by Robert Inman
The next week, when the library reopened from the holiday break, Lonnie looked up Bastogne, Belgium, in the world atlas, placed his finger over the name of the town, and said to himself, “My daddy is there.” Having marked Henry Tibbetts’s existence on a map, he had to know more about the man who occupied the place. And with Daddy Jake out of the house, maybe he could.
His father had been a taboo subject for a long time, he knew that. But it was Daddy Jake’s doing. So he felt no qualms about asking Mama Pastine, as she tucked him into bed one night, “What was my daddy like?”
She stopped, hands still thrust under the mattress where she had been stuffing the edge of the sheet. “What do you mean, ‘was’?”
“I mean when he was a boy.”
She stood up and folded her arms over her bosom. “Well, he was a lot like you are. He was smart, but sometimes he didn’t act like he had much sense.”
“Did he get in trouble a lot?”
She closed her eyes and stood there for a moment as if she were looking back inside herself. Then she said, “No more than most, I imagine.”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
“Yes.”
“Can I see it?”
“ ‘May.’ “
“May I see it?”
She let him get out of bed then and took him to her own room and showed him the photograph, taken when Henry was fourteen. It was in a brown envelope in the bottom drawer of her bureau. She slipped the photograph carefully from the envelope and handed it to him. He looked at it a long time, trying to make a person out of the image in black and white, but nothing came to him. Henry had high cheekbones like Mama Pastine and thick eyebrows like Daddy Jake, and between, his eyes seemed to be lost in his face. Not small, especially, but lost. Lonnie looked up from the photograph into the bureau mirror and searched for some connection, some evidence.
“Who did — does he look like?” Lonnie asked.
Mama Pastine studied the photograph for a moment. “Hmmmm. Probably more like Albertis than anyone. With a little Cahoon thrown in. The intelligent nose. That’s Cahoon. But mostly like Albertis.”
“Daddy Jake’s daddy.”
“That’s right.”
“Did I know him?”
“No, he died before you were born. In fact, he died when your grandfather was a young man.”
Lonnie looked at the photograph again. “And who do I look like?” he asked.
“All of us,” she said.
That wasn’t enough. Lonnie wanted to look like somebody in particular, not everybody in general. He tried to arrange his face in the mirror to resemble the thin-faced boy with the high cheekbones and thick eyebrows in the picture. But the eyes stumped him. Henry wasn’t looking at the camera. He eyes were pointed in that direction, but he wasn’t looking at it.
“You could never tell what he was thinking,” Mama Pastine said, as if she could read Lonnie’s mind.
“Was he very big?” Lonnie asked.
“No, not really. About average. A little thin.”
“Do you have a picture of my mother?”
She sat there very quietly on the edge of the bed for a time and then she said, “No, I don’t.” But the way she said it made Lonnie dead certain there was a picture of his mother, Hazel Benefield Tibbetts, somewhere in this house, perhaps in a box in the dust-encrusted attic, perhaps a picture of Hazel in her wedding dress with her arm entwined in Henry’s. And he was just as dead certain that Mama Pastine, whatever her reason, would not show it to him.
“She was killed in the wreck,” he said. He knew that much.
“Yes.”
“And what did he do?”
“Well, he was very sad,” she said softly and Lonnie could see how sad she was, how whatever had happened had left a deep hurt place in Mama Pastine that she had tucked away like the picture in the bottom of the bureau drawer. She stood up and busied herself rearranging things on the top of the bureau so that Lonnie wouldn’t see how close she was to crying. But he did. He stared at the picture awhile longer and then handed it back and she put it away.
“Can I look at it again?”
“You may look at it anytime you want. Just handle it gently.”‘
“Why is Daddy Jake mad at him?”
“He, uh, hmmmmmm,” she started and then trailed off and closed her eyes again, looking inside. “They had a disagreement,” she said finally.
“What about?”
“They disagreed about a lot of things, actually.”
“Like what?”
“When you’re old enough, I’ll tell you about it.”
So, that was that. Mama Pastine knew everything. But some of it she wouldn’t tell because it made her sad, and some of it she wouldn’t tell because he was too young. Lonnie didn’t want to hurt Mama Pastine, and there was no way he could make himself any older than he was, so that was that. He might glean bits and pieces from her as she was ready to give them up, but that took too much time. What he knew so far only served to confuse and fascinate him.
The photograph told him nothing, really. It was just a face on a piece of cardboard, nothing you could put your hands on and feel and smell the way you could a live human being who was just now in a town called Bastogne, Belgium. There was so much more, and he needed to know it now. He was twelve years old, almost thirteen, by gosh, and he wanted to know where he came from. He wanted to know for himself why Daddy Jake refused to talk about Henry, why the very mention of Henry turned him red with anger, why Henry had been banished to some private secret place where only Mama Pastine ever went. Because he sensed that all that business was part and parcel of who Henry Tibbetts was, maybe the most important part.
So, if Henry was a ghost in his own home, where to turn? Henry Tibbetts wasn’t a subject you could look up in the library, in the set of Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia. There were no photographs of Henry arm in arm with his buddies, like Bugger Brunson had of his daddy. And it sure wasn’t something you would dare bring up with Grandaddy Rosh and Grandmamma Ideal Benefield because there was something bad wrong there, too. He had mentioned Henry once at their house and there was a big cold silence that made him squirm with embarrassment, as if he had cut a fart and everybody had smelled it. In fact, he didn’t spend much time at Grandaddy Rosh and Grandmamma Ideal’s house anymore. It just didn’t seem to be the thing to do, for some reason.
Lonnie knew this: He knew his father hadn’t just run off and left him. The National Guard had taken him off to the war where (Mama Pastine said) he had become a lieutenant. That counted for something, too. Not just anybody could be a lieutenant. No, Lonnie had no bone to pick with his father. He just wanted to know who the hell Henry Tibbetts was, because if he knew that, he would know where Lonnie Tibbetts came from.
He needed clues, things you could store away in the back of your mind and bring out later to fill in missing parts of a puzzle. That was the thing about figuring. If you had a few clues to start with, you could figure out the rest because, after all, things were pretty logical. Look at the Hardy Boys, how they could take a little bitty thing like a scrap of red bandanna hanging from a nail in a boat house and use it to track down a gang of smugglers bringing in diamonds from Africa. Or a guy like Tom Swift, watching bits of ash floating upward from a camp fire and figuring out how to build his own hot-air balloon with an oil burner that would heat the air while he was aloft. Clues. That’s all you had to have. A few clues.
The night after he saw the photograph, he dreamed of Henry on the fire truck. He stood on the corner of the courthouse square downtown, holding Mama Pastine’s hand, and the fire truck passed with a man holding onto the back, leaning way out as the truck turned the corner and sped away with its siren wailing and its engine roaring. Lonnie couldn’t see the man’s face or even tell what kind of clothing he was wearing, but he knew somehow that it was Henry. And he thought, here’s a clue. A big one. So he wiggled away from Mama Pastine’s grasp and ran after the truck, down the side street pa
st the newspaper office and then on out Partridge Road, the truck always just beyond him and the lone figure on the rear, holding on with one hand, leaning way out whenever it rounded a curve, always facing away from him. He ran all the way out the road to where it ended at Tunstall Renfroe’s house, but the truck and Henry were gone.
He woke, feeling a great ache of disappointment and loss. He stared into the darkness over his bed, but there was nothing there, either, except maybe God. He felt the tears well up in his eyes and roll hot and salty down his cheeks and he turned over and buried his face in the pillow so God wouldn’t see him crying and ask him what was wrong, because he didn’t want to have to tell God he didn’t know where he came from. God wouldn’t understand about that. God was Our Father. Everybody’s Father. But he wasn’t Henry Tibbetts.
Then he heard the baby cry. It irritated him, the raw high-pitched squall, that and the thought of her, mouth gaping, pink toothless gums framing her full-throated bellow, a little pissant stranger in his house. He lay there listening to her for a while, feeling very put out by the whole business of having a baby on the premises, wallowing in resentment. Then suddenly it dawned on him: There’s something else, a big clue, a whopper, right here under my nose and I didn’t even see it. There’s Francine. Francine, who had shown up on the front porch on Christmas Eve. Francine, smelling of cold and fright, huge in the belly, come from Texas in the middle of the night. From Henry Tibbetts.
He had been watching her purely out of curiosity, catching glimpses around corners, through open doorways, in mirrors; hearing snatches of conversation, the way she spoke in tight little chopped-off sentences in a hard nasal accent. Half the time, you couldn’t understand what she was saying. It went by so fast and sounded so foreign with the words all run together with no space in between, that you had no time to figure it out before the next burst caught you. It was like trying to dodge a machine gun. When Francine said something, Mama Pastine just automatically cocked her head to one side and said, “I beg your pardon?” She was from Cleveland, Ohio, which might as well be Rangoon, Burma, for all you could understand what she said.
She was small and trim and, he thought, pretty young. Younger than his father, surely. Henry was thirty-four, Mama Pastine told him. It seemed important to know that, to think of him as he was now, not as he appeared in the photograph in the bureau drawer. So Henry had a young wife from Cleveland, Ohio, who spoke like a hedge-clipper, snip snip snip. Lonnie wondered how they had communicated, with her firing off bursts of run-together words like she did. She moved the same way she spoke, with quick, economical motions. Lonnie caught glimpses as she learned to take care of the baby, watching as Mama Pastine tested the temperature of a baby bottle by splashing a few drops of milk on the underside of her wrist, then as she picked up the baby by first putting a hand behind her head and then lifting the baby with one smooth flowing motion that deposited her gently in the soft curve of her shoulder. Francine watched, and then she did it, too, exactly the same way, as Mama Pastine nodded approvingly.
Lonnie watched, but he didn’t have much to say. Two days after the baby came, Francine had appeared suddenly one morning in the kitchen, having walked stiffly and quietly down the stairs by herself. Mama Pastine had grabbed her by the shoulders and helped her into a chair, fussing all the while about how a woman was supposed to stay in bed for a week after she had a baby. Francine was pale and drawn and the old bathrobe she was wearing hung loosely on her thin shoulders. Mama Pastine hovered over her, clucking, while Francine got her breath. Then Francine looked across the table at Lonnie, who was staring open-mouthed, his plate of half-eaten hotcakes getting cold.
“This is Lonnie,” Mama Pastine said.
Francine looked across the table, gave him the once-over. “I’m-gladdamecha,” she said.
“What?”
She gave him a funny look. “Isaidl’mgladdamecha.”
It took a while for his brain to catch up and figure out what she had said, and then he nodded dumbly and said, “Hi.”
“Babykeepinyouwake?”
He ran that one through his head a couple of times and after a moment he lied, “No ma’am.”
Francine brushed a strand of stringy brown hair away from her face. “Wellshe’skeepinmewake.” She gave him a wan smile. Mama Pastine brought her a cup of coffee and she took a sip and set the steaming cup down on the table. “Igottawashmyhair,” she said. “It fellslikeratserlivininnut.”
Mama Pastine cocked her head to the side and said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Rats,” Francine said, tugging at her hair. “Rats.”
My God, Lonnie thought to himself, and finished his hotcakes in silence while the baby began to bellow upstairs and Francine rolled her eyes. For God’s sake. Rats.
Now it was three weeks later and the baby was still crying, waking them all in the middle of the night, hungry and furious, in the room next to Lonnie’s that had once been Great-grandmamma Emma’s and then Henry’s and then had stood empty for a long time until Francine and the baby came. She slept during the day, but she howled in the middle of the night like somebody had stuck a pin in her rump.
Lonnie had gotten his only good look at the baby one afternoon when Mama Pastine had taken Francine to town to buy a couple of dresses at Hamblin’s Mercantile. Mama Pastine gave him strict instructions to sit in the downstairs parlor with the door bolted, and if the house caught fire, to rush up the stairs and grab up the baby. He had no idea in the world how you grabbed up a baby, but he bolted the door behind them and watched through the window as they headed down Partridge Road, and then he went straight upstairs to get a good look for himself at what all the fuss was about. She was quiet and still, just her pink head with its scrunched-up nose and mouth showing from under the blanket. Lonnie stood by the crib and watched her for a long time and saw that she was not breathing and with his heart in his throat he knelt down with his head right next to the slats and suddenly she gave out a little burst of sound, not even a cry, and he almost fainted. When he recovered, he watched her up very close and saw the almost invisible flaring of her nostrils as she exhaled and the way her tiny eyelids fluttered every once in a while like leaves trembling in a faint breeze. He decided that the baby didn’t look like anybody, but that was okay, because she didn’t have a name, either. They were waiting for Henry to come home to give her a name, that’s what Mama Pastine said. For God’s sake. A little old pissant no-name baby that kept them all awake at night.
Like she was doing now. Lonnie lay there listening to her, thinking how this baby and this machine-gun-talking young woman Francine were a link to his father. He listened to
her angry wail and thought that this was sort of like the reverse side of a mirror — something that belonged to Henry Tibbetts that Henry couldn’t see or feel or hear, the way Lonnie could not see or feel or hear Henry.
He heard Francine moving about and then the baby got quiet and Lonnie heard the rhythmic creak-cuh-reak of Great-grandmamma Emma’s old rocking chair. He listened to it for a long time until it became in his mind the sound of a wagon wheel, its axle in need of grease, creaking along the hard frozen clay of a Virginia back road, an undisciplined sound in the dead of night that called out to Captain Finley Tibbetts and the hundred brave and lusty men of the Lighthorse Cavaliers hunkered against the chill in their saddles.
Captain Finley turned to Muldoon at his side and whispered, “Fools making music for us to dance by, Muldoon. They take great care to wrap their horses’ feet in rags, then forget to grease the axles of their wagons.” Captain Finley shifted his weight in the saddle, tilting his head to the side to get an exact fix on the creaking wheel on the road below, raising his arm to signal the Lighthorse Cavaliers to the attack …
“Ohshit!” from the next room.
Lonnie threw the covers back and got out of bed.
There was only the light from the small table lamp at Francine’s back and it took him a moment to realize the baby was nestled in the shadow cas
t by the light, nuzzling Francine’s bared breast. He stared, face flushing with embarrassment but unable to look away.
“Sallright,” Francine said.
“Are you okay?” Lonnie asked after a moment.
“Ofcourse’mokay.”
“What?” He strained to hear.
“Isaid’mokay.”
He just stood there and looked at her, feeling completely dumb and foolish. Finally, he said, “I can’t understand a word you say. You talk like a machine gun.”
“Wellyoutalklikesyrup,” she said. “Arey’slowersomethin’?”
He could tell from the way her voice rose at the end that she had asked him a question, and it made him angry that he couldn’t understand what the sam-hill she was saying.
“Will you slow down!” he said, exasperated.
She stared at him and he could see, even in the dim light at her back, the way she had little hard lines around her mouth and eyes, even as young as she was. She seemed very self-contained. A tough cookie. It was something James Cagney had said in a gangster movie. One dame in particular he said was a tough cookie, a moll who hung around with a hood named Fingers, as he remembered it. Lonnie imagined Francine clinging to the runningboard of a big long black Packard, speeding from the scene of a bank heist in a roar of squealing tires and flying lead, spitting machine-gun words at the G-men hot on their trail, ratatatatatatatat.
“I can’t understand you,” he said.
“Wellcomeoninan’closethuhdoor.”
“Huh?”
“COME IN.”
He closed the door behind him and stood with his back to the wall, watching her, watching the baby at her breast. Francine looked at the baby and then motioned him closer, and he crossed the room to where she sat in the chair with the baby snuggled against her, pink cheek against white breast, small fat arm slung upward, tiny hand clenching and unclenching as if squeezing the breast dry. The baby suckled for a long time, cheeks moving rhythmically, and then she stopped, cheek and hand still until Francine moved to pull her away. Then the sucking and clenching began again. Lonnie stared, fascinated.