Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Good Lord,” Tunstall said, peering up at Jake through his wire-rimmed glasses.

  “What’s the matter?” Jake demanded. “Everybody keeps looking at me and saying ‘Good Lord.’ “

  “You look like you just walked straight out of the print shop,” Tunstall said. He looked at Jake’s grime-smeared arms and hands. “Without washing up.”

  “Well, I did. Tell me about Henry Cahoon’s daughter.”

  Tunstall leaned back in his chair and gave Jake a thin smile. “Henry Cahoon’s daughter. Weeelllll. What brings on all the interest in Henry Cahoon’s daughter?”

  “None of your business.” Jake folded his arms across his chest.

  “All I know is,” Tunstall scratched his chin, “her momma died about eight years ago and Henry Cahoon sent her someplace to school. To get ‘finished,’ you know.”

  “Well, she’s back,” Jake said.

  “Seems like I heard that, yes. Got her degree and came back home. I think I heard somebody say she was helping Henry with his business. He’s got quite a little operation going out there.” Tunstall smiled again, clasped his hands behind his head. “You interested in the stump puller business, Jake?”

  “Hell, no.”

  Tunstall’s grin widened. “You interested in a wife, Jake?”

  “Hell, no.”

  Tunstall fairly beamed. “Well, what’s got you running all over town in your dirty apron asking about Pastine Cahoon then?”

  “It’s a perverse fascination with the Norwegian Navy,” Jake retorted, and left Tunstall Renfroe hiked back in his swivel chair, grinning like an idiot.

  Jake went back to the newspaper and thought about it. He went through the mechanical motions of setting type, proofing the galleys, making corrections, laying out the front page for the next day’s press run, all the time thinking about Pastine Cahoon in her middy blouse with the smudge on the front right over her breast.

  And he thought about himself. He had arrived at a watershed of sorts in his life. Now was the time to decide what he intended to do with the rest of it.

  He would be a newspaperman, that much was set in stone. He had, at twenty-six, surrendered himself to the paper, and having done that, had mastered it. Isaac had died of typhoid, and Jake’s mother did little more than keep the books and take in a few subscription renewals during the few hours she spent at the paper each afternoon. She made it plain that he was the editor, that whatever the Free Press became, it was Jake Tibbetts’s responsibility.

  It was just the two of them at home, in the house at the end of Partridge Road that by now was a two-story frame with a wide front porch and a big oak tree in the front yard. Albertis, before the melancholia had disabled him, had had the second story added and had rearranged the downstairs so that it had a parlor and a dining room where the bedrooms had been. Now, the house yawned with a great emptiness. They took their meals at the small table in the kitchen, and in the warm months they sat after supper on the front porch, wrapping their desultory conversation in cocoons of long silence while the evening gave itself over to the music of crickets and night birds. Emma Tibbetts was a tired woman. She had lost a husband and a son and she wanted no more of whatever foolishness the world was ready to dish out. She seemed to hunker down in the front porch rocker, giving fate a low profile.

  So Jake began to consider Pastine Cahoon; or, more generally, to consider the notion of a wife. It hadn’t occurred to him much before. Not that he was uninterested in women as a species — he just hadn’t given much thought to living with one. He had taken sexual solace a few times from a middle-aged widow in Taylorsville, but now it came to him that it might be a regular thing, part of that enormous regularity that came with looking across the breakfast table at the same woman every morning for the rest of his life.

  What kept him from pursuing Pastine Cahoon at first was just this, the thought that pursuing any young woman might lead to the finality of marriage. But after a few weeks of mulling that over, he became accustomed to that possibility and then even fascinated by it. It was perhaps time, he decided, to consider a wife, if that’s what the natural progression of things brought on. What happened next was that he began to lust in his mind after Pastine Cahoon, and that stopped him dead in his tracks. He began to think thoughts that no young man ought to think about a proper young woman — and be sure, any daughter of a man like Henry Cahoon had by definition to be proper. This proper young woman became, as he told himself, a pain in the balls, the focus of great spasms of passion, a savage outpouring of juices and emotions of which he had not guessed himself capable. Midnights, in his room, he raged in sweaty combat with the laughing satyr in his own mind that kept trying to undress her, to reveal under clutching fingers the sleek belly, full breasts, soft white thighs. When he thought he had the beast under control for a moment, she would spring full-blown and naked before him, full of innocent secrets, undefiled but beckoning, until he flailed at himself, cursing afterward in the hot sweet darkness.

  Jake was wretched. All this agony was after one brief encounter with Pastine Cahoon, and more weeks passed while he strove in vain to conquer the devil in his groin.

  Suddenly, it was October and he came face to face with her in the Farmers Mercantile Bank one morning. He almost collided with her as he bustled through the door, and she dropped the bank bag she was carrying. Jake stammered an apology and stooped to pick it up, bumping heads with her on the way down. They both backed away, leaving the bag lying there on the marble floor of the bank foyer like the contested prize of two warring armies.

  “My goodness,” said Pastine Cahoon, rubbing her forehead. “Is this a holdup, Mr. Tibbetts?”

  Jake laughed, suddenly at ease, suddenly relieved to realize that Pastine Cahoon, out there on her farm on the banks of Whitewater Creek, had not for some reason guessed at how she had been violated in thought by the wicked beast in Jake Tibbetts’s mind. He knelt to pick up the bank bag, and as he stood again he felt wonderfully buoyant, almost giddy, perfectly relaxed, as sure of himself as he had ever been in his life.

  “Shall I give this to you now, or bring it out on Sunday afternoon?”

  Pastine Cahoon cocked her head to one side, gave him a long and searching look, and said, “You may give me the bag now, and I will expect you on Sunday afternoon at three.”

  So it began, and it went on for a year. Jake was in no hurry. He reveled in the courtship and in Pastine Cahoon, wanted to savor it at length. She was a fascinating surprise to him. She had opinions, honed by her schooling, and a lively curiosity inherited from her father the tinkerer. Jake had imagined the courtship of a young woman to be all billing and cooing, but this young woman could talk, for God’s sake, and she challenged him. She knew all about the gold standard, Philippine independence, Kaiser Bill’s expansionism. She considered Teddy Roosevelt an adventurist tool of capitalist empire builders, and said so. Jake Tibbetts hadn’t thought about Teddy Roosevelt at all.

  “If Teddy Roosevelt were to offer himself for local office, I might get worried,” he said to Pastine one Sunday afternoon as they sat on her front porch. “If he’s the kind of adventurist you say he is, he might want to open hostilities against the next county.”

  “But that’s exactly what he’s done in Panama,” she said.

  “So?”

  “Don’t you care about Panama?”

  “I haven’t really thought about Panama.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Well, every time I get around to thinking about Panama, some dear lady from the Methodist Missionary Society calls up and wants something in the paper about their study of Pago Pago. So I’m pretty wrapped up with Pago Pago right now. Maybe you could convince the Methodist Missionary Society to take a look into this Panama business.”

  “Jake Tibbetts,” she said coldly, “you are mocking me.”

  “No,” he said, smiling, “I may be mocking the Methodist women, but I am not mocking you, Miss Cahoon.”

  They courted fitfully
through the winter months, Jake renting a buggy from Martin’s Livery Stable on Sunday afternoons to make the drive out to Henry Cahoon’s factory-farm. He met Henry Cahoon only once — a tall reed of a man who stooped as he went through doorways. He came from a back room as Jake arrived for his third visit, weak eyes blinking behind thick glasses, thinning white hair askew as if he had been standing in a gale. He grabbed Jake’s hand with a powerful callused grip, muttered a few unintelligible words, and disappeared as quickly as he came. Pastine didn’t seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary about him.

  “Daddy’s perfecting his stump puller,” she said when they had sat a respectable distance apart on the living room sofa.

  “Is there such a thing as a perfect stump puller?” Jake asked.

  “Not yet,” she said. “But there will be.”

  When the weather turned warm in the spring, it became a ritual for Jake to pick her up in the buggy and drive back to town, where they would walk in the small park on the riverbank and then sit on the steps of its white band shell. Their conversation became something of a comfortable ritual.

  “The railroads,” she said to him one spectacular Sunday afternoon, the air freighted with the aroma of budding, leafing things, “are the tool of the robber barons.”

  “So?”

  She gave him a disgusted look.

  “Railroads are neither good nor bad,” Jake went on. “They’re simply functional. They move things. Chickens. Lumber. Corsets.”

  “But they’re controlled by a few greedy men who use them to amass unconscionable wealth.”

  “What kind of wealth is unconscionable?” Jake asked. “And what does a robber baron look like, anyway? I’ve never seen one get off the train. I’ve seen lots of chickens, lumber, corsets, the like. I’ve seen preachers, lyceum speakers, ladies’ ready-to-wear drummers, even a United States congressman one time. But not a single robber baron. Do they have fangs? Do they carry vials of plague in their money belts? Now if I was expecting a load of corsets and got a load of robber barons instead, I’d be upset. But as long as the corsets arrive, I’m pretty near satisfied.”

  She brushed impatiently at a strand of hair, a small delicate gesture that made Jake’s heart lurch. He was still having night sweats, worse than ever. The banter helped keep his mind off this lust he harbored for Pastine Cahoon.

  “Have you no conscience, Jake?” she said, shaking her head. “The greed of these people has made virtual slaves of an entire class of citizens.”

  “Greed makes the world go round. Self-interest is the root of human nature. Ask any woman who’s standing at the train station waiting for a shipment of corsets.”

  She rose from where they sat on the band shell steps, exasperated, walked a few paces away on the grass, turned and stamped her small foot. “You are the most hopelessly provincial person I have ever met,” she said. “Why an obviously intelligent man such as yourself refuses to take an interest in the affairs of the world is quite beyond me.”

  Jake grinned at her. “I jes tries to git from sunup to sundown, Miz Pastine. Jes hoes de cotton and plows de mule and tries to fine a little fat to go along wit de lean. De big massah, he make enuf fool of hisself wifout old Jake stirrin’ de pot.”

  “I say again,” she said, her voice rising, “you are a provincial man.”

  “I run the Free Press, not the Harper’s Bazaar.”

  “I would think any editor would have a responsibility …”

  “To show fools the foolishness of their ways,” he interrupted. “And there are quite enough local fools to go around.”

  She stood there for a moment glaring at him, eyes dancing, and Jake thought to himself how foolish he was, sitting here and challenging this marvelous young woman whose very presence made his heart pound. His mouth would get him in trouble yet.

  “Your trouble, Mr. Tibbetts,” she said after a moment, “is that you talk too much. You have a rejoinder for everything.”

  He looked away from her, stared for a time at another couple in a rowboat in the river next to the park. The young woman had a bright green ribbon in her hair that flashed in the sunlight as she tossed her head back and laughed at something the young man had said.

  “Why did you come back here?” he asked finally.

  “Why, indeed, not? This is my home.”

  “But doesn’t it bore you?”

  She cocked her head to one side and laughed, a bright sharp bell note. “Gracious, no.”

  “But the people you were around at school, they must have been infinitely more interesting than we local bumpkins.”

  She laughed again. “Ha! Now you’re talking about bores. They’re so smug. And they all think alike. Everyone there thinks Teddy Roosevelt is an adventurist. All they do is sit around and nod at each other. There’s no one to argue with because there’s nothing to argue about.”

  “Surely, though, after such a rich intellectual and cultural atmosphere you must find this humble community a trifle backward.”

  “Oh,” she said, tossing her head again in the way that made Jake want to lunge for her, “it has possibilities.”

  And so it went, on through the spring and summer. Jake Tibbetts paid regular suit, but only up to a point. Physically, he was the most timid of men, afraid to trust himself beyond brief moments of hand-holding. But they talked and talked, and on that level came to a certain intimacy. Jake began to give up bits and pieces of himself to her — the things he had learned about the newspaper, about his Confederate ancestor Captain Finley Tibbetts, about writing and publishing in a small town where you had to face on Thursday the people you wrote about on Wednesday. He told her of his contempt for pompous fools, especially those who wrote in national magazines, of his relish for grappling with local affairs in good wholesome argument, of his profound belief that a man must take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it’s worth and take final and ultimate responsibility for it. He even told her about the dark strain of madness that ran through his ancestry — Captain Finley, dead with a ghastly grimace on his face and a slash across the brocade of the parlor settee, where he had dispatched one last bluecoat devil; Albertis, haunting the upstairs, mired in melancholia. He told her all these things, unburdened himself to her as he had never done with another person. But he was afraid to touch Pastine Cahoon. And so, he almost lost her.

  The first inkling of trouble was on a Sunday afternoon in early September, still hot with the afterbreath of summer, dust-choked from a dry spell the crop-gathering farmers had welcomed. Jake was sweaty and gritty by the time he drove up in the yard of Henry Cahoon’s home in his rented buggy to see another rig parked by the front door. He climbed down, hitched the horse’s reins around a sycamore tree, and knocked. Henry Cahoon came to the door and Jake stood there for a moment looking up at him.

  “Ahem. Is Miss Pastine home?”

  “She has company,” Henry Cahoon said, blinking behind his thick glasses.

  Jake opened his mouth to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say, and closed it again. “Well,” he got out after a moment, “could I speak to her?”

  Henry Cahoon closed the door without a word, leaving Jake sweating like an idiot on the front porch. He stood there, feeling more and more like a fool, angry and embarrassed, and finally turned to go. Just then, Pastine opened the door a crack and peered out.

  “Oh, hello,” she said, her voice musical. She looked perfectly cool and dry and that made him feel even grubbier, the way he had felt that hot afternoon more than a year ago when he had dashed down the street in his ink-stained apron to find out her name.

  “You have company?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She looked just the slightest bit smug, he thought. Trying not to be, but not quite bringing it off.

  “Who, might I ask?” The Baptist preacher, perhaps? An old friend from school?

  “Rosh Benefield, if it’s any of your business.”

  My God, he thought. Rosh Benefield. His best friend. The sonofabitch
.

  “But didn’t you know I was coming out?” he protested, feeling the heat rising in his face, making him sweat even more.

  “No,” she said.

  “But I come every Sunday …”

  “Perhaps,” she said airily, “you take me for granted. Perhaps you presume too much.”

  “Yes. Yes, I guess I do.” Jake started backing away from the door, staring at her in confusion, feeling horribly stupid.

  Pastine just stood there. “Are you all right?” she asked after a moment.

  “Hell, yes, I’m all right,” Jake bellowed, humiliation washing over him in hot waves. “I’m just by-God fine!” He bolted for the buggy, and he didn’t even look back as he whipped the horse out of Pastine Cahoon’s yard in total rout.

  Jake drove like a madman back to town, went straight to Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s, and got a pint jar of Jim’s Best. He took it to the newspaper office, pulled the blinds, sat there in the darkness of the front office with his feet propped up on his cluttered desk, and drank fiercely. Halfway through the jar, he got hold of himself enough to think coherent thoughts. He railed for a while in his mind at the inconstancy of women, banging his fist on the desk for emphasis. Then he vented his anger on the fickleness of friends. Damn them both — Pastine Cahoon and Rosh Benefield — for sneaking around behind his back. Especially Rosh Benefield, the closest friend he had ever had. They had grown up together, gone off to college together — the only two young men from their graduating class to do so. When Jake had had to quit and come home to run the paper, Rosh had stayed, gone on to law school. But when he came back and set up practice with his father, the mayor, he was the same old Rosh: quick-witted but deliberate, slow to anger, easygoing. They had drifted into the comfortable habit of good conversation, Rosh dropping by once or twice a week in the late afternoon after his day at the law office, settling his already portly frame into the chair beside Jake’s desk for a drink and some spirited talk. Jake would pull a jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best and two tumblers out of the bottom drawer, pour two fingers apiece, and they would sip and banter until it was gone, and when Rosh had left he would wash the tumblers at the sink in the back and put them away. By unspoken agreement, they took turns buying the whiskey. It was never at the law office that they met, always at the newspaper, because Rosh shared his own office with his father and Jake’s domain was entirely his own.