Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Jake pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and folded it carefully and pressed it over the cut, gave Chief Redlinger a withering look, and stalked off. By this time, the MPs had things calmed down a bit. There wasn’t much damage, really. The German with the loud mouth had a busted nose and a few of the others had scrapes and bruises. The MPs hustled the Germans out the back door of the auditorium and the Christmas Eve program broke up quickly. There wasn’t much stomach for hot chocolate and brownies.

  They walked home, Lonnie and Daddy Jake and Mama Pastine, in a dreadful silence. Mama Pastine didn’t say a word, but she was puffed up like a bullfrog and Lonnie could almost smell the bile rising up in her. Lonnie was so excited he could hardly keep his feet on the ground and his mouth shut, so finally he got tired of trying to hold it in and raced off down Partridge Road ahead of them and ran around the house several times and whooped and hollered and then sat down on the front steps to wait for them. They hove into view presently, Daddy Jake strutting like a bantam rooster, holding the handkerchief over his eye, Mama Pastine marching in terrible high dudgeon beside him.

  They had sent him straight to his room and for a long time he could hear Mama Pastine’s voice rising and falling like a bullwhip in their room across the hall. Finally she wore herself out and the house got quiet enough so that he could think back over all that had happened and sort it out in his mind.

  It was then that he began to worry about Santa Claus. Recounting his deeds this day, it came to him that he had been at the center of enormous folly and that perhaps a mere blistering of his rear with Daddy Jake’s belt would not atone for it. Perhaps Mama Pastine had decided to take his punishment an unspeakable step further — to just leave the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun and the other gifts in the back of her closet. Maybe he would be that one solitary boy in all of recorded history who got nothing.

  Mama Pastine had lectured him often on pleasure and pain, good and evil, the agonies of Hell and the glories of Heaven. He believed her, believed fervently that God and the devil made war over his mortal soul, that somewhere in the neighborhood of the Heavenly Throne sat an archangel presiding over a huge ledger on which he totted up every good and evil thought and deed. You could always ask for forgiveness, as Lonnie did enthusiastically every night, at least concerning those things about which he was truly sorry. Still, he figured, everything remained in the ledger just the same — the archangel simply made a check mark beside every black deed for which forgiveness had been sought — and someday there would be a great accounting. It just didn’t make sense that you could wipe the slate completely clean. Why, that way an old reprobate could sin like sixty all his life, then wiggle out of it with his dying breath and waltz through the Pearly Gates alongside the Baptists and Methodists. Surely God wasn’t that dumb. Surely he spotted an old reprobate trying to mingle in with the crowd and thundered, “Whoa there, Buster! Not so fast!”

  But Lonnie thought how horribly unfair it would be if he were lumped in with the old reprobates, and wished passionately this night for the accounting to be postponed. He began to pray and he prayed so hard that his head began to hurt. He went at it for a long time, and finally he heard a stirring in his grandparents’ room, Mama Pastine poking around in the closet. Then the door opened and he heard her measured clomp-clomp down the stairs. She stayed for a few minutes and came back and when the house was still again, Lonnie let out his breath with a great whoosh and said quietly, “Thanks, Lord.”

  He lay there, listening to the house noises for a while, and then the thought of his father bubbled up, unbidden, from the secret places of his mind. Henry Tibbetts might be taboo here, thinking of him might be a very great sin in this house, but he clung stubbornly to the place, a great unspoken mystery. Lonnie wondered where his father was this winter night. Was he warm? Did he have enough to eat? Did he have friends? And did he ever suffer secret agonies deep in his soul, the way his son so often did?

  Lonnie puzzled over his father for a long time in the dark empty midnight. And when he finally drifted into sleep, Henry remained — a sad shadow at the edge of his fitful dreams.

  There was only a hint of light in the room from the last pink and orange embers of the coal fire, and Captain Finley, like the light, seemed more a feeling than a presence. He sat deep in the wing-back chair near the hearth, one gray-trousered, leather-booted leg swung over the other. Young Scout noticed first the movement of his hands as he wiped the blade of the glistening saber with a cloth, stroking it with long sweeping motions. Even in the faintest of light, the blade gleamed softly. Captain Finley’s broad-brimmed cavalryman’s hat and leather gloves lay on the floor next to the chair.

  Young Scout stopped in the doorway of the parlor, confused for a moment over why he had come. He stood for a long time, watching Captain Finley, waiting, listening to the wind outside. It was from the north and it moaned at the windows. Then there was another sound, muffled by the wind, the restless snuffling of horses and the stamping of feet — the Lighthorse Cavaliers at muster in the dark, waiting for their captain.

  Finally he spoke, and the rich weariness of his voice seemed to rise like coalsmoke from under the curve of his moustache.

  “They tried to make me a major today. Can you imagine that, Young Scout? A major! Why, a major is a goddamned fart blown by the wind. Useless, like tits on a boar hog. The next thing, they’d want me performing menial duties on some goddamned general’s staff, the sort of trifling things majors do. By God, I’d rather be a private than a major. A private has more honor to him.”

  “You said no?” Young Scout asked.

  “Damned right I said no. They’d have taken my Lighthorse Cavaliers and given them to some dunderhead barely out of his diapers. Some young fool who’d get them slaughtered trying to glorify himself. Let me tell you, Young Scout, the Army of Northern Virginia is the finest collection of fighting men in the history of combat, but it is a human enterprise and thus has its share of idiots and pettifoggers. Many of them are majors.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to be a major forever,” Young Scout protested. “You could get to be a colonel and even a general. And then you could command a whole slew of cavalry. Like Jeb Stuart.”

  “Hah!” the Captain spat. “Stuart. A dilettante. An egomaniac. The greatest glory-seeker of them all. Brilliant, granted. But he spends as much time plucking plumes for his campaign hat and dancing with the ladies in Richmond as he does fighting the Federals. Besides, he was a major once, wasn’t he?”

  “I guess so,” Young Scout conceded.

  “Well, there you have it. A man can’t be a major and escape unscathed.” Captain Finley finished wiping the saber, tucked the cloth inside his tunic, slipped the gleaming blade back into its scabbard, and laid the scabbard on the floor next to the chair with his gloves and hat.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “a hundred men is the most effective cavalry force. Any more than that and you lose speed and flexibility, and thus forgo the elements of shock and surprise, which are the essence of horse tactics. Tonight, for instance. We ride on Hanover Courthouse, where two companies of Federals are asleep like innocents in their bedrolls, dreaming of sugarplums. We will be upon them before they have time to say ‘Scat.’ And we will carve them up for Christmas dinner.” His eves glowed, fevered, in the dying firelight. “They will bleed this night, Young Scout, at Hanover Courthouse. And McClellan will wake in the morning to the awful truth that nowhere in his lines is safe from the Lighthorse Cavaliers! A hundred men, Young Scout. A hundred good and lusty men will loosen McClellan’s bowels like a dose of salts.”

  “May I come?” Young Scout asked.

  “No. I have more important things for you. Wait and listen. Orders will come.” He stopped, sat deep and silent in the chair for a long time while the wind cried at the eaves of the house and the room grew chill. Then he stood stiffly, reached and picked up the sword, buckled it onto his wide belt, slipped the thick leather gloves onto his hands. “While you wait,” he said, his voice h
eavy, “pray for the poor souls asleep in their bedrolls at Hanover Courthouse. Pray for them, Young Scout. They are damned this night.”

  Then he was gone, and Young Scout could hear the sharp voice outside in the yard, the barking of commands, the stamping of horses and creaking of leather as the Lighthorse Cavaliers mounted. Young Scout watched at the window as they rode away, Captain Finley on the black horse at the fore, leaning into the night and the wind. There was a full moon, a hunting moon. He stood for a long time, long after the horsemen had melted into the dancing shadows of the wind-whipped trees, until he heard the knocking at the front door.

  When he opened it, he saw the woman standing there on the front porch. She had a thin, pinched face, the flesh drawn tightly over the fine bones, an enormous belly covered partly by a threadbare gray coat. She had a piece of paper in her hand. She was shivering. It was miserably cold and the wind whipped nastily around the edge of the house and plucked at the strands of her hair.

  “Jake Tibbetts,” she said.

  “No’m …” Lonnie started to say, then his grandfather’s voice was suddenly at his back.

  “I’m Jake Tibbetts.”

  The woman thrust forward the piece of paper she was holding. “I’m Henry Tibbetts’s wife. Here’s the marriage license. And I’m about to have this baby on your porch.”

  Lonnie stared at her, then turned to look at Daddy Jake, whose face was hidden in shadow in the doorway behind him.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Jake Tibbetts said softly.

  BOOK TWO

  One

  JAKE TIBBETTS WAS proud of the fact that he had written only one editorial in his life.

  It had been just after the death of his father, when Jake had taken over the paper.

  He had written that he came to the business reluctantly but with a sense of the role the newspaper had played in the life of the town since Jake’s grandfather had founded it — that it was as indispensable as the undertaker and the mercantile store to the functioning of a civilized community. He would, he said, attempt to keep the paper honorable and curious. The editorial ran only a few lines and it had caused no particular comment, but the longer he edited the newspaper, the more he prized it. He had no greater ambition for the paper in his sixty-fourth year than he had had in his nineteenth, and he could think of no better way than that editorial to say it.

  The week after that first editorial, when he had written all the news he could think of, he sat down to write another one and found he had nothing to say. Nothing, at least, that should carry the weight of the entire paper behind it. Later, Jake began a weekly column that ran without fail on the left side of the front page. But that was Jake himself speaking. He put his own name to it. An editorial, now — that was the voice of the paper. And that meant all the honor and curiosity and credibility it had earned since its very first issue. Jake Tibbetts might speak of many things, and he might be taken seriously or lightly. But the paper was no trifling thing. When it spoke, it must be a thing of moment.

  Over the years, Jake’s column had brought him a measure of notoriety. He was nothing like William Allen White of Emporia, Kansas — who hobnobbed with presidents and princes and wrote of the great tides that sweep man’s destiny before them — but his columns appeared in several of the state’s newspapers, including the big daily in the state capital. He called the column “Folly” because that was what he wrote about. It was wry, skeptical, caustic. It caught the mood of people sobered by Depression and war. He wrote about the things around him — the minutiae of a small town, the foibles of common folk. Jake Tibbetts was quoted. And when he made one of his rare appearances at the state Newspaper Association convention, he was treated with a bit of awe and deference, accorded the role of seer.

  But that was all long after he had come to grips with the paper, after he had learned that he was meant to be a newspaperman, not an engineer as he had originally intended. It was after he discovered, by doing it, that he had the natural curiosity and passion and gift of expression that made a good newspaperman. It was there in his genes, waiting to be tapped.

  At first, he knew only that he had no choice but to give up his engineering, come home from college and run the newspaper. It was a family obligation. His mother could not handle it alone, and it would be some years before he could turn it over to Isaac, his younger brother. His mother had put it to him quite plainly as they sat in the parlor after they had buried Jake’s father, Albertis: Come home and take over the paper, or she would put it up for sale. And much as Jake loathed the place, that would not do.

  He set out at first, not knowing he had any gifts for the newspaper business, trying to understand it as an engineer would methodically research a problem of angles and stresses. He was not looking so much for insight into the mechanics of the trade — he picked that up naturally enough from the old printer who ran the shop. Rather, he wanted to know the process of how events became news, what was worth telling and what wasn’t, how event became copy, what strange chemistry it was that linked the paper to the town.

  During the first months he struggled during the day just to get the paper out once a week, learning the ancient craft of printing — the strange smooth feel of type, the odd way the type cases were laid out, the noisy maddening intricacies of the Linotype, the quirks of the massive Kluge press and the folding machine. Then at night he spent hours in the yellowing back files of the Free Press, reading the words of two generations of Tibbetts newspapermen, waking often at dawn with the sun slashing through the window of the newspaper office, body cramped and aching, head resting on the pages of the large bound volumes he had been reading when sleep took him.

  He found that it had been, in its best of times, a fierce newspaper — uncompromising, blunt, often judgmental. It printed warts and all and made no apologies for it.

  Take the bank, for instance. Jake learned that it was actually Tunstall Renfroe’s great-uncle who had founded it just after the Civil War. He had managed it with apparent good sense for ten years and then had suddenly absconded with most of the assets, accompanied by a young male teller, never to be heard from again. It was all there in the paper, unvarnished. Tunstall’s father had taken over the ruined bank and over a period of some thirty years he had slowly, painfully, repaid the town’s losses and rescued the Renfroe family name. There were small evidences of the bank’s return to respectability: news that assets had grown, announcements of new services, and finally coverage of the grand opening of the bank’s new offices on the courthouse square, an event of such moment that it included a parade, fireworks, and speeches. There was, as the Free Press reported, “a huge throng, virtually the entire populace of the incorporated community and many from the surrounding countryside, overflowing the sidewalk and street in front of the grand new bank building and covering the courthouse lawn like locusts.” It had been one of Jake’s father’s rare flights of fanciful prose. The article also noted that “the crowd braved a sweltering sun and the speech by Mayor Arthur Benefield, which ran upwards of two hours.”

  It was from the paper and from his mother that he learned about his grandfather, Captain Finley, who had died when Jake was small and who existed in his memory as a short, stocky man with big graying eyebrows and leather suspenders and a powerful, gamy smell about him that Jake first associated with his growling monologues at the dinner table and that he later came to know as the odor of whiskey and cigars. Jake, barely able to see over the edge of the table, his plate of food at eye level, sat at Captain Finley’s left. He rarely understood the conversation, but the memory of the old man’s smell, the confident, rumbling rise and fall of his voice, was powerful. In later years, strong good talk, spirited argumentation, always evoked the bittersweet aroma of his grandfather. Captain Finley was a man who knew his own mind.

  Jake’s mother’s memory was more detailed, but similar: “Captain Finley. He always wanted to be called Captain. He loved Tuesdays, because that’s when he set type. It was all done by hand back then, before
your father put in the Linotype machine. Captain Finley would go to the paper very early in the morning, and he would stop off on the way at Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s house and pick up a quart jar of whiskey. He’d lock the door to the paper and work all day, drinking whiskey and setting type and singing bawdy songs. You could hear him out in the street when you passed by. Then sometime in the late afternoon he would get through setting type and finish off the jar of whiskey and lay down on the floor and go to sleep. He was something of a town scandal.”

  That had been when Jake’s mother was a girl, in the years after the Civil War, in which Finley Tibbetts had fought as a captain in Pickett’s cavalry. Captain Finley had come home from war with nothing but his saber and his horse and the clothes he wore, a man approaching middle age with a wife and a half-grown boy and not much prospect for employment. He had been a railroad man before the war, but the railroads were mostly gone, ripped up by Union raiders, their rolling stock either demolished or stolen and taken up North. Finley had sold the horse, borrowed a little money, and started the newspaper. Years later, when Jake took over, no one could tell him why Finley Tibbetts had gone into the newspaper business. He was a literate man, though he had never been to college, but there was no history of newspapering in his family. He seemed simply to have filled a need. The community had no newspaper, so Finley Tibbetts started one. He hung his warrior’s saber over the fireplace of the small house he built on the outskirts of the crossroads farming community, the house that had sprouted wings and a second story over the years until it was the rambling, disjointed white frame hulk of Jake’s youth. In the beginning, it had been three rough-hewn rooms. That was even before the courthouse had been built.

  Jake deduced, from reading the early issues of the Free Press, that the town had stolen the courthouse. Or, more precisely, had stolen the county seat. The courthouse followed.