Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Rosh! Hilton!” he bellowed out the open door, and they scrambled out of the car, Rosh lumbering behind Hilton up the sidewalk and into the house.

  “Good Christ!” Hilton said softly, pushing by Jake, crossing the room. He knelt by the chair, examining Henry’s gaping wound. There was a powerful odor of whiskey in the room. The floor beside the chair was slick with vomit.

  “Is he …” Rosh started to say.

  “No,” Hilton said, and then Henry moved a bit in the chair and moaned, opening his mouth just enough to expose a bloody pulp of broken teeth.

  Jake shook himself from his paralysis long enough to peer into the other two rooms of the small house, turning on lights. There was no one there.

  “Henry,” Rosh said tentatively, “Henry, where is Hazel?”

  Henry moaned again and turned his head away from them, cradling it in his arms and drawing his legs up, shivering like a wet dog.

  Jake was on him in two strides, grabbing him by the arm. “Where is she?” he shouted. Henry cried out in pain and jerked his arm back, holding it against his side.

  “Where is Hazel? What have you done with her?”

  “Jake. Hold on there,” Rosh said, but Jake waved him off. He reached down and grabbed Henry by the chin and pulled his face around to the light.

  “Ahhhhhh …” Henry groaned in agony. Jake gave his chin another twist, and finally he said, “Caaaa … caaa …,” the sound bubbling out through the bloody mush of his mouth.

  “The car?” Jake demanded. Henry nodded, his face contorted with pain. “Where?”

  But then Henry’s eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.

  “He’s passed out,” Hilton said, rising.

  “Let’s go,” Jake said.

  “What about Henry?”

  “Leave the sonofabitch where he lies,” Jake said.

  “Jake, for Christ’s sake. He’s hurt pretty bad. Look, we don’t know what’s happened here. Let’s just take one thing at a time.”

  Jake stood rooted to the floor, staring at Henry, loathing him, while Hilton found the telephone and rousted Charlie Ainsworth out of bed.

  “You think we ought to call Ideal and Pastine?” Hilton asked then.

  “No,” Rosh said. “No sense worrying anyone until we know what’s going on.”

  They drove in silence across the Whitewater Creek Bridge and out the state highway toward Taylorsville, and it was Rosh, peering into the hole the headlights carved into the darkness, who saw it first — the strip of plowed-up grass and dirt on the shoulder of the road at the near end of the big looping curve.

  “There,” Rosh cried, and Jake and Hilton saw it at once and knew what it was. Hilton jerked the steering wheel around and stopped the car sideways in the road, headlights pointing toward the furrowed gash and the blackness beyond where the shoulder dropped off abruptly.

  They piled out of the car, Hilton carrying a huge silver flashlight. When he cut on the beam, it took a huge slice out of the blackness below the shoulder of the road and showed them in terrible detail the crumpled, still-steaming hunk of metal that had been Rosh Benefield’s Packard. It was clear what had happened. The car had missed the curve, its wheels biting hungrily into the grassy shoulder, slewing it sideways until the wheels clawed nothing but air. Then it somersaulted fifty feet down the embankment toward the red clay of the gully below and smashed with such awful force that it snapped a foot-thick pine tree like a matchstick and rammed the car’s engine completely back into the passenger compartment.

  “Hazel!” Rosh screamed. “Hazel!” But there was no sound in the cool night air except the methodical hiss of liquid dropping onto the hot engine block.

  “I can’t go down there,” Rosh cried in anguish, and it took Jake a moment to realize he meant that he was physically unable, with his huge bulk, to make it down the bank. So Jake and Hilton left him there on the shoulder of the road, moaning and hugging himself, while they scrambled down, grabbing at clumps of grass to steady themselves. The tortured smell of battered metal and burned rubber and death rose up to choke them.

  At the bottom, where it leveled off, Hilton grabbed Jake by the arm and jerked him up short; then Jake could smell the gasoline. A lot of it. They could hear it dripping steadily from the ruptured tank. “It could go up any minute,” Hilton said softly. Hilton swept the car from rear to front with the white-hot beam of the flashlight, resting finally on what had once been Hazel Benefield, a shredded pulp in green taffeta. She had gone through the windshield and had smacked headfirst into the pine tree, and then the car had caved in on top of her.

  Jake stared, paralyzed. Then he heard Hilton retching beside him, and above them, Rosh’s high wailing sob, keening like a woman. Hilton threw up for a long time and then he looked up at Jake, tears streaming down his anguished face. “God, Jake,” he sobbed. “God. Oh, God. Rosh. It’ll kill him.”

  Jake nodded dumbly. “Henry did this,” he said, and it seemed the words came from somewhere far off.

  Hilton shook his head. “Nobody knows.”

  “Henry does,” Jake said.

  Jake never told anyone what Hilton did to spare Rosh Benefield the agony of what oozed from the green taffeta dress on the blasted hood of the Packard. After he and Jake had climbed back up the bank and helped huge, broken Rosh into the police car, Hilton disappeared for a moment into the thicket on the high side of the road and came back with a pine knot, then took out his cigarette lighter and held the flame under the pine for a long moment until it caught, and hurled the flaming piece of wood into the gully. There was a tremendous roar as the gasoline caught and the fading night erupted like midday and Rosh, who was crumpled in the front seat, raised his head and said, “What was that?”

  Jake cradled him in his arms like a baby. “It blew up, Rosh. There was a lot of gasoline around. It just blew up.”

  Henry never told them what happened. He said he couldn’t remember. Not the wreck, not what had gone on in the car before. They could only guess. For Jake Tibbetts, the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that Henry had killed his wife through his drunken blind stupidity, and what’s more, had run away from it. Jake disowned him.

  Rosh and Ideal Benefield were devastated. When they came out of seclusion a month after the funeral, Ideal was in a furious frenzy and she turned it on Pastine Tibbetts. Ideal was by now, as the mayor’s wife and through the force of her own dominating personality, an arbiter of the town’s social code. Ideal and Jake had locked horns before, but now she went after Pastine. And Pastine quietly capitulated. She resigned her memberships in the Study Club and the Methodist Missionary Society, her place on the Library Board. Jake was enraged, but she wouldn’t talk about it.

  “I’m not getting any younger. It’s time somebody else did it,” was all she would say.

  It was as if the fight had gone out of her, after all the years of struggling and agonizing. She was tired. She wrapped a cocoon of quiet about her in the house on Partridge Road, closing off the world as if she had closed the shutters. They seldom spoke of Henry. It was simply something they had ceased to share as a part of their lives together, and that — the fact that there was something, no matter how painful, they could no longer share — was tragedy enough.

  Henry became a sodden wreck. He was dead drunk when he joined the National Guard unit, and the government did them all a favor by mobilizing Henry’s unit on the eve of Pearl Harbor. When he shipped out, leaving Lonnie with Jake and Pastine, Jake hadn’t seen him for almost two years.

  It was a year after the accident before Rosh Benefield and Jake exchanged more than a cursory word in passing. Then Rosh showed up late one Wednesday afternoon at the newspaper office just as Jake returned from delivering the weekly edition to the post office, brown paper sack under his arm, looking older and fatter and frayed. They resumed their weekly ritual and they never spoke of Henry and Hazel, or of their wives. It was enough to know that each had suffered in his own unspeakable way, and that none of them wo
uld ever be the same again.

  Two

  JAKE TIBBETTS WAS still trembling with fright and humiliation when he arrived at the courthouse square on Christmas morning, 1944. He had decided, as he hightailed it down Partridge Road, that no woman who chased him out of his own home and tried to cut off his head with his own grandfather’s sword would tell him where to live. He goddamn well would not go to live at the newspaper, at least not straightaway.

  How the hell was a man supposed to live at a newspaper office, anyway? There was no place to eat, sleep, or bathe in a newspaper office. It was a business establishment, not a habitation. Living at the newspaper would be as ridiculous as living at the Jitney Jungle Super Saver Store or the dry cleaner’s. Better he should set up housekeeping at Redlinger’s mortuary than at the Free Press.

  The only alternative he could think of on the spur of the moment was the Regal Hotel, which was mostly a boardinghouse, filled with itinerant preachers and traveling drummers and 4-f farmhands who had come to town for the scandalous wages at the Harsole Bingham Bolt Company. Jake wanted nothing to do with a fleabag.

  So Jake Tibbetts came to the courthouse square on Christmas morning with no place to reside except in his overcoat. The square was deserted, the courthouse a raw, red, wind-chapped sentinel guarding the boarded-up front of Brunson’s Cafe and the dignified darkness of the Farmers Mercantile Bank and the lighted window upstairs over the bank, where Ollie Whittle’s radio station was playing Christmas music. He felt himself watched by the awning-lidded eyes of the drugstore and the barbershop, whose candy-striped pole was the only splash of Christmas color downtown this year.

  In the years before the war, multicolored lights were strung between the electric power poles on the square — a marvelous twinkling of reds and greens and yellows and blues, a sight to make your spirit tingle. But in the panicky days of December 1941 — after the Japs had blasted Pearl Harbor — Tunstall Renfroe, newly appointed air raid warden, had ordered them all taken down.

  “Can you imagine,” Tunstall said, “the target we’d make with the square all lit up like the World’s Fair? We’re sitting ducks! Just asking for it!”

  “Besides,” Biscuit Brunson added, “the spirit of Christmas is in here,” he thumped his chest, “not strung up on poles.”

  So they had taken down the lights, but not before Jake had had his way with them in his front-page column:

  This newspaper is reliably informed that Santa Claus is considering a cancellation of his appointed rounds this year because the enterprise is so fraught with danger.

  The Old Elf is quoted as saying he does not mind vying for airspace with German Junkers and Japanese Bettys, but the alarmed citizenry hereabouts has compounded his usual navigational problems by removing the colored lights around the County Courthouse that serve as his favorite landmark.

  Santa is an elderly gentleman and his mission is difficult at best. He has, we are informed, no relish for making it more so by having to bump about in the dark, risking life and limb and precious cargo.

  He was heard to exclaim, the last time he drove out of sight, “God save us from air raid wardens!”

  The column caused a commotion, and copies of the paper were hidden from the town’s young. It provoked heated debate over coffee at Brunson’s Cafe and caused a meeting of the Town Council to dissolve in uproar. But soon the issue was moot. Christmas had come and gone and the next year nobody bothered because by then the war was full-blown and grim and no one seemed to fancy colored lights on the courthouse square.

  It broke Herschel Martin’s heart, because the Christmas lights, along with the banana tree that was now just a winter-browned stub against the red wall of the courthouse, had been Herschel’s pride. He spent most of the year fussing over the lights, checking the bulbs and connections. Then the day after Thanksgiving he would supervise the stringing of the wires, dashing back and forth from one side of the square to the other on his Jitney Jungle delivery cycle.

  Now, on this Christmas morning, there was only a small committee of grackles huddled on the electric wires at the edge of the courthouse lawn, not a single car in the parking spaces that paralleled the curbs on either side of the street.

  Jake stood on the corner by the barbershop for a moment, wondering where the hell he would stay the night. He decided that the matter needed some careful consideration. So he headed for Lightnin’ Jim Haskell’s house.

  Lightnin’ Jim’s was a small white frame house that presided over the part of town they called Haskell’s Quarter. White folks mostly called it “the Quarter,” but they recognized it as Lightnin’ Jim’s domain, where he ruled as arbiter, rector, and patriarch. White folks went to the Quarter to pick up their maids or buy Jim’s whiskey, but they didn’t meddle in his business. Most of the houses in the Quarter were unpainted, their boards warped and weathered gray, the roofs tarpapered, the yards hard-packed clay that would turn to goo when it rained. Jim’s place had a fresh coat of white and a neatly trimmed little patch of grass in front, brown now with winter, rimmed by carefully spaced whitewashed rocks. There were thick nandina bushes, heavy with red berries, on either side of the front steps. There was a screen porch across the entire front of the house.

  Jake knocked at the screen door. Rule Number One. You did not go onto Lightnin’ Jim’s screen porch unless you were invited. If you stepped onto the porch without invitation, Lightnin’ Jim figured you were up to no good and he would shoot you dead. He had dispatched one of the Quarter’s ruffians that way, and that’s all it had taken to establish the rule. There was no sign on the porch, but everyone — black and white — knocked first.

  After a moment the door to the house itself opened and Jake peered through the screen. “Yas?” A woman’s voice. Young and throaty.

  “Is Jim here?” Rule Number Two. You did business with no one but Jim. Try to transact with someone else on the premises and Jim would cut you off, which was as bad as shooting you dead.

  “You mean Mr. Haskell.” A soft laugh, teasing.

  “I mean that decrepit bag of bones Lightnin’ Jim Haskell who sells rotgut whiskey,” Jake said, raising his voice.

  Then he could hear another voice, deep and rumbling, inside the house. “Shut the door, bitch woman.”

  The door closed abruptly and in a moment the curtain on one of the front windows was pulled back an inch or so. There was a long pause and the door opened again.

  “Come in the house, Jake.” Rule Number Three. If Lightnin’ Jim invited you into his house, you were among the elite. Most customers he served on the front porch. Some — black and white — he made come to the back of the house. Jim had established a hierarchy, based entirely on whether he liked you or not.

  It was a small neat room, neat despite the piles of magazines everywhere — on the floor, on the mantel above the fireplace with its coal fire flickering in the grate, on the lamp tables, filling two-thirds of the space on the brown sofa — splashes of color in the warm brownness of the room. Thick stacks of Life and Look with their black-and-white war photo covers, Saturday Evening Post with its puckish Norman Rockwell characters, Collier’s, and yellow-spined National Geographic. There was just the sofa and a butt-sprung brown easy chair and Jake took the empty space on the sofa, resting one elbow on a stack of Scribner’s, noticing a 1938 date on the top issue. It was a tight little house. The room was warm. An ancient clock, nestled among the magazines on the mantel, passed time methodically.

  “Not a newspaper in the place,” Jake said. “The goddamn floor sags from the weight of all these magazines, but not a single newspaper. Don’t you care about what’s going on in the world?”

  Lightnin’ Jim was ancient. He shuffled in slopped-over bedroom slippers, flannel shirt and thin gray trousers hanging from his bony shoulders and hips, ruined face a mass of creases beneath a magnificent explosion of wiry white hair. He picked up an open magazine from the seat of the easy chair, turned down a page to mark his place, then dropped it softly onto the threadbare
rug beside the chair and sat down. He waved a hand weakly.

  “Newspapers are triflin’ things,” he said. “Newspapers are full of gossip and slander. There’s nothing uplifting about a newspaper. My woman back there reads the newspaper.”

  Jake could hear, behind the closed door of the next room, the throaty young voice of the woman and the soft babble of a child and a radio playing Christmas music. And there was the exotic smell of collards cooking in pork fat, mixed with the rich dusky aroma of Negroness.

  “Don’t you care what’s going on out there in the world? Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Tunstall Renfroe says we could be bombed tomorrow.”

  “And what can a pore nigger bootlegger do about the war?” Lightnin’ Jim laughed a short, dry laugh. “Let ’em bomb. I’ll be here. They hit this place, they’ll just ruin a lot of good whiskey and tear up a lot of magazines. But I’ll be here, just the same. Newspaper won’t do me no good. By the time the war gets to the magazines, it’s done passed by enough so you can get a good look at it. Newspapers just deals with trifles. They’s nothing uplifting in a newspaper. Just triflin’ stuff. Magazines, now, they take time to uplift a man.”

  Jake picked up a copy of Look from a stack at the end of the sofa and read, “ ‘New York’s Daring New Fashion Look.’ Now that’s real uplifting.”

  Lightnin’ Jim shrugged. “All those magazines is printed by white folks,” he dismissed it. “You can’t keep white folks from triflin’ altogether.” Then he turned and called, “Hey, woman,” and in a moment the door to the adjacent room opened and the woman was there, and a small boy at her knees, staring at Jake.