Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  She stares at him, eyes glazed with the heat, waiting for him to say something, and Old Henry is uncomfortable as hell, boy. His undershorts are creeping up the crack of his butt. See how he shuffles his feet and scratches his ass, half expecting to say, “Yassuh, Mistah Colquitt he done tuk and died.” And then blurting, “Colquitt’s dead.” Old Henry, appalled at himself, cringes inwardly, ashamed, wondering what amends he can make. And he sees her flinch, as if he had raised his hand to strike her. But that is all. A flinch. And then she turns back to the window and leaves him standing there in agony, shuffling and scratching.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry says. But he is as sorry for himself as he is for her.

  She mumbles something and Henry steps toward her, trying to pick it up. “Pardon?”

  She takes a long drag from the cigarette and stubs it in the ashtray and turns toward him, exhaling a stream of smoke. “I said, get the fuck out of here,” she says quietly.

  He does, but he returns at night. He finds her calm, composed, ungrieving. He brings a bottle of whiskey and marvels how she can toss it off neatly. He is fascinated by how strong she is, how tough and self-sufficient, and then later, after they have drunk half the bottle, how young and vulnerable, how afraid of the unknown. Henry knows a bit about that himself, and finds himself, strangely, in the role of comforter — he who craves comfort. Henry comes perhaps wanting to be flayed by her hardness (the way Hazel used to do) but finds, before morning, how wiry-soft she is and how good it is to be with a woman again. He wakes in the night and thinks of them as orphans, huddling.

  Henry remembers the woman with fascination, and having remembered, reluctantly forgets and rushes on because the numbness has wiped out everything but his mind and he can feel it nibbling at the back of his skull like a small night animal. He has to pick carefully now because there is not much time.

  There is the broad ribbon of highway, silver under a full moon, and Henry thinks suddenly of the old tale: A man can go crazy if he stays out in the moonlight too long. Henry is driving very fast and the car is gulping long stretches of road. It is Rosh Benefield’s Packard, a powerful car that glides low against the pavement like an animal. He is driving Rosh Benefield’s car because he is married to Rosh Benefield’s daughter and between them (he and Hazel) they don’t have a pot to pee in, much less an automobile of their own. But Rosh Benefield is a generous man with his Packard, and Rosh and his wife, Ideal, don’t mind keeping the baby while the young folks go have a little fun.

  Next to him in the front seat, Hazel’s voice is rising and falling and beating against his ears like waves. Practice, long practice, has made him accustomed to the way she flails at him with her voice. He can block out long stretches of words, but he can’t escape the rhythm of it, the rising and falling. They have both had a lot to drink. They have been to a dance in the city where Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra played sweet and mellow. Do-WAH, do-WAH. They danced a lot, their young bodies sweating against each other on the crowded floor, and drank a great deal with the other gay young couples, and then Hazel became abusive so he took her and left, driving very fast and trying to concentrate on the silver ribbon of highway and shut out the words, leaving only the rhythm. She mocks him, she taunts him. He has already begun to think of himself as Old Henry, wizened by the knowledge that in his marriage, as in all else, he has screwed up and that his balls will always be in somebody else’s pocket.

  It is true, he thinks, what they say about the full moon. He can feel it pulling at him the way the moon pulls at the sea and spawns tides, rising and falling. They are in a long curve now, and he holds the car to the inside of the curve, fighting the force that tugs at the wheels and makes the car want to slip sideways into the other lane and then off the shoulder into the woods where the moonlight doesn’t go.

  Just past this curve the road will drop sharply down a long hill and then cross the river and they will be into the town, home. Henry doesn’t know what he will do then. He just doesn’t know. When he stops the car and turns the engine off, there will be nothing to block out the words and he’ll have to face them. But he tries not to think about it and concentrates on keeping the car on the inside of the curve while Hazel’s voice rises and falls and beats against his ears.

  Suddenly, she is on him. He isn’t paying attention and it has stirred up the rage in her. She explodes against him, flailing with her fists, hammering at his chest and shoulders and then at his head. So for once, just once, he lets go. “Enough!” he cries, and lashes out at her. It is the first time he has ever, ever struck back. It is a powerful blow. He swings his arm in a broad circle and the back of his fist lands squarely in her face and snaps her head back. Blood spurts from her nose, a gushing of blood, and Henry senses that he has done a great deal of damage. He panics as she slumps against the far door and her hands fly to her face. She screams and he thinks, Oh God, oh God, oh God. But there is no God out there, only the moon, and all the moon has done is make him crazy. So crazy that he realizes his hands have left the wheel completely and the car is its own master now, is defying the curve, the yellow sweep of its headlights inflaming the woods where the moonlight cannot go.

  That is as much as he knows about it, or is willing to remember. Here now, in the numbing snow of the Ardennes, he is grateful that he can remember what he knows of it one last time and put it away. It has been with him since Creation.

  Finally, quickly fixing it in his mind because there is not much time left, Henry remembers perching in the limbs of the huge spreading elm tree that hangs out over the street in front of Bugger Brunson’s house, he and Bugger dropping cowshit on the passing cars.

  They have built a little platform up there and they have been to the pasture behind Tunstall Renfroe’s house and gathered up a bucketful of cow turds, wet them down, and stirred them up to make a thick pungent goo, and now they are sitting on the edge of the platform with the bucket between them, scooping out handfuls of cowshit and letting them drop through an opening in the lush green foilage onto the tops of the cars that sporadically pass below. They have been at it for maybe an hour now and their timing has become quite good. The trick is to avoid windshields, releasing the gobs of manure so that they land squarely on the roofs of the cars. It makes a little splat as it hits the metal, not loud enough to make the driver think it was anything too unusual. But when he gets where he’s going and parks the car and gets out and sees the blob, he must think, My God, I’ve been dive-bombed by a condor. The thought of it makes Henry and Bugger laugh until they hurt, and each time they land a hit, the spasms start again. The aroma of the cowshit is powerful, almost sweet. That, and the laughter, makes the tears roll down their cheeks. They are scraping the bottom of the bucket now. There will be enough for one more car and they can hear it turning the corner at the end of the street. One more and they will get the hell out of here, run like rabbits back behind Bugger’s house to the creek bank, where they will collapse and scream with laughter until they are weak and aching. This one last car is approaching slowly and it will be an easy mark. Bugger grins. The car rolls by under the tree and Henry and Bugger let the cowshit drop at precisely the right moment — a bomb from each of them. These last two handfuls are pretty well dried out and they make a thump instead of a splat as they hit the car. The car rolls on. Then it stops and backs up. Henry Tibbetts blanches with sudden terror. The car stops again directly under the tree, its top with the two sodden lumps of cowshit on it framed by the opening in the branches. Henry hears the door slam but he can’t see the driver. Then he hears the one voice he wishes at this moment were in Heathen China.

  “Come down, boy,” Jake Tibbetts says.

  It’s hard, up here in the tree, to tell just how pissed off he is. Henry suspects it’s a great deal. Jake is not likely to think that dropping cowshit out of a tree onto passing cars is civilized behavior, and Jake is big on acting civilized.

  They climb slowly down from the tree, he and Bugger, and Bugger begins to snuffle. Henry’s
hands feel leaden with the cowshit caked on them, drying to a crust. He tries to scrape some of it off on the bark of the tree as he shinnies down, but there’s still a lot, especially on the backs of his hands. Finally, they stand before Jake. Bugger blubbers a little and Jake stares at him until he shuts up. Jake isn’t much for blubbering, either.

  Jake looks them over, takes a long, long time at it, rolls his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. Henry dies a good bit inside, just withers up like a prune.

  “What have you got on your hands, boy?”

  Henry stares at his hands.

  “It smells like cowshit to me,” Jake says.

  “Yessir.”

  What happens if you stand around long enough with cowshit on your hands? Does it contain some kind of acid that will eat through your skin? His hands begin to tingle and flush and he feels panic rising in his throat.

  It also occurs to him that they’ve been had. Somebody has come by and gotten bombarded and realized what it was and, knowing it was Bugger Brunson’s house, driven down to Biscuit Brunson’s cafe and told Biscuit that his kid was up in the big tree in front of the house dropping cowshit on the cars. Jake, sitting in Biscuit’s cafe having his afternoon cup of coffee and catching up on the gossip, puts two and two together and comes up with Henry. So he borrows somebody’s car (because Jake doesn’t own a car) and sets out to spring the trap. Once again he has caught Henry screwing up, and now Jake is going to lay something really miserable on him. Sometimes he wishes Jake would just haul off and slap the pee-turkey out of him, but no, that’s not Jake’s way. Jake would rather make you miserable, make you want to wither and die inside with shame and guilt. Jake is a master at dispensing guilt.

  “Henry,” Jake says, taking the cigar out of his mouth, “be a goddamned idiot if you want to. But don’t be a goddamned fool.” And Jake jams the cigar back in his mouth and gets back in the car and drives off and leaves Henry standing there with cowshit on his hands.

  So, there it was, at least what there was time for. There was, of course, a lot more, but it was a representation, anyway. The only loose edges were a few questions, like what’s the difference between an idiot and a fool? And another — can moonlight be held legally responsible? And the big magilla — why? But if a life could be capsuled in a few representations and then forgotten, so could questions. And he didn’t want a lot of unanswered questions floating around when he was gone. There would be ghosts and lost souls enough here in the snow under the towering firs of the Ardennes without Old Henry’s haint. Old Henry, who had so frequently screwed up, owed the world that much. He would leave behind a boy and a woman and a double handful of guilt, but no haints.

  So Old Henry forgot it all, representations and questions and the rest, wiped his mind completely clean, as blank as the last white powdering of snow. He forgot his life, and it was all so easy, he wondered at the last if he should feel guilty about that, too.

  Three

  JAKE TIBBETTS THOUGHT of it as an inherited town, a place where men generally did what their forebears had done, where families carved out a little slice of the town’s life and passed it on. It was fitting that the town was built on a square around the courthouse, neat lines and angles crossing back on themselves much the way people did, geometry imitating life.

  To carry it a step further, the concentric squares of the town were a sort of local pecking order. If you were a merchant of the first rank, your business was on the main square, with a view of the courthouse out your front window. It meant the business had been there a long time, generally through at least two generations. If, on the other hand, you were located on a side or back street, it marked you as a newcomer or a business that by its nature didn’t enjoy courthouse square status, like the mule barn. Just about the only exception Jake could think of was his newspaper, the Free Press, which had started, and remained, in its own building a block from the square because of the room it required for the print shop with its big Kluge press and storage for reams of newsprint. Then, too, Jake thought with some satisfaction, the newspaper was a street removed from the “establishment” in the way a newspaper ought to be in order to view it with some detachment.

  Still, it was an inherited business. Jake with his newspaper, detachment or not, shared with the town’s leading men the distinction of doing what his father and grandfather had done, however reluctantly he had come to the enterprise.

  The courthouse square was not much changed in a couple of generations. Biscuit Brunson was the second in his line to run the cafe. Two doors down, Tunstall Renfroe’s grandfather had founded the bank right after the Civil War, just about the time Jake’s grandfather had put out the first issue of the Free Press. Rosh Benefield’s father had been the mayor in his time, and like the old man, Rosh was a lawyer. Rosh’s office was next to City Hall and had a somewhat proprietary look about it, as if the two were connected. Everyone assumed that Rosh’s boy, Billy, would come home after the war and study law and become mayor.

  There were exceptions, of course. Some businesses had changed over the years, like Fog Martin’s gas station and garage on the northwest corner of the square, which had been a livery stable for several generations back in Fog’s family before Fog recognized the permanency of motorized travel. And people changed too, broke the mold. Take Hilton Redlinger. He hadn’t wanted to be an undertaker like his father. He just didn’t have the temperament for it. So Hilton’s brother, Cosmo, had the funeral home to himself when the old man passed on, and Hilton became the police chief. Each grew to fit his job. Cosmo was like the old man — tall, dark-jowled, with a long bony neck that stuck up out of his collar like an egret’s head — gaunt and somber, serious and solicitous. Hilton, on the other hand, had fleshed out. He had a healthy paunch, a solid reassuring face. Cosmo sort of hovered around folks like a dark spirit. Hilton carried himself like a lumberjack — a simple, direct man who knew his responsibility and felt at home with it. Let a man find his natural element, and he would grow to it until it fit him.

  Occasionally, you would get somebody new. George Poulos, for instance. He was a Greek fellow, came from immigrants. George had passed through selling ladies’ ready-to-wear about thirty years back. He liked the place, so he went back to the city and got his family and moved in. He bought out the Jitney Jungle Super Saver Store (a courthouse square establishment), and as soon as folks saw that George wasn’t a fly-by-night sort, they took a shine to him. He had, in fact, been elected to the Town Council the year before.

  And there was Ollie Whittle, who had come from the next county to start the radio station just before the war. It was the most progressive thing that ever happened to the town, people said, having their own radio station. Most towns twice their size didn’t have a radio station. It was competition for the newspaper, but as Jake told folks, you couldn’t remember from one minute to the next what you had heard on the radio, so it didn’t make much sense to advertise on it. Still, Ollie had caught on. He had radio shows like the “Swap Shop of the Air” and Ideal Benefield’s local news program and the quartet from the Baptist Church. And, Ollie had a gift of gab, a way of saying things that would make you chuckle, like the morning he had said it was so cold it would freeze the balls off a pool table. He was about the closest thing they had to a celebrity in town. Not that he could get elected to the Town Council, though. He hadn’t been there long enough for that. And his radio station, though located on the courthouse square, was not on ground level. It was upstairs over the bank, the way the telephone exchange was upstairs over City Hall. A new business, especially a newfangled business, just did not occupy ground level on the courthouse square.

  So, it was mostly an inherited town with a little room for a man to maneuver around in if he wanted to. People and things didn’t change much. It was a solid town, dependable, predictable. The way people liked it. There was the red brick solidity of the courthouse in the middle of town sort of anchoring things down, with a double door on each of the four sides connected by b
ig wide hallways that crossed in the middle like the spokes of a wheel. The courthouse was eighty-something years old and from its beginning it had acted like a magnet, drawing the town up around it as men left the land and congregated to do business with each other and with those who still tilled the land. It was the place where the county recorded its transactions — births, deaths, marriages, business arrangements, land exchanges, legal disputes. It surged with life — the building and the courthouse square — when court was in session, or on the first Saturday of every month, which was Trade Day.

  Court session was good for everybody’s business, especially at Biscuit Brunson’s cafe. Lawyers came in from all over the county for court, some even from the cities if it was a big enough case. They crossed the courthouse lawn to Biscuit’s place for their meals, or for coffee during recess, and sat in genteel conversation in their three-piece suits and starched collars and wing-tip shoes. When trials went far into the night, Biscuit always stayed open until the last light in the big upstairs courtroom had winked off. Biscuit had told Jake once that he sometimes wished he had gone ahead, no matter what his wife, Iris, said, and changed the name from Brunson’s Cafe to Brunson’s Restaurant. It would be more fitting for the courthouse crowd. But as Iris said, you couldn’t get too far ahead of folks, and court session came only four times a year.

  Trade Day, now, was nothing special for the cafe business. The country people brought their food with them in hampers or paper sacks and ate off the backs of their wagons or trucks and drank tap water out of mason jars. But it was important to the other merchants. The farmers, red-faced and weatherbeaten men in faded overalls, slouched against their tailgates, cheeks bulging with Bull Durham chew, and haggled over the price of hunting dogs, farm implements, knives, guns, an occasional cow or litter of piglets. The women sold quilts, jams and jellies, chickens and eggs, butter, fresh vegetables in season. The men crossed the street to haggle with Tunstall Renfroe at the bank over their loans or to buy a piece of harness or a roll of baling wire at the hardware store. The women filled the dry goods store, picking carefully over the bolts of cloth and staring gape-mouthed at the ready-to-wear dresses on the wire-framed busts in the front window. Packs of their skinny kids roamed the square, tussling on the grass of the courthouse lawn. By sundown they were gone, the whole roiling hard-bitten lot, leaving the square limp with the lingering smell of manure and chicken feathers.