Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Bring us a cordial,” Lightnin’ Jim said. She turned away, leaving the door ajar, and the boy stood there. “Come,” Jim said, patting his knee, and the boy scrambled into Jim’s lap, nestling up against him, still looking at Jake, eyes bright and bold, very curious. Jake could see the resemblance, the faint residue of the ruined old face in the very young one.

  “What’s your name?” Jake asked.

  “Jim Haskell,” the boy said.

  Another Lightnin’ Jim, Jake thought, to carry on the business the way generations of Jim’s family had done. There had been a Lightnin’ Jim in his grandfather’s day, serving that generation out of the predecessor to this neat white frame house, passing along the secrets to the next and the next. Mostly, the secret of where they got the whiskey. It was not raw moonshine and it was not rotgut bootleg, either. It had some age on it, a bouquet and a patina that suggested a reverence for the passage of time. There was always the whiskey and there was always a Lightnin’ Jim.

  “You teaching him the business yet?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Lightnin’ Jim shook his head. “Not this one.”

  “You got other boys?”

  “He’s the only one. Only one left. There was another one some time ago, but he wasn’t a whiskey man. He drank too much of it. This one, he’s going into real estate.” The boy burrowed deeper into the crook of Jim’s arm.

  “Here?”

  “No. Buffalo, New York.”

  “What kind of real estate?”

  “Mine. And his.”

  “Good Lord,” Jake said softly. He could see it all of a sudden, how Lightnin’ Jim had taken the money they had paid him for his good whiskey and sent it north, and he could imagine what it had bought — store buildings, two-story tenements, vacant lots. Good, solid real estate that a black man could quietly own and that would blossom in value in a place like Buffalo, New York, under the hand of a bright-eyed young Jim Haskell with a degree from someplace like Cornell or Columbia where Negroes were being accepted now.

  “How’d you do it?” Jake asked.

  “I got good advice,” Jim said.

  Jake laughed, thinking of his grandfather wading with his slashing saber through the gore of Cemetery Ridge while the first Lightnin’ Jim Haskell learned to make whiskey on some white man’s doomed plantation. Then he remembered very vividly his grandfather at the dining table, thundering, “The Confederacy didn’t fight over slaves. Not a tenth of the men who rode at my side ever owned a Nigra. We fought because we were trifled with. We fought for the honor of it!” He could almost feel his grandfather in the room with them — the powerful rumble of his voice, the gamy smell of his cigars and whiskey, the angry batting of his bushy eyebrows. It was a memory like a body long buried and suddenly unearthed, and it took Jake’s breath for a second.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Jake said. “Why Buffalo, New York?”

  “I like the sound of the place,” Jim said simply.

  “What about your business?”

  Jim laughed his little short, dry laugh again. It bubbled up like water out of dry, cracked ground. “Don’t worry yourself, Jake. I’ll be around awhile yet. Even if I wasn’t, folks find a way to get what they want.”

  The woman came back then with a crystal decanter and two tumblers on a green metal tray, the decanter half-filled with golden whiskey, crystal facets reflecting flickers of the coal fire in the grate. The very look of it made Jake warm and for the first time that morning he could feel the knot of anger and hurt in his gut beginning to loosen.

  Lightnin’ Jim poured elegantly from the decanter while his wife held the tray, filling the tumblers a third of the way and handing one to Jake. Then he settled back, the boy still on his lap, and raised his glass. “Merry Christmas to you, Jake Tibbetts.”

  “And to you, Jim Haskell. To your health and good sense.”

  They sipped at the smooth, strong whiskey and talked, and Jake could feel the room closing in around him like a warm blanket, keeping time with the ticking of the mantel clock, the smell of the whiskey keeping the vivid image of his grandfather strong in his mind, holding him halfway between distant past and contemplated future where a young black man named Jim Haskell traded in real estate in Buffalo, New York.

  He dozed, and when he woke, his mind was heavy with sleep and accumulated fatigue and the poison of anger and the narcotic of the whiskey. His eyes snapped open and he looked around in confusion for a moment. Jim was still sitting in the battered easy chair across from him, slowly turning the pages of a magazine, whiskey tumbler empty on the table at his elbow. The boy was gone.

  Seeing him awake, Jim closed the magazine and placed it on the table.

  Jake felt a flush of embarrassment. He blurted out, “Pastine tried to kill me this morning!” Jim just stared at him. “She tried to cut my head off with my grandfather’s sword,” he went on. “She stood at the top of the steps and swung that sword around so hard she took an inch-deep hunk out of the porch column. Another six inches and she would have killed me.” He stopped, stared into the tumbler still clutched in his hands. There was a quarter-inch of amber liquid still in the bottom. He drank it quickly and the gulp of whiskey burned his throat as it went down. Lightnin’ Jim was still watching him, inscrutable as a prune-faced Buddha. “Henry sent a new wife home. She showed up at midnight on the front porch, ripe as a melon, and went upstairs and had a baby girl. The sonofabitch killed one wife and now he sends another one home ten months pregnant and us not even sure the baby’s his. Now Pastine wants me to go upstairs and say how-d’ye-do and welcome and everything’s all right.” The words tumbled out and Jake could feel the heat rising in his cheeks, the anger welling up in him again. “Well, I’ll be goddamned if I’ll do it. I’ll just be goddamned …” He broke off, embarrassed again, and sat for a moment huddled down deep inside the overcoat he had never taken off.

  “White folks,” Jim said, as if he were spitting on the floor. “White folks tell me all their business. I coulda been a rich man offa gossip alone. I s’pose you figure a bootleg nigger ain’t gonna tell on you. Well, you’re right. But this bootleg nigger knows what kind of fools they is walking around wearing white faces. Jake Tibbetts and all the rest.” He sneered. “White folks too goddamn smart to be careful. White folks is triflin’. Like newspapers.”

  Jake got up and placed his tumbler on the table next to Jim Haskell’s own and gathered his overcoat about him.

  Jim sat there and looked up at him for a moment and then asked, “You want whiskey?”

  Jake nodded, and Jim called to his woman, who came with a pint jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best from the dark secret recesses of the house. Jake pulled two rumpled dollar bills from his pants pocket and handed them to Jim, then bade them good day and went back to his newspaper, where he spent the night curled up on a stack of newsprint, well insulated from the cold.

  The banging on the back door waked him and he sat upright with a groan, stiff and aching, his head throbbing from the first hangover he could remember in years. My God, he thought, I’ve drunk enough of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best to fill Whitewater Creek, and I’ve never had it do me like this. Either that whiskey nigger was putting out some bad stuff, or else Jake Tibbetts was getting old. He was cold down to his bones and he could feel a raw tickle at the back of his throat that he knew would have him wheezing and coughing and dripping within twenty-four hours.

  The banging was louder now. “Awright, goddammit!” he bellowed as he swung his feet down off the stack of newsprint and wrapped his overcoat tight around his body, shivering and miserable. He stood, but the room swam around him and his stomach lurched sickeningly. Jake leaned back against the stack, gripping the edges of it with his hands until things began to settle down. He breathed deeply and stood upright again, then shuffled through the press room to the back door, unbolted it, swung it open.

  It was Lonnie, bundled against the cold in his flannel jacket, nose and ears red, holding a paper sack. The back alley was empty and
quiet. Jake remembered. It was the morning after Christmas. Lonnie thrust the sack toward him. “I brought you some stuff,” he said.

  “Your Mama Pastine know you’re here?”

  “Nosir.”

  Jake reached in his pants pocket and pulled out his watch and squinted at it. Eight-thirty. He stared at Lonnie for a moment, blinking painfully in the morning sunlight, then shoved the door wide open. “Well, come on in out of the cold.”

  Lonnie followed him through the press room and the back shop, their footsteps echoing in the emptiness, into the front office, where Jake opened the blinds on the front windows and then sat heavily in the chair at his desk.

  “It’s cold in here,” Lonnie said, setting the paper sack on the edge of the desk.

  “Yeah,” Jake said, then got up and lit the kerosene stove in the corner of the office, fumbling with the matches and muttering at the tart smell of the kerosene that made the bile rise in his throat. He could feel Lonnie’s eyes on his back. The burner on the stove finally caught and Jake turned back to Lonnie. “What you got there?” he pointed to the sack.

  “Underwear, mostly.”

  “Underwear.”

  Lonnie shrugged. “I figured you’d get persnickety about your underwear. Besides, Mama Pastine says if you don’t change your underwear, your bottom will rot off.”

  Jake reached over and opened the sack and pulled out the items: five pairs of boxer shorts; five undershirts; a pair of suspenders; Jake’s shaving mug, brush, straight razor, and strop; a pair of summer-weight gray pants; a porcelain-handled hairbrush; two cigars. He placed it all in a neat pile on his desk, then sat back in the chair and folded his hands in his lap and looked at it for a moment. Lonnie stood there, silent, expectant.

  “What happened yesterday, I don’t want you to worry about that,” Jake said after a moment.

  Lonnie didn’t say anything.

  “I love your Mama Pastine, you know that?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Even after yesterday, you understand?”

  “Yessir.”

  “She just got overwrought. She’s been putting up with me for a long time, and I guess she just got overwrought.”

  He looked at the boy and thought, Ah, Lonnie. How you do haunt me with your father’s enormous brown eyes and that way of looking at me as if you are waiting for me to tell you something. God knows what. I have no answers. Had none for Henry, have none for you.

  “Are you sick, Daddy Jake?” Lonnie broke through the hard shell of his thoughts.

  Jake sniffled. “I’m just coming down with a cold, that’s all.”

  “You been drinking that old corn whiskey, too. I can smell it.” He wrinkled up his nose.

  “Yeah, I been drinking that old corn whiskey. So what?”

  Lonnie’s eyes flashed. “You ought not to. If I’d done it, you’d have whipped my butt.”

  And that was the difference, Jake thought, between father and son. Henry would give you some lip, but if you barked at him he’d get that whipped-dog look and clam up. But this one. This one just rocked back on his heels and came right back at you. He had too goddamn much of his grandmother in him, that was what.

  “You got a big mouth, boy,” Jake said.

  “Yessir.” Lonnie looked around the newspaper office. “You gonna live here?”

  “Hell, no, I’m not gonna live here. This is a newspaper office, not a boardinghouse. For God’s sakes.”

  “You could go to the Regal, I reckon.”

  Jake snorted. “I’ve got no truck with itinerant riffraff.”

  “Well, you gotta live someplace. You got no place to sleep or take a bath.”

  Jake thought for a moment. “I’ll think of something.” He would, by God, think of something. He would not, by God, live at the newspaper office. Pastine was out of her mind.

  Lonnie stood there, arms folded across his chest, head cocked to one side the way Pastine did when she was giving him that don’t-give-me-any-foolishness look.

  Jake wiped his face with his hand. “Don’t you worry about me, boy,” his voice rose. “I’ll do just fine. By God, I’ll make out.” His head hurt like the dickens. Little flickers of light danced before his eyes.

  There was a long silence, and then Lonnie said, “You could come home, I reckon.”

  “No,” Jake said quietly. “I can’t come home.”

  “Well,” Lonnie said, “I can’t say as I blame you. That baby squalls all the time and when she messes up her diaper, you can smell it all over the house.”

  Jake studied him for a moment. “They give it a name yet?”

  “Nosir. I heard ’em talking. They’re gonna wait until Henry comes home to give it a name.” Not Daddy, but Henry. It had been a long time, Jake thought.

  “Ah.”

  Lonnie waited, then said, “They talk all the time. They’re thick as thieves already.”

  “Thick as thieves.”

  “Yessir.”

  Jake understood then how bewildered Lonnie must be by the whole business. It came to Jake, sitting there cold and stiff and hung over, how upside down Lonnie’s small world had always been. And how unfair it was. A boy ought not to be torn. He ought to have a place that was safe and warm and somebody around who had some answers, or at least thought he did. And Jake Tibbetts felt small and lost himself because he didn’t know what the hell to do about it. It was just such a godawful mess they had all made of things.

  Jake wanted to cry. But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Lonnie, I love you.”

  Lonnie looked at him in surprise.

  “Your Mama Pastine loves you, too. We’re gonna get this thing straightened out. We’ve just got to give it some time, you hear?” Lonnie nodded.

  Jake turned away from him, stared out the window at the morning after Christmas, bright with expectation, and he thought about giving things some time. How much time did they have?

  “You ever tried pissing into the wind, Lonnie?” he asked.

  “Nosir.”

  “You’ll get it all over you.”

  “I reckon.”

  He turned back, put his hand on the stack of things Lonnie had brought in the paper sack. “Thanks for the supplies, boy. I’ll be okay, don’t you worry. You just help your Mama Pastine. She’s got her hands full right now.”

  Lonnie walked over to the front door and stood there for a moment, then asked, “Can I come help you down here?”

  Jake held his breath, then let it out slowly. “Doing what?”

  Lonnie swept his arm around, indicating the back shop. “All that stuff you do back there.”

  “You want to be a newspaperman, boy?”

  Lonnie shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll get your hands dirty.”

  Lonnie nodded.

  “And sometimes folks’ll raise hell with you.”

  He nodded again.

  “Well,” Jake said, “it’s all right with me if it’s all right with your Mama Pastine. I don’t want you getting caught in the middle of this little row we’re having. I don’t want this newspaper business to have anything to do with that. You understand?”

  “Yessir. It don’t.”

  “Doesn’t.”

  “Yessir.”

  “But if you want to come down here and hitch up your britches and pay attention and work hard, okay. I’ll pay you ten cents an hour.”

  Lonnie’s eyes widened.

  “But you’ll have to work it out with Pastine. Whatever she says goes. If she’ll let you come an hour after school every day, fine. Saturdays, that’s fine, too. But she’s the boss on this. You go home and talk with her and let me know.”

  Lonnie opened the front door, still keeping his eyes on Jake. “Thanks for the BB gun,” he said.

  Jake waved him off. “Don’t thank me, thank Santa Claus. He flew through shot and shell …”

  “Oh, bull,” Lonnie said, smiling. “I ain’t a kid no more, Daddy Jake.”

  “Well …”

 
; And then he was gone and Jake sat there for a long time and stared out the window at the morning, feeling some warmth creeping back into his body, listening to the small sounds in the back shop, the rustling of the mouse that lived under the shelves on the back wall and ate small holes in the stacks of paper he kept for job printing, the tiny metallic clink of the Linotype machine that had never been allowed to cool down completely since Albertis Tibbetts had installed it years before. Jake thought about his father, imagined him hunched there over the Linotype keyboard, fingers dancing flawlessly over the keys, brow creased in concentration. Albertis could set galley after galley of type and never make a mistake. He was a printer, but he was not a newspaperman. Old Captain Finley, from what they said, had been both. Jake was both. Henry had been neither. And now there was Lonnie, who might be both or neither or somewhere in between. He might even be the best of the lot. God bless him if he wanted to become a newspaperman. And God save him, too. Thinking about it, Jake decided suddenly that he was hungry, and he remembered that he hadn’t had a bite to eat since dinner on Christmas Eve, right before Henry’s wife had appeared. By God, he could eat a horse. He could almost smell the rich aroma of eggs and bacon and coffee at Biscuit Brunson’s cafe, where by this time they would have heard about how Jake Tibbetts had been routed from his own home at the point of a sword on Christmas Day, would be smacking their lips over the juiciness of it. What the hell, he thought, and went to face the music.

  He was right. He could tell it the minute he opened the door, the way they all stopped talking and turned and stared at him as if he had leper’s spots all over his face instead of just a two-day stubble of beard. Tunstall Renfroe put his coffee cup down in its saucer with a soft clink. Fog Martin stared, then reached for a Victory Donut and bit off half of it. Hilton Redlinger hitched his big butt around on the counter stool and hauled up on his sagging pistol belt. Biscuit wiped the counter furiously and said, “Howdy, Jake!” a bit too loudly.

  Jake bowed. “Gents,” he said, and made an elaborate show of taking off his overcoat and hanging it on the coatrack next to the door while they sat there and watched him. Then he turned back to them. “Well,” he said, grinning and slapping his hands together, “let me tell you what happened to me yesterday.”