Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  He existed these days in a twilight world between the improbable and the outrageous. Between Daddy Jake, living here in the newspaper office, sleeping on a cot back by the Kluge, heating coffee on a hotplate, shaving over the wash-up sink, taking an occasional shower at the fire station, smelling like cigars and bay rum oil and Lightnin’ Jim’s Best and the nose-tickling, slightly rank odor of bachelorhood — and home, where women dogged his every footstep, traipsing up and down the stairs with armloads of diapers, sheets, gowns, frilly-lacy-doily blankets, smelling of talcum powder and lilac water and Carnation Evaporated Milk, except for the little one, who yelled her head off and just smelled, period.

  There was not a quiet place anywhere. Not here, where the machinery clanked and rattled and Daddy Jake bellowed and fulminated; not at school, where the drone of decimals-conjugations-elements-continents buzzed through his head; not at home, where even the deepest hours of night were split with the wails of the little bugger in the room next door. Certainly not in the secret compartments of his own mind, where his imagination ran riot and gave him no peace. It all made him a little dizzy.

  It had been almost a month now since the great shebang, when Mama Pastine had run Daddy Jake out of the house and he had taken up residence at the Free Press. He seemed to be more or less holding his own. He was a little rumpled around the edges and he didn’t shave every day and sometimes he forgot to go over to Biscuit Brunson’s cafe for a meal. But since he had gotten over his cold he had been in reasonably good health. And he made a great show of showing no interest whatsoever in what was going on out Partridge Road.

  He had plenty to keep him occupied in town, because things were still in a general uproar over the war memorial. It had been three weeks since Daddy Jake wrote the editorial, and the whole town was still in an angry twit over it. He was being given pretty much the silent treatment in Biscuit Brunson’s cafe, which was where he was taking all his meals since his first purchase of bologna and cheese and bread had gone rancid and given him the stomachache. Several people had canceled their subscriptions to the Free Press. George Poulos, who had a boy in the paratroopers, stopped running ads for the Jitney Jungle Super Saver. And others called on the telephone. One in particular. Lonnie was working in the back shop when Daddy Jake picked up the receiver in the front office, listened for a moment, turned red in the face, and snarled, “Meet me in the street, you sonofabitch!” then slammed the receiver on the hook. He stormed into the back shop and sat down with a great jolt in the chair at the Linotype machine, turned to Lonnie and said, “Don’t ever hide behind the anonymity of a cowardly instrument like the telephone!”

  The next morning, as Lonnie was on the way to school, he detoured by the newspaper office and saw Daddy Jake standing out on the sidewalk in front, bundled in his overcoat, doing something to the window. As Lonnie walked up behind him, he could see that Daddy Jake was scraping at the glass with a razor blade. And there was enough of it left so that Lonnie could see that it was a swastika, done in bold slashes of black paint. He stood there for a moment by the curb, watching Jake absorbed in the job, and then he said, “Daddy Jake …” Jake whirled around and Lonnie saw the cold flat fury in his eyes. He backed up a step, suddenly afraid.

  “Go to school!” Jake barked at him, and he took off running.

  But at school there was still the war memorial to be dealt with. Purvis Redlinger saw to that. Purvis was a head taller and a good ten pounds heavier and when he bulled into Lonnie from the back in the schoolhouse yard just before opening bell, he sent Lonnie sprawling, books flying. Purvis stood over him for a moment with a nasty grin curling his upper lip and then he said, “Well, look here who I bumped into. Lonnie Tibbetts, the little Nazi. Well, I’m so sorry, Adolph.”

  A crowd gathered around them quickly, pushing into a tight little circle, and a nervous giggle went through the throng.

  It took Lonnie a moment to get his breath back. He looked down and saw that he had scraped the knee completely out of his pants and the flesh was raw and bleeding underneath. The cold knot of fear in his stomach made him want to roll over and cover his head, but he looked up at Purvis Redlinger and swallowed hard and said, “Kiss my ass, Purvis,” and came up swinging. Purvis decked him with a roundhouse blow that caught him aside the head and made his ear explode in pain. Lonnie drew back to throw a punch, but Purvis hit him again, this time with a left that whumped into Lonnie’s stomach and sent him down hard on his rump on the frozen raw clay. He sat there a minute, staring at his shoelaces and trying to keep from throwing up, while Purvis hovered over him, slapping at the top of his head; then he just sort of crumpled forward and grabbed Purvis around the ankles and yanked hard, pulling Purvis down on top of him. That was where it ended because Professor Kessler, the principal, pushed through the crowd and grabbed each of them by the jacket and yanked them apart. “See here!” he commanded. And Lonnie could see quite well. He had had his butt whipped.

  Professor Kessler took them in his office and spread-eagled them across the front of his desk and gave each of them five blistering whacks with his long flat paddle, then sent them limping down the hall to their room.

  Purvis muttered threats at him all day, crowding up against him in the lunch line, taunting him on the playground, but avoiding anything so blatant that it would bring the wrath of Professor Kessler down on them again. The rest of the kids gave him wide berth, even Bugger Brunson, who was his best friend, but who was terrified of Purvis Redlinger. Purvis liked to punch Bugger in the stomach and call him “blubber gut.”

  Lonnie kept to himself and kept his mouth shut. As soon as school was out, Lonnie went to the back of the playground behind the big oak tree, where serious disputes were settled, and waited. Purvis swaggered up a few minutes later, trailing a little band of snotty-nosed hangers-on who, like Bugger, were terrified of Purvis. Lonnie didn’t even give Purvis time to open his mouth. He kicked Purvis in the nuts, and when Purvis collapsed in agony, Lonnie glowered at the rest of them who had gathered to watch the massacre and stalked off. Bugger Brunson was standing on the sidewalk at the edge of the school yard, but Lonnie didn’t even look at him.

  As the newspaper office, where he went every afternoon for an hour after school, Daddy Jake surveyed his red swollen ear and the rip in his pants and said, “You’ve been fighting.”

  “I fell down playing kick ball.”

  “And fell on your ear.”

  “Right smack on it.”

  Daddy Jake ran his hand through his thinning hair and Lonnie could see how his knuckles stood out hard and white. Then he stood there with just his jaw moving for a while and looked at Lonnie, and finally he said, “Well, I hope you kicked the shit out of that kick-ball.”

  “Yessir,” Lonnie said. “I sure did that.”

  Lonnie was late getting home that evening because he went with Daddy Jake to the every-other-Thursday-afternoon Town Council meeting. And that’s where things came to a head.

  Grandaddy Rosh Benefield was presiding since he was the mayor, and things were going along fine until the end of the meeting when Cosmo Redlinger, who ran the funeral parlor, said he wanted to make a motion.

  Grandaddy Rosh looked down the long council table at Cosmo and folded his hands in front of him and said, “All right, Cosmo.”

  “I want to move,” Cosmo Redlinger said, “that we build a war memorial.”

  There was a good little crowd in the council room, more than usual, most of the chairs around the wall filled with spectators, and it got so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart when Cosmo Redlinger said that. Everybody seemed to lean forward a bit toward the rectangular table in the middle of the room where Grandaddy Rosh and the other four members of the Town Council sat. Everybody, that is, except Daddy Jake, who paused barely an instant as he scribbled on the sheaf of folded newsprint he was using to take notes. He finished the sentence he was working on and then held his pencil poised above the paper, waiting to record the next salvo. Everybody else seemed to be making
a great effort not to look at Daddy Jake. Cosmo Redlinger, in fact, was making a great study of the ceiling above his chair, where paint was flaking off the plaster around a big brown water stain. The commode in the upstairs telephone exchange would be just about there, Lonnie thought, taking a good look at the stain himself. He took a moment to imagine Em Nesbitt, the operator, sitting on the commode while the switchboard buzzed furiously with someone trying to get through to report an air raid, or worse.

  Grandaddy Rosh looked all around the table, fixing each of them in turn with his small bright eyes, and Lonnie noticed again how small Grandaddy Rosh’s eyes were in his big face and how bright they were, like little diamonds nestled in a pillow. And he noticed how hard it was to tell what Grandaddy Rosh was thinking because his face stayed the same almost all the time. Only his eyes changed, and now they were hard and bright.

  “Councilman Redlinger has made a motion,” Grandaddy Rosh said, sounding very formal about it. “Do I hear a second?”

  George Poulos mumbled something from his place near the middle of the table, but he had his back to Lonnie, and Lonnie couldn’t hear what he said.

  “What, George?” Grandaddy Rosh asked.

  “I said, ‘Second,’ “ George answered.

  Grandaddy Rosh unfolded his hands and then folded them again. “We have a motion and a second. Is there any discussion?”

  There was a long breath-holding silence, and then Alvah Foley, who owned the barbershop, spoke up from his side of the council table. “What kind of war memorial?”

  They all looked at each other, and then Grandaddy Rosh said, “Cosmo, it’s your motion. Do you want to elaborate?”

  Cosmo pulled at his long nose for a moment. “Well, a … uh … monument, I suppose.” He thought about that for a while, then added, “Granite.”

  “A granite monument,” Grandaddy Rosh repeated. “Do you think it ought to have any embellishments or appurtenances?”

  “Spell that,” Orval Middleton said. Orval was the fourth member of the Town Council and the secretary. He wrote laboriously on pages of a loose-leaf binder and later transcribed the minutes of the council meetings into a large leather-bound ledger that had been kept since the town was founded after the Civil War.

  “Which one?” Rosh asked.

  “Appurtenances,” Orval said.

  “A-p-p-u-r-t-e-n-a-n-c-e-s.”

  Orval wrote it down.

  Cosmo shot them a blank look. “Any what?”

  “Decorations,” Grandaddy Rosh said. “I’m … ah … trying to flesh out your motion, Cosmo.”

  “Decorations,” Cosmo nodded. “Like what?”

  “Well, statuary. Inscriptions. The like.”

  “You don’t have to use legal terms, Rosh,” Cosmo complained. “We’re all just ordinary folks here.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rosh said evenly. “What I mean to say is, do you think our” — Lonnie noticed that, how he said our — “war memorial ought to have some kind of figure represented on it, perhaps a statue, or any writing on it?”

  “I think a statue would be fine,” Cosmo said, placated. “A statue of a soldier.”

  “Well,” Alvah Foley threw in, “there are a lot of sailors and airmen from around here.”

  “I’ve got a nephew in the Merchant Marine,” Orval Middleton said, looking up from his three-ring binder.

  “How about people who work in dee-fense plants?” said a man over in the corner of the room, one of the spectators. Grandaddy Rosh turned around and stared at him, because he didn’t allow spectators to just speak up like that, unless it was the part of the council meeting called Remarks from Citizens.

  “We can’t put everybody on it,” Cosmo said irritably.

  “Then maybe we ought to think about something besides a statue,” Rosh said, in control again.

  “Maybe,” George Poulos said, “we ought to just have a big granite thing with the names of the boys who died in action on it.”

  “What about the ones who were wounded?” Alvah Foley asked.

  “All right,” George said. “The dead and wounded.”

  There was a moment of somber silence in the room while they all thought about the dead and wounded.

  Alvah Foley cleared his throat. “How badly wounded?”

  “Wounded and injured,” Orval Middleton put in. “My nephew hurt his back real bad loading cargo on a freighter and I think,” Orval raised his eyebrows, “that a man who was injured in the line of duty ought to be recognized because that cargo was going to Russia.”

  Lonnie looked over at Daddy Jake’s sheaf of newsprint and saw that the last word on there was “appurtenances,” and after that his pencil had meandered off into a series of squiggles. But Daddy Jake was taking it all in, his gaze shifting from one to the other. Every so often his ear, the one turned toward Lonnie, gave a slight twitch.

  Cosmo Redlinger was getting a little flushed in the face. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” he said. “Every boy that’s gone in the service has had some kind of injury or another, I imagine. Where do you draw the line between getting shot and dropping your rifle on your foot?”

  “I didn’t say anything about dropping a rifle on your foot,” Orval said hotly. “I just think when a boy gets hurt bad doing something that helps the war effort, like sending vital cargo to Russia, he’s made just as much of a contribution as another one that gets shot.”

  Grandaddy Rosh nodded agreeably. “There are,” he said, “all kinds of sacrifice.”

  The rest of them nodded with him, except for Cosmo, who turned sideways in his chair and hiked one leg over the other knee, giving them his shoulder. “I think,” he said after a moment, staring up at the brown stain on the ceiling again, “that we’ve gotten off the subject.”

  They chewed on that for a moment and shifted their rumps around in their seats and then Alvah Foley said, “Truth of the matter is, the war ain’t over.”

  “That’s true,” Grandaddy Rosh said.

  Orval Middleton scribbled some more and then stopped, hung fire, and looked up and down the table. “I suggest,” he said, weighing his words as if they were pieces of rationed beef, “a cannon.”

  There was a long deep silence and then Cosmo said, “A what?”

  “A cannon. We could just put a cannon on the courthouse lawn and let it do the whole job. Honor the dead, the wounded, the injured, everybody that comes back — from all the services.” He thought about it, bobbing his head up and down. “We could even make it a memorial to all the past wars — the War Between the States, the Spanish-American, the First War, all of ’em. And we could,” he wound up with a flourish, “even paint it white. For peace.”

  It took a while to digest all that, but finally Grandaddy Rosh said, “I ought to remind you that anything that goes on the courthouse lawn is the purview of the County Commission. They may have some ideas of their own.”

  “They’ll want the whole county in on it,” Alvah Foley said.

  “And there’s the American Legion,” George Poulos added.

  “Well!” Cosmo Redlinger exploded, surprising them all with his vehemence. “I think” — he slapped his hand on the council table — “that this body should go on record favoring the idea of a war memorial.” He turned and looked directly at Daddy Jake, the first time anyone in the room had done so all afternoon. “We ought to let folks know how we stand on that.”

  “We can work out the details later,” George Poulos said, nodding.

  “All in favor say ‘Aye,’ “ Grandaddy Rosh said quickly.

  They all said, “Aye.” All five of them.

  “Opposed?”

  Silence.

  “Motion carries. Further business?”

  Silence.

  “Move we adjourn,” Orval Middleton said. He had been on the Town Council longer than anybody else, and he was always the one who said “Move we adjourn.”

  “Second,” George Poulos said.

  “All in favor?”

  “Aye.”


  The room emptied quickly and after a moment there were only the three of them — Grandaddy Rosh, Daddy Jake, and Lonnie. Daddy Jake sat there and scribbled a few lines on his newsprint while Rosh shuffled through the papers in front of him on the council table, finally standing them on edge and jogging them against the table to make a neat pile. Through the window at the side of the room, Lonnie could see that the light was fading fast. He was late and Mama Pastine would skin him good — for being late and for having the knee ripped out of his pants and a cauliflower ear. Should he tell her? No, she wouldn’t understand, any more than she would understand why a submarine stays on the bottom.

  Grandaddy Rosh got up from his chair like an elephant rising from a long sleep and put the papers into a manila folder.

  “Lonnie, you ought to come to council meetings more often,” he said.

  “Not if y’all gonna drag on so long,” Lonnie said. “Mama Pastine’ll skin me alive.”

  “Tell her you’ve been observing democracy in action,” he winked. He looked over at Daddy Jake. “Tell her it’s not a perfect form of government, but it beats lynching.”

  Daddy Jake just snorted and got up and walked out.

  What he didn’t tell Daddy Jake — what he didn’t dare tell Daddy Jake — was that he was consumed with the need to know more about his father.

  Henry Tibbetts existed for him as a shadow man, a gray and half-remembered figure who appeared infrequently and smelled of what Lonnie later came to know as Lightnin’ Jim’s Best and scratched Lonnie’s face with the stubble on his cheeks. Lonnie had lived with Daddy Jake and Mama Pastine for about as long as he could remember. His mother, Hazel, he could barely recall, and Henry had moved in and out of his life like a soft-spoken ghost. Lonnie hadn’t seen him at all since the National Guard had taken him off to war. But Mama Pastine’s outburst on Christmas morning, the way she had turned on Daddy Jake with such wrath, had awakened his curiosity. There was something important going on here, something that made Henry Tibbetts, shadow man that he was, seem suddenly compelling.