Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  No, as Biscuit often told Jake Tibbetts, you couldn’t depend on either court session or Trade Day to make a living at the cafe business. It was the regulars who kept you going — mercantile people who didn’t go home to lunch, traveling drummers, a steady group of widows who paid by the week and marked off their meals on the big Krazy Water Krystals calendar on the wall behind the cash register. The widows were so regular that you knew something was wrong if one of them didn’t show up. One Wednesday, when Ida Flournoy, who was eighty-two, didn’t appear, Biscuit had sent Hilton Redlinger around to see about her. Hilton found Ida at the bottom of the stairs in her back hallway with her neck broken.

  Then, to break up the empty hours between meals, there was the midmorning and midafternoon coffee and pie crowd, like Jake and Fog Martin and Rosh Benefield and Hilton Redlinger, drifting in and out for an hour or so, long enough to check up on the pulse of the town and on each other. If there was anyplace that was central to the town, Jake told Biscuit, it was the cafe. It, not Jake’s newspaper nor Ollie Whittle’s radio station, was the central means of communication.

  That’s why, Jake told him, you couldn’t turn it into a restaurant. In a restaurant, Jake allowed, you had to spend a lot of time and attention on the frills like cloth napkins and thin, fancy plates and cups and saucers that broke if you looked wrong at ’em. In a cafe, you could serve chili to a workman from the Harsole Bingham Bolt Factory and make him feel just as at home as the starch-collar lawyer from the city who sat at a table with a red-checked tablecloth and a napkin dispenser and salt and pepper shakers. No, what this town needed was a cafe, not a restaurant. As Jake told Biscuit, a business, like people, should fit. Jake congratulated himself on possessing, if nothing else, the gift of unassailable logic. It was a boon and comfort to the community.

  Right now, at midmorning on Saturday, the day before Christmas, the courthouse square was nearly empty. The day was almost blindingly bright and clear, but there was a sharp, biting wind that pushed people along quickly on the sidewalks. Biscuit Brunson stood behind the counter next to the front window of the cafe, drying thick white coffee mugs with a dish towel and lining them up neatly on the shelf against the back wall, getting ready for the midmorning coffee and pie crowd. There was only Tunstall Renfroe at the counter, down at the last stool, sipping his coffee and being awfully quiet about it. Biscuit had tried to stir up a little conversation, but Tunstall was full of grunts and mumbles this morning, so Biscuit had let him be. Tunstall looked a little weary-eyed, like he had been up all night playing Santa Claus. But that wasn’t supposed to be until tonight, and besides, Tunstall’s daughter Alsatia was twenty or so and too big for Santa Claus, though Biscuit thought if he were Santa Claus he would sure like to come down the chimney to see Alsatia Renfroe. She did indeed fill up a pair of britches, and there was just a whisper of gossip.

  Tunstall Renfroe was in fact thinking of his daughter Alsatia and more particularly about the silk handkerchief he had found plastered on the hood of his Packard when he had walked out of the house this morning to go to the bank.

  “Jism,” he said to himself after he had peeled off the handkerchief, held it up gingerly by a corner, and studied it. That’s what it was, all right — jism. It was slick, slightly off-white. Where had it come from? Some love-struck young pervert, skulking around the place in the early morning, trying to get a peek at Alsatia. But who? Lonnie Tibbetts? He was the closest. Jake’s house was maybe a hundred yards away. But Lonnie was only twelve. So. Some over-juiced stripling, morals corrupted by rampant passion, loose on Partridge Road, spilling his jism on silk handkerchiefs and leaving them plastered on the hood of an upright man’s automobile. It was the curse of a man with a daughter.

  But what to do? You didn’t go to Hilton Redlinger and say, “Look, Hilton, I found a silk handkerchief full of jism on my hood this morning and I want you to do something about it.” And you didn’t march into the house and say, “Alsatia, do you know any young boys who might be masturbating about the yard, dear?” Unthinkable. He shuddered at the thought, deeply offended by the whole business, and then realized he had been standing there holding up the jism-soaked handkerchief for several minutes. He walked quickly to the toolshed, got out a long-handled shovel, and buried the handkerchief behind the shed next to the coal bin. Then he sat down on the back steps and tried to compose himself. He felt sick at his stomach. Not that he blamed Alsatia. A young woman of ripe charms could only do so much to avoid arousing the beast of passion. Alsatia dressed primly, was the soul of decorum behind the teller’s cage at the bank, where she had been working since she finished high school. No, it was the fault of morals cut loose by the war, the way people’s lives were uprooted and flung to the far corners of the globe. It was as unsettling to the folks back home as it was to the boys at the front. The uncertainty of the thing … Tunstall Renfroe, being a banker, abhorred uncertainty. And he recoiled at the thought of impropriety of any sort, not only as a banker, but as one who had helped rescue his own family’s bank from the shame of embezzlement. A scandal, any kind of scandal, would kill him.

  So now, as he sat in Biscuit Brunson’s cafe on the morning before Christmas, with his coffee getting cold in his cup, he was in a fit of gloom, and it showed on his face. The last thing he needed right now was Jake Tibbetts, and here he came.

  Jake never walked through a doorway, he blew through it like a little sawed-off tornado, as if he were testing the door to see if it would hold together. The door of Biscuit Brunson’s cafe was easy to open, mainly on account of all the widows who came in for dinner every noon, and it was no match at all for Jake Tibbetts. He flung it open and the door banged back against its rubber doorstop. The glass in the upper half rattled. Jake was short and stocky and paunch-bellied with big bushy gray eyebrows and a squared-off little bulldog face that flushed bright red in the cold midmorning that followed him in. Lonnie was right behind, a little out of breath from the brisk walk down Partridge Road from Jake’s house to town.

  “Mornin’, gents,” Jake said, shucking out of his overcoat, hanging it on the rack next to the door, hoisting himself up on a red-leather-covered stool at the front of the counter. Lonnie crawled up on the stool beside him. Tunstall nodded at them from the end of the counter.

  “Biscuit, how about two cups of stout coffee for a pair of weary travelers,” Jake said.

  “Good morning, Jake. It gettin’ any warmer out there?”

  “Colder, if you ask me,” Jake said. “Lord, I do hate cold weather. Pastine starts nagging me about wrapping the pipes again.”

  Biscuit poured two mugs of coffee from the pot simmering on the hotplate behind the counter, sat one in front of Jake, the other in front of Lonnie.

  “Lonnie, how’s the world treatin’ you this morning? You use sugar and cream?”

  “Fine, Mr. Brunson. A little sugar, that’s all.” Lonnie heaped his teaspoon with sugar and dumped it into the coffee.

  “What’s Santa Claus gonna bring you tonight?” Biscuit asked.

  “Surprise, I reckon.”

  “And you, Jake.” Biscuit wiped his hands on his apron. “What’s Santa Claus bringing you for Christmas?”

  “Switches,” Jake said. “And some stuff to wrap Pastine’s pipes.” Jake leaned past Lonnie and called down to the end of the counter. “Tunstall, you look like you’ve been up all night with a sick calf.”

  Tunstall smiled weakly at Jake.

  “I know what it is,” Jake said, “you’ve been out on air raid business again.” He turned to Biscuit. “You seen Tunstall’s air raid get-up?”

  “No, Jake.”

  “Well, now,” Jake said, inhaling a chestful of air, “let me tell you about Tunstall Renfroe’s air raid get-up. Tunstall has him a little platform on the top of his toolshed out back of the house. And he has him a pair of binoculars. And he has one of these charts the Army Air Corps sends out that has the silhouettes of all the Jap and German planes. And that’s not all, Biscuit. Tunstall has him a fine
brass whistle on a cord that he hangs around his neck AND” — he slapped his hand on the counter, just missing the mug of coffee Biscuit had set before him — “a PITH HELMET, by God. Looks like one of the King’s Hussars, ready to defend the Khyber Pass. Ain’t that right, Tunstall?”

  “Now Jake …” Biscuit started. Tunstall was staring into his coffee mug.

  Jake forged on. “Tunstall goes up there on that platform every night, rain or shine, sleet or snow, and keeps his eagle eye peeled for the INVASION, by God.” Jake took a sip of the steaming coffee and batted his bushy eyebrows. “Almost had himself some Nips the other night, so I hear, Biscuit. He rang up Central and told Em Nesbitt there was a flight of Zeroes headed straight for the Heartland of America.” Jake paused and leaned over the counter, lowering his voice. “Turned out they were geese. I understand you could hear ’em honking two states away when the Army Air Corps shot ’em down. Just wouldn’t believe they were geese. When Tunstall Renfroe tells ’em he’s got a flight of Nips in sight, you better believe he’s got a flight of Nips. Ain’t that right, Tunstall?”

  Tunstall sat up straight, stared Jake in the eye. “Not a word of it, Jake.”

  Jake Tibbetts was an affront to his dignity. He could badger a man to distraction. And the older Jake got, the worse he was — irascible, argumentative, acid-tongued. The real crime of it was, he owned a newspaper, a mouthpiece for all his blather. The only reason he got away with what he did was that there was the faintest scintilla of truth at the edge of what he said. Yes, Tunstall was the air raid warden, but everybody in town would have forgotten it by now except for Jake. Rosh Benefield had come to him right after Pearl Harbor, back when there was genuine fear of enemy air attack, had explained how the town needed someone of stature to rally public support for an air defense program. And Tunstall had taken on the responsibility with the gravity he gave to all things of moment. Yes, he had in fact acquired a pith helmet with WARDEN stenciled across the front. But Jake had made such a hoot of the thing that it had undermined whatever chance there was for serious effort. People would pass Tunstall on the street and make siren sounds. And when Tunstall slipped and fell off the roof of the toolshed and broke his ankle, Jake had headlined it on the front page of the Free Press: “WARDEN CRASHES, TOWN SURVIVES.” And then the man just wouldn’t let it drop. Only last month, Jake had nominated Tunstall for citizen of the year in his front-page column:

  In four long and difficult years of war, our town has not once been attacked by enemy aircraft, and that is a singular tribute to the diligence of Air Raid Warden Tunstall Renfroe.

  Yes, Tunstall thought, Jake Tibbetts was a threat to people’s dignity, and when you took away their dignity, you invited sloth and loose living. The old verities, genteelness and civility, broke down. Decorum became the object of ridicule. So Jake Tibbetts was largely to blame for the kind of loose living that left jism-soaked silk handkerchiefs on the hood of an upright man’s car. That, and the war, and the fact that people were making astronomical sums of money working at the Harsole Bingham Bolt Factory on war contracts.

  Look at what it had done to the bank, at the class of customers it had brought in. You had people who used to have a hard time keeping clothes on their backs, now opening savings accounts, for goodness’ sake. Making so much money they couldn’t drink it up. On Friday afternoons the bank would be packed with them, poker-faced men in khaki and gray work clothes or overalls, with the grime so deep in the creases of their skin you couldn’t cut it out with a knife, clutching yellow paychecks. Some of them even had two paychecks because their women worked over there, too, right alongside the men. The farms were going to weed and seed. Even old men who had never known anything except the rear end of a mule had thrown down their plows and gone to Harsole Bingham. Greed, that’s what it was.

  “… can tell you the difference between a Zero and a Stutz Bearcat in a jiffy,” Jake was saying. He just rambled on and on like a windmill driven by his own hot air. The old fool.

  The door blew open and Fog Martin and Hilton Redlinger bustled in, Fog in his big red flannel overjacket and his hunting cap with the flaps pulled down over his ears, Hilton in an old brown overcoat and wearing his blue police chief’s cap.

  “Hark, the gendarme,” Jake called. “Tunstall here was just telling us he has a German spy living at his house, Hilton. Morning, Fog. Merry Christmas.”

  Fog and Hilton stamped their feet and hung their coats on the rack by the door, then climbed onto stools at the counter. Hilton hitched up the wide leather belt that strapped his holstered Colt revolver to his hip. Biscuit shoved mugs of steaming coffee in front of them, along with a platter of Victory Donuts. They were Biscuit’s special contribution to the war effort. Every nickel he collected from Victory Donuts went for war bonds. He kept the change in a glass jar on the counter by the back wall.

  Fog Martin picked up a donut, stared at it, then dunked it into his coffee and bit off a quarter of it. “Every time I see one of these things now,” he said, chewing, “I think of a tire.”

  Hilton Redlinger laughed, spearing a donut of his own. “They ain’t that bad, are they?”

  “Naw, that’s not what I mean,” Fog said. “They’re round, with a hole in the middle, that’s the trouble. Just like tires. And I am wore out with tires. Seems like all I do is patch tires and try to keep enough air in ’em to get folks where they’re going.”

  Hilton ate his donut in two bites. “I ain’t seen a new tire in this town in three years.”

  Tunstall Renfroe opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself. He had four new tires stashed away in his toolhouse. They had been there since the war started, and dry rot had probably gotten them by now. By the time his car had needed new tires, it was too late to put them on. People would have noticed. It would have caused a lot of snotty questions. A banker couldn’t afford snotty questions. So, like everybody else, he rode around on bald tires (when he could get gasoline) that Fog Martin kept patching.

  “When do you figure we’ll see tires, Fog?” Tunstall asked.

  “I don’t know. The fellow from Esso came through here last month, he said there doesn’t seem to be an end to it. Everything’s going to the front, and as long as there’s any fighting going on, we ain’t likely to see tires, or any more gasoline than we’re getting now.”

  “What you fellas need to do is get rid of your cars,” Jake said. Jake had never owned a car. He walked where he went, and had his groceries delivered from the Jitney Jungle Super Saver by Fog Martin’s brother Herschel on a three-wheeled bicycle.

  “Well, I’ll tell you for sure, I’m getting too old to be climbing around under folks’ wore-out automobiles on a cold morning,” Fog said.

  “Old!” Biscuit laughed. “You ain’t old, Fog. What do you mean, old?”

  “Of course I am,” Fog said. “I’m getting old, you’re getting old. Hell, all of us sitting here are getting to be a bunch of old farts. Young Lonnie excepted, of course. I’m sixty-one years old, Biscuit. How old are you?”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “And you, Hilton?”

  Hilton Redlinger passed his hand over his thinning hair. “Sixty-eight,” he said.

  “See. One of these days the Town Council is gonna come around and say it’s time you handed over the badge to a younger man.”

  “The hell!” Hilton said hotly.

  “Tunstall” — Fog turned to the far end of the counter — “how about you?”

  “Ahem.” Tunstall cleared his throat. “Ah, sixty.”

  “And you, Jake?”

  “I forgot,” Jake said.

  “Oh, come on, Jake.”

  “Yes, Jake,” Tunstall said from the end of the counter, “you needn’t be sensitive about your age.”

  “All right,” Jake said, “I’m ninety-three.”

  “No, you ain’t,” Lonnie said, “you’re sixty-four. That’s what Mama Pastine said.”

  Jake glared at him, then winked.

  “Well, anyway,” Fo
g Martin said, taking another donut from the Victory platter, “you see my point. We’re all getting old as hell.”

  Well, maybe they were, Jake Tibbetts thought, but it was not anything he cared to dwell on. They might be getting a few gray hairs, but his generation was still running the town, the way they had for thirty years or so. They had no choice, really. The young men, the ones in their twenties and thirties, were off at war or building B-29S in Seattle or Liberty Ships in Pascagoula. And as for men in their forties or fifties, there was a whole lost generation in there — the ones who had left during the Depression. There were a few around, like Ollie Whittle, but he had moved in from the next county. The young bucks, the ones who survived the war, now they would be coming home before too long, fresh from having done important things, and they would want their place. Yes, they would shove old men like Hilton Redlinger aside. Hell, the old knocker was beginning to look a little seedy, anyway. He didn’t even shave on Saturday morning anymore. Jake studied him, the white stubble grizzling Hilton’s fleshy cheeks and chin, the dry skin flaking off his eyebrows, the long black hairs growing out of his ears. Hilton’s wife was sickly. She stayed in bed most of the time. And Hilton was going to seed. But the rest of them had a few good years left. They wouldn’t give things up without a struggle. Jake Tibbetts might have turned sixty-four the month before, but there was still a lot of piss-and-vinegar in his bloodstream, by God. And anyway, there was nobody to push him out of the paper. There wasn’t anybody to hand it over to, even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. God knows, Henry would never make a newspaperman.