Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Holy cow,” the printer’s devil said from the back of the shop, where he had stood thunderstruck watching them.

  Jake spun on him. “Be celibate,” he roared. “It’s simpler.”

  Their house was an icy, silent battleground for more than a week. Jake went home from the newspaper that Monday night prepared to apologize for his outburst and patch up the quarrel, but when he tried to broach the subject lightly at the dinner table, Pastine calmly picked up her glass of iced tea and poured it over Jake’s head while Emma Tibbetts sat there in stunned amazement. Jake leaped from his chair and flung out of the house and didn’t come home until well after midnight, lurching up the stairs under the influence of Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s Best to find the door to their bedroom locked. He slept on the parlor sofa and dreamed fitfully of Captain Finley Tibbetts dispatching bluecoated demons with his sword.

  For several days, they didn’t speak. They sat down together at meals, but the kitchen table was a gulf of enmity between them. They stared at their plates, avoiding each other’s glances, eating with quick, angry bites. Jake left the house without a word immediately after dinner each night, went back to the newspaper office, where he puttered and drank and cursed to himself, then came home when the house was quiet and dark and slept in the back bedroom that had been Isaac’s. Several times, he was struck with remorse and started to blurt out something that would break the awful hostile silence, but then he would glance at her tight-lipped, iron-jawed, unforgiving face and the thought of what she had done would well up like a raging beast and devour him with rancor that left a bitter taste of bile in his throat. She had … She had … He was hard-pressed to put a name to it. Well, what the hell. She had crossed him. She had invaded his private domain, which she might have done innocently enough, but once there, she had challenged his right to it. She had tried to tinker with the one thing in Jake Tibbetts’s life you just damn well did not tinker with — his newspaper — and then had called him a mule when he bowed up his back. And then she had poured iced tea on his head. Humiliated him in front of his mother. Made him a skulking stranger in his own house. He seethed at the thought of it, and as the week went on, the anger and sense of betrayal festered and grew until they threatened to consume him.

  Emma Tibbetts ignored them both for several days, hoping they would work it out. But when the end of the week approached and the air in the house seemed electric with their hostility, she took matters into her own hands. She talked to Pastine and then she left.

  When Jake came home late Saturday afternoon, he saw that Emma Tibbetts’s rocking chair on the front porch was empty. He stood for a moment in the yard, regretting there was no excuse to delay the dread of going into the house. He let himself quietly in the front screen door and stopped in the hallway, thinking how in the space of a few days it had become a house where you did not speak. Then something, a tiny movement, caught his eye and he turned and saw Pastine sitting naked there on the floor of the parlor. He stopped, dumbstruck, in the doorway. He just stared at her for a long time, a curving statue of flesh and shadow in the fading light. Then he thought suddenly of his mother and looked wildly about, up the stairs and in the kitchen.

  “Jake,” she said softly, the first word she had spoken to him in five days.

  He jerked his head back to her.

  “Take your clothes off. We’re alone.”

  He hesitated for a moment, confused, and then she reached out her arms to him and he moved toward her in a trance. She stopped him. “Take them off,” she said again, and he did, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor, shivering in his nakedness in the openness of the parlor where people just did not go naked. He was numb.

  Pastine patted the floor in front of her. “Sit down,” she said.

  He sat, feeling incredibly awkward, but when he reached to touch her she stopped him again.

  “Now let’s talk,” she said. “With nothing between us.” And they did, haltingly at first and then in torrents, each pouring out hurt and anger, ticking off grievances, opening wounds. They lost track of time. It turned dark outside and Pastine got up and turned on a single lamp in the corner so they could see each other, then sat down again cross-legged on the floor in front of him and they went on and on. And finally, when they were utterly exhausted with lashing at each other, they came to an accommodation.

  They agreed that Jake would run the newspaper. It was his business, but more than that, his fiefdom, to do with as he saw fit. He had made the newspaper his own, and that’s what it would remain. Pastine, for her part, would champion whatever cause she wished. A woman of her sense and sensibilities could not be expected to stay meekly at home and simply be the newspaper editor’s wife, without opinion or prejudice. She would be mistress of her own realm. Neither would interfere with the other. And to hell with what the town thought on either score.

  They each gave out of their stubbornness, and then they collapsed sobbing into each other’s arms and coupled hungrily, violently, ignoring the lumpy braided carpet beneath them. Then totally spent, they slept where they lay.

  They woke on Sunday morning with the sun streaming in the windows, stiff and aching from the hard floor.

  “My God,” Jake said, suddenly remembering. “Mama.”

  Pastine laughed. “She spent the night out.”

  “What?”

  “She said she had a sick friend who needed some company, so she spent the night out.”

  “You … she …”

  “We had a long talk.”

  “And she …”

  “Then she left me to my own devices.”

  “Good Lord, she never spent the night out in her life.”

  “Maybe,” said Pastine, “she never had a good reason.”

  Emma Tibbetts came home just after noon, spoke to them pleasantly, and went to the front porch, where she spent the afternoon humming and rocking. She died quietly in her sleep a month later. Jake regretted that he never said something, just a little something, to let her know how grateful he was. But he, the master of language, never could find the right words.

  Pastine eventually got her library. She assaulted the citadel of the Town Council for a while longer, and the council heard her politely and unbendingly. Then she came to understand she would win no battles with them in their own arena. She would have to construct one of her own.

  It took three years. Pastine stopped going to council meetings, stopped making public pronouncements about a library. The council sighed with relief and forgot her. But while they did, she was organizing — a lyceum series, a study club, concerts in the band shell beside Whitewater Creek on Sunday afternoons. She became a bundle of vigor in the Methodist Church (the doors of which the Tibbetts family had barely darkened since the death of Captain Finley’s widow, Henrietta, one of the church’s staunchest members). She took on the hundreds of small tasks and responsibilities that let the older Methodist ladies know she was properly aware of her role. She began to learn patience, to fit herself into the community. It began to be said of her that while she still left you a little breathless with her energy and enthusiasms, she was not quite so, well, forward as she had once been.

  But if Pastine mellowed, she had her own agenda. Slowly, with a thousand subtle hints and pressures, she brought a sizeable number of the town’s influential women to the notion that their community could be just as refined, cultured, and intelligent as any other, and that a library was just the thing they needed. And before they knew it, the members of the Town Council had been sandbagged. They were in deep trouble with the town’s guardian females. It was about the time the woman’s suffrage movement was beginning to get a good deal of attention in the Eastern cities, and while the local women were certainly not in sympathy with that sort of unladylike business, there was a faint stirring of female militancy in their campaign for the library. Such a matter could not be entrusted to men, the kind of recalcitrant dolts on the Town Council who stood in the way of Truth and Enlightenment.

  T
hey did it without speeches or demonstrations at council meetings. Instead, they applied pressure in dozens of parlors and bedrooms. The council finally capitulated in a rout, announcing without fanfare that a small room of the City Hall previously housing the records of the Water and Sewer Department would be cleared and shelves installed for the purpose of accommodating a modest lending library. A small sum would be appropriated from the town treasury for the purchase of books, and contributions would also be welcomed. A delegation of ladies made the rounds of the town’s business establishment, collecting enough to buy a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and hire a young woman to keep the library open three afternoons a week. One mysterious donor gave the staggering sum of three thousand dollars, which was put in trust to provide continuing funds for books and upkeep.

  Pastine stayed entirely in the background, and Jake reported the business without comment. They stood together on the afternoon when the library was dedicated, listening to Mayor Arthur Benefield, Rosh’s father, extol the virtues of learning and proclaim the library a repository of the world’s wisdom. Jake leaned close to Pastine’s ear and said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  She tossed her head playfully, just the way he had seen her do that afternoon when she presented herself in middy blouse and sailor hat in his steamy print shop more than four years before. “All you have to do is decide the cat needs skinning, and if you’ve got any gumption, you’ll find a way.”

  “I’d say this cat was skinned from the inside out,” he said. She smiled. “I’d think you would want at least a little of the credit, though.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’d much rather have the satisfaction.”

  He was quite proud of her. And very much in love.

  A library was easier to get than a baby. Calculating patience might defeat the Town Council, but nature was quite another thing.

  In those three years while the library project went on quietly, Pastine had two miscarriages and the second almost killed her. Jake found her unconscious in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor when he came home for lunch. He carried her upstairs to their bed, crying with fright, and dashed madly down Partridge Road to Doc Ainsworth’s office. They sped back in Ainsworth’s buggy to find her pale and lifeless, the red stain spreading around her on the bed sheets. Jake huddled sobbing in the hall for an hour until Ainsworth emerged, shaken, to say he had stopped the bleeding and she might live. She was terribly weak, but Jake hovered over her for days, feeding her broth and warm milk, massaging her listless arms and legs, until she finally began to stir. It was two months before she got out of bed. And Charlie Ainsworth said, “No more of this baby business.”

  So in 1910, Jake Tibbetts resigned himself to the notion that there would be no offspring, no heir to pass along the newspaper to, now that he had it so embedded in his gut that it was the most essential thing about him. He thought to himself, I’ll just have to run the sonofabitch until I croak.

  He tried hard not to fix blame. He told himself that Pastine had been more than willing, that she had risked her very life to bring them a child. But as time went on, the thought began to eat at him that he had done his part. His seed was fertile. It was the soil that would not support life. Was she too damned brainy to be a proper mother? After all, she had been away, had been exposed to exotic ideas and philosophies, had an obstinate mind of her own. Perhaps it went deeper than that. Her father was a tinkerer, an inventor, a cerebral man. Had the accumulated genes of the Cahoons conspired to short-circuit those of the Tibbetts?

  Jake didn’t expect a big family. The Tibbetts women had never been great child-bearers. Captain Finley had fathered only a girl besides Albertis, and she had become a sour old maid. Albertis, in turn, had begat only Jake and Isaac. So now there was only Jake, of the entire line, and if he did not particularly wish to father a nation, he at least had the right to expect a single heir. But Pastine seemed incapable, and the thought of it rankled and in turn made him feel guilty for thinking it.

  However, Jake’s mental agonies came to an abrupt halt when Pastine became pregnant again. Now Jake was terrified. She was fearfully, wretchedly nauseated, and Jake himself was sick with worry, having blamed her in his own heart for her failure to bear a child, now having impregnated her in a fit of sweating passion against all advice of Charlie Ainsworth. If she died, it would be his fault. All his fault. Ainsworth glowered at Jake accusingly and ordered Pastine to bed. And they waited.

  Then one day in Pastine’s third month, Jake arrived home in the late afternoon to find her sweeping the front porch, a gingham apron tied across the slight swell of her belly, strands of hair loose around her head as she wielded the broom vigorously.

  “Good God, woman, back to bed!” he yelled, dashing up the steps and wresting the broom from her.

  Pastine tossed her head. “Go to bed yourself, Jake. You’ve been looking a little peaked lately.”

  “What the hell are you trying to do …” His voice trailed off before he could say mess it up again? and he felt the cold grip of panic in his gut.

  “This one’s going to be all right, Jake,” Pastine said, smiling. “Don’t ask me how. A woman just knows these things. I woke up this morning and I said to myself, ‘This one’s going to work out. It’s my time.’ “

  “But Charlie said …”

  “Charlie Ainsworth is just a doctor.” She patted her stomach. “I’m in charge here.”

  She was indeed. She began to blossom with a beautiful fullness, to hum with some secret reservoir of confident energy. Dust flew. The house fairly squeaked with cleanliness, was aromatic with the rich smells of nesting. Pastine became especially playful in bed, as if her body sought affirmation of her condition. Jake was both delighted and frightened, fearing their frenzied thrustings and thrashings would disrupt the awakening life in her womb. But she took control of him as she had taken control of herself. Jake sensed an awesome strength in her. She would deliver a baby, by God, and once she had decided that and captured her own body in the fierce grip of her mind, nothing could sway her. She swept everything, Jake included, before her. So he finally gave up protesting and worrying and gave in to the overwhelming delight of it.

  It was a cesarean. The baby had gotten himself twisted around ass backward and tangled in his own umbilical cord, and there was nothing for Charlie Ainsworth to do but go fetch him. Henry came ill-tempered and bellowing into the world, flailing his arms in protest. Ainsworth’s nurse, who helped with the delivery, washed him up, wrapped him in a blanket, and stood in the doorway of the room so that Jake, who had been pacing like a madman in the hall, could get a look at him. The nurse said, shaking her head, “That boy’s got a spark in his eye, Mr. Tibbetts. Just you watch out for that young’un.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said, grinning. “Ink in your blood will do it every time.”

  Pastine lay ghostlike in the sheets when they finally let him in a couple of hours later. As he bent to kiss her, she whispered, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat, Jake.” Jake felt a great rush of joy and pride and love. And yes, awe. Some sort of vehement grit had brought her through it. She would do, he thought happily. She would do.

  Charlie Ainsworth told them that this was the end of it. No more babies. This one had been sheer luck, a miracle, against all odds, and it had left her with a lot of damage that couldn’t be fixed. So he had tied things off so there would be no more risk of pregnancy.

  Jake wouldn’t let the finality of it take anything away from his immense pleasure. They named the boy for Pastine’s father and for Jake’s grandfather: Henry Finley Tibbetts. For weeks after Henry was born, Jake would slip into their room after supper each night, carrying Captain Finley’s Confederate saber, and sit for a long time in the darkness while Henry slept and muttered in his crib, wiping the blade of the sword with a soft smooth cloth, thinking of the Tibbetts men — the fire, the madness, the pride, the courage and shame — and how it had all come finally to this. There was, for this small sleeping baby, bot
h a kinship and a magnificent aloneness. All things old and new. Alpha and omega. Amen. Pastine would often find him there, asleep in the chair with the sword on his lap and a smile on his face, and take him to bed.

  But Henry was a disaster from the first. He developed a terrible case of colic at one end and diaper rash at the other, and together they kept him squalling and red-faced. He slept at most for an hour or two at a time and then awoke screaming and rattled the windows with his fierce cries. Nothing they tried helped his angry stomach — not Pastine’s own milk, not store-bought formulas, not even the goat’s milk Jake got from a local farmer. His raw, red bottom broke out in ugly blisters and defied every medication. Charlie Ainsworth said he had never seen another case like it. There was nothing to do but keep Henry’s rump greased and force food into him so he wouldn’t starve to death, then walk the floor with him bawling and shaking with rage until he finally exhausted himself and fell asleep. He was eighteen months old before he slept through the night, and by then Jake and Pastine were gaunt and battle-weary.

  At two, Henry was a terror. He threw, spilled, screamed, kicked, bit, upset, and rejected. Jake he especially rejected. If Jake tried to pick him up, Henry would bellow at the top of his lungs and lunge for Pastine. And Jake recoiled in astonished hurt. The worst of it came one night after supper when Jake picked him up to take him upstairs to bed. Henry was heading across the parlor for an empty whatnot stand that had once held an assortment of figurines and doodads until Henry had broken some and the rest had been put away. Jake scooped him up and lifted him high in the air, and Henry flailed out with a small hard fist and smashed Jake in the eye. Jake roared with pain and staggered to the parlor sofa, where he sat with a thump, turned Henry over his knee, and gave him two resounding whacks on his diaper-padded rear. Pastine, sitting dumbfounded in the wing-back chair next to the fireplace, leaped up, screamed with fright, and snatched Henry away from him.