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Home Fires Burning

Page 15

by Robert Inman


  Bugger had grown up fat, eager to please. He had passed up the cafe business and learned to operate heavy machinery at Harsole Bingham Bolt Company, married, fathered a boy who was inevitably called Little Bugger. Same age as Lonnie. When the war had come, neither Bugger nor Henry had had to serve. But Lee Mason Brunson the First had lost forty pounds, joined the Navy, become a chief petty officer in the Seabees, grinding up Pacific islands to make landing strips from which Curtis LeMay’s B-29S could rain hell on the cities of imperial Japan.

  And Henry? Well, it had been a relief to them all when the Guard had been activated. Henry disappeared, as far as Jake was concerned, until the Army Hometown News Release arrived at the Free Press two years later, saying that Lieutenant Henry F. Tibbetts had been assigned as a platoon leader with the 25th Infantry Division. Jake had thrown it into the wastebasket, but not before wondering how Henry had managed to avoid being cashiered or jailed, and even more, how he had managed to become an officer, for God’s sake. He wondered if perhaps Henry had come to grips with himself, if somehow in the maelstrom of war he had taken his life in his own hands.

  It would have been the most remarkable of miracles for Henry Tibbetts to have come to grips with himself. This, after all, was the Henry Tibbetts who had run his car off Taylorsville Road in a drunken stupor and killed his wife, and then crawled away and hidden like a craven coward. Ah, yes, Jake thought, I’ve been to the pit, Biscuit.

  Still, the thought of Henry making something of himself had gnawed at him for a long time. Until last midnight, when the woman had shown up ready to have her baby, Henry’s baby, on Jake Tibbetts’s doorstep. No, Henry hadn’t learned a goddamned thing. As Jake stood on the porch, shivering in the gray cold of Christmas morning, he thought, The sonofabitch. He’s done it again. Another dirty trick.

  Herschel Martin clomped out the back door, his rubber boots squeaking down the steps, and Lonnie was left alone with his dilemma.

  What to do? he agonized as he sat there in the warm kitchen wrapped like a seasoning fruitcake in a swath of blankets, his feet in a tub of water turning tepid, carols and Christmas greetings on the radio making antiharmony with the squalling of the baby upstairs, the aroma of bubbling coffee filling the room. What to do about Captain Finley?

  He could always tell Daddy Jake a flat-out, bald-faced lie, but that was really no option at all. Telling a bald-faced lie to a person you loved was surely one of those monstrous black sins that stayed in the archangel’s book in huge bold letters, no matter how hard you tried to pray it away.

  When Daddy Jake had asked him a few minutes before if somebody had been chasing him, with Biscuit Brunson and Herschel Martin sitting there staring at him, he had said, “I don’t know.” But that wasn’t a lie, it was just stalling for time. Now, though, Biscuit and Herschel were gone and Daddy Jake would march back in here in a minute and want some answers. It would be just the two of them. And there would be no more “I don’t know’s.”

  So, what to do? Tell him? But how? How to explain Captain Finley, whom Daddy Jake knew only as a face in a picture frame on his desk at the newspaper, a sword hanging over the fireplace, the vague memories he had passed along to Lonnie of an old man who smelled of cigars and bay rum oil? As much as Lonnie might love him, Daddy Jake was part of the chaotic, feverish here and now where airplanes landed in your front yard and people had fistfights at the Christmas program and big-bellied women showed up on your front porch at midnight.

  But Captain Finley — he traveled light, rode like the wind, kept his eye on his duty. Out there, out where Captain Finley and his hundred good and lusty men thundered through the fields and woods and creek banks, was a clean and simple place. Be bold! Take matters in your own hands! And be honorable. In such a place, it was not madness at all to be thrashing about in an icy creek on Christmas morning. It was duty. So how to tell Daddy Jake that no matter how much Lonnie Tibbetts loved him, he must go when Captain Finley called, to the secret places where only warriors could go? If he told Daddy Jake, it wouldn’t be real anymore. And there would be no place to go when the here and now turned upside down and left him reeling.

  Lonnie heard the front door open and close and then he looked up and saw Daddy Jake standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

  What to do? What would Captain Finley do? A diversion. He looked Daddy Jake square in the eye and asked, “Did Santa Claus come and take all my stuff back?”

  His grandfather looked at him for a long moment, then pulled a cigar out of his pocket, rolled it around in his mouth to moisten it, bit off the end, spat the nub in the garbage pail under the sink, and lit the cigar, jamming it in the corner of his mouth. Billows of smoke issued from it, as if it were an old clunker of a car starting up. Daddy Jake hardly ever lit up a cigar at home. Never in the kitchen.

  Finally he said, “That was a damfool thing you did this morning, boy.”

  “Yessir,” Lonnie said, looking straight at him.

  Daddy Jake pulled out a chair with a clatter and sat down at the table. “In fact, you’re building up quite a little list of damfoolishness these past couple of days.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Lonnie shrugged.

  Jake stared at him a moment, then placed his cigar carefully on the edge of the table, got up and poured himself a cup of coffee from the fresh bubbling pot on the stove, sat back down at the table, dumped in two spoons of sugar, stirred, and took a quick sip, cradling the cup in both hands. On the radio, Ollie Whittle was delivering Christmas greetings from George Poulos and the Jitney Jungle and sending special holiday wishes to all the fighting men far away from home on behalf of George, whose son was a trooper with the 82nd Airborne somewhere in France.

  Daddy Jake set his cup down on the table and stuck the cigar back in his mouth. He sat there for a while, looking down into the blackness of his coffee cup, before he spoke. “Imagination’s a wonderful thing, Lonnie,” he said. “A fellow can’t buy imagination, can’t manufacture it. He’s either got it or he hasn’t.” He spoke slowly, choosing his words. “Most of the failures in this world are failures of imagination, Lonnie. Most men who fail are failures because they lack imagination. The first thing a fellow has to do is to decide that something needs to be done. There’s plenty that needs to be done in this world, but lots of folks just sit there like a bump on a log” — Jake made a bump on a log out of his fist — “and think everything is just hunky-dory. But even deciding that something needs to be done isn’t enough. You’ve got to imagine how it can be done. A fellow who sees a need but has no imagination is just a complainer, and he’ll just sit there on his butt. But you take a fellow who sees a need and has an imagination, and he won’t let a damn thing stand in his way.”

  Jake took the cigar out of his mouth, had another sip of coffee, put the cigar back, leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in his belt. Lonnie could feel his rump going numb on the hard stool, but he sat very quietly, listening.

  “The thing you have to watch for,” Jake went on, “is folks who don’t have any imagination. Every time a fellow with imagination does something, it makes the other bunch madder’n hell because it shows ’em up. Right off, they’ll tell you ninety-eight ways why it can’t be done, and if that doesn’t work, they’ll tell you ninety-nine more ways why it shouldn’t be done.” He took a puff of the cigar, held it for a moment, studying it, then went on. “Take that fellow Seward, when he said the country ought to buy Alaska. Well, they hooted — all those who said he couldn’t and the rest who said he shouldn’t. They said, ’if it’s so bad the Russians don’t want it, it must be worse than worthless, because the Russians will take anything.’ But Seward just kept to his business and went right on and bought Alaska. Then a few folks with imagination went up there and discovered gold and lived on the edge of peril and proved that a fellow can lick the meanest, coldest, wildest wilderness on earth if he just imagines he can. And someday, mind you, they’ll find a way to warm the plac
e up, and folks’ll be swimming in fancy outdoor pools in the middle of January in Juneau and growing sweet corn and pole beans in Nome. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yessir, I think so.”

  “Now a man with imagination,” Jake went on, “he’ll make a damfool of himself sometimes. But when he makes a mistake, he’s just got to hitch up his britches and go on, don’t you see. He’s just got to push on through, because at the end of all his damfoolishness he’ll find what he’s been after. He may not know what shape it is or how it feels or smells. But he knows it’s there. And after he’s blundered around a bit being a damfool, he may land smack-dab on top of it. And if he doesn’t worry too much about being a damfool, he’ll have a good time in the process.”

  “But what if he just keeps blundering around and never does find it?” Lonnie asked.

  “Some never do. But you just keep trying. If you give up, all you have left is a trail of damfoolishness to show for your time and effort, and that makes you an Absolute Damfool. There is nothing to be more pitied.”

  Lonnie wondered then about his father. Nobody had ever come right out and told him much about Henry Tibbetts’s damfoolishness, but he had picked up enough to know that Henry had probably broken every tenet of Mama Pastine’s notion of Doing Right. He knew that Henry rode dead drunk on the back of the fire truck whooping and hollering when the volunteers went to a fire; that he had been drunk the night Lonnie’s mother, Hazel Tibbetts, had been killed in the car wreck, and drunk the night he joined the National Guard. Daddy Jake made no secret of his conviction that Henry was a reprobate and a disgrace. But what Daddy Jake was saying here seemed to put a different light on things. Was Henry Tibbetts just blundering about being a damfool because he was looking for something? If so, there was nothing especially wrong with his damfoolishness. Unless, as Daddy Jake said, he was an Absolute Damfool. The more Lonnie thought about it, the more he wanted badly to ask Daddy Jake about it. But he didn’t.

  “Is imagination the same thing as pretending?” Lonnie asked instead.

  “Sometimes that’s the way it starts, Lonnie. And sometimes that’s all it ever amounts to.” Then he looked away out the window and stared for a moment through the frost-glazed panes at the bare branches of the trees, and Lonnie knew for dead certain that his grandfather was thinking of Henry Tibbetts, too. He sensed with unerring instinct that a great truth was waiting to be spoken, a mystery revealed, that this was the one moment perhaps never to be seized again when he might learn who he was and where he had come from. He waited, holding his breath until his chest ached and his eyes burned, waited for Daddy Jake to say it. But he didn’t.

  “But a man with true imagination …” Jake started to say, and then his voice trailed off and Lonnie could see how tired Jake was, how the lines around his eyes and the furrows on his brow had deepened.

  It was then that it dawned on Lonnie that Daddy Jake wasn’t going to ask him about Captain Finley. It had been sitting there between them, just waiting to be asked. But Daddy Jake, God bless his soul, had let it be. Lonnie felt the sting of grateful tears in his eyes and he wanted to leap up and throw his arms around Daddy Jake and tell him how much he loved him — loved him for somehow understanding. But he didn’t, because he was afraid that if he did, he might blurt out a question about his father. And that was something Daddy Jake didn’t want to talk about, the way Lonnie didn’t want to talk about Captain Finley.

  So they were even, he thought. Things remained unspoken. Secret places remained secret. At least for now.

  Lonnie felt a great weariness creep over him. He wanted to shuck off the blankets and go upstairs and burrow down in the warm cave of his bed and drift off to sleep thinking about damfools and Absolute Damfools, tunneling like a mole through the rich dark underground of his imagination.

  Then he noticed the silence. The radio was quiet. Bing Crosby broke off right in the middle of “Silver Bells” and there was no sound in the kitchen except for the faint bubbling of the coffeepot. Upstairs, the baby had apparently cried herself to sleep. The silence lasted perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds, and then Ollie Whittle came on, his voice crackling with urgency. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have an extremely important news bulletin in my hand from the wires of the United Press. American troops have reached the beleaguered garrison at Bastogne, breaking the thrust of the massive German advance in Belgium. Elements of General George Patton’s Third Army, aided by unexpected clearing weather that allowed heavy aerial bombardment and resupply missions, broke through stiff enemy resistance to relieve the Bastogne garrison, which had been surrounded by German units for five days. Repeating this news bulletin …”

  And then Ollie was interrupted by Mama Pastine’s stifled cry and Lonnie jerked around to see her standing in the doorway of the kitchen, hand over mouth, hair askew, wild-eyed.

  “Pastine …” Jake rose from his chair.

  She pointed at the Atwater-Kent. “Bastogne,” she said, her voice an anguished croak. “That’s where he is.”

  “Who?” Jake asked, his mouth already beginning to frame the word …

  “Henry,” she said. “He’s near Bastogne. He’s all right!” she cried.

  “What do you mean?” Jake asked, staring at her.

  “His last letter,” she said, still looking at the radio, which was now thundering majestically with “Adeste Fidelis.” “He mentioned a town named Bastogne. The censors left it in.”

  “What letters?” Jake asked. “There haven’t been any letters.”

  “Oh, yes.” She turned on him, her voice brittle. “There most certainly have been letters. Henry writes me letters.”

  “But where?” All their mail, business and personal, came to a post office box. Jake picked it up on his way home to lunch. It was part of his regimen. He sorted through it as he ate, opening the personal items, laying aside the business mail to take back to the newspaper with him in the afternoon. If they got mail, he saw it.

  “Rosh Benefield,” she said after a moment. Lonnie could see the color drain from Jake’s face as if she had struck him in the belly. Pastine sat down in a chair at the table and folded her hands in her lap. Jake stood there, immobile.

  “They started coming about a year ago,” Pastine said, calm now. “Rosh called one morning and said I had a letter addressed in his care and I should come get it. So I went, and it was from Henry. It wasn’t much. He just said he was in Texas and he was a lieutenant in a new division. After a month or so there was another one and then they came more often until there was one every week or so. Then they shipped out in August, straight to France, and there was a long time that I didn’t hear anything. Finally there was a letter saying Henry was near the front lines. That’s when he mentioned Bastogne. I looked it up on the map.”

  “Where are the letters?” Jake asked.

  “Locked away in Rosh Benefield’s safe,” she said. “They belong to me. And someday to Lonnie.”

  “You wrote him back?”

  “Of course.”

  “And did he tell you he was married?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe he’s not.”

  “Yes,” she said flatly, “he’s married. I looked at that marriage certificate real carefully last night. And this morning I rousted the probate judge in Loconas County, Texas, out of bed and told him I was calling from the Pentagon and I had to know if Lieutenant Henry Tibbetts was married because he was on a dangerous secret mission. So the good judge got himself down to the courthouse and confirmed it. Henry’s wife used to be Francine Wolzinski. She is twenty-two years old and she was born in Cleveland. It’s all according to law. They are man and wife.”

  Lonnie was thunderstruck, listening to it. Not that his father was remarried, but that Mama Pastine had called on the telephone all the way to Loconas County, Texas, and convinced some old judge that she was from the Pentagon.

  “When did this all happen?” Jake asked.

  “July eleventh,” Pastine answered.

  �
��That makes,” Jake counted on his stubby fingers, “five and a half months. And that means …”

  “That means,” she cut him off sharply, “that Henry’s wife and daughter are here in this house. Your daughter-in-law and granddaughter. Your son is in mortal peril in Belgium. God willing, he has been delivered from danger.”

  Jake started to speak again, but she went barreling right on by him. Lonnie had never seen her so wrought up. “Now the next thing that is going to happen, Jake Tibbetts, is that you are going to get yourself up the stairs and welcome your daughter-in-law and your new granddaughter into this house.” She stood abruptly and pointed at Daddy Jake. “You have been at this business long enough!”

  She towered above the table, a fury in a rumpled cotton print dress, hair flying, eyes flashing. For the first time Lonnie could remember in his entire life, she seemed bigger than Daddy Jake — bigger than Lonnie ever imagined she could be.

  “Up!” she cried, jerking her arm as if she could levitate Daddy Jake up the stairs.

  Lonnie thought suddenly of the Great Waldini, the black-caped hero of the serial now in mid-run at the motion picture show, a man of deep piercing eyes and enormous mystic powers who moved inanimate objects with the sheer force of his will as sparks flashed from his fingertips. As of last Saturday afternoon, the Great Waldini was hanging from the tattered shred of a venetian blind out the window of a New York City skyscraper with Madison Avenue fifty floors of heart-stopping emptiness below him, waiting for Episode Seven. Lonnie could not picture Mama Pastine hanging from a venetian blind, but there was the same powerful electric force about her that filled the room and made the hair on the back of Lonnie’s neck tingle.

  “Up!” she roared again.

  But Daddy Jake, to Lonnie’s amazement, not only didn’t go, he sat down. It was as if he moved out of the line of sight of Mama Pastine’s flashing finger, out of the aura of her powers. But it had taken a lot out of him. He slumped, shoulders sagging. There was a long silence, and then he said weakly, “I’ll be damned.”

 

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