Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Don’t you ever!” she cried, clutching the astonished Henry to her breast.

  “Goddamn!” Jake roared. “The little sonofabitch put my eye out!”

  “Don’t you curse! Don’t you dare curse! Don’t you call this baby a sonofabitch!” Pastine was near hysterics now.

  The pain was excruciating. Jake slumped on the sofa, holding his hand over his eye while Pastine stormed from the room and pounded up the stairs. He sat for a long time, hoping it would stop hurting, but when it didn’t, he finally left the house and walked the mile and a half to Charlie Ainsworth’s, tears streaming from the injured eye.

  “Nothing serious, but my God, what in the hell did you tangle with?” Charlie said when he looked at it.

  “Henry,” Jake muttered.

  “Henry?”

  “Yeah. I picked him up and the little bugger bashed me in the eye.” Jake looked at him plaintively. “Charlie, he’s the meanest kid I’ve ever seen.”

  “Hell, Jake, it’s just a stage,” Charlie said.

  And it was, but it was just the beginning of many stages. As a child of five and six, Henry was sullen and uncooperative. For days, he refused to eat. He would get frighteningly pale and weak, and just when they were ready to take him to Taylorsville to the hospital, he would suddenly break his fast as if nothing had happened. They would go for weeks with no problem and then Henry would sit down at the kitchen table for a meal and look across at them over his full plate and his eyes would glaze over and he would go on strike again. Jake would yell and threaten, Pastine would wheedle and cajole, and Henry would go right on doing what he damn well pleased until he was damn well ready to eat again.

  In his elementary school years, he was bright enough, but he disrupted his classes with the same obstinate behavior and was constantly in dutch with his teachers. He was whipped, lectured, and occasionally sent home. But he simply stared at them with a stubborn set to his little jaw and went on about his business. He wasn’t mean, he didn’t fight, he had friends. He didn’t seem especially angry at anyone, not even at Jake, who tried mightily to make him toe the line. But he played his own tune and to hell with the rest of the world. When Jake fussed, Henry simply clammed up and hunkered down inside himself. He never cried.

  In adolescence, he stopped giving anybody a hard time. He simply stopped giving a damn. Jake tried to interest him in the newspaper, but it was a disaster. Henry was all thumbs in the print shop. He dropped things, broke things, messed up printing jobs and machinery. He stood for hours in front of a box of hand-set type, looking at a diagram of the box Jake had made and slowly, piece by agonizing piece, setting a headline with half the letters upside down, never learning the layout of the box so that he could do it quickly and deftly. Jake had hated the paper in his own adolescence, but nevertheless he had learned the layout of a type box in a single afternoon.

  Finally, one day as he watched Henry going through the agonizingly slow motions of setting type for an advertisement, Jake walked over and took the stick of type out of his hand and said, “Henry, why don’t you go home.” Henry turned and looked at him, gave him a tight little smile, took off his shop apron, and walked out.

  “I can’t talk to him,” Jake complained to Pastine. “He never says anything back. He just stands there and looks at me as if I’ve got antlers growing out of my head.”

  “You preach, Jake,” she answered. “Just talk to him. Don’t preach. Do you ever ask him a question?”

  “Hell, yes. I ask him questions all the time. I try to find out what’s inside that head and he just mumbles. Yes or no, that’s about all I get.”

  “But you preach a lot, too,” she said.

  “How the hell will he ever learn any of the things a father is supposed to teach his son if I don’t tell him?”

  “Just let him watch,” she said. “He’ll pick it up.”

  “Hah!” Jake exploded. “Like I did.”

  Jake was confounded. What had he done to make this son of his a rebellious idiot? What had he ever done except try to make Henry, at every difficult step of the way, learn to take responsibility for himself? That wasn’t too much to ask, was it? He was haunted by the specter of his own father, Albertis, pacing the floor of his upstairs room in the grip of melancholia while Jake stumbled through his boyhood trying to find his own way. Henry would not be like that, by God. Henry would have some idea of what a man did to fend for himself and take his life in his own hands. But nothing seemed to sink in. Henry was just one big aching disappointment in the pit of Jake Tibbetts’s soul.

  As for Pastine, she simply stayed with it.

  “My God,” Jake told her, “you hover over him like he’s going to fly away. Give him some room. Don’t spoil the boy.”

  “I’m not spoiling him,” she answered quietly. “He just takes more work than most. We’ve just got to have patience, Jake.”

  And she was patient. She focused the same relentless energy on raising Henry that she had brought to having him in the first place. He tried her to the point of absolute exasperation, but she plodded on, coaxing, bullying, cajoling. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. But she didn’t give up. She became incredibly weary with it. She gave up many of her community activities and gave herself over to ornery, difficult Henry.

  Between the two of them, Pastine and Jake, Henry became a hard sore spot, a canker that would not heal. They argued frequently and acidly, and Jake could feel something essential going out of his marriage. There was a distance between them now, a gulf across which they could not touch — for Jake, a source of deep, bitter resentment.

  When Henry finally found something he was truly interested in, it was Hazel Benefield.

  She was eighteen, a senior, when sixteen-year-old Henry discovered her. He followed her about the halls of the high school like a small dog and she ignored him at first while her girlfriends giggled and the senior boys mocked him, barking as he passed, oblivious. And then to everyone’s astonishment, Hazel Benefield — the sauciest and most popular girl in the senior class — decided she liked Henry Tibbetts, for gosh sakes. And she began to devour him.

  Henry became meekly obedient around the house, took to keeping himself and his room neat, silently did what he was told, kept his grades up. But he had a glazed, slack-jawed look about him. He slept fitfully. They could hear him moving about in his room in the middle of the night like a haunted spirit. He left the house early every morning to walk Hazel to school and returned late every afternoon glassy-eyed and exhausted. And he absolutely refused to talk about Hazel Benefield with either of them.

  “He’s sick,” Pastine said, genuinely alarmed. “Don’t you think he’s sick?”

  “I’d call it an advanced catatonic state,” Jake answered, relieved that something had finally jolted Henry.

  “No. Don’t pass it off like that, Jake. It’s not healthy. It’s not just that Hazel Benefield is two years older than he is. She’s … she’s … well, she just knows too much.”

  In Jake and Pastine’s presence, Hazel Benefield was a model of demure girlhood. But she had a way of taking Henry’s arm possessively, her eyes dancing with a secret mischief, while Henry turned pale. Pastine was right, Jake thought to himself. This girl knew too much. Certainly, too much for Henry Tibbetts.

  They thought it would end when Hazel went off to college the next fall, but it didn’t. The letters passed in the mail every day — one arriving, one leaving. And Henry was in agony. Whatever Hazel was doing at school, they suspected she was teasing Henry by long distance. He burned the letters as soon as he read them. He lost weight, became gaunt and hollow-eyed.

  “You’re right,” Jake said. “He’s sick. This is serious.”

  “It’s like a disease,” Pastine said, her hands clenched tightly in her lap, her brow creased with worry.

  “We can intercept the mail,” he said. “Both ways.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “He’ll find another way.”

  “I can have a talk with R
osh.”

  “And tell him what? That his daughter is making a zombie out of our son?”

  Jake sat there for a long time next to her on the parlor sofa, staring at the floor. Then finally he raised his head and said, “Pastine, Henry has been making a goddamn fool of himself in one way or another since he was old enough to hold his head up. The one thing about it is, he always graduates from being one kind of fool to being another.”

  “Jake,” she said, clutching his hands in her own, “don’t give up on him.”

  Jake couldn’t answer her, because in a way, he already had.

  But then it changed. Hazel went to visit a cousin in Minnesota during the summer after her freshman year, the letters stopped, and Henry came out of it. He seemed older, stronger, as if whatever Hazel Benefield had done with him had left a tough callus. Jake saw it, but he left Henry alone, having decided by now that the boy would have to come to grips with himself.

  In the spring of his senior year, Henry announced at the dinner table one night that he wanted to go to the state university in the fall.

  Jake stopped in midbite, his fork poised above his plate. “And study what?”

  “Psychology.”

  Jake put his fork down. “Horse manure.”

  “Jake …” Pastine started, but Jake waved her to silence.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because I’m interested in it,” Henry said, meeting his eyes.

  Jake picked up his napkin out of his lap, wiped his mouth, and laid it beside his plate. “Psychology is the study of why people make fools of themselves.”

  Henry nodded, a touch of a sardonic smile around his mouth. “Yes. That’s part of it.”

  “What’s the rest?”

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. “That’s what I want to find out.”

  “Well, I will send you to that great citadel of higher learning if that’s where you want to go,” Jake said. “But I will not send you there to study psychology.”

  It was the first argument Jake and Pastine ever had about money. Pastine’s money. She had enough to send Henry to college, she let him know straight off when they were alone in the parlor later. Henry Cahoon had bestowed a dowry of ten thousand dollars on Pastine when she married Jake, but Jake refused to have anything to do with it. “If a man can’t support his wife,” he said, “he’s got no damn business getting married.” So they had agreed that what Pastine did with her money was her business and Jake was never to hear of it. He suspected that the three-thousand-dollar founding contribution to the library had come from her private funds, but they never spoke of it.

  Henry Cahoon had died when Jake and Pastine had been married for ten years, and by then he had built his stump puller business into a modest enterprise. Pastine was the only heir. She tried to talk to Jake about her inheritance, but he refused. “I’m no business tycoon,” he said. “Go see Rosh Benefield.” She did, and Henry Cahoon’s business was sold to two young locals, Oscar Harsole and Rupert Bingham, who transformed it over the years into the Harsole Bingham Bolt Company. It was the town’s largest employer. The only remote benefit Jake Tibbetts had ever seen from it was the yearly two-column-by-three-inch advertisement Harsole Bingham took in the Free Press to wish its employees a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. How much money Pastine got from the sale or what she did with it, Jake never knew — didn’t want to know. But now, she was telling him she was going to use part of it to send Henry to college.

  “No, you won’t,” Jake said, tight-lipped. “I’ll send Henry to college.”

  “No, you won’t,” she said. “You just said you wouldn’t.”

  “I said I wouldn’t send him up there to study why people make fools of themselves.”

  “Well, that’s what he wants to study.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t even know anything about it.”

  “I know…”

  “Nothing,” she interrupted, wagging a finger at him. “You are a fine, perceptive newspaper editor, Jake, but about many things you are plainly ignorant. And concerning those things about which you are ignorant, you are mule-headed.”

  “It seems we’ve had this conversation before,” Jake said, grinning. “Want to take your clothes off?”

  “Don’t mock me!” she snapped. “And don’t try to out-talk me, either. You’re bad about that, Jake. Sometimes you talk and talk and talk until you just wear me down and I wonder afterward what it was you said that was so persuasive. And then I realize there wasn’t anything persuasive, it was just the weight of all those words that finally did me in. Well, this time I won’t be talked out of it.”

  There was a long, long silence as they stared at each other across the parlor — he on the sofa his grandfather had slashed with the Confederate sword, she in the wing-backed chair where Albertis had once sat, mocking Jake’s own plans for college. Engineering it had been. Something useful.

  “Psychology,” he said. And then he got up and went to bed.

  So Henry went off to college to study psychology. When he had been there for six months, he married Hazel Benefield.

  The telephone. Calling him like a thief from sleep in the dead of night. He stumbled downstairs, cursing Pastine for having insisted on a telephone in the house, where it could violate a man’s privacy at a forsaken hour.

  “Yeah,” he said into the receiver.

  “Jake?”

  “Who the hell else?”

  “Rosh here. Are the kids with you?”

  His mind worked sluggishly, like a swimmer fighting through murk.

  “Henry and Hazel,” Rosh said. “Are they there?”

  “No. I don’t think so.” Jake laid the receiver down, walked to the front door, peered out. The yard was empty and still in the moonlight.

  “No. They’re not here.”

  He could hear Rosh’s heavy breathing on the other end, the deep noisy breath of a fat man. “They went to a dance in Taylorsville. They should have been back by now.”

  “What time is it?” Jake had left his pocket watch on the bedside table upstairs.

  “Three o’clock. Ideal just woke me up. We thought they might have gone to your house.”

  “Did you try to call their place?”

  “No answer over there,” Rosh said. “They’ve been gone almost eight hours, Jake.”

  “Where’s Lonnie?” Jake was awake now, awake enough to feel the dread beginning to build in his gut.

  “He’s here. They left him with us about seven.”

  “Where was the dance?”

  “Taylorsville.”

  “I know. But where?”

  “The National Guard Armory, I think. That’s where they have all the dances in Taylorsville.”

  “Have you tried calling over there?”

  “No,” Rosh said. “I thought I’d call you first, just to see, you know.”

  “Yeah. Well, do you want me to call Taylorsville?”

  “No,” Rosh said, “I’ll do it. I’ll call the police station over there, see if they’ve had any word.”

  “Okay. Call me back.” Jake hung up and sat down on the stairway to wait. Henry and Hazel. The thought of them made him bone-weary. Hazel was crazy — probably certifiably so — and Henry was a bigger goddamn fool now than he had ever been. Together they were the most chaotic mess he had ever seen. They had come home from college in Henry’s junior year with Hazel pregnant and Henry in an absolute fog, like a man shipwrecked. Ideal insisted they move in with the Benefields, but that lasted until Lonnie was born and Hazel’s constant whining and bitching drove Ideal to distraction. So Rosh and Jake had found them a small three-room house and made the down payment and moved them in. They had been there for four years now and their screaming fights had become a town scandal. Lonnie spent a lot of time with his grandparents. Henry had been through two jobs — as a shipping clerk at Harsole Bingham and as a burial insurance salesman — and had failed miserably at both. At the moment he was looking, and in 1936, looking for a jo
b was no piece of cake. Henry and Hazel could barely buy groceries, and here they were going to a dance in Taylorsville. They were wretched. Hopeless.

  The phone rang again and Jake snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “Nothing,” Rosh said.

  “Okay. Rosh, come get me and we’ll try to find ’em.”

  “But they’ve got my car,” Rosh said.

  Jake thought a moment. “Call Hilton Redlinger, then. You’re the mayor. Get him up and get him rolling. The two of you come get me.”

  It was still very dark when they picked him up in front of the house. He had left Pastine sleeping. She had never awakened, even when the telephone jangled downstairs. It was cool with the first hint of autumn, the sound of Hilton’s police car and their voices swallowed by the last remnants of night. They drove first past Henry and Hazel’s small house. It was dark and there was no car at the curb in front. Henry owned a ruin of a Model A Ford, but it was parked behind Fog Martin’s service station these days, waiting for Henry to scrape together enough money to get the block re-bored. When Henry and Hazel needed transportation, they borrowed Rosh’s Packard, as they had done this night.

  They cruised the town for a while, searching the square and the side streets, then lurching through the potholed streets of Haskell’s Quarter, where Lightnin’ Jim and the other Negroes lived. Nothing.

  “Maybe they had car trouble on the way home,” Hilton said.

  “Yes,” Rosh said. “The car’s in good shape, but anything can happen.”

  “You want to drive a ways out Taylorsville Road and see if we can find ’em?” Hilton asked.

  “Before we do that,” Jake said, “swing back by their house. Just in case they’ve come in.”

  There was no sign of them, but Jake had Hilton stop the car and he got out and walked up the buckled sidewalk to the front door, feeling a rush of anger at the unkempt grass and Lonnie’s scooter, one wheel gone, lying against the front steps. He tried the door. It was unlocked and he pushed it open, stepped into the house, fumbled along the wall next to the door for the light switch, found it with his hand, flipped it on, and saw Henry sprawled in a chair in the darkness, head slumped to one side, covered with more blood than Jake had ever seen. It scared the hell out of him. He thought at first that Henry was dead, thought crazily of his own safety, half expected Hazel to rush in from another room and slash him with whatever instrument had opened the terrible gash across Henry’s forehead.