Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Whatcha gonna do with the rest of that food you bought?” Lonnie asked as he folded the wax paper from his sandwich and stuck it back in the paper sack he had brought from home. “You leave it laying around in here and it’ll spoil and you’ll get the toe mange.”

  “The what?”

  “You know, the stomach poison.”

  “Ptomaine poisoning.”

  “That’s what I said. Toe mange.”

  There were still several slices of bologna left and most of the bread and cheese, more than enough for his supper. “I’ll stick it in the window by the back door,” Jake said. “It’ll stay cold enough.”

  It brought him crashing back to earth, just that simple little thing about what to do with uneaten food. Gad, the whole business was complicated. Half the day was gone and he still hadn’t made any provisions for sleeping tonight. He had spied an old cot and mattress at the fire station, but he would have to go back and get Rosh’s key again later in the afternoon and haul the thing over here to the newspaper office. And he didn’t have any sheets or blankets, so he would have to bundle up in his overcoat and leave the kerosene heater on all night. Then tomorrow there would be a whole new set of domestic details to worry with. He didn’t feel so damned fine anymore.

  “Time’s wasting,” he said, getting to his feet. “I got a newspaper to get out, and you got to tell the nation what Old Abe said at Gettysburg.”

  They went back to their work, Lonnie laboring over the type case, Jake firing up the Linotype and wading into the stack of copy that had to be set into metal. He was a half-day behind and it would be late into the night before he got it set, proofed, and laid out in the forms he would have to load onto the big Kluge press by noon tomorrow to print the paper.

  He stopped at midafternoon and walked over to the layout table where Lonnie was slowly, methodically, fitting pieces of type into the type stick. Click-click. Lonnie looked up from his work. There was a smudge of ink on his forehead where he had wiped it with a grimy hand. “How’s it going?” Jake asked.

  “He sure did talk a lot.”

  “One of the shortest speeches a politician ever made.” Jake pulled his watch out of his pocket and flipped open the cover. “Three o’clock,” he said, “time for you to knock off.”

  “Do I hafta?”

  “Yep. You don’t want to burn yourself out in one day. Go get washed up.”

  Jake was back at the Linotype when Lonnie finished scrubbing himself and he stood behind Jake for a moment, watching him punch the keys. Jake finished the line, then took one of the slugs he had set a few minutes before out of the tray on the machine. It was still warm to the touch. He handed it to Lonnie. “See what’s on there?”

  “Type.”

  “Just like you set. This machine does exactly the same thing you’re doing over there, only it won’t set anything any larger than eighteen-point. But it’s all the same. Turning words into metal so you can put ’em on paper.”

  Lonnie looked over the Linotype, top to bottom. “Can you print anything you want to?”

  “Within reason. I try to stick approximately with fact. Let me see your hands.”

  Lonnie showed him. He still had the smudge on his forehead.

  “Not bad. A newspaperman is never one hundred percent clean. But you’ll do.”

  “You smell a lot better yourself,” Lonnie said.

  Jake grunted. “Coming back tomorrow?”

  “I reckon. I can’t leave Old Abe in the middle of his speech.”

  “Okay. You know I’ve got to get out the paper tomorrow. I can’t spend a lot of time with you until that’s done.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Jake looked at him for a long moment. “You can quit anytime you want to.” Lonnie didn’t say anything. “I didn’t have any choice when I was your age or a little older. I had to work here, and I didn’t like it a bit.”

  “You didn’t? Then why are you doing it now?”

  Jake smiled. “I tried it again later and decided I liked it. So there’s nothing wrong with you deciding now that it’s not for you.”

  “I reckon I’ll try it some more.”

  “As long as your Mama Pastine thinks it’s okay.”

  Lonnie studied him for a moment. “You want me to tell her anything for you?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  When he had gone, Jake sat there at the Linotype keyboard for a while, remembering how he had, ages ago, stood sullenly at the same layout table where Lonnie had been working all day, hating the meaningless jumble of the type case, hating the smell of the place and the grime under his fingernails, hating Albertis Tibbetts for being a haunted man who hid from his demons in a darkened room, pacing, pacing. Then he remembered another sullen boy, Henry, standing at the type case, eyes glazed in befuddlement, hands clumsily trying to fit pieces of type into a type stick, and then just standing there and staring for a long time until finally Jake went over and took the type stick out of his hand and told him to go home. He remembered his great disappointment, the empty ache the boy had left when the front door had closed.

  Jake shook his head forcefully, thrusting the images away. He looked toward the front window and saw that the gray afternoon was waning fast. He still had the society page to do. And something about the war memorial. It would be a long night.

  He had quite lost track of the time when he heard the rattling at the front door. He peered through the pool of light around the Linotype machine into the darkness of the front office and saw the door open and the great bulk of Rosh Benefield fill the doorway.

  “Rosh?” he called.

  “Do you know anybody else this size?”

  Jake got up from the Linotype and pulled his watch out of his pocket. It was after eight o’clock. Five hours had passed since Lonnie had left and he had been totally absorbed in his typesetting, punching page after page of copy through the keyboard, pausing only to remove the finished type and restoke the machine with metal ingots and relight the cigar he finally felt good enough to smoke. Galleys of bright metal slugs sat waiting on a table nearby for proofing.

  “Well, don’t just stand there with the door open,” Jake said.

  “I’m waiting for you to come help me.” Rosh disappeared into the darkness and Jake followed him outside and felt the sudden bite of cold air. The sky was clearing and there was a half-moon winking behind the scudding wisps of cloud. There would be a hard freeze tonight. He thought suddenly of Pastine, of the unwrapped pipes outside the kitchen window, wondered fleetingly if he should call and remind her to leave the faucets dripping overnight …

  Rosh was standing by his Packard, which was parked against the curb, the trunk open and some kind of contraption sticking out. Jake stepped closer and recognized it as the camp cot he had seen earlier in the day in the fire station. Gad. He had completely forgotten about sleeping arrangements. And here was Rosh Benefield with the cot in the back of his car.

  “Well, are you going to help me, or do I have to tote it in for you, too?”

  They wrestled it out of the trunk of the car and carried it inside, then went back and got the thin mattress that was on the floorboard of the back seat and set the whole business up next to the paper stacks in the back room. By the time they finished, Rosh was grunting with the effort and his forehead was speckled with shiny beads of sweat.

  “I’m too old and fat for honest work,” Rosh said, pulling a handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopping his brow. He fixed Jake with his small bright eyes. “And you have the look of a man who is fresh out of whiskey.”

  “Right on both counts,” Jake said.

  “Well, I thought of that, too.” Rosh huffed out the door and came back with a paper sack and sat down heavily in the chair next to Jake’s desk, his overcoat flapping open to give his great belly room, while Jake turned on the light in the front office and pulled the shades on the windows. Rosh set the sack down with a soft thump on the desk and sighed. “You’ll have to do t
he rest, my good man. I’m tuckered out.”

  Jake sat in his own swivel chair and got two tumblers out of the bottom drawer, opened the sack and took out the full jar of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best, its clear beautiful liquid laced through with a rainbow of colors, fracturing the light from the overhead bulb. He opened the jar and poured three fingers in each tumbler and handed Rosh one; then they lifted their glasses in a silent toast and drank.

  “You’re a day early,” Jake said.

  “No, I’m a day late.” Rosh wiped his mouth with a huge hand.

  Jake grunted. “I assume the rabble are having an exquisite time with my … er … circumstances.”

  Rosh nodded. “You couldn’t get a man, woman, child, nor beast in town to vouch for your sanity.” He smiled. “I think Reverend Sylvester Pomfret put the cork stopper in the bottle, so to speak.”

  “God be praised,” Jake said.

  They drank in silence for a while, savoring the whiskey slowly, while Jake thought how many times they had sat here in the shank of a midweek day in this musty, cluttered office, how the ritual of it connected all the years they had been friends and broached the times when they might not have been. There were many reasons why they should not have shared so many fruit jars of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best for such a long time. There was Ideal Benefield, who did not cotton to drinking or to Jake Tibbetts. There was the anguish of Henry and Hazel, deadened by time to a dull ache. And there was most basically the fact of who they were and what they represented — Rosh the mayor, the lawyer, the pillar of the community; and Jake, who threw rocks at everything. But the simple fact of the matter was that they liked each other and they liked good whiskey and they agreed on a few basic things that ought to guide how a man acts — honesty, diligence, grace. So they created inviolable pockets of time in which they shucked off all their trappings and became just Rosh and Jake, whiskey drinkers.

  “It must be fairly good whiskey,” Rosh said, taking a sip and raising his glass to let the light play on it. “We’ve drunk enough of it to have long ago discovered any inadequacy.”

  “It may not be any good at all,” Jake countered. “But it is consistent. I’ve often wondered why everybody calls it Lightnin’ Jim’s Best. Is there a Lightnin’ Jim’s Worst?”

  “If there is, I hope it never touches my lips.” Rosh smacked his lips. “Perhaps this is simply the best whiskey there is around here.”

  “It’s the only whiskey there is around here.”

  “Well,” said Rosh, “there you have it. Maybe it’s just right. If it were any better, Lightnin’ Jim would be selling it to city folks. If it were any worse, it would have killed us.”

  “Do you know what that sonofabitch told me Sunday?”

  “No, what?”

  “He said he’s getting out of the business. He said he’s the last of the line. That little ’un of his. Jim’s going to send him to college up north and let him manage real estate.”

  “Oh?” Rosh didn’t seem surprised.

  “Jim says he’s got holdings in Buffalo, New York, of all places. Now how the hell does a bootlegging black man buy real estate in Buffalo, New York?”

  Rosh took a long sip of the whiskey. “It helps if he’s got a good lawyer.”

  It took a moment for it to sink in. “You?”

  Rosh shrugged his massive shoulders. “I can’t, of course, divulge any details of a lawyer-client relationship.”

  “But why you?”

  “He pays on time.”

  “Well, why Buffalo, New York?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he read about it in a magazine.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” Jake reached and got the whiskey jar, splashed another couple of fingers into their glasses. “I’ll be damned,” he said again. It was a part of Rosh Benefield he knew little about — who his clients were, what he did for them, what secrets he kept locked away in his safe and in his rich, curious mind. People no doubt trusted Rosh with their most private thoughts and deeds. And Rosh, the great Buddha, sat unblinking as they bared their souls, committed to his keeping their foulest sins.

  “What a moral hell-pit,” Jake said out loud.

  “What’s that?”

  “Being a lawyer. People ridicule lawyers for being greedy connivers. Maybe they ought to pity you for what you know.”

  Rosh shifted in his chair, a mountain moving. In a lesser man it would have been a squirm. “Quite unlike your own profession.”

  “Yes.”

  “You plumb for man’s most private indiscretions and then trumpet them from the steeple top.”

  “I often say,” Jake said, “that man’s avarice is exceeded only by his curiosity. And man is never more curious than he is about the avarice of others. I’m simply in the curiosity business.”

  “You must admit,” Rosh raised his eyebrows, “that you newspaper people feed off the bottom, so to speak — mayhem, despair, misfortune …” he waved his hand, indicating the ills of mankind.

  “True. But we can unburden ourselves. You can’t.” It brought to mind his vague notions of Catholicism, of the dim flicker of candles in great arched rooms, of the tortured utterances of the confession box.

  “What do you do when a scoundrel walks in?” Jake demanded.

  “Represent him,” Rosh said. “The fact that he’s a scoundrel doesn’t make him any less worthy of representation.”

  “But …”

  Rosh cut him short. “Don’t think it doesn’t cause an occasional upheaval of my bowels. I once said to myself, ‘Rosh Benefield, you are either a pedant or a sophist. You either take refuge in rules or you fool yourself with fallacious argument.’ And I quit the profession for several hours.”

  “For several hours!” Jake snorted.

  “Yes, and don’t snort.” He sat there for a while, staring at his glass, then drank off what was left in the bottom. “I’ll tell you a story, Jake Tibbetts, and then you can snort if you want to.” He paused again. “A woman came to me once and asked me to help her deceive her husband. It was” — he waved his hand again — “nothing of an amorous nature. She, ah, wanted to relieve the husband of a potential distraction, let’s say.” He looked at his glass again, then thrust it toward Jake. Jake poured and Rosh took a long swig. “To go on. It was a small deception. The woman had the best possible intentions. I had been privy to far greater evil on the part of others. But it came at a peculiar time, when I had started to fear for my own integrity and sanity. I told the woman I’d have to think about it. Then when she left — it was late in the day — I locked the door to my office and got very drunk. And sometime during the early evening I took a pistol out of my desk drawer and pressed it to my temple. And then do you know what I did?”

  “You blew your brains out,” Jake said.

  “I thought about you.”

  “You blew my brains out.”

  “No, dammit, you smart-assed sonofabitch!” Rosh exploded. Jake was stunned. Rosh rarely raised his voice and he never cussed. He looked hard at his friend and he could see that Rosh was deeply moved. This was something very important to him, something so private and delicate and yet so momentous that the urge to tell and the urge to keep faith with a secret that warred in his great body and soul.

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said, chastened.

  “I thought,” Rosh went on after a moment, when he had calmed himself, “about something you had said. You said a man had to take complete responsibility for himself, that he had to take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it’s worth. I thought about that, Jake. I thought about it real hard. Then I looked down the barrel of that gun and I said to myself, ‘This isn’t taking responsibility. This is just taking off.’ So I put the gun away and went home.”

  There was a long, heavy silence, and finally Jake asked, “And what did you do about the woman?”

  “I did what she asked me to do. There was nothing illegal about it, nothing any other lawyer wouldn’t do as a professional service. There were some personal qualm
s, but I decided I would let them be her qualms, not mine. And since then, I’ve refused to assume anybody else’s guilt. I decided that if I could take responsibility for myself, I could expect everybody else to do the same.”

  “But they won’t,” Jake interjected.

  “Some will. Sometimes. And some won’t. But that’s their problem, not mine. Anyway, since then I have slept like a saint. And you,” he smiled, “what you said, Jake, saved my life.”

  “My God,” Jake said softly.

  “I only wish,” Rosh said, “that you believed it.”

  “What?”

  “Just words, Jake.” Rosh waved his glass, sloshing the whiskey. It caught the light of the overhead bulb and gave off a shimmer of tiny amber explosions. “You don’t really believe what you say about a man taking responsibility for himself. If you did, you wouldn’t try to tote other folks’ guilt around like a peddler’s sack. You’d let other folks do their own toting.”

  After a moment, Jake said, “You mean Henry.”

  “Mainly.”

  “Well, to hell with Henry. I haven’t thought about Henry in two years. Maybe longer.”

  Rosh laughed. “You put on a big show, Jake. You damn him, you disown him, but you carry Henry around on your shoulders, trying not to let the rest of us see how it makes you stoop.”

  Jake opened the fruit jar and poured another dollop of whiskey in their glasses. He was a little drunk. His eyebrows were turning numb. He could feel the whiskey like a thin film between himself and the room, wrapping him in a cocoon. He took a small sip. “You’re full of shit,” he said.