Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Another community, thirty miles away, had been the seat of government before the war, but it was located on the railroad line and had been pretty well ravaged by the Union raiders who came to tear up the tracks. So as soon as the Reconstruction legislature was formed, peopled with newly freed Negroes and Northern carpetbaggers, Captain Finley and other locals mounted a campaign to have the county seat moved. They argued that their town was more centrally located in the county, and thus more accessible to a farming population whose labors left precious little time for conducting legal and commercial affairs. The Free Press was filled with exhortatory editorials trumpeting the superior qualities of the town and citizenry, the unassailable logic — real and imagined — of making it the seat of county government. But when the deed was done, Captain Finley Tibbetts’s account left no doubt that logic had little to do with the business:

  This newspaper is reliably informed that the decision to relocate the seat of government to this community was aided and abetted by liberal amounts of cash, crops, and other inducements, to which our Legislature is uncommonly susceptible these days.

  Let it never be said that our citizenry (both here and in the Capital) do not know how to strike a bargain.

  Debate on the measure in the General Assembly was virtually nonexistent, a fact that may be due in part to the absence from the proceedings of the representative of our rival community. It is reported that he was at the moment in the clutches of a band of ruffians who accosted him on the outskirts of the Capital City and incarcerated him incommunicado, bound and gagged at the bottom of a well, during the period of the Assembly’s discourse.

  We trust that such carryings-on will result in better protection for members of the Legislature in the future, and that those responsible will be brought to Justice. If God wills it.

  The former county seat, of course, screamed foul. The federal governor-general investigated. But the decision stood, and Finley speculated in print that the governor-general had been persuaded by the same “overpow’ring logic” as had the General Assembly. The future of the town was assured. A new courthouse was built and the railroad, when it was reconstructed, followed the new county seat, which became a bustling mercantile center serving the surrounding farmland. The town grew up around the courthouse, and as it prospered, the Free Press thrived.

  Captain Finley Tibbetts had not been content to observe and comment. He served on the Board of Education, held posts in the powerful Masonic Lodge. In the pages of the paper, he spoke of himself in the third person:

  Reports having reached the community that a gang of thieves and rogues had seized control of the Whitewater Creek Bridge and were accosting the good citizens of the area and were relieving them of their worldly goods and affronting their Personages, an armed force led by Captain Finley Tibbetts, formerly of General Pickett’s horse troop, moved against the marauders.

  Following a brisk engagement in which two of the ruffians were dispatched on the spot, the remaining three were hung from the bridge railing until dead.

  Captain Tibbetts’s force suffered the loss of one horse.

  As Jake pored through the back issues of the Free Press in search of its soul, he came to identify the newspaper largely in terms of Finley Tibbetts, because Jake’s father, Albertis, had left little of his mark on it. And when he pictured Finley Tibbetts in his own mind, it was the picture of a warrior. The only photograph of him in existence was a daguerreotype showing Finley in his cavalryman’s uniform — close-set, intense eyes like live coals under the bushy eyebrows, staring out from under the perky bill of a campaign cap, nose slightly large for the square face, bold curving moustache that made the thin mouth seem to turn down at the edges as if Finley were about to spit.

  The photograph had been taken in Richmond near the beginning of the war, when the Confederacy was in full blush, the Army of Northern Virginia recognized as the finest assemblage of fighting men in history, before Finley had witnessed the insane hope of the Confederacy go glimmering on the blood-soaked slopes of Cemetery Ridge as his horse company attacked through a nightmare of gore on Pickett’s left flank. Jake had been only six years old when Finley died in 1886 at the age of fifty-seven, so all that lingered were the photograph (which he kept now on his desk at the paper) and the vague but insistent memory of the bushy eyebrows and leather suspenders, the rumble of the strong confident voice like a cannonade rolling across the dinner table, the smell of cigars and whiskey. That memory, and the Finley he discovered in the pages of the Free Press, convinced Jake that his grandfather had brought home a cast of personal devils from the slopes of Cemetery Ridge, and that he had spent the rest of his life spitting in their eyes.

  His editorials were proof enough that the warrior remained. Of the Town Council he had written:

  The most unnecessary rank in the Military Forces is that of Major. It is the Captains and Lieutenants and those in the enlisted ranks who do all the work, whilst Colonels and Generals get all the glory. Between the two classes is the rank known as Major, holders of which have no other responsibility than to jump through their skins upon the command of the Colonels and Generals and on the whole make life discommodious for the Captains, Lieutenants, and enlisted men.

  Pity, then, the community whose entire Town Council is composed of Majors. They are at the beck and call of that odious minority known as the Landed Gentility and manage to needlessly complicate the lives of the General Populace.

  There was the occasion in 1883, three years before Captain Finley’s death, when — as Jake learned from his mother — the captain had gone on an especially lengthy and devastating drinking binge, had barricaded himself inside the Free Press office in defiance of family and constabulary, and had come to his senses on Thursday morning to find he had not gotten out an issue of the paper for the week. To avoid loss of his postal permit, he had met the weekly mailing requirement by simply reprinting the previous week’s issue with a new dateline and a bold headline above the masthead: “REPEATED BY POPULAR REQUEST.” It was a story still told with knee-slapping relish in the state’s newspaper circles.

  Toward the end, when the years of heavy drinking and battling with his private devils had begun to eat at his mind, Finley had become savage. He wrote:

  Congressman Llewellyn visited this community on Friday last to participate in the Independence Day celebration. Despite that, the festivities went on apace. Congressman Llewellyn came disguised as a hotair balloon and floated throughout the day above the assembled celebrants, tethered only by the weight of his overwhelming pomposity.

  And:

  This journal hereby notes the passing of a local citizen of some notoriety, one Emmanuel Haislip, who, being stupefied by spirits, fell from the porch of the Majestic Hotel, and, striking his head against a hitching post, was killed instantly.

  Said Haislip is survived by his wife and seven young innocents, who exist in utter destitution.

  The ladies of the Methodist Missionary Society, noting the sorry state in which the late Haislip was wont to keep himself, have refused to render aid to the family of the departed.

  Mr. Haislip was a servant under arms of the late lamented Confederacy, which he served with distinction and courage. The ladies of the Methodist Missionary Society are not worthy to lick his boots.

  We know whereof the Bible speaks when it invokes blessings upon the POOR IN SPIRIT. It does not mean Mr. Haislip.

  Jake could see that the paper had been a sharp-witted conscience for the young town in its early years, but that as Captain Finley aged, it had become simply the old man’s vituperative mouthpiece, full of his own dark hauntings. Jake resolved not to let it happen again. A man might have his own prejudices and the paper might have its own voice, but the twain must not be confused.

  There was little evidence of Albertis Tibbetts, Jake’s father, in the pages of the Free Press in the years before Albertis had succeeded to the editorship. Captain Finley had dominated the paper totally. The only mention of Albertis was a brief annou
ncement in 1873 when Albertis, at age eighteen, had entered the paper’s full-time employ. “The editor,” Captain Finley had written, “notes the addition to the staff of this journal of Albertis Tibbetts.” That was all. No title, no mention of Albertis’s duties, no comment on the editor’s expectations.

  Albertis had, in truth, been consigned to the back shop, to the ink pots and type cases, and there he stayed until the day they found Captain Finley bug-eyed and stiffening in the parlor of the house with a whiskey jar in one hand and his Confederate saber in the other. There was a deep slash across the flowered brocade of the parlor sofa, cut through to the springs, a final bluecoat Captain Finley had faced and slain. Jake’s mother told him how Finley’s face, in its death pose, had been twisted into a grotesque, vicious snarl that Cosmo Redlinger, Senior, the undertaker, could not expunge. Jake had been a small boy at the time, but he had a vague, troubled recollection. Henrietta Tibbetts, his long-suffering wife, looked at him one last time before they bolted the casket lid and shuddered. In his last years, Captain Finley had been a hard, hard man.

  Albertis was not. There was a deep tinge of melancholia in the Tibbettses’ family history — a tendency toward fits of depression, dark imaginings, night sweats, purple fevers, overactive dreams. This sullen strain in the family psyche would vanish for generations, then suddenly fester and erupt as it had in Albertis.

  He was a doe-eyed, gentle, forebodingly quiet man, given to great silences when time seemed to hang suspended about his thin, bent shoulders. He had seen his father bedeviled by liquor, so he had never taken a strong drink. But there were times when his melancholia was stronger than whiskey. For days, he would be incapacitated by whatever dark and secret fears he harbored, when he would sit immobile in the deep-tufted wing-back chair in the parlor, facing the open window, staring into the day or night as if waiting for the visit of an archangel. He had always been a moody boy, but the fits of depression began to surface regularly after Captain Finley died and Albertis, at the age of thirty-one, took over the paper.

  No one had to tell Jake Tibbetts about Albertis. He knew firsthand, because he watched his father slowly wither and rot from whatever it was that sucked away his vitality.

  Albertis was a sensitive craftsman in the print shop. He set type flawlessly. His layout of the paper was pin-neat, a beauty of composition. But the soul of the paper, what was written in it, utterly confounded him. He had none of Captain Finley’s natural affinity for words or his keen sense of man’s fickleness and folly that made the pages of the Free Press fairly dance with excitement. The paper under Albertis was a pleasure to look at, but it was as dull as dishwater.

  What Albertis did do was modernize the paper’s physical plant. He went to St. Louis and bought a typesetting machine, the first to be installed in a newspaper in the entire region. The Linotype clattered and rumbled as Albertis sat hunched over its keyboard, making it sing with the columns of copy that passed through his fingers into its keyboard and were transformed into slugs of type ready for layout. Albertis rarely made an error. His concentration was total. He and the machine seemed to become as one, as if the hot metal coursed for a time through his own veins. The machine was an early model, and temperamental. Periodically it would belch in protest and suddenly spit a stream of molten metal toward the ceiling, sending everyone within range scurrying for safety. Albertis would patiently clean it up, make minor adjustments, sit down at the keyboard, mutter to the machine, and resume typing. Jake’s earliest and most basic consciousness was embedded with the tart smell of the Linotype metal cooking in the machine’s bowels, the rich shop smells of ink and glycerin and paper, the clink of metal against metal, the vision of sweat pouring down Albertis’s face as he stroked the machine, his countenance serene, the only time he ever seemed at peace with himself.

  The paper prospered, even more than it had under Captain Finley. It was not burdened with the old man’s raging passions, the feuds with advertisers and subscribers that kept somebody mad with the paper almost constantly. Under Albertis, it was bland, predictable, safe, and utterly lacking in personality. But then there was little of his father anywhere. Albertis Tibbetts did lonely battle in the agonized arena of his own soul.

  Albertis had always been quiet and withdrawn, so in the years of Jake’s childhood it had not seemed particularly odd that he became more so. But about the time Jake was entering adolescence, Albertis’s periods of gloom and silence and immobility began to stretch into days, and the running of the paper became something of a crisis. Jake’s mother, Emma, began to take on more and more of the duties. Out of desperation, with Albertis incapacitated for longer periods of time, she hired a printer, a grizzled ink-stained gnome named Turbyfill, who, when provoked by the ornery Linotype machine, could spew forth streams of profanity that were works of beauty in their inventiveness.

  Emma put the boys to work in the shop, Jake proofing galleys and setting headlines and advertising copy in movable type, Isaac stacking paper and running errands. And Jake began to resent the paper. He saw nothing but tedium and confinement in it. He began to hate the sight of his father hunched over the Linotype keyboard, on the days when he was well enough to work, turning babble into metal. He had no understanding and even less patience with the notion that a man’s private devils could eat at his innards. He assumed that it was the paper that did it, and he resolved to never, never let that happen to him. The paper could go to hell. He thought of it as a gaping black hole, stinking of sweat and ink, that could swallow a full-grown man.

  Emma, because she couldn’t depend on her husband, became the paper’s de facto editor. Albertis’s name never left the masthead, but she was in fact running the place without pretense of being a newspaperwoman. Jake and Isaac helped, but it was not much. As months passed, Jake could see the newspaper sapping her strength, and that made him hate it even more. Emma kept the paper together, protected its name and reputation because she had two sons who would inherit it. But the paper was slowly defeating her. Seeing it, Jake would stand in the back shop shaking with a rage that left him weak-kneed and faint of vision. He wanted to throw his work violently to the floor and run screaming out the front door. But to do that he would have to pass his mother, who would peer up from her work with strained, faded eyes. And he couldn’t face that. Years later, he would see in the back issues of the paper what a haunted shell of itself it had become under Albertis Tibbetts, how much the paper had become like the man. But at the time it was happening, when he was there watching it, he felt only rage. He vowed to have done with it as quickly as he could, even if it meant running away.

  As Albertis’s melancholia deepened, his isolation from the family became almost total. Days stretched into weeks when Jake’s only notion of his father was a presence behind a locked door, the measured tread of footsteps pacing the floor of the upstairs bedroom, the pall of a deeply troubled spirit in the house. A doctor came and went periodically, but there would be no change in Albertis’s condition for a week, two weeks at a time. Then, unannounced, he would emerge from whatever black chamber he had been inhabiting, mumble a few words to wife and sons, and steal quietly back to the newspaper office, where he would hunch over the keyboard of the Linotype, sweating the rancid sweat of a man whose vital juices were poisoned and curdling.

  When Jake was seventeen and on the eve of graduation from high school, Albertis called him into the parlor during one of his rare moments of lucidity to talk about Jake’s prospects. The sight of his father caused Jake’s breath to catch in his throat. He had seen little of Albertis for weeks. The man was a ghost in his own home. His flesh was pale, parchment-thin, drawn tightly around the deep-set eyes and sharp cheekbones. There was a kind of fever about him, the smell of wasting flesh and spirit. His hands trembled in his lap, alive with their own uncontrolled electricity.

  “Jacob,” he said, and it was the voice of a stranger, a wayfarer lost in the desert of his own soul, a voice so dry and barren and robbed of life that it was more silence than
sound. Albertis was sitting deep in the wing-back chair and the chair was turned so that it faced the window, away from the rest of the room. His eyes never left the window, never stopped staring out at the yard, where spring was beginning to wither under the hot breath of June. “Jacob,” he said again, “will you take over?”

  Jake’s mind tumbled in confusion for a moment. What in hell was the man talking about? And then he realized Albertis meant the paper, and his stomach took a sickening lurch. “No,” Jake said.

  There was a long silence and Jake searched Albertis’s face for some flicker of emotion, even anger, but there was nothing.

  “I plan to be an engineer,” Jake said. “I’m going to college. Mother says there’s enough money to get me started, and I’ll figure out the rest.”

  “What about the paper?” Albertis asked, still staring out the window.

  “Let Isaac have it.”

  The thin hands trembled, the pale eyes blinked. “Does he want it?”

  “I don’t know. He’s only eight years old. How the hell would he know?” Albertis’s gaunt head jerked slightly.

  “Did you know that?” Jake went on, hearing his voice rise, feeling the rage beginning to thrash about in his gut. “Did you know that Isaac is eight years old? Or that I’m seventeen? Or that Mother is getting old? Huh? Did you know that?”

  He wanted to lash out with his hands, grab the bony shoulders, cuff Albertis about the head, shake the dry brittle body until pieces came loose and fell on the carpet. But he held himself ramrod straight beside the fireplace next to the chair, arms rigid at his side.

  Then for the first time Albertis turned to look at Jake. If he had spoken sharply, Jake would have struck him. But Albertis’s voice was calm and steady. He lifted a quavering hand and stroked his chin. “Young man, you speak like a fool. You have been in league with phrenologists and soothsayers and exorcists and that idiot doctor who comes here poking and farting and mumbling. What, by God, do you know of succubi?” He gave a hollow laugh, then went on, his voice fevered. “Would an infant cling to its mother if her fangs were dripping with poison? Hah! Field mice know their own hiding places.” He looked out the window again, nodding to himself, his eyes dancing about in their sockets like dervishes. Then suddenly he seemed to collapse upon himself. His shoulders sagged, his face went slack, he sunk back into the deep reaches of the chair. Again, his voice was ancient, barely a whisper. “An engineer. Ah, yes. Your mother’s doing. Well, be done with your engineering.”