Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  They talked about the town, about people, about matters of public portent, sensing their place as young men whose opinions would increasingly matter as time went on. They talked about their lives, their aspirations, their philosophies. But they had not talked much about Pastine Cahoon. Jake Tibbetts was reticent when it came to Pastine Cahoon. Obviously, he thought now, too reticent. He should have warned Rosh Benefield, the skulking sonofabitch, that Pastine Cahoon was his girl. His girl. He thought about it for a long time, sitting there in the gloom while Sunday afternoon faded outside. No, she wasn’t his girl at all. He had been too goddamned timid. He had sat around sweating with indecision until she had given up on him. That was the plain and simple truth of it. He, Jake Tibbetts, the most decisive of men, who had chased Pastine Cahoon down the street, had not pressed his case because he was timid and because he thought he had all the time in the world. Jake thought for a moment about going back out there, banging on the door and declaring himself. But he was pretty drunk now, and he didn’t want anybody else — especially Pastine Cahoon — to see him as more of a fool than he really was. So before he began to wallow in self-pity, he screwed the top on the jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, stuck it in the bottom drawer of his desk, and lurched home and straight to bed for a fitful, tortured sleep.

  He was a bit surprised when Rosh Benefield turned up on Wednesday evening just after Jake had finished his weekly press run and had carried the neatly folded stacks of papers to the long worktable that filled the middle of the print shop, ready for labeling. The front door was locked, as it always was on Wednesday evenings when Jake was busy up on the big Kluge press. But Rosh knocked loudly and Jake saw him through the glass upper half of the door, standing there on the sidewalk with a brown paper sack tucked under his arm.

  Jake went to the door, unlocked it, and opened it a crack. “I’m not finished,” he said. “I don’t have the labels on yet, and I’ve got to get ’em down to the post office.”

  Rosh blinked. It was the only movement in his face. If you were going to whip Rosh Benefield in a courtroom, Jake thought, you would have to figure out what his blinks meant. If he didn’t want you to know what he was thinking, it was his only expression.

  “I’m not in any hurry,” Rosh said. “I’ll just wait while you finish up.”

  Jake didn’t want to drink whiskey with Rosh Benefield this Wednesday evening, not when he was still seething over the man’s duplicity. But for God’s sake. Here he stood like a walrus on the sidewalk with a paper sack under his arm, as patient as sunrise.

  “All right, come in.” Jake closed and locked the door behind him and Rosh eased into the chair beside Jake’s desk like a berthing ship, placed the paper sack on the desk, and folded his arms across his spreading middle. Jake looked at him, grunted, and went to the back shop. He took his sweet time putting the labels on the papers, all 585 of them, stopping to bundle them with twine by rural route numbers the way the government required. When he was finished with that, he hauled them to the back door and stacked them in his dray cart. Then without a word to Rosh Benefield, he closed the door with a bang and pushed the cart the three blocks to the post office, opened the door with the key the postmaster had given him, and deposited the bundles on the sorting table in the mail room, where the postmaster could get at them early the next morning. Jake locked up, then stopped for a moment outside and took out his pocket watch. Almost seven. It had been an hour and a half since Rosh Benefield had arrived. Well, he thought, let the sonofabitch marinate.

  Rosh was still sitting there, hands folded, when Jake got back. Jake took off his apron and spent several minutes at the sink in the back, scrubbing at the grime that blackened his hands and arms, then dried himself and went to the front office. He sat down in the swivel chair at his desk, feeling the sudden rush of satisfied fatigue that always came with putting the paper to bed for the week. It was something he liked to enjoy by himself. Rosh Benefield never came this early on Wednesdays.

  But here he was. Jake opened the bottom drawer of his desk, took out the two tumblers and left the half-empty jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best he had been working on Sunday. He placed the tumblers with a thump on the desk, took Rosh’s jar of whiskey out of the paper sack, unscrewed the lid, poured two fingers apiece, and recapped the jar. He shoved one of the tumblers over toward Rosh, who had been watching him with those small slow-blinking eyes. They raised their glasses to drink, and just when Jake was about to take a good mouthful of the strong, raw whiskey, Rosh said, “Let’s drink to Miss Pastine Cahoon.”

  “Goddamn!” Jake bellowed, red-faced. He slammed his own tumbler down, splashing whiskey across the desktop, spattering the front of Rosh’s vest. Rosh calmly finished taking his drink, then set his glass down, reached for the handkerchief in the inside breast pocket of his coat, and blotted the droplets of whiskey. Jake glowered at him in a high rage.

  When Rosh was finished, he put the handkerchief back in his pocket, smiled at Jake, and said, “I’m in love with Miss Pastine Cahoon.” Jake wanted to kill him, but he gripped the arms of the swivel chair and kept his butt jammed into it. “I have asked her to marry me,” Rosh went on.

  “How …” Jake croaked, the words barely coming out, “… how long have you been seeing her?”

  “Oh, about six months,” he said. “On Thursday evenings. We go to prayer meeting.”

  Jake almost lost control then, imagining them sitting there on their pious rumps listening to the Baptist preacher mouth religious hokum, and then riding side by side to the Cahoon farm on the narrow seat of Rosh’s buggy while he … oh, God. And this had been going on for six months. While he dawdled, unsuspecting.

  Rosh took another sip of his whiskey. “I think we are what you refer to as rivals, you and me.”

  “Did you know …”

  “Yes.”

  “And still, you …”

  “Yes. Miss Cahoon is a singular young woman. Quite capable, I think, of making up her own mind. Which she has done.”

  Jake slumped in the chair. So, that was it. He felt a great ache welling up in him, a sense of something indescribably precious, irretrievably lost. He wanted Rosh Benefield to get the hell out of here so he could die quietly.

  “She turned me down,” Rosh said.

  It took Jake a moment.

  “I said, she turned me down.”

  “What?”

  “I asked Pastine to marry me and she said no. Nicely, but quite flatly.” Rosh’s poker face broke just a little then, just a flicker. He started to say something else, but the sound died in his throat and he picked up the tumbler and tossed off the rest of the whiskey with a gulp, then sat it down again on the desk with a long, deliberate motion. “Wheee,” he said. “I think Lightnin’ Jim must be straining that stuff through an old horse blanket.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Rosh, I …”

  Rosh waved him to silence, then reached and got the whiskey jar in his meaty hand, unscrewed the cap, and poured three fingers in his glass. He took another big sip and coughed, his eyes watering. “I think she’s got her mind set, Jake.”

  “Huh?”

  Rosh leaned forward, heaving his bulk toward Jake, got up close to his face and breathed a great cloud of whiskey fumes on him. “I think,” he said, “if you would get off your goddamn butt and ask her, she’d have you.”

  Jake stood up, bent over, and kissed Rosh Benefield on the cheek. Then he went straightaway and did what Rosh told him. And she married him.

  They had been married for five delicious months when Pastine decided to build the library — not for their home (though she had filled the place with books and magazines) but for the town.

  Jake Tibbetts was still congratulating himself on his incredible good luck. Pastine had said to him straight off, on their honeymoon in Memphis, “Jake, I want you to know that I will show no modesty in making love to you.” And she didn’t. There was no question that she hadn’t had the slightest experience with it. But she c
ame to the marriage bed delightfully curious, explorative, uninhibited. Jake Tibbetts floated down Partridge Road each morning to the newspaper office, knowing there must be a joyously wicked aura about him that people could see. Surely, he was the only man alive — well, certainly the only man in this straightlaced town — who had a shamelessly lusty wife at home.

  She was a straightforward young woman, to be sure. She had a strong, clear voice that hailed people from across the street, a way of fixing people with her eyes when she spoke that was mildly disconcerting. People were hard-pressed to speak of any Eastern airs cultivated by her schooling; rather, she was if anything too thoroughly democratic in the way she insisted on approaching everyone — man or woman, adult or child, prominent or obscure — with the same unsettling directness. The best they could summon was the notion, discreetly shared, that Pastine Tibbetts was a trifle forward for a young matron. The stuffiest of folk objected most to her opinions, which she hadn’t the good grace to keep to herself.

  There had been no clash at all at the white frame two-story house at the end of Partridge Road where Jake took Pastine to live. Quite the contrary. Emma Tibbetts summarily turned over the management of the house to Pastine and retired permanently to her front porch rocker, glad to be rid of the responsibility of the house and Jake. She also announced that she was giving up the bookkeeping duties at the Free Press and that if Jake wanted to know whether he was going broke or making a living, he would have to do his own figuring. “My Lord,” Jake protested, “I’m a newspaperman, not a business tycoon!” He had no patience for it. So Pastine took over the books, too. She was quick with figures, and one afternoon a week was enough for her to balance the ledger sheets, get the bills out, and do the banking. Jake went right on letting his correspondence stack up on the corner of his desk until Pastine could dispose of it. Pastine kept him organized in his work and happy in his home. She brightened up the house with the intimate touches it had never known — new curtains in their bedroom, a fresh-cut rosebud in a small pewter bud vase on the table just inside the front door. Yes, she had changed his life in every way, quite remarkably. Jake Tibbetts was a satisfied man.

  Then, there was the library. There was none, save for a few shelves of books at the high school. Pastine decided that it was an abominable situation. A town without books courted dim-wittedness and quackery, and she told the Town Council so in person. She had thrown their meeting into an uproar when she rose to ask for the floor. It was the first time in the community’s history that a woman had addressed the council. In fact, it was the first time the members could remember a woman even attending. But Pastine Tibbetts was there, and she was politely determined to be heard; not knowing what else to do, they heard her. She let the Town Council know precisely what she thought about the lack of a town library while the honorables sat slack-jawed and fidgeting in their seats and Jake hunched in a chair in the corner chewing on his cigar, jotting down notes on the folded sheets of newsprint that served for his reporter’s pad, wearing a bemused expression. He recounted the meeting in full, writing that it “was hastily adjourned in some disarray following Mrs. Tibbetts’s presentation.”

  At the end of the week, after the Free Press had hit the street and the town had had time to absorb the novelty of the situation, the council sent Cosmo Redlinger to see him. Cosmo was the council member closest to Jake’s age, a promising young man already established in his father’s funeral home business and now occupying the council seat his father had recently given up. Jake laughed in his face. “You pompous farts looked like a bunch of penguins with your feathers plucked,” Jake said. “That’s Pastine’s business, Cosmo. I don’t tell her how to save the world from sin and ignorance, and she don’t tell me how to run the goddamn newspaper.”

  That was what he told Cosmo Redlinger, but Jake believed otherwise, and he broached the subject with Pastine that night after dinner as they sat in the parlor, Jake polishing Captain Finley Tibbetts’s sword, Pastine reading Harper’s Bazaar.

  “Ahem.” Jake cleared his throat, and she looked at him over the top of the magazine.

  “This, ah, library business,” he said, rubbing the sword briskly, its blade gleaming in the lamplight.

  “Yes?”

  “You, ah,” he laughed, “sure have thrown the Town Council into a tizzy.”

  “Probably.” She went back to her magazine.

  “You, ah, feel pretty strongly about it.”

  Pastine put the magazine down in her lap. “A community without a library is like a church without a hymnbook. The Town Council has a duty to tend to the cultural and intellectual life of the community.”

  “They don’t see it that way,” Jake said. He put the sword down, picked up the scabbard and begin polishing it. “They figure their business is to keep the town safe from ruffians and keep horse droppings off the streets,”

  “A library is no less a matter of the public’s welfare than lawfulness and cleanliness.”

  Jake nodded. “Maybe.”

  “But?”

  “Well…” he hung fire.

  “What’s bothering you, Jake?”

  “It’s, ah … well, the wife of the newspaper editor …”

  “What about it?”

  Jake put the scabbard down on the floor and stood up, facing her. “I try to keep a neutral stance in the community.”

  “For goodness’ sake, why?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “So people can depend on the paper. So they can make up their own minds.”

  “Well,” she said, picking up her magazine again, “you and the newspaper can do what you like. But I intend to see that the issue of the library remains stuck in the craw of the Town Council.”

  Jake could feel the heat rising in his face. “You make my job difficult,” he said. She didn’t answer, and after a while he sat down and finished his work, put the sword back on its hooks above the mantel, and went to bed, miffed and a bit hurt that she had dismissed him so abruptly. But when Pastine came up later, she snuggled in next to him as if nothing had happened, and they made love and he forgot everything.

  Pastine did not. The next Monday afternoon as Jake was slaving over the Linotype, sweat streaming down his face and back and stinging his eyes, the machine in one of its especially temperamental moods, Pastine walked into the back shop and handed him a sheaf of papers.

  “What’s this?” he asked, edging his swivel chair back from the keyboard of the typesetter and glancing over the four pages covered with her neat, economical handwriting.

  “An editorial.”

  Jake handed the papers back to her. “We don’t print editorials.”

  Pastine jutted out her chin. “This is important, Jake. It’s about the library.”

  “We don’t print editorials,” Jake said again, keeping his voice even. “And if we did, that would be my job.”

  Pastine’s eyes flashed. “Don’t you think this town needs a library?”

  “I haven’t thought much about it,” Jake said. He pulled a fresh cigar out of his shirt pocket, bit off the end, took a kitchen match out of his pocket, struck it on the side of the Linotype machine, and lit the cigar. He took his time, concentrating on the work, took several deep puffs to get the cigar going. Then he looked up again at Pastine.

  “Does this newspaper have a social conscience?” she asked.

  “Well,” he drawled around the cigar, “we have a society page, if that’s what you mean.”

  Pastine stamped her foot. “Don’t mock me!” She waved the sheaf of papers in his face. “This town needs a library. Any community that wants to call itself a place of reasonable thought needs a library. And the Town Council just sits there and blinks. Jake, you’re the only means of public expression. You have a duty to speak out.”

  “Oh, no!” he roared, leaping to his feet. “That’s where you’re wrong. The duty of this newspaper is whatever the hell I say it is. And I say its duty is to print facts. That’s all. Facts. The way things are, not the way s
ome do-gooder supposes they ought to be. People will act like idiots and fools, but it is not the job of this newspaper to correct their behavior by foisting its opinions upon them. Now if you want to speak out about the library or the presidential election or the heathen Filipinos or any other cockeyed thing you’ve got on your mind, then stand out there in the street and rave ’til the sun goes down. Assassinate the Town Council if you wish. This newspaper will print a full account of the deed. But we will not editorialize upon it. Or the library. Or anything else. Goddammit!” He ended at the top of his voice and the young printer’s devil he had hired to replace Isaac, working at the back of the shop, dropped a full galley of Linotype slugs onto the floor with a clatter.

  “Don’t you curse and bellow at me, Jake Tibbetts,” Pastine yelled.

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself in my newspaper office,” Jake shot back. .

  They stood there for a long moment glaring at each other. “Then you will not run the editorial?”

  “No,” he said, “I will not run the editorial.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I will buy an advertisement to state my position.”

  “The hell you will. Advertisements are for the purpose of selling goods and services, not pandering propaganda.”

  “You are a stubborn ass, Jake,” she said softly.

  “Guilty on both counts.”

  “You are a provincial, unprogressive, close-minded mule.”

  “Correct again. And I’m one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I am the editor of this goddamn newspaper. Now get the hell out and let me edit. OUT!” He flung his arm in the direction of the front door. She gave him an absolutely murderous look, shook her fist under his nose, and flounced out.