Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “I reckon ’til I get finished,” Lonnie said fiercely, eyes glued to the ground.

  Jake stopped dead in his tracks and whirled on him. “Boy, don’t you sass me!”

  “Yessir,” Lonnie said quietly, drawing all up inside himself. My God, Jake thought, Henry again. Just like him, just like the way he used to curl up into a ball like a roly-poly so that you couldn’t penetrate the tight, hard crust.

  “Damn!” he said. The silence, the sullen, insular silence was beginning to nettle Jake like a heat rash. Lonnie had simply stopped talking to them. Just the way Henry had done. It was maddening. He wanted to seize Lonnie by the shoulders and shake him violently and yell at him to wake up before it was too late, before he indeed became Henry made over. But he didn’t do that. Instead, Jake stomped off and left Lonnie standing there.

  Inside the print shop, it was sweltering. Jake turned on the huge fan in the back window of the press room and left the front door open, but all it did was stir the hot air. Lonnie came in after a few minutes and went straight to the type cabinet, where he was setting copy for George Poulos’s advertisement. Jake watched him, but Lonnie didn’t even look his way.

  Jake sat down at the Linotype machine and mopped his brow with a handkerchief. And then the spell of dizziness hit him. It was very quick, a sudden roaring in his ears and the objects in front of him seemed to turn shades of black and gray and fall away from him, beyond his reach. All he could do was to lean forward and grip the edge of the Linotype keyboard and steady himself. He sucked in great gulps of air while the roaring got louder and louder and his vision dimmed to almost nothing. Then after a moment, as quickly as it came, it passed, leaving him cold and clammy and a bit sick at his stomach.

  It was the second time it had happened in a week. The first had been in the front parlor after he had walked home late one evening. The heat had been oppressive and he had put in a hard day, and when he stepped up on the porch after the walk home, he felt weak-kneed and short of breath. He got through the front door and into the parlor before the reeling blackness hit him. He staggered to the sofa and slumped onto it, lying half-on, half-off until the dizziness passed. Then he raised himself to a sitting position and sat there very still and very quiet for a few moments until he got himself back together.

  Nobody had seen him. They had all been upstairs. He heard Pastine coming down the stairs and then she poked her head into the parlor and gave him a curious look. He sat up very straight. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Oh, nothing.” His voice sounded hollow and distant.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Just the heat.”

  “Well, I don’t wonder,” Pastine said. “You insist on parading in it four times a day.”

  Next, he thought, she’ll say for the umpteenth time, “Why don’t you get an automobile?” But she didn’t. It was just as well. He was too old for an automobile.

  Now it had happened again, and as Jake sat at the Linotype machine trying to get his head cleared, he wondered if he ought to stop trying to go home for dinner in the middle of the day when it was so hot. But then he thought that he was not old enough to start pampering himself. What would the young men think if they got home from war and saw a bunch of doddering old fools lurching around town and hiding from the noonday sun? They would be eager enough to run things as it was. They would take a look at men like Hilton Redlinger and decide it was time for some fresh blood. Hilton was a doddering old fool. The heat made him cantankerous. He forgot things. He shuffled when he walked. Something had seemed to go out of him just over the summer. There were one or two who were bold enough to say (though not around anybody who might carry it back to Hilton) that he hadn’t been the same since Jake Tibbetts had taken his gun away from him at the cemetery. It was there for everybody to see. And when the young bucks came home from war, the Town Council would take a look at some quick-footed youngster, maybe with military police experience, and gently suggest to Hilton Redlinger that it was time to retire. Well, that was okay for Hilton Redlinger. But not Jake Tibbetts. Nobody had taken Jake Tibbetts’s gun away from him and he wasn’t about to stop walking home in the heat.

  Jake sat back in his chair and looked over at Lonnie. He was standing in front of the type cabinet, back to Jake, head down. Click-click. His fingers moved deftly, setting type. He seemed not to have noticed.

  Jake sat awhile longer until he was sure the spell had passed and then he stood up, steadied himself, walked over and leaned against the layout table next to the type case where Lonnie was working. Jake felt drained and lifeless and old, both from the spell of dizziness and from the mystery that Lonnie had become. It left him baffled and miserable. Not like Henry, he pleaded. For God’s sake, not like Henry. There was still time. Or was there? Lonnie was still a boy. He would be thirteen years old next month, September, but he was still small and wiry. There was no break in his voice, no fuzz on his upper lip. But there was one enormous change. He had stopped trusting in the way a child can trust.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Almost done,” Lonnie mumbled.

  “Did you check everything?”

  Lonnie looked up at him. “Sure.”

  “George is awfully particular about his prices.”

  Lonnie finished the line of type he was setting, then turned to the layout table and placed it neatly in the corner of the page form where the Jitney Jungle ad would run.

  Jake peered over at the line Lonnie had just set.

  “It’s f-i-e-l-d, not f-e-i-l-d.” He pointed at the word. “Field peas. You misspelled field.”

  Lonnie stared at the type and Jake could see his shoulders hunch up, his arms tremble with some deep, hidden rage. They stood there, both of them looking at the type, and finally Jake reached over and reversed the two errant letters.

  “I’ve been thinking about something,” Jake said. “I’ve been thinking it’s time you learned the Linotype. You’ve got this” — his hand swept over the cabinet of type — “down pat. You think you can handle the Linotype?”

  Lonnie shrugged.

  “It’s a cantankerous old sonofabitch. But I think you can do it.”

  “All right.”

  “We’ll start Thursday morning. After we get this week’s edition out. Okay?”

  Lonnie nodded.

  “Turn around here and look at me,” Jake said.

  Lonnie turned slowly and stood facing Jake, arms at his sides.

  “Why don’t you talk to anybody anymore?”

  Silence.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Still nothing.

  “Well, for God’s sakes, boy, what in the goddamn blue blazes is wrong with you?” Jake exploded.

  Lonnie just stared at him.

  Jake took a deep breath and waited for a moment until he calmed down and then he said, “What do you think about your daddy coming home tomorrow?”

  Lonnie shrugged.

  Jake threw up his hands. “Well, to hell with it.” He turned to go and then Lonnie’s voice spun him back around. “What do you think about it?”

  Jake studied him for a long time, trying to find something of himself in Lonnie’s face, wondering how he would answer this most simple of questions.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not mad anymore.”

  “What were you mad about?”

  “Because …” Jake hung fire. How to say it? Mad because Henry wouldn’t do right? Mad because he clammed up? Mad because of what happened with Hazel?

  “I never thought your father took much responsibility for himself,” Jake said. “That’s all I ever wanted him to do, really. I was tough on him about a lot of little things, I suppose, but all I ever wanted him to do was just take responsibility for himself.” It was strange, standing here and saying these things to his grandson, talking to a boy about the father he had never really known and now would have to come to grips with.

  “I reckon the war changed that,” Jake went on. “It seems
your daddy finally did take things on himself, and I …” he hesitated, “I admire that. I don’t know how it will be between us, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is how it is between you and him. I’m an old man. I’ve had my chance. Now it’s your chance and his. Depends on what you want to do with it. Depends as much on you as on him.”

  They stood there and looked at each other across the open space between the type cabinet and the layout table, boy and old man, and Jake wanted to reach out and touch him. But then he thought, No, this is not the time for that.

  “What are you going to do?” Jake asked.

  Lonnie ducked his head, but not before Jake saw the tears fill his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lonnie said.

  “Yes, you do. Your daddy’s coming home tomorrow and he and Francine are going to want to have a place of their own and they’ll want you with ’em.”

  “No!” Lonnie jerked with a convulsion that shook his small body.

  “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” Jake demanded. “All this sulking around with your bowels in an uproar.”

  “No!”

  “You just don’t want to make a choice. You don’t want to take responsibility for yourself. Time’s come you have to grow up a little, and you just can’t stand it.”

  “No!” he screamed. “You don’t know a goddamn thing!”

  Jake slapped him. The blow stunned them both. It snapped Lonnie’s head around and left a broad red welt on his cheek. Jake stood there, gape-mouthed, staring at him.

  “Lonnie …”

  But it was too late. Lonnie bolted. He was past Jake and through the print shop and out the door before Jake could turn around.

  “Lonnie!” he yelled, following. By the time he got to the sidewalk, Lonnie was nearly a block away.

  “Go on, then!” Jake bellowed after him. “Quit! Turn tail! Run away from it!”

  Lonnie stopped, spun around, yelled back at him. “Just like you! You wouldn’t even fight over the war memorial!” His eyes bulged with rage. “You quitter!”

  And he was gone.

  A woman came to the door of the house across the street, peered out through the screen. “What’s going on out yonder?” she called.

  “Mind your own business,” Jake thundered, and went back inside and closed the door.

  He telephoned and said he would not be home for supper. There was too much to do. He wanted to finish the layout of the paper tonight and get the forms on the press because there was other business tomorrow.

  He also wanted some time to sit quietly at his desk with his feet propped up as the front office mellowed with dusk and think about how much he missed Rosh Benefield.

  He opened the bottom left-hand drawer and got out the pint jar of Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s Best and one of the glass tumblers and poured three fingers. The other glass was there, but it had been unused for two months, since the business at the funeral home, since Rosh had poured the whiskey at his feet.

  Jake had gone to Rosh’s office the day after they had let him out of the county jail. He had begged Rosh’s forgiveness, grieved with him over Billy. And Rosh had said that it was all right between them. But Rosh had not been back around to the newspaper office. True, he had his hands full at home. Ideal Benefield was paralyzed by grief, as isolated in her own home as Pastine Tibbetts was in the house out Partridge Road. Jake wanted to comfort his old friend, but Rosh didn’t come around. So Jake drank by himself in the shank of the evening while the heat gradually gave up its terrible grip and left the air close and lifeless.

  What he would have told Rosh Benefield, had Rosh filled the enormous void in the chair next to the desk, was that he had come to question his most basic and cherished belief — that a man could indeed take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it was worth. It was a terrible question for a man to have to ask himself, after sixty-four years of believing. But the question itself was the consequence of all that had happened these past few months when things seemed to take on a life of their own, Jake Tibbetts be damned.

  He had always assumed that what a man did in this life, if there was anything to him, was to try to come to grips with his imperfect self in an imperfect world. He started, stumbled, farted, and fell — and then picked himself up and tried again. In the process, he came to decide what was important and what was not. He came to some conclusions and sometimes he threw them out and started over. But through it all, he made no excuses and accepted the consequences of what he did and thought.

  That was what he, Jake Tibbetts, had done for sixty-four years. What was different now was the dawning suspicion that no matter how much a man took responsibility for himself, he might not, at the bottom of things, have much say. He might, like Jake, be whipsawed by a sequence of events and circumstances that took away any sense of control over his own destiny. Or he might, like the hundred thousand poor bastards of Hiroshima, Japan, be here one second and gone the next. Grab your ankles, Jap, some fat-assed general in Washington, D.C., has decided to turn you into vapor. In either case, could or would God hold a man to account? And, faced with what a man like Jake was beginning to suspect, how should he act? Could he, indeed, take responsibility for himself? And was his life his own, to take in his hands and shake for all it was worth?

  Sitting right here in this newspaper office, a few months ago, Rosh Benefield had agreed that Jake Tibbetts’s cherished belief held true, indeed had said that it had saved his own life at a moment of personal anguish. Rosh had said then that Jake himself didn’t really believe it, because he wouldn’t give Henry the right to his own consequences. He said that Jake had been toting Henry’s guilt around all these years.

  So, what was it? Was the premise true and Jake’s practice of it bankrupt? Or was the premise itself rotten at the core? He would like to ask Rosh Benefield that right now. If he were here.

  And where was God in all this business? Jake might not be a religious man in the strict sense of the word, but he had always assumed there was an Almighty and that the Almighty had plenty to keep himself busy. What He expected of a man like Jake Tibbetts was that he would make his own way without a lot of whining and in the process bring no harm to man nor beast. He assumed that the Lord operated on common sense, and it made common sense that if a man toted his share of the load, the Lord would not meddle in his affairs. He considered it his own compact with the Almighty, a form of religion quite privately his own.

  But recent events, including the big bang at Hiroshima, made him wonder: Was God a meddler after all? Did a man in truth really have no say? Was there something basically wrong with the notion that God operated on common sense and could enter into a reasonable compact with a man? Irony of ironies, had Henry been closest to the truth all this time? Henry expected nothing, ventured nothing, judged not at all. As far as Jake could tell, he absolutely refused to take responsibility for himself. He simply survived. They had sent another man home in Henry’s casket, while Henry, incredibly, had survived. Was Henry proof that ultimately there was no such thing as responsibility — only survival?

  Or was it just the opposite? Was the fact that Henry survived, was the fact that Hiroshima happened, proof positive that God specifically did not meddle? That rather than manipulating fate He instead just stood back and let ’er rip, allowed men to fart and fall and take others with them into perdition, if that’s what they had a mind to do?

  The questions swirled in Jake’s head and doubled back on themselves and banged against each other. But what it all came back to, after due consideration of the great cataclysmic tides that swept mankind, was what went on in the piddly-ass life of one aging smalltown newspaper editor. How was he, Jake Tibbetts, to act, in the face of all that had befallen him these past few months? Was he to throw up his hands? Or did the compact still hold? Must a man take responsibility for himself no matter what?

  He and Rosh Benefield could have had a fine time with all that. Rosh would sit there, hands clasped across his great bell
y, small bright eyes blinking slowly, and argue all sides of the question and invent some new ones. The two of them would chew the great question like lions worrying the carcass of a water buffalo, and then Rosh would sigh a great sigh and take another sip of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best and say, “Well, at bottom, it appears to me …” and there you would have it.

  But Rosh Benefield did not come around anymore to drink his whiskey. Rosh had his private grief and his private sense of honor. Jake had violated one and thus could not share in the other. And there you had it.

  Jake was so lost in thought that he had no idea Francine was standing there until she placed the plate of food on the desk in front of him, covered with a cloth napkin. He looked up, focusing slowly on her, and realized that he had drunk a good deal of the whiskey. His eyebrows were a little numb. He smiled, thinking of Captain Finley, setting type by hand with a fruit jar of whiskey at his elbow.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “My grandfather,” he said. “He was a pisser. ‘Scuse me.”

  “You’re a bit of a pisser yourself,” she said.

  He squinted at her in the dim light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling in the front office. She was indeed young and sort of pretty, and yes, she did talk funny.

  “Yes, I am,” he said finally. “A bit of a pisser.”

  She stood there for a moment with her arms clasped across her bosom and then she said, “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

  “Yes, I guess I am,” he said, motioning to the chair. “Sit down. Right there. It’s a helluva big chair, but you can sit in it, I suppose.”

  She sat, and he got the other tumbler out of the desk drawer and poured a little splash of whiskey in the bottom. He looked at her, but she didn’t say anything, and he poured another splash.

  “That’s fine,” she said, and when he put the fruit jar down, she picked up the glass and took a good healthy swig. It made her eyes water a little. “Sheeez …”

  “You may be the first cultured lady who ever had a drink of that,” he said.