Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Come on, Jake,” Tunstall said, “don’t take the fun out of it for us.”

  They all laughed then, taking the edge of embarrassment off of it, and Jake sat down on the stool next to the front window.

  “Well, you’ve all heard the story by now, I’m sure. Complete with embellishments. My version would be dull by comparison. Suffice it to say I’ve still got all my limbs if not my wits. Pastine, good woman that she is, dispatched me from the house at sword point, and that’s the whole of it.” He grinned at them. “My God,” he slapped the counter, “I could eat a horse.”

  “I’m fresh out of those,” Biscuit said.

  “Then gimme two eggs over light, sausage, grits, toast, and coffee. And hold the marmalade.”

  “How ‘bout a donut?” Fog said, raising the glass lid from the platter of donuts and taking another one for himself.

  “Naw, I’m afraid I’ll ruin my appetite. I just want to sit here and savor the smell of Biscuit fryin’ up my breakfast and suffer in anticipation.”

  “Coming up,” Biscuit said, turning to the griddle behind the counter, where he cracked two eggs and plopped them sizzling on the hot surface, then placed two thick circles of sausage beside them and, over to one side, two pieces of white bread to brown into toast. Biscuit cooked all his short orders on the same big griddle here in the front of the cafe, the juices of eggs and bacon, sausage and pancakes, mingling richly. If you came in later in the day and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, it would taste faintly of the breakfast you had had several hours before.

  Jake looked over at the boards Biscuit had nailed over the bombed-out window and thought about Billy Benefield and the airplane. It seemed like eons ago. So much had happened. There was a strange quality to their even being here this morning, like men who had wandered through a time warp and staggered exhausted up on the far shore, weighted with the baggage of their journey. Jake felt for a moment as if they were all sitting here holding their breaths, waiting to see what calamity would strike next. Or was it just he who felt that way?

  Hilton Redlinger finished his plate of blueberry pancakes with a great sigh of satisfaction, placed his knife, fork, and spoon neatly in the middle of the plate, and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. He looked over at Fog, who was making quick work of another donut. “Fog, you must have paid for enough bonds eatin’ those donuts to arm a division.”

  Fog nodded. “Patriotic duty,” he said thickly.

  “Biscuit, how many war bonds you reckon those donuts have bought?” Hilton asked.

  “Four hundred and twenty-five dollars’ worth,” Biscuit said over his shoulder. “That’s bought and paid for. And I got some change in the drawer back in the kitchen. Maybe another ten bucks’ worth.”

  “Lord, can you imagine that. Four hundred and thirty-five dollars’ worth of donuts at a nickel apiece. That’s …”

  “Eight thousand, seven hundred donuts,” Tunstall said, doing a quick calculation in his banker’s head.

  “And you been selling ’em how long?”

  Biscuit thought back for a moment. “Almost three years exactly. I started just after Pearl Harbor. December of forty-one.”

  Hilton turned to Tunstall. “Figure that, Tunstall. Eight thousand, seven hundred donuts in three years. How many is that a day?”

  “Wait a minute, boys,” Jake said from his end of the counter. “Let me run back to the paper and get my Speed Graphic so I can get a picture of the Human Adding Machine in action.”

  Tunstall reached for a paper napkin and took his fountain pen out of an inside coat pocket.

  “Oh, no,” Jake said. “Do it in your head.”

  Tunstall put the pen away, smiled at them, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes for a few moments while his lips moved almost imperceptibly. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Figuring that Biscuit is open six days a week, that’s three hundred and twelve days a year, and he has sold eight thousand, seven hundred donuts in three years, that comes to just over nine donuts a day. To be precise about it, nine-point-three donuts a day, slightly rounded off.”

  “Is that right?” Hilton asked the rest of them.

  “How the dickens would I know?” Fog said. “There ain’t another man in this room can find the square root of fifty, even using paper.”

  “Seven-point-oh-seven,” Tunstall said, “slightly rounded off.”

  “You’re pretty good at figuring, ain’t you, Jake?” Hilton said. “You had some college.”

  “Lord, no. I’m a newspaperman, not a financial tycoon. We of the press deal in approximations.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to take your word for it, Tunstall,” Hilton said.

  “Hell, he figures loan interest that way,” Jake said. “No telling how much folks in this town overpay the Farmers Mercantile because Tunstall sits there and smiles and does tricks in his head.”

  “I’ll be glad for you to check me any time, Jake,” Tunstall spoke up. “Anyway, it’ll be time to retire those Victory Donuts before long. From the news on the radio this morning, I’d say the war’s just about over.”

  “Yeah,” Hilton said, “I heard Kaltenborn last night. He said the big fight in Belgium was the Germans’ last gasp. The only thing to decide now is who gets to Berlin first — us or the Russians.”

  Tunstall got up from his table, walked behind the counter and poured himself another cup of coffee from the steaming pot. “I hope it’s our boys. The Russians are a barbaric lot.”

  Hilton hitched himself around on the stool again. “Yeah, but they fight like hell. I’d hate to think we had to whip the Germans all by ourselves.”

  Biscuit poured Jake a cup of coffee and Jake spooned in sugar and cream, stirred, and took a noisy slurp. “Personally, I think we should have sat back and let the Germans and the Russians kick the doo-doo out of each other and then walk in and pick up the pieces.”

  “That wouldn’t be fair,” Tunstall said. “The Russians have lost millions.”

  “Good riddance,” Jake snorted.

  “Well, anyway, it looks like the Germans are pretty much whipped,” Tunstall said. Tunstall fancied himself something of a war strategist. He spent considerable spare time at the radio station, poring over the big war maps that Ollie Whittle had mounted on the wall.

  “You ain’t forgetting the Japs, are you?” Fog Martin asked. His brother Carlton was on the carrier Midway in the Pacific.

  “Heck, we’ll whip the Japs in thirty days,” Hilton said, nodding for emphasis. “We’ll just turn Georgie Patton loose on ’em.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” Fog said. “Carlton says the Japs are fanatics. He says they tie themselves to trees so they can’t run away and they’ll have to die fighting. And he says they strap hand grenades to themselves and run right into the middle of a group of our boys and set the grenades off. They just don’t give up. I hate to think what’ll happen when we invade Japan.”

  There was a long moment of silence while everybody thought about that, and then Tunstall said, “Well, maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll just surround Japan and starve ’em out.”

  “That could take years,” Hilton said gloomily. “The little buggers don’t eat much, anyway. They can grow enough rice to keep going, I imagine. And they eat bamboo, don’t they?”

  Biscuit gave Jake’s eggs and sausage and toast a flip, let everything sizzle for another half-minute, and then scooped it all up with his spatula and deposited it on a plate, which he placed in front of Jake along with a steaming bowl of grits with a puddling pat of butter in the middle. The aroma hit Jake full force and he fell on the breakfast, eating ravenously while the talk went on, a quiet babble at the edge of his slowly satiated hunger.

  “Everything okay, Jake?” Biscuit asked.

  ‘Mmmmmm,” Jake answered, feeling the pit of his stomach beginning to warm and fill. He was oblivious to the rest of them and their talk of starving the Japanese. “More grits,” he said after a while, and Biscuit refilled the grits bowl and plopped anot
her pat of butter on top. Jake ate with relish and then he slowed down and began to savor every mouthful, feeling the last vestiges of his hangover swept away by his gorged belly. He finished finally and wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. Biscuit refilled his coffee cup and he sat there on the stool, reveling in an overwhelming sense of well-being and taking note of the novelty of it — eating breakfast at Brunson’s Cafe instead of his own table, a man on his own, footloose and fancy-free for the first time in … Lord, how many years? In a few minutes, he would get up and pay his bill and get a toothpick from the small glass container on the counter and amble leisurely back to the paper, picking his teeth and contemplating the business of getting the paper out for another week, the honest labor of an honest man. Not the kind of man who would live in a damned newspaper office, by God.

  “… be coming home all of a sudden,” Fog Martin was saying. “They’ll be busting a gut to get out of uniform and settle down.”

  “What I wonder is, is it safe?” Tunstall asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, all these boys running around loose. Trained killers, so to speak. I mean, we don’t know what combat has done to them. You could have a young fellow standing on a street corner and a car backfires and he grabs the nearest gun and starts shooting at everything in sight. What do you think, Hilton?”

  Hilton pondered that for a moment, slack-jawed. “Well, I reckon it’s something we ought to consider. I guess maybe the sheriff should be careful who he issues pistol permits to, but you can’t deny a man the right to have a gun. It ain’t constitutional.”

  Biscuit leaned over the counter toward them. “I ‘spect the last thing any of those boys wants is a gun, after what they’ve been through.” There were nods all around. “In fact, I think instead of worrying about them shooting up the place, we ought to be thinking about a proper memorial.”

  Jake sat up on his stool. “What do you mean, memorial?”

  “I mean something to honor all the boys who fought. Especially the ones who won’t be coming back.” There was a glint of moisture in Biscuit’s eyes.

  “You’re still hung up on a war memorial“ Jake strung out the words. They had been debating it just two days before, on Christmas Eve morning, when Billy Benefield had come swooping down on them and turned the courthouse square into a war zone. You would think after that foolishness, folks would be content to let the war well enough alone.

  “I’m not hung up on anything, Jake.” Biscuit picked up his cloth and started wiping the counter. The dishcloth was Biscuit’s security blanket. Any time you got him the least bit agitated, he’d pick up that damned dishcloth and start trying to rub the top off the counter. “I just think we ought to do something to let the boys know we appreciate what they’ve done.”

  “Best thing we can do for the boys,” Jake said, slapping the counter with a bang, “is to let ’em alone. Let ’em forget the goddamned war and get back to living normal lives.”

  They all stared at him, a little taken aback at his vehemence.

  Tunstall cleared his throat. “Ahem. Well, I think Biscuit’s got a point.” He looked at Fog and Hilton expectantly.

  Fog nodded. “I reckon. Yeah, I reckon Biscuit’s got a point, all right.”

  “Well, you both got a point,” Hilton said, noncommittal. “It’s something we ought to think about.” Hilton, always the public servant. Teetering between the whims of the dolts on the Town Council and every jackleg common citizen who thought he knew how to enforce the law, serving at the caprice of both, and getting no younger. Hilton’s once-hard jaw sagged now and his hair was all white and thinning badly so that the mottled pink of his scalp showed through. He was spreading on the bottom and thinning on the top and if his wild shoot-em-up response to Billy Benefield’s air attack was any indication, he was losing his grip.

  “Aw, what the hell, Hilton,” Jake said. “Take a stand for once in your life. Do you or do you not think we ought to have a war memorial?”

  Hilton turned on him, startled. “Well …”

  “Yeah?” Jake demanded.

  The color rose in Hilton’s neck then, and for a second he looked like the Hilton Redlinger of old who could lay a grown man out on the sidewalk with one roundhouse swing. “I think,” Hilton said, “we ought to have a war memorial.”

  Jake looked at them a moment, his eyes moving from Biscuit behind the counter to Fog and Hilton on the stools next to him to Tunstall sitting at the table. “Well, you’re all full of horseshit.”

  “Jake …” Biscuit started. This just was not the way you ran a friendly argument in Biscuit Brunson’s cafe. They had been sitting here, the five of them, jawing over one thing and another for forty years or so, digging at each other in more or less good humor, with rarely a truly heated word, taking even Jake Tibbetts’s barbed wit in stride. Nobody had ever told them they were full of horseshit.

  “Horseshit,” Jake said again. “Hell, we’re just a bunch of goddamned old men sitting here on our fat butts. We didn’t fight the goddamned war. We don’t know a fool thing about war — with the possible exception of Tunstall, who thinks he knows more about strategy than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not a damned one of us ever killed a man, including our esteemed police chief, whose only victim is a plate-glass window.” He could see the surprise, the hurt in their faces, but he barged on, lashing out at them. “So what the hell do we think we’re doing, sitting here debating a war memorial? We got no damn business putting up a war memorial. If the boys come back and want a war memorial, let them do it. It’s their war.”

  “It’s everybody’s war,” Tunstall said, the heat rising in him. “Everybody in this town took part in the war in one way or another.”

  “Yeah,” Jake shot back, “we went around wearing our air raid helmets and taking down the Christmas lights and eating donuts, all right. But none of us fought. Them that fights gets to memorialize.”

  “Jake,” Biscuit said, “I think you’re dead wrong on this.”

  “You may damned well be right. But I know what I think. And me and my newspaper are dead set against a war memorial.”

  There was a moment of stony silence, and then Fog Martin, gentle Fog, said, “Jake, don’t make a horse’s ass out of yourself over this just because of your boy.”

  Jake stared at him for a moment, unblinking. Then he pulled his dirty handkerchief out of his back pocket and blew his nose noisily, then put the handkerchief back, still looking at Fog, and fished a dollar bill out of his front pocket. He laid the bill on the counter, got off the stool, put on his coat, and walked out the door without another word being said.

  By early afternoon, the word was out — at least around the courthouse square, where Jake was making his usual rounds of the merchants, gathering advertising copy for the week’s edition of the Free Press. Nobody came right out and said anything to Jake about it. But the looks they gave him let Jake know the breakfast set-to in Biscuit Brunson’s cafe was common talk among the rabble. Jake Tibbetts was against a war memorial and he had cussed out four of his best friends over it. Used the word “horseshit.” Conversation stopped in mid-sentence when he walked in the front door of the Jitney Jungle Super Saver or Alvah Foley’s barbershop or Hamblin’s Mercantile, and they went scurrying about finding something terribly interesting in a cantaloupe or bolt of cloth, cutting funny looks at him out of the corners of their eyes.

  At the Jitney Jungle, George Poulos was a little distant, but then George had a boy in the paratroopers somewhere in Europe and he might be a little touchy about a war memorial. Then, too, he was on the Town Council, and that was where any flap over a war memorial would end up eventually. George took his usual quarter-page ad and jotted down a list of his specials on the back of a brown paper sack while Jake waited, but he didn’t have much small talk today.

  “I’ll get your proof over to you tomorrow morning, soon’s I set the type,” Jake said, folding the paper sack and tucking it into an overcoat pocket.

  “No need,” Geor
ge said, then hung fire for a moment. “But you got the chickens wrong last week.”

  “Huh?”

  “The chickens. I had the chickens down for nineteen cents a pound. Whole fryers. You ran it eighteen cents a pound.” George sounded a little testy. “I had to sell ’em for eighteen cents. Seems like every woman in town was in here wanting whole fryers for eighteen cents a pound.”

  “I’m sorry, George,” Jake said. “Figure up how much it cost you and I’ll take it off your bill.”

  “No,” George shook his head. “No need.”

  “I insist,” Jake insisted.

  “Folks see something in the paper, they figure it’s right,” George said.

  “Sure. How much did you lose?”

  “Coupla dollars, I reckon.”

  “It’s done. And I’ll bring you this week’s proof tomorrow.”

  “Well, maybe you better.”

  Jake stood on the sidewalk outside the Jitney Jungle for a few minutes, thinking to himself that yes, George Poulos was upset over the war memorial. George had never asked for a proof of his ad before. It was a little ritual with them. Jake would say he was bringing over the proof and George would say no bother. It was one of those million small gestures in a day’s transactions with your fellow supplicants that could go either way: I trust you or I don’t. Jake had no doubt made mistakes on George Poulos’s ads before — all those items, all those numbers. But over the years, it probably all evened out. This was the first time George had ever mentioned it. He had even asked for a proof, for God’s sake.

  Whit Hennessey at the post office likewise had a bit of a burr under his saddle. Whit was sitting in the little back room of the post office, but when he saw Jake’s box open and the hand slide in to get the stack of envelopes, he came to the window and peered out.

  “Jake.”