Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “It never happened, Jake,” Rosh said calmly.

  “Horseshit! I’m standing here and I’m seeing a kid in a United States Army Air Corps airplane parked in the middle of Partridge Road with the engine running, trying to get Tunstall Renfroe’s hot-pants daughter to go for a ride with him, and you say it never happened? Why, Rosh?”

  “Because it’s my boy.”

  Jake was struck by the great weight of it, by the notion that a man would risk pride, credibility, respect — a lifetime of them — for his son. Once you had asked for a thing like this, you had no more right to ask for anything. The price was staggering, yet Rosh hadn’t flinched. Jake, of all people, knew just how staggering it was, because he knew in his heart he would not do the same thing for his own son. He had not ever bailed Henry out. He never would.

  But it was not enough. “Rosh, you make a fool out of yourself if you want to. But I’ve got a newspaper to put out.” Jake turned to go, but Rosh grabbed him by the arm.

  “There’s one other thing, Jake.”

  Jake swung back around to him and felt his jaw go rigid and his head tilt back as if a great force were pushing at him. He wanted to throw up his arms and shield himself from what he knew was coming, but he didn’t.

  “You want me to beat you over the head with it, don’t you,” Rosh said.

  They stood there glowering at each other and finally Rosh let go of Jake’s arm and shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “You owe me, Jake.”

  Jake’s face went slack and the strength drained out of him and puddled on the red clay of the roadway. Rosh didn’t have to spell it out because Jake Tibbetts had been living with it for a long time. Plain and simple, it was the fact that his boy had married Rosh’s daughter and it smelled of death and destruction from the beginning and that’s the way it ended, with Hazel dead and Henry a drunken shell of a man. Now, after all this time, it was laid open like a festering boil pricked with a needle, pus running out of it smelling like death. It had remained unspoken for a long time because it would be an act of dishonor to speak of it. You went on living in a place and living with people despite indiscretion and disgrace because they were the only place and the only people you had, and you had to put some things away for life to go on. Speaking of it now was another terrible price for Rosh Benefield to pay, because it violated unspoken law. This, too, was an act of courage.

  It was no matter of winning or losing here. Rosh had simply called in a debt and in doing so had wiped the slate clean between them. But Jake felt a great sense of loss and violation, because to pay the debt meant conceding his one inviolate possession, the integrity of his newspaper. He felt unclean now, standing on the side of the road as Rosh left him and walked back to the plane. He was a man who was about to pillage the sanctity of his own mind, and nothing would ever undo that.

  Jake followed Rosh, who was beside the plane now. Billy leaned over the side to hear him.

  “How long are you overdue?” Rosh asked.

  “Less than an hour.”

  “All right. Go back. Tell them you had engine trouble. Tell them you landed here, called me, I got it fixed for you. I’ll call your base on the telephone while you’re on the way and tell them the same thing.”

  “What kind of engine trouble?” Billy asked.

  “How the hell do I know?” Rosh shook his big head impatiently. “I’m a lawyer, not a mechanic. Think of something. Something that’s easy to fix. Something Fog Martin could do. A loose wire — I don’t know. Do you have enough gas?”

  ‘It’ll be close, but I think I can make it.”

  “And Billy …”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Give it a week or so to settle. Then get out.”

  Billy looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Get out of this airplane business.”

  “But why?” Billy protested.

  “Because you lack judgment, son.”

  Billy pulled the goggles down on his face again, covering the white circles around his eyes. “I’m the best pilot in the Army Air Corps,” he said flatly.

  “I said, get out,” Rosh repeated.

  Billy peered at him through the goggles. “I’m sorry, you know that.”

  “I know. Now get out of here.”

  “Yes sir.” Billy turned around and looked again at the porch of the Renfroes’ house where Marvel and Alsatia stood. Alsatia shook her head, smiled, blew him another kiss.

  They got the road cleared and the people and cars out of the way with a great deal of shouting and running about, and Hilton Redlinger sent Fog with the fire engine down to the other end of Partridge Road to block it off so no more traffic would get through. Then Billy settled back in the cockpit and strapped on his parachute harness and gave everybody a wave and eased the throttle forward. The plane lumbered down the road, kicking up a terrible dust storm in the bright cold midday, until it rounded the big curve. Then Billy turned the plane at an angle in the road and locked the brake down and revved the engine to a high whine, checking it, testing the controls until he was satisfied that all was in good order. He pointed the nose at the long straightaway and gave another wave and gunned the Stearman down the road and lifted it majestically into the air, leaving the road swirling with a storm of debris. The plane cleared the trees nicely, gaining altitude, then Billy banked sharply and roared back over the crowd of people standing in the road. It was then that they saw Lonnie Tibbetts, waving gaily from the rear seat of the Stearman, unseen by Billy Benefield, and all their frantic calling could not bring him back to earth.

  Four

  BILLY YELPED and jerked his head around and stared at Lonnie with a stricken look when he tapped Billy on the shoulder as they taxied down the ramp at the airfield. “Holy smokes!” he cried. “What are you doing back there?” And Lonnie Tibbetts, who had enjoyed his first airplane ride immensely, just grinned at him.

  “It’s okay. I buckled myself in,” Lonnie said. Indeed, he had figured out the seat strap and shoulder harness and had buckled himself to the plane, loosely so he could raise up in the seat and see over the side. “You could have done acrobats and I wouldn’t have fallen out,” Lonnie said.

  “There’s not even a parachute back there,” Billy said, shaking his head back and forth, as if he could will Lonnie away.

  “So, you weren’t gonna crash, were you?”

  “Christ!” Billy slumped down in the front seat and stared straight ahead and kept taxiing for a while. Then he turned back to Lonnie and said, “You just keep your trap shut, you hear? You don’t say nothing. I mean, nothing.”

  “Okay,” Lonnie said.

  They rolled to a stop and several men ran out. Lonnie rose up in the seat and peered over the side of the cockpit, and they stopped and gawked at him and then started yelling.

  The lieutenant who was Billy’s flight instructor was madder than hell to begin with. Rosh Benefield had called ahead and told them Lonnie was in the backseat, so that was no surprise, but still the lieutenant was plenty steamed about Billy being overdue on his crosscountry flight and not calling in when he had engine trouble. He yelled and screamed and Billy hung his head like he had got caught cutting a fart in church and Lonnie listened and learned a few new words. Eventually they took Lonnie to the flight shack and sat him in a corner and gave him a cup of coffee and a donut while Billy went off with the flight instructor. After a while a major came out of a back room, a tall sandy-haired crinkly-eyed fellow, and said, “You the stowaway?”

  “Yep,” Lonnie said, before he remembered that Billy had told him to keep his mouth shut.

  The major stood tall and straight-shouldered over him, hands on hips. “I oughta court-martial you, buster.”

  “You cain’t,” Lonnie said. “I ain’t in the Army Air Corps.”

  “Consider yourself a prisoner of war, then,” the major said. “You know what we do with POWs?”

  “Some of ’em’s coming to the Christmas program tonight,” Lonnie said.
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  The major looked at him quizzically. “What’s your name?” he asked after a moment.

  “Tibbetts.”

  “Well, Tibbetts,” the major said, “since you’re a POW, I’m gonna put you on a work detail.”

  Lonnie imagined a rock pile and a group of sweating, swarthy Germans. But as it turned out, he rode around with the major in a jeep for an hour or so, holding the man’s clipboard while the major checked the flight line. The major bundled him up in a fleece-lined flight jacket that swallowed him and put an olive drab stocking cap on his head, and he was quite warm in the front seat of the open jeep despite the sharp wind that whipped across the open tarmac. The planes were lined up in neat rows on the apron next to the runway, a few old bi-winged Curtiss Stearmans like Billy had been flying, several newer trainers, even a couple of fat-bellied Thunderbolts. They sat waiting, silent, chocks under their wheels, canvas lashed over the open-cockpit Stearmans, plexiglass canopies latched tight on the others. Mechanics worked on one of the Thunderbolts, its cowling stripped off to bare the huge engine, the men on ladders tinkering with its innards, blowing on their bare hands to keep them warm. The major stopped the jeep under the nose of the plane, so close that Lonnie could reach out and touch the gleaming silver blade of the propeller. A young sergeant climbed down from one of the ladders and walked over to the jeep, gave a halfhearted salute. He had a big grease smear across one cheek and his nose was red and raw from the cold. The sergeant stared at Lonnie.

  “How’s it coming?” the major asked.

  “It’s a bitch.”

  “How long?”

  “Two hours, maybe three. Fuel line’s clogged. We got to take it out, see where the trouble is. Then put it back in.”

  The major scratched his head. “Colonel wants it ready by morning.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But hell,” the major said, looking straight up at the sky, “I’ll betcha there’s a part you need to fix that airplane that we just haven’t got. And there’s no sense keeping the men out here on Christmas Eve when they can’t get the job finished.” He looked back at the sergeant. “I suppose the colonel will just have to fly something else.”

  There was a trace of a smile at the edge of the sergeant’s mouth.

  “Knock off, sergeant. You just make sure you’ve got that bird ready to fly by twelve hundred hours Monday. I’ll see you get that part in time.”

  “Yes sir!” The sergeant stepped back, snapped off a smart salute, and the major threw the jeep into gear and roared off.

  “You believe in Santa Claus, Tibbetts?” the major asked as they drove back to the operations shack.

  “No, sir. He’s a phony.”

  The major shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong, buster. Just like a POW to say something like that. Guys like you, you been fooled by the propaganda. You think Santa Claus is some old fart with a white beard and a red suit who comes down the chimney. Then you get about your age, you start thinking how dumb the whole thing is, and bingo, you got no more Santa Claus. Right?”

  Lonnie looked over at him, saw how crinkly his eyes were around the edges under the stubby bill of the shapeless cap he was wearing. “Yes sir. That’s right.”

  “Well, let me tell you something, Tibbetts. When I get through putting this godforsaken place to bed in a couple of hours, I’m gonna hitch up my britches and get my ass to town, and I’m gonna see Santa Claus. The real magilla. On the way, I’m gonna stop and buy a bottle of the best hooch I can find, and Santa Claus and I are gonna pass it back and forth awhile until things get good and mellow, and then Santa Claus is gonna haul my ashes. You ever had your ashes hauled, Tibbetts?”

  “Mama Pastine makes me clean out the fireplace every morning,” Lonnie said.

  The major threw back his head and roared with laughter. “That’s the ticket, Tibbetts, that’s the ticket. Anybody gets his ashes hauled every day has got to believe in Santa Claus.”

  His two grandfathers, Daddy Jake and Rosh Benefield, were waiting for them at the operations shack, having driven the hundred miles to the air base on preciously rationed gasoline in Rosh’s car. Rosh described again how Billy had had engine trouble and landed his plane and called Rosh, and Rosh had had a local mechanic, a whiz of a fellow with engines, fix whatever it was that was wrong with Billy’s plane, and somehow little Lonnie here had crawled up in the back seat while they were working on the plane, nobody noticed him, and well, here he was. Rosh explained it all very matter-of-factly, as he would to a jury, and the major just looked at Rosh with his crinkly eyes. While Rosh was talking, Daddy Jake kept the evil eye on Lonnie, making sure he kept his mouth shut. When Rosh was finished, the major looked over at Lonnie and told him to keep the olive drab stocking cap and to remember about Santa Claus, and then Rosh and Jake and Lonnie piled into Rosh’s car and headed home. Jake didn’t have much to say. He mostly stared out the window, and Lonnie could see that he was thinking about something real hard the way his brow furrowed and every once in a while his jaw got rigid and wiggled as if he were grinding his teeth. He didn’t even chew Lonnie out. But when Rosh dropped them off at the house, Mama Pastine took Lonnie straight upstairs and whaled the daylights out of him with one of Daddy Jake’s broad leather belts.

  As he sat that night on the stage at the high school auditorium, tapping his wood block in the front row of Mrs. Eubanks’s Rhythm Band at the Christmas program, his rump and the back side of his legs still stung. But he said to himself that if that was the price you had to pay for a little old airplane ride, so be it.

  Lonnie suspected it was all pretty awful. He had heard the Philadelphia Orchestra concerts on the radio, and Mrs. Eubanks’s Rhythm Band couldn’t even keep time as well as the guys in the Philadelphia Orchestra. But the high school auditorium was packed and there was an air of Christmas excitement mixed with the delicious undercurrent of all that had happened that day. Em Nesbitt sang “O Holy Night” while Mrs. Eubanks accompanied her on the piano. Reverend Ostrow Willis of First Methodist (it would be the Baptists’ turn to run the show next year) delivered the Christmas Eve message, all about the hope represented by the Baby Jesus and how Mary and Joseph had wrapped him in squabbling clothes. Rosh Benefield, because he was the mayor and had a good speaking voice, read the Christmas story from the Bible, and you could tell from the buzz and hum in the auditorium when Rosh rose to go to the podium that the whole town knew, and more than that, was in on it. But Rosh looked them in the eye and read the passage from Luke strong and clear, and when he sat down there was a lot of nodding out in the audience, except from the couple of rows down front where the German POWs were seated. Lonnie was astonished at how ordinary they looked in their plain gray uniforms. A couple of them were very young, no older than Billy Benefield. You couldn’t have told they were German POWs except for the military policemen seated behind and to the sides of them. There had been a lot of oohing and whispering and a few baleful stares when they shuffled in just before the program started, but they looked so harmless there was almost an air of disappointment, as if people had been expecting a Panzer Division.

  The Rhythm Band played last, and they went boldly through “Good King Wenceslas” and “Jingle Bells” and “Up on the Housetop,” with Lonnie keeping up a good strong beat on the wood block and anticipating the hot chocolate and brownies in the cafeteria after the program was over and trying not to squirm in his seat to ease the stinging in his rump.

  When they finished, they got a nice solid round of applause, but before Reverend Willis could get to the podium to pronounce the benediction, one of the Germans, an older man with close-cropped hair, stood up right there in the front row and said in a loud voice, “Dat iss the verse shit I haff effer heard.”

  There was a huge appalled silence and then Daddy Jake leaped out of his seat like a little berserk bulldog, bellowing, “You sonofabitch!” and crawled over people in a frenzy, out in the aisle and down into the middle of the German POWs before anybody could stop him. Jake hit the Kra
ut three times before the man could get his dukes up. The German crumpled and went down with blood spurting from his nose. Lonnie jumped up in his chair and yelled, “Git ’im, Daddy Jake, whup the bastard!” while the auditorium just went crazy, a wild flailing swarm of bodies down at the front as several other local men leaped into the fray, women screaming, one surging mass of people trying to get down front tangled with another surge toward the rear as others tried to get out of the way, the kids on the stage yelling with delight while Rosh Benefield stood there and watched it in fascination and Reverend Willis wrung his hands and murmured, “Goodness, goodness.”

  Then Lonnie saw Chief Hilton Redlinger bulling his way through the crowd, pushing people out of the way until he got down to the front of the auditorium, where the mass of heaving men had sort of collapsed on itself in a grunting, cursing pile while the MPs danced around the edge pulling at bodies, trying to get them separated. Chief Redlinger had his huge Colt pistol in his right hand, and Lonnie thought, My God, he’s going to start shooting again like he did this morning at Biscuit’s. But Hilton had his whole meaty hand wrapped around the pistol, shielding the trigger guard, ready to use the Colt to whack heads if he had to. He reached into the pile and grabbed Jake Tibbetts by the rear of the britches and yanked hard, and Jake came loose like he had been pulled from a mud hole. Jake spun around suddenly and somehow — unintentionally, Lonnie thought — Hilton’s revolver caught him just above the right eye and blood spurted bright red from the gash and streamed down his face. Jake stopped short, stared at Hilton for a moment, then reached up and felt the cut and brought his hand away and looked at the smear of blood on it. He was almost serene. Lonnie, standing at the edge of the stage, heard it quite plainly when Jake said, “Hilton, I’ll get you for that.”

  “Jake, get the hell out of here!” Hilton said. “Get out before I throw you in jail for starting a riot.”