Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Rosh drank, then set his glass down on the desk. “Am I? Think about it. Think of everything you’ve done, everything that’s happened to you since the day before Christmas. Starting with Billy’s plane landing out on Partridge Road. Think about it, Jake, and then tell me you don’t have Henry stuck in your gut like a tumor.”

  “You think I’m a goddamn fool, don’t you,” Jake said bitterly from behind the whiskey film. “You think I ought to forgive Henry everything he’s done and tuck my tail between my legs and skulk home to Pastine.” He was slurring his words now and that made him angry. “And you think I ought to stop stirring up trouble about the goddamn war memorial.”

  “God forbid,” Rosh sighed, “that I should ever tell a man what he ought to do. I just wish you’d follow your own advice.”

  “Well,” Jake said stubbornly, “I’m not going home. She ran me out of the house with my grandfather’s sword, for God’s sake. She almost cut my head off.”

  Rosh nodded. “That she did.”

  “And I am going to have to live here at the newspaper office, just like she told me to do, because I can’t find anyplace else and have made an ass of myself at the Regal Hotel.”

  “Well …”

  “And the war memorial …” he trailed off. “Well, to hell with all of it anyway.”

  Rosh drew his overcoat over his belly as if protecting himself from the fierceness of Jake’s scowl, and then he got up from the chair with a great effort. “A fat man is a menace to himself,” he said. “A fat drunk man is a menace to the world.”

  “Why don’t you just kiss my ass,” Jake said.

  “I can’t bend over that far anymore,” Rosh said pleasantly.

  “Can you drive?”

  “Of course I can drive. Whether I can drive home or not, that’s the question. But since you won’t drive — God, you’re a backward man, Jake — I’ll have to make the attempt. Why don’t you get a car, for Christ’s sake.” He lumbered out the door, leaving Jake sitting there at the desk, and after a while Jake heard the engine of the Packard start up, the clashing of gears, a series of sharp squeals as Rosh drove herky-jerky away from the curb and headed down the street. Jake sat listening until the sound of the engine died away. There was so much of Rosh that he left a great yawning emptiness in the room. Then Jake remembered that he had never thanked Rosh for the cot.

  He got up presently and went to the back shop, where the Linotype machine waited for him in the pool of light, hissing and creaking. It was a molten maw into which you poured your soul. He sat down in the chair with a groan, thinking of his grandfather, Captain Finley — how he had come here early on Tuesday mornings in the days before the Linotype machine and set all the type by hand with a jar of a long-dead Lightnin’ Jim’s Best beside him, curling up on the floor in a stupor when he finished. He would like to have known the old bastard, known what private demons inhabited the dark recesses of his mind, and more importantly, how Captain Finley kept them at bay. One thing about it, demons didn’t go away just because you were drunk.

  Jake fished in the pocket of his shirt for a fresh cigar and a match, lit it, and jammed it into the corner of his mouth. He belched around the cigar, tasting whiskey and olives. Then he started setting type because tomorrow he had to get out a newspaper, drunk or not.

  He worked for a long time, forgetting Rosh Benefield, forgetting Henry, forgetting everything but the words on the pages before him and seeing them only as words, not thoughts. He set tray after tray of type, carrying them hot from the machine to the proofing table, pulling proof sheets and marking them, making the corrections. It was the point where the mechanical part of being a newspaperman took over, where Jake the writer gave up his words. As long as the copy was in his Underwood, he worried it like a dog with a bone, agonizing over phrase and syntax, x-ing out, rewording, slashing angrily with his thick black pencil until the paper was virtually unreadable — all a vain, maddening effort to say something just right for a change. But once he committed the copy to the Linotype, that was that. There was something about casting the words in metal that gave them — wise or foolish — a permanence that you didn’t tinker with. The words now belonged to the newspaper, to that entity that you both created and were enslaved to. If there were such a thing as heaven, it would be a place where newspaper editors wrote with perfect clarity and wit and grace, and where nobody took issue with what they said.

  He set type until his whole body ached and sagged with fatigue, and when the final page was set and proofed and corrected, he stopped and looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. He would have to be up again in six hours, laying out the final four pages of the paper and locking them into the heavy forms to put on the Kluge.

  It was all done, all except the thing he had been putting off for two days now.

  He thought about it for a long time and he thought about what Rosh Benefield had said about a man taking responsibility for himself. He made up his mind finally and decided to compose it directly on the Linotype machine so that there would be no rewriting, no editing, no turning back. He typed:

  AN EDITORIAL

  The Free Press is unalterably opposed to the erection of a War Memorial in this community.

  Those who favor such a monument do so with only the most honorable intentions. They see it as a testament to the bravery and dedication of those who serve in the present conflict, especially those who have died.

  The Free Press thinks otherwise. No monument can honor warriors without honoring war itself. And war is dishonorable.

  Let the Germans and the Japanese erect War Memorials. They made the war. Let us get on with the Peace.

  He set it without error in two-column slugs that would fit in the space in the upper left-hand corner of the second page, where there had not been an editorial in more than forty years.

  Then he went to bed.

  Three

  THE WEATHER CLEARED over Belgium and Luxembourg on Christmas Day, 1944, and as the year ended, so did the great German offensive in the Ardennes forest that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. With the clearing weather came the American Army Air Corps — first, General Pete Quesada’s P-38s and B-25s, tactical support for George Patton’s Third Army, which was driving to relieve the embattled garrison at Bastogne; then “Toohey” Spaatz’s big bombers that rained tons of high explosives on the German positions.

  But by the time the Air Corps came, the battle was decided. The infantry had done it. They were by now gaunt, hollow-eyed men, frozen and exhausted, numbed from fear and noise and physical misery. But all along the great bulge the Germans had made in their lines, they held — at the bloody ridge guarding Elsenborn at the north; at the blasted village of Bastogne in the south; at Foy–Notre Dame, the tip of the advance, a few miles from the Meuse River that was Hitler’s initial target. Two things happened to the Germans: They were outfought and they ran out of gasoline. When a German unit abandoned its vehicles on the road leading to Foy–Notre Dame, the Americans found the tanks all but dry. Hitler’s last desperate gamble had failed. The carnage was appalling.

  By January 4 of the new year, the Americans had begun to take back the ground they had lost.

  Thus it was that a small patrol from a unit of the 82nd Airborne Division came to the clearing on a hillside not far from St. Vith, where Lieutenant Henry Tibbetts and thirty of his men had made their pitiful stand against the German attack.

  There were seven of them, led by a nineteen-year-old sergeant from South Carolina. He was miserably tired and cold and he would carry the chill of the Ardennes snow in his bones for the rest of his life. But he led the patrol, as many nineteen-year-old sergeants did on that day, because the battle had taken a terrible toll of junior officers. So he tried to keep his numbed senses alert because he had the lives of six other men in his keeping.

  He saw the tank first, slewed up on its side against a big rock, its paint blistered from the Panzerfaust that had ripped a hole in the side of the turret and tur
ned the tank’s innards into a blinding hell. Now it was just a frozen piece of junk. And good cover for an ambush. He dropped to the snow, bringing his M-I to the ready, and heard the rest of them scattering and hitting the deck behind him. He lay there for a while, looking it over — the ruined tank, the dark lumps in the snow of the clearing. It was awesomely quiet, as if the war had gone on ahead and left them and this white-crusted place in an eddy of time. Then a gust of wind moaned through the tops of the huge fir trees and he started as a clump of snow fell from one of the branches and plopped in an explosion of white. He stifled the urge to fire, to empty a clip into the clearing, where the snow had fallen on the dark lumps. He swallowed the hard ball of fear in his throat and rose to a half-crouch and sprinted for the tank, flattening himself low against the side. He looked back and saw the others watching him, waiting. He pointed to one man and then to a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, showing him where to go. When the man hesitated, the sergeant jerked his arm impatiently, and the man got up and ran low to the ground, his boots crunching holes in the hard crust of the snow, and sprawled behind the log. The sergeant moved the rest of them up the same way, one by one, until they were all in position with the clearing in their field of fire. Then he took a deep breath and eased around the edge of the tank, sweeping the clearing with his rifle, seeing nothing but the snow and the dark lumps, seeing that it was a killing ground.

  The sergeant stood up and motioned them in and they rose and came slowly, warily, seeing for the first time what he had seen in the clearing.

  “Jeez,” one of them said, a kid from Idaho. “There must be fifty of ’em.”

  “They had a helluva fight.”

  “Check ’em,” the sergeant said.

  They made a circle of the clearing, turning over the hard-frozen bodies, avoiding their unblinking eyes.

  “One-oh-sixth Division,” one of them called, examining the patch on a jacket.

  “Yeah, those bastards took an ass-kicking,” another one said.

  “They were green,” said a corporal from Toledo. “First time in action and they lost half the fuckin’ division.”

  “Most of these guys been shot in the head,” the kid from Idaho murmured. “Bastards.”

  They gathered by the tank and hunkered in the snow, lit cigarettes, while the sergeant made his own check. He counted twenty-nine bodies, all but two of them Americans. Then he pulled out the map he was carrying inside his shirt and marked the place so he could report it when they got back from the patrol. Graves Registration would be along in a few days.

  “How much farther we going?” the corporal asked him when he put the map away.

  “ ’til we find something,” he said.

  “Ain’t nothing to find. The Krauts are gone. Hell, they’re probably over there” — the corporal indicated the general direction of the German lines — “inside getting warm. We’re still out here in the fuckin’ snow trying to find ’em.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice from the wad he had tucked in his cheek, making a brown stain on the snow at his feet. The sergeant said nothing.

  The kid from Idaho raised his head. “They’re probably hightailing it to Berlin.”

  “They’re finished,” one of the others said — an older man, twenty-five perhaps. He was tall and thin and wore glasses. He had been to college for a year before he became a paratrooper and he thought a lot about things before he opened his mouth. “They may hold out another month or so, but this was it.” He looked around at the rest of them. “What you want to do now is try to keep from getting your ass shot off while we mop up.” They nodded. “And hope we don’t have to fight the Russians.”

  “Do what?”

  “I heard the captain say the other day that we might as well go ahead and whip the Russians while we’re here. He said we’ll have to do it sooner or later.”

  “The Russians are crazy,” the corporal said, and spat another thin stream of tobacco juice. “I heard stories. I heard one of their tank commanders has got strings of what look like dried peppers draped around the turret of his tank. They’re German peckers.”

  “Where did you hear that?” the kid from Idaho demanded.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I heard it.”

  The sergeant got to his feet and walked a few feet away from them, to the middle of the clearing, and knelt to look where he had seen a glint of metal in the snow. He picked it up. A dogtag. And under it, where the snow fell away, another one. He brushed away the snow and saw the pile of dogtags, their beaded chains stiff and frozen. “Sonofabitch,” he said softly. “Look here.” They gathered around him and looked at the pile of dogtags.

  “Christ,” the kid from Idaho said. “Why you figure the Krauts did that?”

  “I don’t know. It don’t matter. They’re all dead, anyway.” But it did matter. It made him angry, strangely so, in a way that all the killing and maiming of the last few days had not done. Killing was what they all did, both sides, and nobody had taken any prisoners the last few days. But this. It was stupid. It defiled the dead, as if killing weren’t enough. The sergeant laid his M-1 down in the snow and scooped up the pile of dogtags, holding them in both hands. He was shaking and the small dull metal rectangles rattled against each other. “Give every body a dogtag,” he said, holding out the double handful to the others. “Give every sonofabitch a dogtag.”

  “But how’s anybody gonna know who’s who?” the corporal asked.

  “It don’t matter,” the sergeant repeated. “They’re all dead anyway.”

  They stared at him for a minute, saw the red craziness in his eyes, and then they did as he said. When they were finished, there were four dogtags left over. He stood there, holding them dangling by their chains, and looked around the clearing.

  “Check under the tank,” he said.

  The corporal crunched through the snow and knelt at the spot where the tank’s right tread had slewed up on the rock and scooped away the snow, making an opening. Then he pulled a match out of the pocket of his jacket, struck it on the rock, and leaned into the opening, pausing there for a long moment. He drew back and turned to the others and they could see that his face was ashen.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, they’re there.”

  Four

  IT CAME TO HIM as he was setting type for the front-page headlines, laboring over a case of twenty-four-point Bodoni Bold on a Tuesday afternoon after school, click-click, the pieces of type standing like soldiers (or sailors) in the type stick — upside-down backward w’s and o’s and m’s and a p that reminded him of “periscope.” And he wondered. What makes a submarine stay on the bottom?

  He thought about it for a moment and then set the type stick down softly on the layout table so as not to jostle the w’s and o’s and m’s and p’s, and he went over to where Daddy Jake was hunched over the keyboard of the Linotype, fingers drumming clackety-clack while the machine snorted and wheezed and disgorged slugs of type like small shiny farts.

  He waited until Daddy Jake reached the end of a paragraph and then he tapped him on the shoulder. When Daddy Jake turned around and peered out from under his big bushy eyebrows, Lonnie asked, “What makes a submarine stay on the bottom?”

  Jake just looked at him for a while, his eyes red and watery from concentrating on the copy, and then he leaned back in the chair and ruminated for another while, batting his eyebrows with the ferocity of great wisdom rumbling around inside his head.

  “I think,” he said when he was finished ruminating, “that they make everybody sit down.” He digested that, blinked once or twice, and went on. “When they want to bob around on the surface, they make everybody stand up. And when they want to go down to the bottom, they make everybody sit down. And that keeps the weight on the bottom of the boat. And if the enemy is overhead, they just sit there and stay real quiet so that nobody can hear them.”

  “But what if somebody has to get up and go to the bathroom?”

  Jake rolled his eyes back in his head. “That’s th
e hardest part.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well … they can always let half of ’em stand up and the other half sit down, and that means the boat will be halfway to the bottom. And those that are standing up can go to the bathroom.”

  “It sounds pretty complicated.”

  “Timing and discipline,” Daddy Jake nodded. “Timing and discipline. Study the lives of the great generals and admirals and you’ll find they possessed those virtues in abundance. They knew just when to stand and when to sit. When to fight and when to cut and run.”

  “Did Captain Finley Tibbetts have timing and discipline?”

  “The utmost.” One of Daddy Jake’s ears began to twitch. “How else do you think he got Ulysses S. Grant’s ear?”

  “He WHAT?”

  “I never told you about that?”

  “No, you never told me about that.”

  “Well, it’s not much of a story.” He swiveled around in his chair to the Linotype keyboard.

  “Daddy Jake!”

  “Well, all right.” He swiveled back. “It was at Gettysburg. Captain Finley had his troop attacking up Cemetery Ridge and the shot and shell were so heavy that the Confederate charge was beginning to wither. And Captain Finley knew he had to do something to buck up the boys. So he gave that fine black charger of his the spur and galloped straight through the Union lines and took out his big sword and whopped off General Grant’s ear. Then he rode out again with hellfire and damnation exploding around his head. He not so much as singed an eyebrow.”

  Lonnie cocked his head to one side and gave Jake the fish eye. “Ain’t so.”

  “Is so. Go to the library and find a picture of Ulysses S. Grant in a history book. See how his hair always covers his ears.” And Daddy Jake smiled with great satisfaction while Lonnie stood there and took in the delicious outrageousness of it, the infinite preposterous possibilities of submarines and cavalry riders and Ulysses S. Grant’s ear mixing with the rich warm smells and sounds of the print shop. It was all very, very fine.