Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Lonnie was struck suddenly by the realization that he was sitting here, actually sitting here, talking with the Great Mystery called Henry Tibbetts. Not only that, but in the space of a few short moments they had spoken of things that connected them — people and places, even if Henry didn’t know his own ancestors. Lonnie was stunned by it.

  “There’s a curse on us, you know,” Henry said, breaking into his thoughts.

  “A what?”

  “A curse. It started with Captain Finley. He was a pisser. He dropped dead in the front parlor with that old sword in his hand. He hacked the sofa near in half, then dropped dead. The curse was after him.”

  “He did not!” Lonnie said hotly.

  “Ask Mama,” Henry said calmly. “We’re all certifiable loonies.”

  Lonnie stared at him and he could see then the starved, haunted look in Henry’s eyes. It came and went, but it was there if you watched and waited. Oh, my God, Lonnie thought, he’s crazy! For God’s sake, he has been gone so long and now he comes here and starts talking about curses. Lonnie was suddenly frightened, afraid to be here under the lean-to with this stranger who had not only existed for him as the Great Mystery, but moreover was so deeply locked inside himself that he might well be unknowable. The thought of it lay curdling in his stomach.

  Then Henry smiled and the look in his eyes was gone and Lonnie wondered if he had been just seeing things. “Anyway, you don’t want to be bothered with that kind of stuff. Tell me what you been doing.”

  “You mean here?”

  “No,” Henry waved his arm. “I mean everything.”

  “Well,” Lonnie swallowed his fear, “I been working at the paper. I can set type and make up ads and run the folding machine and stuff like that. And tomorrow Daddy Jake’s gonna start teaching me the Linotype.”

  “You like it — the paper?”

  “It’s okay. I like to write.”

  Henry nodded. “So did I.”

  “You did? Why didn’t you become a newspaperman?”

  “I guess I never got the chance,” Henry said. “I hated the print shop. I hated standing there all day setting type and getting my hands dirty and smelling the ink and the machinery. I wasn’t very good at it. One day Pa just came over and took the type stick away from me and sent me home. I never got to the writing part.”

  “You and Daddy Jake didn’t get along, did you,” Lonnie said.

  “No,” Henry said, and then there was the look in his eyes again and he fell silent and once again Lonnie was frightened. Henry could change so quickly. The silence grew and grew until it filled the space underneath the lean-to and pounded in Lonnie’s ears.

  Then Henry sighed a great, sad sigh, as if he had surrendered to something. And he said, “Hooo, it’s gonna be a bitch.”

  Lonnie stared at him.

  “It’s gonna be a bitch and I’m not sure …” His voice trailed off and he closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the worn gray boards of the toolshed. He sat that way for a moment and then he struggled to his knees.

  “Where you going?” Lonnie asked in a small voice.

  Henry looked confused. “I’m … I’m going to see what I can do about it.”

  “About what?”

  Henry didn’t answer.

  “Can I come?” Lonnie asked.

  Henry looked at him. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said finally. “You wait for me, okay? You stay right here and wait for me.”

  “Yessir.”

  Lonnie sat for a long time, waiting, as the afternoon sweltered through its zenith. When he gave in to the realization that Henry wasn’t coming back, he remembered what Captain Finley had told him last night, there in the fog-shrouded pasture, about doing his duty. He knew what it meant now, at least part of it.

  So Lonnie got up and went to find his father.

  Seven

  HENRY WALKED SLOWLY down Partridge Road in the midafternoon heat, skirted the edge of town on the levee that bordered Whitewater Creek, then cut across the pasture where once upon a very long time ago a huge Santa Gertrudis bull had chased him. He stopped, feeling even now the memory of terror pounding in his ears and the bull bellowing at his back, closer and closer, until he lunged and cleared the fence with a great leap, leaving most of his pants hanging on the barbed wire and a deep blood-gushing gash along the inside of his leg and the bull raging and pawing the ground on the other side. The pasture was empty now. He realized that it was the first time he had set foot in it since that day more than twenty years before. The path, this back way to Haskell’s Quarter, was worn smooth in his memory. But he had always detoured around the pasture. Until today. Why today? He stopped at the fence, just about at the place where he had leaped across. He stood looking back at the field, grown rank with weeds. He waited, but nothing spoke to him. There was only the heat, sweat trickling from his hairline down the sides of his face, the field empty and withering. He went on.

  Haskell’s Quarter was a single dirt road that hugged the lee of the levee with a row of ramshackle houses on either side, weather-warped gray boards and tarpaper, glassless windows open to the heat like unseeing eyes, the yards bare red clay that turned to muck when it rained, each with a small plot of vegetables in the back. Everything was coated with dust. Except for Lightnin’ Jim’s house. Dust seemed to avoid Lightnin’ Jim’s house.

  Henry could feel all the small twinkling black eyes of Haskell’s Quarter watching him as he walked up the front steps and rapped on the frame of the screen door. Across the porch, the front door of the house was closed, even against the heat. Henry knocked again, but there was no sign of life.

  “Hoooo, Jim.”

  Nothing. He could hear the buzz of an insect in the grass behind him, the squeal of a child in a yard down at the end of the street.

  “Hoooo, Jim. Y’all got so rich and uppity you stopped doin’ business in the daylight? Folks got to sneak around here in the dark now?”

  He waited, feeling the sweat puddle in the small of his back. Finally, a hand pulled back the curtain on one of the front windows a couple of inches, held it a second, then dropped it back into place. Another long moment and the front door opened a few inches. He couldn’t see anybody inside.

  “Hey, yonder,” Henry said. “Anybody seen an old whiskey nigger name of Lightnin’ Jim Haskell that used to live here?”

  “Which white sonofabitch wants to know?” The voice was rich and deep like thunderheads piling up black and powerful on a sweltering afternoon.

  Henry bowed from the waist. “Henry Finley Tibbetts,” he said.

  The door opened another few inches and back in the shadows he could see the stooped form of the old man.

  “Henry?”

  “Yep. I’m back. Back at the old stand, Jim. Come to do some business.”

  “I heard you was coming,” Lightnin’ Jim said. “Come on the train this noon.”

  “I come all the way from the war to see you,” Henry said. “I thought about you all the time I was at the war, Jim. I lay there in the snow in Belgium with my ass turning blue and I thought, ‘Boy, if I could just have a little taste of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, just a little something to ward off the evil spirits, I could last through this thing.’ And you know what? I lasted. Just the thought of your old rotgut whiskey pulled me through.”

  “Horseshit,” Lightnin’ Jim said.

  “I thought to myself,” Henry went on, “there ain’t but two things in the world worth doing. That’s riding on the fire truck and drinking Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s Best. I wish I had had a tankerload of it in Europe, Jim. It will burn the lining right out of your stomach and make your bowels tremble with terror, but if I had had a tankerload of it in Europe, I could have made us both rich men.”

  Lightnin’ Jim stepped out to the edge of the porch and held onto the doorjamb with one gnarled hand and Henry could see how thin and bent with age he was. But the voice. It hadn’t changed. “You been home since noon and already you’re over here wantin’ w
hiskey.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Lightnin’ Jim. Just a little something to ward off the evil spirits.” Henry shuffled a little bit, shifting his sweat-soaked fanny around. “Hooo, boy. It’s gonna be a bitch, Jim. I got … ah … I got lots to take care of. Lots of folks looking at me. I got a new wife and a new baby and all the old stuff to boot. I just need a little something to tide me over ’til I get straight and figure out what to do.” He could feel the thirst powerful in his throat and his gut. “Sometimes I don’t know exactly where I am or what I’m doing, but I’m gonna get it all straightened out. I just need …” He blushed, felt like a fool standing here in front of this old whiskey nigger like some penitent. He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket. “I got money,” he said.

  “You didn’t always have money, Henry,” Lightnin’ Jim said. “Lots of times you came and you didn’t have money. You just had a craving, but no money.”

  “No, and you never sold me any on credit, either,” Henry said. He waved the bills. “But the United States Army gave me a wad of money to go away and leave ’em alone. Now you gonna sell me some whiskey or not?” He reached for the handle on the screen door.

  “Don’t you come up here on that porch ’til I say you can,” Lightnin’ Jim said.

  Henry dropped his hand. He was breathing heavily. “You gone out of the whiskey business?” he asked after a moment.

  “I never was in the whiskey bidness,” Lightnin’ Jim said. “I always been in the foolishness bidness. White folks’ foolishness. Goddamn white folks.”

  “Niggers drink too,” Henry said.

  “Niggers get drunk and go on about they bidness,” Jim said. “White folks sneak around and buy my whiskey and go back behind the shed and get drunk and act like fools and pretend they don’t. Goddamn white folks, put a bad name on whiskey.”

  He turned and went back inside and slammed the door behind him, leaving Henry standing there on the front steps with all the twinkling black eyes watching him and the sweat coursing from every pore of his body. Several minutes went by. Well, piss on it, he thought. He turned, started to go, and then the door opened again and Lightnin’ Jim stepped out onto the porch, holding a pint jar in one hand and balancing himself on his walking stick with the other. He clumped slowly across the porch, stopped, stared at Henry through the screen. A fly buzzed at his head and Lightnin’ Jim reached up with the hand holding the jar and waved at the fly impatiently. The amber liquid inside the jar sloshed about, shimmering with refracted color. The old yellow eyes were sunk deep in Lightnin’ Jim’s head. He was dying, Henry thought, but he had probably been dying for years. It might take him another hundred years to die. Unless he started drinking his own whiskey.

  “You got a new wife and a new baby,” Lightnin’ Jim said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And one boy half-grown.”

  “Lonnie. Yep, he’s about half-grown all right.”

  “Does he act like you?”

  “No,” Henry said. “He doesn’t act like me.”

  “You tell that boy … Lonnie,” Lightnin’ Jim said, “when he gets growed up so big that he thinks he’s about to bust his britches, don’t come around here wantin’ to buy no whiskey. You tell him Lightnin’ Jim Haskell ain’t got no whiskey to sell to Lonnie Tibbetts. You tell him to pay attention to what his Grandmamma says. You hear that?”

  “You’re a nosy old bastard,” Henry said.

  Lightnin’ Jim smiled then, showing a mouthful of very nice, very even, very white teeth. “Thass right. But I got the whiskey.”

  Henry pushed open the screen door and Lightnin’ Jim handed him the pint jar. Henry turned it, held it up to the sunlight, watched it ripple and swirl and give off flashes of blues and pinks like a prism. “The quality don’t appear to have changed,” Henry said. “Same old rotgut as always. I believe … I believe it will put my mind at ease.” He looked up at Lightnin’ Jim. “How much?”

  “Same as always,” Jim said.

  “You gonna need a price increase,” Henry said, peeling two dollar bills off the wad. “All the boys coming home from the war gonna have a fistful of money. Prices gonna go sky-high.”

  “What I charge ain’t none of your bidness,” Jim said. “You drink the whiskey, I do the bidness.” He took the money and pushed the screen door closed. “Henry, you remember what I said for you to tell that young’un. No whiskey for Lonnie Tibbetts. And mind what his Grandmamma says.”

  What in the hell is he going on about it for? Henry wondered. What does he know? What is in that ancient wrinkled black woolly head, behind those old yellowed eyes?

  “You tell him that, you hear?”

  “All right,” Henry said.

  “Now you go on. I ain’t got time to stand out here in the heat and jaw with you. You got what you want. Go on, now.”

  He went back inside and left Henry standing on the steps, holding what he came for — a little something to ward off the evil spirits. Just ’til I get it all straightened out, he thought. Just ’til I figure out what I’m doing.

  In the early evening the heat still clung to the earth like flypaper. Henry could feel it on his face as he peeked over the parapet of the flat roof of the fire station at the courthouse square two stories below. The pavement of the sidewalk and street held the heat stubbornly. Long after dark it would be warm to the touch. Henry remembered, as a boy, sneaking out of the house in the middle of a summer night, walking barefoot downtown, feeling the last of the day’s heat on the toughened soles of his feet.

  Up here on the roof it would be so horribly hot in the middle of the day that it would burn the skin off a man’s body. The tar would absorb the heat until it turned to a bubbly black liquid in places. It was still warm, still spongy underfoot, here near twilight.

  Henry didn’t know how long he had been there. His mind seemed to fester and bubble like hot tar. Awareness was a narrow slice of time, bounded by the last few minutes and the next several. There was just now, just here. Just Henry and the fruit jar and the sword.

  The courthouse square was deserted. To the north of his position, the hulking red shape of the courthouse blocked his view. Beyond it were the bank building, with the radio station upstairs, and Biscuit Brunson’s cafe. If anybody was about at this dusky hour, it would be there — a few people having a bite of supper at Biscuit’s or maybe Ollie Whittle putting the radio station to bed. But perhaps Ollie had already gone home and left the airwaves to the clear-channel giants from Cincinnati and Chicago and New Orleans.

  To his left, on the west side of the square, Henry could see lights on in the City Hall building — downstairs, where Hilton Redlinger would be puttering around in the cubbyhole of a police station, tidying up; and upstairs, in the telephone exchange. In a few minutes Hilton would turn off the downstairs light and lock up and go home, and if anybody needed the strong arm of the law during the night, they would call him on the telephone. Upstairs, Em Nesbitt would be at the switchboard until eight, when her relief came.

  Everybody else had already gone home. They had, as local people used to joke, rolled up the sidewalks. On the east side of the square, the Jitney Jungle Super Saver and Hamblin’s Mercantile were shut tight. The green window shades of the barbershop were pulled. The four cane-bottom chairs at the pinochle table beneath the pecan tree on the courthouse lawn were empty. People were at supper, at rest.

  Henry gave the square a long careful look, then settled back into a half-crouch, his back to the brick parapet. He patted the pockets of his pants, searching for his cigarettes, remembered that he was out, felt the dry tickle of anticipation in his throat. He reached for the pint jar beside him, lifted it, saw that it was empty, set it back down. He didn’t know how long it had been empty, but he thought that the fact that it was empty might have something to do with why he couldn’t remember back very far. And he didn’t know when or how he had gotten Captain Finley Tibbetts’s sword, but it was there, too, propped against the wall beside him. Just the sword, not the sca
bbard. The thin polished blade gave off a soft gleam in the dimming light. The thin point made a small precise indentation in the soft tar of the roof. He looked at it for a long time, studied the intricate engraved scrollwork on the blade, read the inscription: Aide toi et Dieu t’aidera. French, he guessed. Toi. That sounded French. Ooh-la-la. He didn’t know what it meant, but that really didn’t matter. What mattered was that he was here and he had a job to do.

  Henry stood again, rising to his full height, the upper half of him exposed over the top of the parapet in full view of anybody who might be below in the courthouse square. Dangerous. A sniper upstairs in the courthouse or on the roof of the Jitney Jungle could pick him off with one clean shot. Right through the head. BAM!

  “Hey, you sonsabitches!” he yelled.

  His voice rose and then died immediately on the soft warm cushion of the evening. And nothing happened. Nobody came running out into the square to see what the hell was going on and who the hell was up on the roof of the firehouse yelling, not even Hilton Redlinger, who was — given the soft gleam of light in the ground-floor window at City Hall — still in the police station.

  Henry unbuttoned his khaki pants, leaned over the edge of the parapet, and peed. The dark yellow stream arced out and fell splattering on the sidewalk below. Henry waggled the stream from side to side, hosing a dark pattern onto the concrete. Then he looked around the square again. Nothing. Nobody. No sign that anyone had seen a man pissing off the roof of the firehouse.

  Henry tucked himself away and buttoned his britches, and just as he did so, Hilton Redlinger stepped out the front door of City Hall, locked the door, rattled it to make sure it was secure, and then headed down the sidewalk. Hilton was stooped, the hair on top of his head thin and white, showing the soft pink of his scalp. The leather holster with its huge pistol hung loosely from his waist and Hilton listed slightly gunward. He shuffled slowly in a sort of loose-jointed gait, head down, feet barely clearing the concrete. He crossed the street at the end of the block, turned left, and headed down the south side of the square along the sidewalk in front of the fire station. He walked directly under Henry, straight through the dark splashes on the concrete, kept going. At the end of the block he turned right, disappeared toward home.