Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Finally, he asked, “What happened?”

  She never stopped kneading. Her strong hands, white with the flour, worked the dough, pressing, pulling. She looked up at him for an instant, then down again at her work. “I wondered if you would ever ask,” she said.

  “I was afraid,” he croaked.

  “Well, they’re all right,” she said. And she told him then how Charlie Ainsworth had happened to be heading home from a house call out in the country when he saw the commotion on the courthouse square, stopped his car, and grabbed the spurting artery that was gushing blood out of Lonnie’s chest, holding it all the way to Taylorsville until they got Lonnie to the hospital and sewed him up. She began to cry, telling it, but she sat there and kept pulling and tugging with her tears dropping into the bowl and mixing with the yellow dough. And Jake began to cry, too, great sobs racking his wretched body as he remembered the blood, all the terrible blood, and the searing flash of pain and heat and light that tore through his own head. Now, the tears seemed to flood through those same passages in his brain, cleansing, washing out some of the rancid poisons. They cried, both of them, for a long time — she in the chair, he on the bed, never touching. Finally, they composed themselves.

  “How is he?” Jake asked.

  “He’s mended,” she said. “He’s in school now.”

  “Why hasn’t he come to see me?”

  “He hears how you are,” she said simply. “And I think he blames himself in some way for all that’s happened. I don’t know why, but he does.”

  There was a long, empty silence. “And Henry?”

  “They put him in the county jail. He’s out now, helping Francine run the newspaper.”

  “Francine and Henry?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They hired a printer and they’re getting it out. They haven’t missed an issue.”

  Jake didn’t ask any more about the newspaper. He just didn’t want to know, not now. In fact, he didn’t ask any more questions about anything for a long time. And he stopped abusing people with his vile tongue.

  It was his voice. It haunted him. It was the dry raspy whisper of Albertis Tibbetts, and it echoed maddeningly through his brain whenever he tried to speak. It floated through this very upstairs room, the one where Albertis had paced and lain abed years before during the awful periods when the melancholia got him. Now it had become Jake’s own voice. Albertis’s beast possessed him and he could hear its grating rasp in his throat and feel the leaden weight of its sadness filling his breast. It was not fair that a man should have to put up with two beasts. But then, he thought, he had been cleaning up his father’s mess all his life. Albertis had left a newspaper in shambles, and Jake had made something of it. Or had he? Albertis had sat in this same room, in that straight-backed chair there, and told him that he was a failure, that it had been Pastine’s money all these years that kept the Free Press going. What right had he to do that? Goddamn his wretched soul, he had no right. And Pastine. She had no right to do what she had done. She had no RIGHT!

  But wait. Who had sat in that chair and told him these things? Albertis Tibbetts was dead, and even if his ghost came back to haunt his son, there was no way he could know what he seemed to know. Had it been Rosh Benefield sitting there? Had Rosh told him something he had hinted at before, sitting in the Free Press office on a summer evening, recounting how he had helped a woman deceive her husband? Or was it something Jake himself had somehow known all these years — the accumulation of a thousand small clues tucked away in some secret place in his mind? But no matter. It was done and it cut deeply. They had betrayed him, all of them — Albertis, Rosh, Pastine, all of them. They had let him go on this way for a lifetime, thinking he was a newspaperman, while they sneaked around behind his back and propped him up. What pity they must have felt. Goddamn them all! Tears of frustration filled his eyes as he sat through the unbearably long hours and pondered it all and the bile of his own bitterness filled his throat.

  So he walked. He had to do something with the great rage that built like an overheated boiler inside him. He could no longer cuss them because Albertis Tibbetts haunted his voice. He wasn’t strong enough to break things. So he walked. At first, he just got unsteadily to his feet with Pastine holding him up and stood there, feeling faint as the blood rushed from his head, right hand gripping the walking stick she had got for him. Then after a few days of doing that, he took the first halting step. He stood by the bed, steadier now, commanding his left foot to slide forward an inch or two, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, teeth grinding with frustration because the damned foot wouldn’t go. He strained every muscle and nerve until the tears coursed down his cheeks, and then, finally, by God, it moved. “Enough,” he croaked, and lay back on the bed, exhausted. Pastine cried and hugged him, patting his cheek until he drifted off to sleep, totally spent. The next day he did it again — once in the morning and again in the late afternoon. And by the end of the week he was rasping at Pastine every hour or so, Albertis’s voice be damned, to come and help him. She came, brushing the loose strands of hair away from her face, wiping her hands on her apron, while he fretted impatiently. She stood there, silent, gripping the waistband of his trousers, as he took each step.

  By the middle of October he was ready to navigate on his own. One morning, Jake turned to her and said, “Let go.”

  “Jake …” she protested.

  “Let go my goddamn pants,” he insisted.

  She let go and he took one step and fell in a heap on the floor and lay there, cussing and crying while she hovered anxiously over him.

  “I’m all right,” he said finally. “Help me up.”

  It was a terrible strain for both of them, but somehow they got him upright. “Now let go,” he said again.

  She started to say something, but she could see the awful, trembling rage in him and she released her grip. He took a shuffling step, wobbled, steadied himself, took another. He kept moving, one foot after the other, head down watching his slippered feet slide agonizingly along the floor, an inch with this one, an inch with that one, like some creaking ancient machine. He moved, kept moving, put every ounce of his concentration and energy into what he told himself was the hardest thing he had done in his life. Then his forehead bumped against the far wall and he stopped, unable to go any farther, unable to turn around because the only movement he could make was straight ahead. He coughed and sputtered with anger. The raspy voice of Albertis Tibbetts rattled in his throat. Then Pastine’s gentle hand touched him on the elbow and she took hold and guided him so that he could turn slowly to the left, an inch at a time, until he was headed back toward the bed. Once there, he collapsed and slept the rest of the day.

  But it had been a start, and once started he went at it fiercely. He flung himself against the stubborn barrier of his own physical incompetence, every move agonizingly slow and graceless. He shuffled the length of the room, back and forth, back and forth, realizing as he did so that he was retracing the haunted steps of Albertis Tibbetts, who had paced this room so unremittingly that he had worn a threadbare path in the carpet. Jake trod the same path now because it was the only place in the room that was wide enough and long enough for him to traverse. He studied each tattered thread in the carpet until the path was etched in his mind, hating it, hating Albertis, hating himself. But he walked until he exhausted himself and then sleep came mercifully to wipe his mind clean and restore his body enough to try it again.

  Pastine finally left him alone, inventing excuses to come back upstairs every few minutes to check on him, but he glared at her when he caught her watching him.

  “Stop that,” he said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m crippled,” he snarled.

  She shrugged it off. “Don’t you want to stop and rest awhile?”

  “No. Now go away. I’ll either walk or I’ll fall and bust my ass.”

  “Your foul mouth is an abomination, Jake Tibbetts,” she told him, angry now.

/>   But she went away and gave him a few moments’ peace to lose himself in his struggle.

  Before long, he got up enough strength to pass through the doorway of the room and out into the upstairs hall, where there was another space of several feet open to him. And from there, it was a matter of days until he tried the stairs.

  “Jake!” she screamed up at him from the downstairs hallway as he teetered on the third step from the top, left hand gripping the banister, right hand pressing the walking stick hard into the smooth-worn pine of the stair.

  She started up the steps toward him, but he stopped her with an angry bellow. “Stay back,” he yelled, “or I’ll jump!” Jump, he thought, what a joke. He couldn’t jump two inches. “I’ll topple,” he said, correcting himself.

  She stepped back, gave him a disgusted look, and wiped her hands on her apron. “All right, topple,” she said, and turned on her heel and marched back into the kitchen, leaving him there on the stairs. He mumbled under his breath for a moment and then panic began to set in. He couldn’t do it. He would, indeed, either topple forward and kill himself or he would have to sit down here on the staircase and stew in his juice until he swallowed his pride and yelled for help. To hell with them all. He took a deep breath, got his bowels under control, and after a few minutes he took another step and then another until he made it down to the bottom.

  “Pastine,” he rasped.

  She took her time, but after a moment she poked her head around the doorway from the kitchen.

  “I made it,” he said.

  “I see you did. How are you going to get back up?”

  He stared at her dumbly for an instant, mouth agape, and finally said, “I don’t know.”

  It took them half the afternoon to hoist him back up the stairs, Jake straining to raise each foot the few inches to the next step, Pastine next to him hauling on the seat of his pants. When they finally made it, they both sat, exhausted, on the top step, eyes glazed with fatigue.

  “You’re a stubborn old fool,” she said.

  He nodded, unable to speak, and then he collapsed against her, put his head in her lap while she stroked his forehead with her firm, gentle fingers.

  “When are you going to stop being so angry?” she asked after a moment.

  “When I stop being a sick, wasted, washed-up old man,” he growled.

  “Maybe if you didn’t act like one, you wouldn’t feel like one.”

  “Hah! That’s easy for you to say. You’re only sixty-one and you don’t have to have anybody haul you up the steps by the seat of your britches.” He tried to raise his head, but she forced it back down in her lap and kept kneading his forehead.

  “Well, I will haul you, Jake, despite your rottenness,” she said.

  He waited for a long time, poised on the edge, feeling the beast gnawing, gnawing in his gut, before he finally asked, “Why did you do it?”

  Her fingers didn’t stop. “Do what?”

  “Take my newspaper away from me.”

  Then it was her turn to hang fire and he thought, She’s going to deny it, and if she does I’ll never know for sure because she’s the only one I can ask. But then Pastine sighed deeply, sadly. “Ahhhhh. I didn’t take your newspaper away from you, Jake.” She paused. “What do you think I did?”

  “I know you paid the bills.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My father came … while I was sick … he told me.”

  There was another long silence before she spoke. “Your father’s dead, Jake. He’s been dead a long time,” she said gently.

  “I know. But he came and sat in the chair next to my bed and told me how you paid the bills.”

  “You always said you weren’t a business tycoon, you were a newspaperman. And that’s what you are. A fine newspaperman. An ornery newspaperman who makes people mad and makes them think. So, why does the rest of it matter?”

  But he didn’t answer that. She knew why it mattered, why it would matter to him of all people.

  “Well,” he said finally, his voice still the hoarse rattle of Albertis Tibbetts, “it’s over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The paper. It’s finished.”

  Her fingers stopped abruptly. “No, it’s not, Jake. It’s still there when you’re ready to go back to it. And there’s Francine and Henry. And Lonnie.”

  Jake wanted to cry out in anguish. Henry. Goddamn him, he wouldn’t go away. He was everywhere, the ghost of nightmares past and present, a specter that no jail cell or even casket could hold. Henry. Always there was Henry — confounding him, maddening him. Why couldn’t Henry have had the decency to just blow himself away after what he had done, or at least quietly disappear and never be heard from again? No, he clung fiercely to life, a shipwrecked survivor, forever muddling and haunting and always there. Jake wanted to cry out with the rage and frustration that had always been Henry. Goddamn him! Goddamn him!

  And Lonnie. God, he thought, the baggage that boy carries around with him. There’s Henry and all his craziness and beyond that, Jake’s own craziness, and even before that the assorted lunacy of Albertis and Captain Finley, all of it echoing back and forth like thunder through their mad generations and coming to rest on the frail shoulders of a twelve-year-old boy. No, thirteen now. Lonnie would have had a birthday in September. How they must mock him at school — the grandson of the loony old newspaper editor, son of the idiot who stole the fire truck. The thought of it brought back the sting of his own youth, how cruelly they aped his mind-sick father, how their laughter followed him as they yelled down the street, “Hey, Jake, did your daddy come out today?” The curse of the Tibbetts men lay on all of them, the burden growing heavier as father passed it on to son.

  “The curse,” he said out loud.

  “The what?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m tired. I want to go to bed.” But he lay there a while longer with his head in her lap, only the soft sounds of the house around them and the downstairs hallway darkening with evening. After a while he heard the rumble of Tunstall Renfroe’s car passing on Partridge Road, going home from a day at the bank. Finally Pastine rose and helped pull him to his feet so he could take the last stair step to the second-floor landing. Fatigue covered him like a blanket now, shutting out everything except Pastine’s tug on his arm when he started to turn right in the hallway and shuffle toward the spare bedroom.

  “No,” she said gently. “You’re coming home tonight.”

  He felt a great uncontrollable shudder go through his body then, as if something that had possessed him were leaving. The beast? Having done its foul work? Or maybe something as simple as surrender? He couldn’t answer, because he was already asleep before she ever got him onto the bed and pulled a quilt over his tired old bones.

  He began, in the days that followed, to make a certain peace with himself. Certain things were irrevocably gone. All the days of his youth, for instance. A man of sixty-five had no claim at all on the days of his youth. Certain pretensions, too. A man of sixty-five could no longer put off considering the things he had not done, because if he had reached this age without doing them, there was precious little chance he ever would. Jake Tibbetts began, as Henry had begun under the blasted tank in the Ardennes eleven months before, to tick off the items of his life and put them to rest. Scenes of his past returned to him, almost as vividly as they had done in the weeks when he had been a prisoner of his own mind. He stood again with his father on the steps of the courthouse; knelt sobbing at the top of the embankment as Rosh Benefield’s shattered car burned like an inferno below him; held Hilton Redlinger’s huge pistol as Lieutenant Grover Whalen loosened the bolts of the casket with the strange boy inside.

  He did it all with a strange, stark honesty. This was good, he said, and this was not. I succeeded here, I failed utterly there. In this instance I sinned and fell short; in that, I acted with dignity and grace. In many things, I was inadequate: I did not try hard enough, or have charity or grace or
wit enough. What he could not forgive in himself, he tried to reconcile.

  Long hours passed for Jake Tibbetts, long hours alone with his soul. Slowly, methodically, he made a kind of peace. But one puzzle from the past remained.

  He woke with it in the middle of the night.

  “Pastine,” he said. She didn’t answer. He listened for a moment to her soft even breathing, then nudged her shoulder. “Pastine,” he said again, “wake up. I’ve got to ask you something.”

  She moaned and turned to him in the bed. “What’s the matter?” she murmured.

  “Did you …” he started, then swallowed hard. “Did you and Rosh Benefield … did you ever …”

  There was a long, awful silence and Jake could feel the dark chill of the night deep in his soul as he prayed that she would tell him the truth, no matter how bad it was, so that he could make peace even with this.

  Pastine took a deep breath and then she said softly, “No.” And then, after a moment, “You’re a fool, Jake Tibbetts, but you’re the only fool I ever wanted.”

  He started to cry then, and after a moment Pastine began to cry, too. They clung to each other like orphans in the middle of the night, as only a man and woman can cling to each other after they have passed through a long journey and have known the perils of traveling together, each burdened by private agonies and hopes. When finally they slept, Jake Tibbetts was ready to be at peace. The war was over and all the boys were coming home.

  On November 17, 1945, Jake Tibbetts observed his sixty-fifth birthday. It was the Saturday before Thanksgiving and he sat alone in his upstairs room at midafternoon and contemplated being sixty-five and wished they would all let him suffer through the indignity in peace. He hated being fussed over, and they were making a fuss over him today. The telephone had been ringing downstairs all morning and half the afternoon. People were calling to wish him well, Pastine said, to congratulate him. More people than had ever called the Jake Tibbetts residence in one day. Francine and Henry had put it in the damned newspaper, for God’s sake.