by Robert Inman
Mama Pastine lowered her arm. “Yes, you will,” she said quietly. “If you’re not already, you certainly will be. You are a hard and stubborn man, Jake Tibbetts. You are your grandfather’s grandson and your father’s son.”
“I am no drunk or lunatic,” Jake muttered.
“Better you were. We could write off your mule-headedness to it and put you away until you came to your senses. But no, you are running loose in the world. Now, you have gone far enough. You may disown Henry, but not his wife and daughter.” She paused a moment, brushed back the strands of hair from her forehead. “Go upstairs to them.”
Jake stared at the floor, considering it a moment, and then said, “No, I will not.”
“You will not?”
Jake didn’t raise his head, but Lonnie could see that defiance was stuck in his gut like concrete. His jawline was rigid and the veins on his neck stood out like cords. “I will not,” he said again.
Mama Pastine stood over him a moment longer, glaring at the top of his bowed head. “All right, then,” she said finally. And she walked out of the kitchen, leaving them sitting there, Jake staring at the spot on the floor where her feet had been planted, Lonnie staring at Jake, awed by the test of wills he had seen. Mama Pastine, in a fury of which he had never known her capable, had been unable to move him. The mystic power of the Great Waldini had failed.
Then they heard her banging around in the parlor, heard a loud clatter of metal, heard her heading back toward the kitchen, realized at the same instant what she had done, rose up out of their chairs in unison as she filled the doorway, both hands gripping the hilt of Captain Finley Tibbetts’s cavalry sword. She raised the long curving silver blade, gleaming from the polish of Jake’s chamois cloth, until it was aimed directly at Jake’s chest, the wicked tip barely trembling.
“Out!” she bellowed. “Out of the house!”
Jake opened his mouth and the cigar fell out and plopped on the floor. A large-sized rat could have run down his throat.
“You have thirty seconds to be clear of the premises!”
Jake’s mouth closed, then opened again. “Put that thing down before you cut yourself, Pastine.”
“I will run you clean through with it!” she cried. “I swear I will.” She made a quick menacing move toward his chest. Jake flinched.
“Don’t stick him there, Mama Pastine,” Lonnie yelped. “It’ll bounce off his breastbone.”
“You keep your mouth shut, buster,” she roared at Lonnie, “or I’ll run you out of here with this old fool! You have concocted enough devilment of your own to put the Jehovah’s Witnesses to rout. And you” — she jabbed again at Jake with the sword. “Move!”
Lonnie knew then that Jake would make a sudden lunge toward her, grab the sword away, and put an end to all this, but to his amazement, Jake began to edge backward. His chair tumbled over with a racket and he lurched, grabbing the edge of the table with one hand to steady himself. Mama Pastine pivoted to give him the open doorway and he edged sideways along the table until he reached the opening and backed through it. “Pastine, you were a lot more fun before you got religion,” he said hoarsely.
“Oh no you don’t, you old fool. Don’t you start in with your words, Jake. You’ve bamboozled me and the rest of the world long enough with your wit and wisdom. Now you just keep your mouth shut and your feet moving.” She feinted again with the sword and Jake winced as if he had been cut. “Move! Save your blather for the rest of the fools who can’t tell the difference between good sense and hogwash.”
Jake backed through the kitchen doorway into the hall. He reached behind him to open the front door, still keeping an eye on her. Lonnie watched it all in open-mouthed amazement, then got up out of his chair and followed them, dropping the blankets on the floor and making small puddles with his dripping feet as he walked. Daddy Jake backed on through the front doorway, pushing the screen door open with his hand. Mama Pastine was close behind him, the sword held straight and unswerving in front of her, arms locked with some powerful force. Jake kept moving, easing sideways down the front steps. Lonnie stood just inside, behind the screen door, seeing how quietly furious they both were — Jake all red-faced at the bottom of the steps, eyebrows bobbing violently, Pastine glaring down at him from the top.
That was just how they were when Rosh Benefield pulled up in the front yard in his Packard, switched off the engine, sat staring at them for a moment, then opened the door and eased his great bulk out of the car. He closed the door behind him softly and stood there, taking it all in. “Merry Christmas,” he called finally. He waited a moment for an answer, and when none came, he shrugged his massive shoulders, walked around to the back of the car, opened the trunk, reached in and lifted out a shiny red bicycle. He sat it on the ground by the car and kicked down the kickstand so that it stood by itself.
“Billy’s,” he said, looking up at them. “You can’t buy a new bicycle for love nor money these days. They just aren’t making any new bicycles, I guess. But I found this one of Billy’s in the back of the garage and I got Fog Martin to fix it up. He did a real nice job on it, don’t you think?” He patted the seat and looked at them again, again got no comment. Jake and Pastine just stood rooted in place, staring holes in each other, ignoring Rosh. “A young fellow like Lonnie ought to have a bicycle, don’t you think?” Still no answer. Rosh looked up at Lonnie standing behind the screen door. He cleared his throat. “Lonnie, don’t you think you ought to get some clothes on there?”
Lonnie looked down at himself, remembered for the first time that he had been naked beneath all that swaddling of blankets. Now he shivered in the cold and bent forward a little bit and covered his dingle with his hands. Naked or not, freezing or not, this was too good to miss. Out on the porch, Mama Pastine gave him a withering look, then turned back to Jake.
There was another very long silence, and then Rosh Benefield said, “Well, are you folks having a good Christmas?”
“Shut up, Rosh,” Mama Pastine said. “Can’t you see I’ve got two fool idiots on my hands?”
“Well,” said Rosh affably, “what seems to be the matter, Pastine?”
“Jake won’t go upstairs and welcome Henry’s wife and the new baby.”
“Ah,” Rosh said, “I see.”
“You’ve heard all about it by now, I suppose?” she asked.
“Ahem. Well, Herschel Martin’s pretty well spread the news, I guess.”
“Yes, I suppose he has,” Mama Pastine said. She sighed an enormous sigh and then lowered the sword slowly until the tip touched the wood at the edge of the porch, leaned on it for support. Lonnie couldn’t see her face from where he stood inside the house, but he could see how her jaw sagged with fatigue.
Then suddenly Jake lunged back toward the steps and in a single beautiful rippling motion worthy of Captain Finley himself, Mama Pastine brought the sword up and hauled back like a baseball batter and swung, carving a great curving slice of Christmas morning out of the air, the tip of the blade passing just inches short of where Jake seemed to hang in midair on the third step, the force of the swing taking her clean around until the rushing blade — CHHHUUUNNNGG — hit the post next to the steps and bit a good inch and a half into it, rattling the galvanized tin of the porch roof like musket fire. She jerked on the hilt mightily with both hands and pulled it free as Jake bellowed in fright and leaped back to the ground at the bottom of the steps, ashen-faced. Pastine pointed the blade again at Jake and screamed, “OUT! I said OUT!”
“My God, you could have cut my head off!” Jake hollered. He turned to Rosh Benefield, who was frozen in place next to the Packard, hand resting on the seat of the red bicycle. “Did you see that? Did you see what she nearly did to me?”
Lonnie’s heart leaped into his throat. He could see, even though Mama Pastine had her back to him. He could see the terror in Daddy Jake’s eyes that told him she would have done it. It would have been a monstrous thing, but she would have done it. Lonnie felt his knees go weak a
nd he wanted to cry out in horror but his throat was locked by the big lump of his heart.
Grandaddy Rosh blinked his small bright eyes and stood there looking first at Pastine, then at Jake. “I think,” he said finally, “that you might ought not to try getting back in the house again, Jake.” His voice was slow and measured, as if he were carefully explaining a point to a jury. “And Pastine, don’t you think it would be best if you went back inside and put the sword up? And got some clothes on young Lonnie there? Let’s just try and get ourselves organized here and work this thing out like sensible folks.”
“You call that sensible?” Jake yelled.
“I’d call it pretty persuasive, Jake,” Rosh said.
“Well, what the hell am I gonna do if I can’t live in my own house?”
“Stay at the newspaper,” Pastine spat. “Stay down there with your printing press and your cranky Linotype machine and your ink and all your precious words. Talk to your typewriter. Just sit there and laugh all you want at everybody who’s not as wise and witty as you are. Call us all fools the way you love to do. Then every once in a while, get up and go back to the washroom and look in the mirror and say, ‘Fool, fool, fool.’ Because that’s what you are, Jake. Fool, fool, fool.”
“Is that what you think?”
“You’re an arbitrary old man,” she said. “You have no milk of human kindness in you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, mostly.”
Jake’s shoulders slumped. “All right, Pastine. If that’s what you want.”
“That’s just the way it is,” she said. “If you change your mind about Henry’s wife and baby, let us know. Until then, just live at the newspaper.”
Jake turned to Rosh Benefield. “She’s throwing me out, Rosh,” he said.
“Well, there does seem to be some ground for compromise there, Jake.”
Jake thought for a moment, and then his jaw hardened. “No. Hell, no. Nobody’s gonna tell me how to think.”
Rosh nodded slowly, his great head bobbing up and down. “Then I guess you’re right. She’s throwing you out.”
“Do you think I’m an arbitrary old fool, Rosh?”
“About some things, yes.”
“About Henry.”
“That, mainly.”
“What did I do that was so wrong, Rosh?”
Rosh shrugged. “Maybe you didn’t forgive him enough.”
“I forgave him a helluva lot,” Jake said stubbornly.
“But maybe not enough.”
“The way you forgive Billy?”
“It’s what a man does, Jake.”
Jake turned back to Pastine. “Is that what you think, too?”
She stood there for a moment, leaning on the sword, looking down at him, then said, “Yes.”
Jake squared his shoulders. “Well, you can all go straight to hell. If raising a damfool makes me a damfool, then so be it. I’m going to town.” He turned and started off across the yard, then stopped and yelled back to Pastine, “I’m gonna freeze in this weather. Can I have my coat?”
Pastine walked back in the house, brushing by Lonnie, got Jake’s old brown overcoat off the rack in the hall, went back to the edge of the porch, and tossed the coat down to the bottom of the steps. Jake walked over and picked it up, brushed it off, and made a great show of putting it on, pulling the collar up tight around his throat, buttoning all the buttons one by one while they watched him. Then, without looking at them again, he stalked off toward town, arms swinging briskly, shoulders thrown back, legs pumping. Acting like it didn’t matter. Knowing better.
Lonnie sagged to his knees in the doorway and watched him go, feeling very small and alone, wondering in despair if somehow he had brought it all down on their heads with all his damfoolishness, wondering most of all if it would ever be right again.
BOOK THREE
One
HE WAS TWENTY-SIX, unmarried, when he looked up from the Linotype one summer Tuesday afternoon, sweat pouring down his face and back, the Linotype grumbling with the indigestion of a week’s worth of copy it was turning into metal, to see her standing over him, fresh-scrubbed and peach-complexioned in a middy blouse and white organdy skirt and pert sailor hat. He felt suddenly grotesque and rancid, like a ruined ancient prisoner kept overlong in a dungeon and visited at long last by a lady.
“My God,” he said aloud, “the Royal Navy.” He had a way, he was aware, of confounding people with his directness. But not this one. He studied her as she studied him, all coolness in the fetid heat of the print shop.
“Dante in his inferno,” she said. He had never seen her before, not that he had paid more than passing attention to the young women hereabouts. He was married, by God, to the newspaper. But he had never laid eyes on this one, and in fact she didn’t have the look of the local girls. There was a certain air of … what? Refinement? That, yes. But more — a sense of being quite sure of herself, quite capable. She was a sturdy girl with fine high cheekbones and strong blue eyes, a bit too tall perhaps. Not the Royal Navy, the Norwegian Navy.
“What is this thing?” She indicated the machine with a flip of her hand.
“It’s called a Linotype.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“It casts fools’ words into metal,” Jake said.
She tossed her head and the twin ribbons on the back of the sailor hat danced in the close air of the shop. Jake felt something catch inside him, deep in a place he had almost forgotten. “Then better you should shut it down,” she said with a trace of a smile.
“Even fools love to see themselves in print,” Jake said.
She looked around at the dimly lit print shop, every machine and workbench and wall coated with decades of grime and grease and ink, absorbing light, rich and fevered in the August heat. Jake expected her to raise her eyebrows or give a little twitch of her nose to show him how dingy she found it. But she didn’t.
“Out of the darkness …” Jake started to say, and then the Linotype, envious perhaps because of his inattention, suddenly groaned and hissed and exploded with a spurt of molten metal that shot toward the scarred ceiling. Jake leaped up with a cry, his chair clattering backward, and shoved her away as a shower of metal droplets rained down on the floor. She gave a small quick cry of fright and indignation. “Jesus …” he yelled, and then he looked and saw the dirty gray handprint across the front of her blue middy blouse, just over her breast.
Jake felt a bit faint. He knew he was blushing and he shoved his hand in his pocket. She drew herself up and gave him a withering stare.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered, shuffling his feet like an idiot. “The damned thing is cantankerous. It doesn’t know when to keep its mouth shut.”
“Its owner doesn’t know where not to put his hands,” she said icily, reaching into her small blue purse (the same fabric as her navy blouse) to withdraw a white handkerchief, which she used to dab at the ink stain on her front.
“I didn’t want you to get burned,” Jake said, recovering a bit, staring at her firm full bosom as she worked at the smudge. “I’ll get it cleaned for you.”
She looked up, saw him gaping open-mouthed. He blushed again, feeling the hot rush of blood engorging his ears and cheeks. She stopped, lowered her hands, opened the purse, shoved in the handkerchief, and took out a five-dollar bill. She thrust it out to him. “Renew our subscription, Mr. Tibbetts,” she said, and then turned and walked out the door, the ribbons of her hat flouncing behind her.
Jake caught up with her two blocks away, breathless from the run. He didn’t know how to stop her, didn’t want to touch her arm and run the risk of having her strike him down in the street, so he just leaped ahead of her and planted himself in the middle of the sidewalk, right in front of the Farmers Mercantile Bank.
“Good Lord,” she said, and stopped.
“Who are you?” Jake blurted. He held out the five-dollar bill. “I can’t renew the subscription unless I know who you are.”
&nbs
p; She studied him for a long moment and he stood there frozen to the sidewalk, knowing what a ridiculous, godawful sight he must be with his hair matted with sweat, every inch of exposed flesh covered with the grime of his labors, wearing a filthy shop apron over his undershirt. He blinked in the afternoon sunlight, chest heaving from his dash. He wanted to melt into the sidewalk, leaving only a black puddle of ink and sweat. But he stood his ground. By God, he would be a fool if he had to.
“Pastine Cahoon,” she said finally. “I think you will find the subscription in my father’s name.”
“Your father.”
“Henry Cahoon.”
Then she swept past him, left him standing there like an egg frying on the sidewalk. He stood for a moment, rooted to the spot, and turned just in time to see her round the corner at the end of the block and throw a quick glance back at him, a mere flick of her eyes. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Jake muttered.
Henry Cahoon’s daughter. Henry Cahoon was something of an eccentric — a farmer of sorts with a good bit of rich bottomland bordering Whitewater Creek several miles north of town, but more than that a tinkerer and inventor. Several years past he had created and patented a mechanical stump puller, which he manufactured now in a converted barn on his property. He employed perhaps thirty or forty men and the stump pullers were sold all over the South and Midwest, wherever men were still tearing down forests to make cropland. Henry Cahoon had been one of the first men in the county to own an automobile, not because he was one of the wealthiest (which he might well be by now) but because it gave him something else to tinker with. He was a quiet, tall man who kept to himself. Jake Tibbetts had never known him to have a wife, much less a daughter.
Jake marched into the Farmers Mercantile Bank, ignoring the staring eyes of the customers, into the glass-walled back office where Tunstall Renfroe sat hunched over a ledger book.