Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  But she caught him. He was halfway across the lobby, hat in left hand shielding his face from the tableful of babbling gluttons, when Mrs. Grayson’s voice rang out. “Reverend Pomfret!”

  He took another long stride toward the door, but she grabbed him by the arm and spun him toward the dining room. He had a glimpse of her plump face as she called out, “Gentlemen, I want y’all to meet Reverend Sylvester Pomfret from St. Louis!” Conversation stopped in midmouthful and the entire table turned and stared at Jake. There were at least twenty and Jake knew most of them, including Whit Hennessey, the postmaster, and the red-faced man with the enormous nose sitting down at the end of the table: E. Thurmond Broadus of the Foot-Pleasure Company of St. Louis.

  “Reverend Pomfret had a vision,” Mrs. Grayson announced. And then, spying Broadus, she said, “Of course, here’s somebody you know already. Mr. Broadus come in on the early train.”

  Broadus stared at Jake, then guffawed. “Hell, that ain’t no reverend, that sonofabitch is Jake Tibbetts.”

  The rest of them began to snicker, and then Whit Hennessey said, “Jake, you takin’ up a new line of work?”

  “What?” Mrs. Grayson jerked her head back and forth, confused, and her ears began to turn red.

  “He runs the newspaper,” Whit added.

  “But he said he had a vision,” Mrs. Grayson insisted.

  “Hallucination is more like it,” E. Thurmond Broadus said helpfully.

  “Local!” said Mrs. Grayson, indignant, as if he had peed on the floor. “You get the hell out of here! And don’t come back!” She gave him a shove.

  Jake glared at them, clamped his hat on his head, and said, “Horseshit.” Only it came out as a tiny croak from the depths of his stricken throat. Then he turned on his heel and stalked out, leaving the breakfast table at the Regal Hotel awash with gales of laughter. His ears burned. I have made of myself, he thought, an Absolute Ass. If I keep this up, I will become an Absolute Damfool, and there is nothing to be more pitied. What the hell. I will go live at the newspaper.

  Lonnie was waiting for him at the front door of the newspaper office, bundled in flannel jacket, knit cap and mittens, holding a small paper sack in his hand.

  “Where you been?” Lonnie demanded.

  “Doing the Lord’s work,” Jake croaked. He was beginning to get a little of his voice back, but his throat burned like fire and his overstuffed head throbbed.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What’s wrong with your voice? You sound like a frog.”

  “I’ve got a cold,” Jake rasped irritably.

  “Did you sleep outside last night?”

  Jake ignored it, fished the key out of his pocket, and unlocked the door. “Come on in.”

  ‘I’d love to,” Lonnie said. “I’m freezing. I been standing out here waiting on you about five hours.”

  Inside, Jake pulled up the shade on the front window, letting the strong gray light into the front office, then lit the kerosene stove in the corner. Lonnie watched him silently, still bundled, sack in hand.

  Jake turned to him and pointed at the sack. “You bring me something?” he growled.

  “Naw. That’s my lunch. I come to work. Mama Pastine says it’s okay. She says if I’ll stick to newspapering and not pay any attention to your foolishness, she don’t mind.”

  Jake nodded. “Well, take your coat off.”

  They both took their coats off and hung them on the rack next to the door and Lonnie put his lunch bag down on Jake’s desk, and then they stood there and looked at each other for a moment.

  “Well?” Lonnie said finally.

  “Well, what?”

  “You gonna teach me to be a newspaperman or what?”

  Sweet Jesus! Why the hell would anybody want to be a newspaperman? It was proof positive of the strain of madness that curdled the blood of the Tibbettses.

  “You can start,” Jake said, “by sweeping up.”

  “What?” Lonnie looked incredulous.

  “Now listen,” Jake said evenly. “I can hardly talk and I ain’t going to waste any words on you. If you want to be a newspaperman, start at the floor and work your way up. Start at the front door and sweep to the back.”

  Lonnie put his hands on his hips and glared at Jake for a moment, then shrugged. “Awright. Where’s the broom?” Jake glared back, and finally Lonnie waved his arms and said, “Awright. Awright. I’ll find it myself.”

  Lonnie banged around in the back shop and after a moment he came back with the broom and started sweeping, making a great show of getting into every nook and cranny. When he had finished with the front office and moved into the back shop, Jake slumped in his swivel chair, opened the bottom drawer of the desk, and got out the jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best and took a small swig. He winced as it burned his raw throat and settled like molten lava in his empty stomach. After a moment, his throat felt a little better and he took a couple of more swallows and put the jar away.

  He surveyed the wreckage of his desk, piled high with mail unopened, stacks of correspondence unanswered, bills unpaid, things undone. It was the backwash of his business, the place where he put things that had little to do with actually getting out a newspaper. It was, in fact, more Pastine’s domain than his own. She came at least once a week, spent an afternoon rustling busily through the stacks, extricating the bills and writing out checks from the thick checkbook she kept in the lower right-hand drawer, mailing out subscription renewal notices, collecting the checks and cash that people sent him, and making a weekly bank deposit. She tended to the most immediate and critical paperwork, stacking the rest for Jake to peruse when and if he took a notion. But just look at it now. She had been here only last Thursday. Or was it Tuesday? Already it was a mess. And God only knew when Pastine Tibbetts would be here again. Maybe never. The paper would pile up until it covered the top of the desk entirely, then spill over onto the floor and grow and grow until it blocked the front door and he had to conduct business entirely from the rear entrance. But it was not anything he, Jake Tibbetts, could handle. He was a newspaperman, by God, not a business tycoon. He must get help.

  Then he thought again of the war memorial, or more particularly, what he ought to do about it. That he would do something about it there was no question. He would not back down on this the way he had already backed down once this week, when Rosh Benefield had called in an ancient debt. There were no old debts associated with this business of the war memorial. He had it stuck in his craw, and now he had to make a public issue of it, and that meant speaking through the voice of the newspaper. But how to say it? It nagged at him like a toothache, but words wouldn’t come. It would just have to fester awhile longer.

  “Awright. What next?” Lonnie stood in the passageway between the low partitions that divided the front office from the back shop, leaning against the broom.

  “You finished?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Front to back?”

  “Top to bottom. Your voice sounds better.” Lonnie sniffed, turned up his nose. “You been drinking that old whiskey.”

  Jake leaned forward in the chair. “Yes, by God, I’ve been drinking that old whiskey. And if you want to become a newspaperman, you keep your nose out of the personal habits of the editor.”

  Lonnie cocked his head to one side and gave him a quizzical look. “Well, if you’re finished drinking whiskey, what’s next?”

  Jake stood up and scratched at his crotch, where he was beginning to itch badly from lack of a bath. “Next is, you gotta learn how to set type.” Lonnie’s face lit up. “Come on.” Jake led him to the back shop, where the type cases were stacked in their cabinets against the wall next to a layout table. He slid one of the wooden cases out of its niche and placed it on the table. The pieces of type, black with years of use, lay jumbled in their compartments, separated by thin wooden partitions. Jake picked up a single piece of type. “Type,” he said. “What letter?”

  “It’s a d,”
Lonnie said, looking at the end of it.

  “Wrong. It’s a b. Type is backwards when you look at it. You set it backwards. Right to left.”

  “Like Chinese,” Lonnie said.

  “Like what?”

  “Chinese. They write backwards.”

  “Well, sort of. Anyway, it’s backwards and you set it backwards, so that when you turn it upside down and print it on a piece of paper, it comes out right. Now.” He tossed the piece of type back into its compartment. “Type comes in all sorts of sizes and styles. Big and little, plain and fancy. This here is twenty-four-point Bodoni Bold. Different types for different jobs. Boldface for headlines and ads. Fancy styles with little squiggles on ’em for the society page. But you’ll get all that later.” Jake stopped, caught his breath, swallowed hard. Speaking was an agony. “First you learn the layout of a type case. Anything strike your eye right off the bat?”

  “It’s dirty,” Lonnie answered promptly.

  “It’s got ink on it,” Jake said. “What else?”

  “The compartments ain’t all the same size.”

  “Bingo. God, my throat is killing me.” He was seized by a fit of coughing that doubled him over and scalded his throat like a hot poker. “Be right back,” he gasped, and stumbled to the front office, where he took another healthy slug of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, blew his nose mightily on the dirty handkerchief from his back pocket, and composed himself.

  Back at the type case, he said, “Now where were we?”

  “The compartments. They ain’t all the same size.”

  “Aren’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jake glared at him a moment. “Now why do you reckon that is?”

  Lonnie studied the type case. “There’s more of some pieces than others.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Which ones have more pieces?”

  Lonnie picked up a piece of type from one of the larger compartments. “E.” He examined another. “And a.”

  “Right,” Jake said. “You use more e’s and a’s making words. And lots of s’s and o’s and t’s. But not many z’s and q’s.”

  Lonnie picked over the type, then looked up at Jake. “Why don’t they have the letters in order? Here’s the a’s up here and the b’s way over here.”

  “There’s no rhyme or reason to a type case except what I just said. A type case was designed by a drunk German who was blind in one eye.”

  “Then how do you know what’s where?” Lonnie demanded.

  “You just learn it,” Jake said. “You learn it so well you can set type drunk and blind, which is the way many a printer has done it through the ages. Now I want you to go back yonder and get a piece of poster board off that stack” — Jake pointed to the back wall, where the paper was stacked — “and I want you to draw a layout of this type case. Then I want you to put in all the letters and numbers and punctuation marks and such. And then I want you to set the Gettysburg Address in twenty-four-point Bodoni Bold.”

  “Holy cow,” Lonnie exploded. “How’m I gonna do that? I don’t even know the Gettysburg Address.”

  “Find it.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s your business.”

  Lonnie thought. “The library?”

  Jake shrugged. “Sounds good enough.” He showed Lonnie how to hold a type stick in his left hand and drop the individual pieces of type into it one by one, click-click, right to left, until they became words, separating each word with a blank piece, filling an entire line with words and spaces and then lifting the line out between two long metal slugs and placing it in a form that Jake set up for him next to the case.

  “Now,” Jake said. “Got it?”

  “I reckon.” Lonnie looked a little glum.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Aw, nothing.”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, this ain’t what I thought it would be like.”

  Jake scratched his crotch again. God, he needed a bath. That was the next order of business. A bath. And a shave. And another little nip of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, which was already working wonders on his cold.

  “Look,” he rasped. “What a newspaperman does is turn words into print. You can have all the great words in the world, and if you can’t turn ’em into print, nobody’s gonna see ’em. And if nobody sees ’em, you got no newspaper. Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address would have been forgotten in an hour if some newspaperman hadn’t written it down and turned it into print. Just pretend you’re that newspaperman, listening to old Abe there on the battlefield with the guidons whipping in the breeze and the soldiers gathered around close with their hats over their hearts. And you there, preserving his words for posterity.”

  He could see the idea take hold in Lonnie’s head. “I reckon I better go to the library first.” He headed for the front door.

  “Hey, whoa, wait a minute.” Jake caught him. “Put on your jacket and your cap and mittens.”

  “Aw…”

  “Aw, nothing. You want to go home with pneumonia and have your Mama Pastine put you to bed?”

  “Nosir.”

  “And here,” Jake fumbled in the middle drawer of his desk, found what he wanted in the back, under a pile of pens, pencils, paper clips, junk. “Here’s a key.” He handed it to Lonnie. “I’m gonna go get myself cleaned up, and I may not be here when you get back. Just let yourself in and get to work. And put on one of those aprons back there so you don’t get ink on your clothes.”

  Lonnie held the key in his mittened hand for a moment, staring at it as if it were gold instead of tarnished brass.

  “You keep it,” Jake said. “You can’t be a newspaperman if you don’t have a key to the newspaper office.”

  Lonnie grinned and bolted out the door, and Jake stood in the open doorway and watched him, sneakers flying, until he turned the corner at the end of the block and headed for the library.

  He went back inside and got the jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best out of the drawer of his desk and drained what was left, a half-inch or so, letting it trickle down his throat so that it both burned and soothed the raw membranes. His head still felt like an overstuffed parlor cushion, but the whiskey had considerably eased his misery. In fact, he was beginning to feel positively fine. Maybe even better than fine. Maybe a little foolhardy, like he might be ready to piss into the wind.

  He put the empty fruit jar back into the desk next to two other empties and reminded himself that he needed to take them to Lightnin’ Jim’s the next time he went. It would make the crotchety old sonofabitch easier to deal with if he got some empty jars back. He was always complaining about not having enough jars, about how the war had caught him short. He was always glowering at you and saying, “Don’t you white folks know there’s a war on?”

  Jake slammed the drawer shut, then locked up and walked the two blocks to Rosh Benefield’s office, carrying the sack of supplies Lonnie had brought him the day before. The sign on Rosh’s front door said he was at the courthouse, so Jake opened the unlocked door and took Rosh’s key to the fire station from its hook inside.

  He crossed the square at a brisk pace, holding his paper sack as if it contained the heads of vanquished foes, and fired off a jaunty greeting to everybody in sight. They gaped at him, amazed that he had the gall to show his face in public after having made an Absolute Ass of himself. He could see people peering out of the front windows of the stores at him as he cut across the courthouse lawn, legs pumping. There goes the lunatic. And what in blazes do you reckon he’s got in that paper sack? You heard the latest, of course. Yes, a preacher, for God’s sake. He waved and smiled, wondering if he should slobber a bit for effect.

  He went around back in the alleyway behind the fire station, let himself in the rear door, lit the heater in the small locker room behind the bay where the pumper sat, took off his clothes, and turned on the shower. He stepped under the stinging spray and let it blast his body for a while, washing away the gr
ime and embarrassment of three days of uncleanliness. He soaped himself twice, cleansing every pore, then turned off the water and stepped out. He had no towel, so he dried himself on the shirt he had just taken off, dressed in fresh clothes, and got out his brush, mug, and straight razor and shaved carefully. He looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, turned his head this way and that, and decided that he looked just fine. Damn fine, in fact.

  Thus cleansed and refreshed, he locked up and paraded again across the square to the Jitney Jungle Super Saver for supplies. He bought a package of sliced bologna and another of cheese, a loaf of white bread, two cans of sardines, a box of saltine crackers, a small jar of mayonnaise, and a bottle of olives. He knew the olives would give him heartburn, and that’s why Pastine never kept them in the house. But he was no longer under Pastine’s roof, and he loved olives, and if he was going to have to live at the newspaper, he would by God have olives with his lunch. Anybody who looked and felt this damned fine should have a jar of olives if he wanted them. Jake stood in front of the butcher case whistling tunelessly while George Poulos sliced and wrapped his bologna and cheese in self-conscious silence. Then he carried the items to the front counter, where George totted up the bill by hand on the back of a paper sack and put the groceries inside.

  “Did you hear about the sonofabitch that tried to pass himself off as a preacher from St. Louis over at the Regal?” Jake asked as he handed over his money. George almost choked.

  It was past noon by the time he got back to the newspaper office, and Lonnie was hunched over his work in the back shop, face screwed up with concentration as he drew an outline of the type case on a piece of poster board, a hand-copied Gettysburg Address beside him on the layout table. Lonnie stopped and they spread out their lunches on a corner of Jake’s littered desk and discussed the relative merits of store-bought versus homemade mayonnaise (Pastine made her own) while they ate, washing down their sandwiches, sardines, and olives with tap water from the sink in back, drunk from the tumblers Jake kept in his bottom desk drawer. Jake ate happily, and when he finished he belched with pleasure, tasting the tartness of the olives already doing mischief in his full belly.