAS WORTH. A man had to take responsibility for himself and his destiny. Up to now, he had. But sixty-four years of believing that had been shaken in one mad day.

  He meant to write an editorial apologizing to his readers. He meant to tell them that he was deliberately keeping something out of the paper for the first time in its history, violating his own most precious possession because another man had called in a terrible debt that he had no choice but to pay. It was the kind of thing that had to be said in an editorial, not in Jake Tibbetts’s own front-page column. It was the voice of the paper that he had sullied, and the readers deserved to know it. After all these years, it was time for another editorial. But after five hours, he was no closer to writing it than when he began.

  He heard again the sporadic popping of the firecrackers outside, and it brought him back to the notion that had been tilting about in his head since he sat down at the typewriter hours ago: It was the war that had him spooked. He had thought about it long and deeply through the night. He realized, as Captain Finley Tibbetts must have realized in the gore of Cemetery Ridge, that there were times and circumstances when a man might be denied the right to take his life into his own hands, when a man himself might be taken up and shaken like a rag doll and tossed away. A war might, as he had told Hilton Redlinger the day before, be made by men too old or fat to fight. But once made, it assumed a life of its own and it swept young and old along with it. It left nothing unsullied.

  He, Jake Tibbetts, had held this particular war at arm’s length for a long time. He refused to acknowledge it in the left-hand front-page column of the paper, his private domain.

  Still, the rest of the paper was full of it because the paper belonged to the town, and they could wallow in the war if they wanted to. … Technical Sergeant Mason R. Daniel has completed the Advanced Bombsight Calibrator’s Course at Nellis Army Airfield… . Mrs. Zouetta Beacham has returned from a visit with her daughter, Mrs. Ella Fay Carmack, in California. Mrs. Carmack’s husband, First Lieutenant Horace D. Carmack, is stationed with the Army artillery at Fort Ord… . War Bonds Chairwoman Mrs. Marvel Renfroe announces that Brunson’s Cafe has led all local business establishments. . . . and on and on, filling the precious columns of the Free Press we
ek after week, the trivial backwash from powerful currents that were changing the country. Young men gone to places like Port Moresby and Salerno and Fort Ord were indelibly marked and altered by it. Young women tagged along after them as far as they could go, snatching moments in tiny rented rooms — women who in past wars would have been scorned by polite society as camp followers, but who were now polite society’s daughters and sisters.

  The goddamned war reached into every crevice. A man could not buy a decent cigar anymore, because the best of the tobacco went overseas, and what was left smelled like it had been pissed upon when you set match to it. Every window had a gold star, every home a scrap-metal collection box, every face a pinched look because they knew someone for whom death meant a delivery boy with a telegram or a fuzzy-cheeked young officer scuffling his feet at the front door.

  The God-damned war. Surely God must be as sick of it as Jake was. Surely it must prove that God was a mysterious and ironic God, not the meddler the church crowd made him out to be. If He were a meddler, He would have meddled by now, when ultimate depravity had taken the world by the short hairs.