Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  There was a long pause. “With what?” Jake asked.

  “The baby.”

  “Oh.”

  Another long pause. “It’s a girl. You can tell it’s a Tibbetts. She’s got a big mouth.”

  Pastine hung up and Jake put the earpiece on the hook and sat there staring at the telephone for a while, thinking about the man who threw himself off the roof of his house in agony over his mother-in-law. Then he got up and put on his coat and headed for home.

  He was halfway down Partridge Road, arms swinging briskly, when Herschel Martin, Fog’s younger brother who tended the banana tree on the courthouse lawn, came by on the Jitney Jungle Super Saver Store delivery cycle. It was a three-wheeled pedal contraption with a big wooden bin behind the seat where Herschel carried sacks and boxes of groceries. Herschel had found his place in life. He knew where every soul in town lived and he was single-mindedly faithful about delivering groceries from George Poulos’s store. Winter and summer, he wore a red baseball cap with the white letters USN on the front that another brother, Carlton, had sent from the carrier Midway in the Pacific. This morning, he was well bundled against the cold in a flannel jacket, earmuffs, and a pair of rubber fishing boots that came midway up his thighs.

  “Hey, Jake,” he called as he pulled alongside, pumping hard on the pedals, the rubber boots squeaking in rhythm as he pedaled, “that Hitler, he’s a dumb sonofabitch.”

  “Where’d you learn a word like that, Herschel?” Jake asked without breaking stride.

  Herschel slowed to match Jake’s speed and rolled alongside him. “Heard it from Fog,” he said. “Fog’s allatime saying stuff like that. Hell, he thinks I’m crazy and don’t pay no attention. Him and his buddies, y’know. Hell, I ain’t crazy, I’m just a little slow, y’know, Jake.”

  “Maybe not even that,” Jake said.

  “Biscuit Brunson, he helped me work it all out. He’s been a big help to me, y’know. Biscuit Brunson, he says I got plenty of sense, lest I wouldn’t be able to find everybody’s house, y’know. Biscuit Brunson, he says I’m making a worthwhile contribution to the war effort. And he says if a fellow’s making a worthwhile contribution, he can’t be crazy, y’know.”

  “Well, who told you you were a little slow?”

  “Biscuit,” Herschel nodded vigorously. “He says if I wasn’t a little slow, I’d be off fighting. Anyway, that Hitler, he’s a dumb sonofabitch.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right, Herschel,” Jake said. “Where are you going with the groceries?”

  Herschel stopped pedaling and pulled over to the side of the road. “Ain’t going no place now. I’m outa gas.” It was a favorite of his, running out of gas. Jake stopped, walked over to the delivery cycle, pretended to pour gasoline from an imaginary can into Herschel’s imaginary tank.

  “Why is it,” Jake asked, “that you’re always running out of gas when your big brother runs a service station? Tell me that, Herschel.”

  “Hell,” Herschel laughed, “it’s the war, Jake. Don’t you know there’s gas rationing?”

  “I don’t have a car,” Jake said.

  “Well, there’s a war on,” Herschel said. “They’re sending most of the gasoline overseas, y’know. Everybody gets a little, but not enough to get ’em where they’re going. And Fog, he don’t play no favorites, y’know.” He laughed again. “Funny thing about it, though. Can’t nobody find enough gas to get where they’re going, but they always got a little extra for old Herschel. Figure that.” And he pedaled off, pumping madly.

  “Where you going with the groceries?” Jake called after him.

  “Your place. Got lots of stuff for the new baby. Hey, you know that Hitler, he’s a dumb sonofabitch,” Herschel yelled back, and then he was gone around the big curve, out of sight. So, the story was out. If Herschel Martin knew, then George Poulos knew. Pastine had obviously rousted him out of bed on Christmas morning to fill an emergency order. And if George Poulos and Herschel Martin knew, the whole town would soon know because news like a new baby at Jake Tibbetts’s house would travel like a locust storm. Damn the telephone.

  By the time Jake reached the house, Herschel had the groceries stacked neatly on the sideboard next to the sink and was sitting at the kitchen table nursing a steaming mug of coffee. Biscuit Brunson was sitting across from him, looking rumpled and frazzled, a cup of coffee untouched on the table in front of him. And Lonnie was in a chair next to the stove, swaddled in blankets, feet stuck in a tub of hot water, hair tousled and damp. The smell of Vicks Vapo-Rub was strong in the room. Ollie Whittle was muttering on the Atwater-Kent, “… at this season of unbounded joy and universal hope, the management of Redlinger’s White Angel Funeral Home want to thank you for your patronage …” Upstairs, Jake could hear the baby squalling her head off and the clump-clump of Pastine’s feet as she moved around.

  Jake stood in the doorway looking at them for a moment. Lonnie ducked his head and stared at his feet.

  “You look like you been out all night, Jake,” Biscuit said.

  Jake grunted, and then he heard Pastine clomping down the stairs behind him. She had a big armload of bloodstained towels and sheets. Pastine looked frayed about the edges. Wisps of graying brown hair escaped from her tight bun and floated about her head and face. She shot Jake a murderous look. “Fix some more coffee,” she said, brushing by him. She crossed the kitchen and opened the back door, letting in a blast of cold air, and dumped the linens on the back porch. Lonnie stared.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” she said, turning back to Jake with hands on hips. “We need a fresh pot of coffee. And when you get through with that, see if you can figure out what Mister Crazy Horse here is up to.” She pointed to Lonnie, who grimaced. “Tell him what happened, Biscuit.” And she stomped out, leaving the kitchen chilled in her wake. Upstairs, the baby was making the air dance with her bawling.

  “Well …” Biscuit started to say.

  “What’s all the blood for?” Lonnie interrupted.

  “That’s from the baby,” Herschel Martin said. “Babies come with lots of extra blood, y’know. That’s what Doc Ainsworth told me when George Poulos’s wife had her last one. Babies …”

  “Shut up, Herschel,” Jake said.

  “Awright, awright,” Herschel said, “but that Hitler is one dumb sonofabitch if you ast me.”

  “Don’t you have some more deliveries to make, Herschel?” Biscuit asked.

  “Nope. This is the only one. George Poulos, he says we don’t go out on Christmas morning for nobody but babies.”

  Biscuit rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “All right. Well, anyhow,” he said to Jake, “I was up early, about six-thirty like I always am, and I went out to the henhouse to get some eggs. You know, my henhouse is down in the back, not far from the creek, and well, all of a sudden I heard this yelling and thrashing around back by the creek and I ran down there to see what was the matter. Then I saw Lonnie here just run pell-mell into the water, cursing — I mean CURSING — at the top of his voice, like he had somebody chasing him. Only I didn’t see anybody else there. I mean, he just ran pell-mell into the creek with all his clothes on, and it not much over freezing this morning.” Biscuit waved his arms to show them how incredible it was. “Beat anything I ever saw, Jake. Then he stepped off into a deep place and went under, and I waded in and pulled him out. I asked him what in the dickens he was up to, but he wouldn’t say a word. So I took him up to the house and dried him off and put some of Lee Mason’s clothes on him, and he still wouldn’t say a thing. He just stared at me. I went back down to the creek after a while to see if I could find anything, and I did find a place where somebody had built a fire. The ashes were still warm. I wondered if Lonnie here had happened up on a tramp or something. Whatever it was, it must have scared him pretty bad. He hasn’t said a word since I got him home ’til just now.”

  The silence hung heavy over the room for a long time, then Lonnie raised his head and looked at Herschel Martin. “Herschel, was you out
here yesterday when Billy Benefield’s plane landed?”

  “Nope,” said Herschel, “I run out of gas downtown, y’know. Couldn’t get NOBODY to help me. Everybody was just so busy runnin’ out here to see the airplane, they couldn’t stop to help old Herschel. And you can’t tell me there wadn’t gas to be had, neither. Rationing and all, folks still got a little gas for old Herschel, except when they’re in such a fool hurry they ain’t got TIME to help a fellow,” he huffed. “I seen you jaspers come by on the fire truck, and I waved and tried to get you to stop and give old Herschel some gas, but you made like you didn’t even see me. You just kept a-gettin’ it.”

  “If I’d seen you, I’d have stopped, Herschel,” Lonnie said earnestly.

  “Dammit, shut up!” Jake bellowed. “I’m trying to figure out why a twelve-year-old boy with supposedly good sense is wallering around in Whitewater Creek at six-thirty on Christmas morning, and all I get is goddamn gasoline!”

  Herschel drew himself up out of the chair with great dignity. “I can tell,” he said sonorously, “when I ain’t wanted. It don’t take no dummy to know that.”

  “Aw, sit down and drink your coffee,” Jake waved him back to the chair.

  “Okay,” Herschel said, and sat down, his rubber fishing boots making tiny squeaks.

  “Now,” Jake turned back to Lonnie. “Let’s have it. What’s going on here?”

  Lonnie shrugged.

  “Was somebody chasing you?”

  “I don’t know.” He squirmed in his chair, his eyes darting from Biscuit to Jake to Herschel. Everything was quiet in the kitchen except for the Atwater-Kent, which was playing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”

  “That won’t do,” Jake said.

  “What if I told you I saw some gold on the bottom of the creek,” Lonnie said hopefully.

  “Uh-uh.”

  Lonnie thought a minute. “Went to rescue a fair damsel?”

  “You see any fair damsels in the water, Biscuit?” Jake asked.

  “Any what?”

  “Pretty women.”

  “Lord, no. There wasn’t anybody else around, like I said. Lonnie just ran down off the bank pell-mell into the water like he had fire in his britches. And I never heard the like of cussing from a young’un.”

  “What kind of cussing?” Jake asked.

  Biscuit looked around, then lowered his voice. “He said ‘sonofabitch.’ Several times.”

  “Who were you ‘sonofabitching,’ Lonnie?”

  Lonnie looked up into Jake’s face, his eyes pained.

  “Was anybody chasing you, Lonnie? Did anybody try to mess with you?”

  “No, sir.”

  Jake paused for a moment and then he said gently, “Was there anybody else there?”

  “Yes …” Lonnie started to say, and then he hung fire. “I mean …” and his face scrunched up and Jake could see that he was about to cry.

  “Biscuit,” Jake said, “could I talk to you outside for just a minute?”

  Biscuit got up from the table and put on his coat and they walked outside on the front porch, where the morning was gray and cold, the kind of morning you ought to have on Christmas when it looked like it might even snow if you were lucky, but probably wouldn’t. It hardly ever snowed until late February or March, sometimes not even then. Jake remembered that there had been only one white Christmas on record: 1865. The year the men came back from war. Captain Finley Tibbetts had written about it in one of the very first issues of the Free Press.

  “Biscuit,” Jake said, “I think what we got here is just a case of overactive imagination.”

  “You mean,” Biscuit said, “he ran in the creek on a freezing morning and there WASN’T ANYBODY THERE?”

  Jake nodded. “I think that’s the case, yes.”

  “Good Lord.”

  Jake put his hand on Biscuit’s shoulder. “Biscuit, I really appreciate your taking care of Lonnie. I think he’ll be okay now. We’ll get him warmed up and send him up to bed.” He gave Biscuit’s shoulder a squeeze.

  “Jake,” Biscuit said earnestly. “I hope you’ll take this thing seriously. It’s not like it’s an isolated case, either. I mean, this is two days in a row he’s pulled a caper like this. Yesterday, he went flying off in Billy Benefield’s airplane. Today, he’s thrashing around in an ice-cold creek and cussing at the crack of dawn. Things is, it seems to me, a little out of control.”

  “Out of control.” Jake nodded again.

  Biscuit stared at him a moment. “You don’t see anything wrong with it, do you.”

  “Now, I didn’t say that, Biscuit. I just think the boy’s imagination runs away with him sometimes. You know how kids are. You may not remember it, but you were a kid one time. Hell, I remember me and some of the older boys caught you and another squirt peeing off the Whitewater Creek Bridge onto a man and a woman in a rowboat.”

  Biscuit blushed. “Jake, I’m telling you,” he went on doggedly, “when a twelve-year-old boy runs pell-mell into the middle of a creek at six-thirty on Christmas morning, cursing like a wild savage, that ain’t overactive imagination. That’s a SERIOUS PROBLEM. I just don’t think you see it. Not a bit.”

  But he did see it, Jake thought. You had to live in bedlam to get the point, but he did indeed see it. If you were a sixty-four-year-old man who had sat up all night in a frigid newspaper office trying to write an editorial you never really intended to write in the first place; if you had a pregnant woman on your front porch at midnight and a caterwauling baby in the back upstairs bedroom by daybreak; if you had a profligate, reprobate son who had wiped out one wife and sent another one home heavy with child from some tawdry wartime union — when you had all that going on, then a grandson who stowed away in airplanes and went dashing into Whitewater Creek on Christmas morning was not so grievously insane after all. In fact, those might qualify as the sanest acts he had seen in the past twenty-four hours.

  God, he thought, how the Tibbetts clan must confound the rabble. They were all reincarnations of Job, visited with plague and pestilence. But they refused to cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes in penitence for whatever curse it was that invited misery down on their heads. The Tibbetts were like the man who visits the bank to find that he has been wiped out, then walks out the front door and pisses on the sidewalk in defiance. Four generations of them now had been pissing on sidewalks. The drunken, raving Captain Finley and the haunted Albertis had gone right on being their eccentric, bellicose, unreconstituted selves. Henry, for all his craven good-for-nothingness, remained defiant about it. He simply would not do what he was supposed to do, and to hell with the world. And now there was Lonnie, who could dash into a creek at dawn and then sit there and refuse to say why he did it. No, it wasn’t insanity, it was sidewalk-pissing raised to a new level of art.

  “Well, Jake,” Biscuit interrupted his thoughts, and Jake realized he had been standing there for a long time squeezing Biscuit’s shoulder, lost in contemplation. “Well, Jake, it’s Christmas morning, after all, I’ve got a family waiting home. Lee Mason will have his Santa Claus all tore open by the time I get there.”

  Jake released his grip. “Biscuit,” he said lamely, “thanks. I mean …”

  “Sure.” Biscuit looked at him for a moment. “Just … just get the boy some help. I mean … you know, he and Lee Mason play together …”

  And Jake realized that Biscuit Brunson was afraid, afraid for his own kin, afraid that whatever curse it was that hung over the Tibbetts bunch would touch somebody else with its godawful bad luck.

  “We’ll pray over it,” Jake said, and wondered why he said it.

  Biscuit cocked his head to one side. “Jake, tell me straight. Have you ever prayed over anything in your life?”

  “Oh, yes. I remember sending up a little signal when Joe Louis was fighting Max Schmeling. I had a little wager on that one. And there was another time, right after I took over the paper. The press broke down and it took me two days to fix it. When I finished an
d climbed back up on the sucker and got ready to throw the juice to it, I distinctly remember saying, ‘Lord, if you’re listening, tell this sonofabitch to behave.’ “

  “Jake, you blaspheme,” Biscuit said.

  “That’s what Pastine tells me.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve been to church?”

  “Not since the press broke down,” Jake said. “When the damn thing ran, I figured I had called in all my cards.”

  Biscuit looked him square in the eye for a long time.

  “Jake,” he said, “you may need it one of these days.”

  “What, church?”

  “God.”

  “It’s the same thing, ain’t it?”

  “No,” Biscuit said, “it’s not.” And that surprised Jake, because he had always thought of Biscuit Brunson as the staunchest of churchmen, a deacon at First Baptist. “You may,” Biscuit went on, “have to go to the pit someday. And you can’t take a church with you.”

  “I’ve been there,” Jake said quietly.

  “Maybe so.”

  Maybe not? Jake stood there on the porch and watched as Biscuit walked down the steps and got into the old Ford coupe parked between the house and the big bare-branched oak tree. Biscuit rolled down the window. “Merry Christmas to you, Jake.”

  “And to you, Biscuit.”

  Biscuit started the car and pulled out of the yard, made a big circle in the road and headed down Partridge Road toward town. Jake stayed there on the porch after the car had disappeared, hearing the sound of the motor fade, listening to the faint poppety-pop of firecrackers from over in town. He stayed there and thought about their two sons, his and Biscuit’s, remembered the two frightened faces peering down at him from the branches of the tree in front of Biscuit’s house when he had caught them dropping cow turds on passing cars. His Henry and Biscuit’s Lee Mason, whom everybody called Bugger. Bugger’s face round and fat with the big moon eyes beginning to well up with tears. Henry’s thin little face starting already to glaze over with that look of utter impassivity it got when a confrontation was at hand. And Jake wanting to take him by the shoulders and shake him and say, “For God’s sake, if you’re going to piss on the sidewalk, ENJOY IT.” Wanting to, but not doing it.