Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Francine looked up at him. “Ainchaeverseenatitbefore?”

  “What?”

  “A TIT,” she said loudly.

  Lonnie could feel his ears and face flame and he thought, My God, what if Mama Pastine hears her and wakes up and comes in here and I’m standing here and she’s got her tit hanging out. For God’s sake. But if the thought of it bothered Francine, she showed no sign. She let the baby work at it awhile longer until she was still again and then she lifted her to her shoulder and began to pat and rub the tiny hunched back until the baby belched.

  “Organ recital,” Lonnie said, half to himself.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Daddy Jake calls it when somebody burps. An organ recital.”

  She left the baby on her shoulder for a few minutes, patting and stroking. Her breast was still exposed, white and blue-veined. Lonnie stared at it. There was a tiny drop of milk on the nipple.

  Francine looked down. “I’m leaking,” she said, slowly so he could understand it. She covered herself with one hand, pulling her nightgown over the breast, and then she rose and deposited the baby in the crib and covered her with the blanket, tucking in a loose side. The baby gave a deep sigh and stuck a fist in her mouth. Francine sat back down in the rocker and they both watched the baby.

  “Why do you put her on her stomach?” Lonnie asked. “And talk slow.”

  “Pastine says that way, if she spits up, she won’t strangle.”

  The way she said it. Pastine. It was right, what he had told Daddy Jake. They were already thick as thieves. She was as familiar as if she had been living here all the while. She and the little pissant no-name baby. Here he was, been living here most of his life, couldn’t get the time of day about his own father, and they just moved in and took over.

  “Iwishlhadacigarette,” she said, almost to herself.

  Lonnie caught the word cigarette. “I got a cigar,” he volunteered. “One of Daddy Jake’s.”

  “A cigar?” The way she said it, Lonnie wondered if he had said “cowshit” instead of “cigar.” “Wellferchrissake.”

  He glared at her. “Beggars can’t be choosers when they’re having a nicotine fit.”

  A slow grin spread over her thin face and she said, “WellIreckon. Sogetthecigar.”

  So Lonnie went to his room and rummaged in the shoe box he kept in the back of his closet shelf and got out the cigar he had been saving for some special time when he and Bugger Brunson might fire it up on the creek bank and pass it back and forth like tycoons. Francine held it daintily between her thumb and forefinger and lit it with a match she got from the scuffed leather purse on the top of the dresser, puffing lightly to get it started. It flamed up and a cloud of smoke issued from the end.

  “I guess it’s a little dry.” Lonnie said.

  “Whew,” she said. She took a small drag and coughed, then waved her hand to scatter the smoke and held the cigar out toward him. “Wannapuff?”

  Lonnie held the cigar expertly between his forefinger and middle finger, took a big drag, and held the smoke in his mouth for a moment before tilting his head up and sending it in a white stream toward the ceiling, where it dissipated in a widening pall.

  “You don’t inhale ’em,” he said, handing the cigar back to Francine.

  “Oh.” She nodded. She held it this time like Lonnie had done and stared at it. “Howlong’sit” — then she stopped when Lonnie held up his hand and shook his head. She started over, saying the words one at a time. “How-long-does-it-take-to-smoke-one-of-these-things?”

  “Depends,” he said.

  “On-what?”

  “Whatever you take a notion to.”

  “Take-a-what?”

  “Notion.”

  “Holy cow,” she said, shaking her head. “This is like talking with a mud puddle.”

  “Well, we ain’t hicks, if that’s what you think.”

  “Idin’saynothin’ …” Lonnie held up his hand. “I-didn’t-say-nothin’-about-hicks. I-just … oh, what the hell. What about the cigar?”

  “What about it?”

  “HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO SMOKE IT, FERCHRISSAKE?”

  “Shhhhhhhhh,” he waved his hand at her. “You’ll wake Mama Pastine, and she’ll come in here and find all this cigar smoking going on and she’ll tan my butt.”

  “Awright, awright.”

  “Now,” he said. “You can make a cigar last a long time. Or if you get wore out with it, you can just stub it out and then come back and finish it later.”

  “That’s a consolation,” she said, wrinkling her nose. She tried it again, taking a small quick puff and holding the smoke in for a little while before she let it out. She coughed again. “It’s kind of strong.”

  “Yeah. A cigar ain’t like a sissy-stick.”

  “What?”

  “Cigarettes. That’s what Daddy Jake calls ’em. Sissy-sticks.”

  She held the cigar well away from her. “I suppose Daddy Jake just smokes cigars?” The way she said “Daddy Jake” sounded strange and foreign coming from her, in her Cleveland, Ohio, machine-gun accent.

  “Yeah,” he said. “ ‘Course, lots of men smoke cigarettes. Hilton Redlinger smokes two packs of Picayunes a day and he’s the police chief so he ain’t no sissy. But Daddy Jake kids him about it. Daddy Jake will take a big puff on his cigar, and say, ‘Hilton, you still smokin’ them sissy-sticks?’ “ He mimicked Daddy Jake, rolling his eyes and batting his eyebrows. And then he thought to himself, What in the hell am I doing this for? This woman’s a stranger in my house with a little old no-name baby and here I am running off at the mouth like she was Bugger Brunson or somebody. Was it because she had clues? He stopped short and looked down at his bare feet and he could feel the blood rushing to his face, turning his ears hot.

  “Well,” she said, and he looked up to see her studying him closely, her head tilted slightly to the side as if she might get a better view of him from an angle. “I guess I’ll stick to sissy-sticks. You want me to stub out the cigar so you can finish it later?”

  He was beginning to get the hang of her talk now. You just had to put your brain in “race” and let it fly along with the words, then digest them for a second. You could get the gist of it, anyway. “Naw,” he said, “it’s too old. Why don’t you just throw it out the window.”

  She got up from the rocking chair and went to the window and raised it with a rattle, letting a rush of cold air into the room, and tossed the cigar into the darkness and shut the window quickly. Lonnie looked to see if it had waked the baby, the cold air and the cigar smoke, but she was sleeping soundly.

  “Thanks anyway,” she said, turning back to him. They stood there looking at each other for a long minute and then she said, “I-guess-we-better-get-back-to-bed.”

  “I ‘speck.”

  “You what?”

  “‘Speck.”

  She gave a little grunt and sat down on the edge of the bed, not in the rocking chair, and Lonnie could tell she wanted to get back to sleep. But he said, “What’s it like in Cleveland, Ohio?”

  She thought for a moment. “It’s big and it snows a lot in the winter and people don’t say ‘speck.’ “

  “What’s it like in Texas?”

  “It’s big and ugly and hot and I don’t know if people say ‘speck’ or not because I din’paynodamnattention.”

  “Do I look like my daddy?”

  She stared at him, taken aback, and he looked down at his feet again, stunned that he had just come out with it like that and wanting to turn and run back to his room and get way down under the covers in his bed and not come out for a long time. But he was frozen to the spot by something stronger than his urge to bolt, and no power on earth could have raised his hand to the doorknob not two feet away. Come on, he thought. The clues. The clues.

  “Yes,”’ she said after a moment. “Look up at me.”

  He looked up.

  “Yes, I think you do. But different, too.” She paused and then said, “You
ain’t seen him for a long time, have you?”

  “No’m.”

  “Well, I didn’t know him but a short time myself.”

  “But you had a baby.”

  Francine looked over at the baby and started to say something, then stopped and sat there quietly for a minute or so while Lonnie grew increasingly uncomfortable with the certainty he had said something terribly out of place, like mentioning Henry Tibbetts in front of Grandaddy Rosh and Grandmamma Ideal Benefield.

  Then she looked back at him and said, “Yes. We had a baby.” The way she said it hit Lonnie with a jolt. This woman and this baby here in this room were not just two people who had turned up on his front porch, they were his father’s other life, something he could never, never know anything much about. He didn’t know anything about his father, he didn’t know where he had come from, and here were this woman and this baby who had a claim on Henry Tibbetts of their own. There weren’t any clues here, he thought angrily. Just more puzzle.

  “It’s funny,” Francine said, “your’re his kid and I’m his wife and neither one of us knows much about him.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. I just said, I didn’t know him very long. We got married in Texas and then a few weeks later he shipped out.”

  Lonnie tried to imagine her in Texas with his father, wiggling around and making a baby. It made him sick with despair and hurt and lonesomeness.

  “You gonna stay here?”

  There was a look of surprise in her eyes. “What else?”

  “Well, you’re from Cleveland.”

  She laughed, a harsh little laugh. “Huh. Ain’t nothin’ in Cleveland. I spent too damn much time gettin’ out of Cleveland.” She looked at him for a moment. “Hell, I’m just tryin’ to make out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look,” she said. “He sent me here. He told me to come here and have the baby and wait for him. I’m just tryin’ to make out, that’s all. He gets home, maybe we’ll … I dunno, get to know him.”

  Lonnie nodded dumbly. So much for that. Nothing doing with this tough cookie if he wanted to know who the dickens Henry Tibbetts was and who he his ownself was, because all she had done was wiggle around in Texas and get her belly all pumped up and then send Henry off to Bastogne, Belgium. Maybe during the time Henry had known her he had never understood a goddamn word she said.

  He turned and opened the door. “Good night.”

  Then she said something that surprised him completely. She said, “Gimme a chance, huh?”

  He turned back and looked at her and it came to him how hard it might have been for her to say that, how a tough cookie with little hard lines around her mouth and eyes just didn’t talk that way. It brought him up short. It took him a long time to say, “Yes’m,” and then to wonder what he meant by it.

  “Well, g’night.”

  He could feel her eyes on him as he stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind him, realizing for the first time how cold his feet were on the bare floor.

  He got into his own bed and pulled the covers up over his head and rubbed his aching feet to get them warm, and then he wondered where Henry Tibbetts was this very moment. He wondered what Henry ate for supper and whom he spoke to and what he said, whom he thought of just before he went to sleep and whom he dreamed about in Bastogne, Belgium, on a cold January night. He wondered if Henry knew he had a baby with no name and if he thought even for an instant about a twelve-year-old boy (almost thirteen) back home who wanted to know where he came from. He wondered about it until he finally slept.

  When he woke in the morning his room was uncommonly bright, even around the edges of the window shades. He got out of bed and pulled back the edge of a shade and saw that it had snowed sometime during the early morning hours, a once-a-year snow, enough of it to blanket the ground and leave a thick topping on the bushes like cake frosting. For God’s sake. Snow. And Ollie Whittle hadn’t said a thing about it on the radio. It was overcast, but the snow made everything look very bright, very clean, very silent, so that he was almost reluctant to put on his clothes and go tromping around in it, crunching tracks through its perfection.

  He released the shade and stood there in the semilight for a moment, then got his clothes off the hook inside the closet door and dressed quietly. He opened the door to the hallway and listened. He was the only one awake. He tiptoed downstairs and stood in the hallway, glancing into the parlor to see if perhaps Captain Finley were sitting there deep in the wing-back chair beside the dying embers of the coal fire. But the parlor was empty. He crossed to the front door and pulled back the lace curtains and looked out and saw Daddy Jake coming down Partridge Road, a small overcoated figure in the great still whiteness, feet making holes in the snow that stretched behind him in a lurching row of black dots and disappeared around the curve by the pasture.

  Lonnie watched him as he came and then he stepped back from the front door as Daddy Jake climbed the steps to the porch, shoulders hunched, overcoat drawn tightly about him. He stamped his feet on the porch to shake off the snow, then opened the door and stepped into the hallway and stood there blinking at Lonnie, his great riotous eyebrows batting fiercely. He looked awfully tired, his eye red-rimmed and puffy, his cheeks sagging. For God’s sake, Lonnie thought to himself, he’s an old man. It frightened him.

  Then Daddy Jake looked up, behind Lonnie, and Lonnie turned and saw Mama Pastine halfway down the stairs, tying the belt on her bathrobe as she came, her hair frizzled from sleep. She stopped, looked at Daddy Jake. “I thought I smelled cigar smoke last night.”

  “I just came,” Jake said quietly.

  There was a great silence and Lonnie looked from one to the other, trying to figure out what was wrong, because there was something awfully, terribly wrong. And then he saw the envelope in Daddy Jake’s hand, a small brown envelope, and he knew. Daddy Jake didn’t have to say it, but he did, in a voice so small you would have thought it had been lost in the snow.

  “Henry’s dead.”

  Then the great snow-silence rushed back in on top of him and obliterated all sound. Mama Pastine might have howled in anguish behind him, as Daddy Jake’s face collapsed and his shoulders heaved with sobs, but Lonnie could hear none of it. There was only the deafening silence, a feeling of lightness. He felt his knees give way, but there was no sensation of falling, just the awesome stillness and the need to be very quiet in a place where he could consider the awful truth that now, he would never, never know where he came from.

  Five

  THE LETTER ARRIVED on a late April Wednesday and Whit Hennessey brought it around to the Free Press. Jake would have picked it up from the post office himself an hour later as he headed home for lunch, but Whit brought it around.

  Jake had spent the morning in the back shop laying out the pages of that week’s edition of the paper, locking the neat columns of type and the black-bordered advertisements into their forms, ready for the press run that afternoon. There was only the front page to finish. It would have two photographs this week. Its centerpiece would be a two-column picture of Biscuit Brunson receiving a citation from the county war bond chairman for the four hundred dollars’ worth of bonds he had bought with nickels and dimes from the Victory Donuts he had sold over the counter of the cafe for three years. Biscuit was donating the bonds themselves to a community fund that would be used to build a war memorial. Jake’s front-page column, already set in type, would go on at length about the Victory Donuts. It said that if all the pounds of flesh the community had added from eating them were dropped from an airplane, they would sink a good-sized Japanese battleship. It said nothing about the war memorial.

  The front page might also have a one-column photo of Billy Benefield in uniform and dress cap, gold bars on his collar, tie knotted neatly. The caption underneath would tell how Billy had finished advanced flight training, gotten his pilot’s wings, and was in Presidio, California, awaiting assignment to the Army Air Corps in the Pacific. What would be left unsai
d was what Alsatia Renfroe had done. She had walked out of the bank at midmorning two weeks ago after taking six hundred dollars from her cash drawer, had gone home and packed her suitcase and gotten on the train. She left a note for Tunstall and Marvel on the entrance hall table that read, “I have not been kidnapped. Your loving daughter, Alsatia.” They hadn’t heard a word from her until two days ago, when she called to say that she and Billy had been married in the base chapel at Presidio. Marvel had taken to her bed and Tunstall, scandalized, had kept to himself at the bank. Ideal Benefield hadn’t been out of her house, and Rosh wore a grim look that kept anyone from commenting or questioning. Everyone shook their heads and left them all alone.

  Jake looked again now at Billy’s photograph and caption and wondered if he should just leave it out. It would be the easiest thing to do. He agonized over it a moment, then told himself he would decide after lunch, the last thing before locking down the front-page form and carrying it to the big Kluge press for the afternoon run. Lonnie would be there straight from school at three to help him fold and label the copies of the paper and tie them into neat bundles to deliver to Whit Hennessey at the post office.

  Lonnie. The thought of him troubled Jake. He was quiet, too quiet. Had been, in fact, since the news came almost three months ago. He had fainted there in the hallway when Jake brought the telegram through the snow, and after that, he seemed to withdraw inside himself, making none of them privy to whatever he was thinking about Henry and death. Jake had tried to draw him out several times, but Lonnie gave him a fierce look and refused to talk about it. He was no more responsive with Pastine. But she didn’t push. “Be patient,” she said. Lonnie showed up faithfully at the newspaper office every afternoon after school. He was catching on quickly in the back shop. His fingers flew over a type box like a seasoned printer’s. Before long, Jake would let him start learning the Linotype machine. But Jake would catch him frequently, stock-still over what he was doing, staring blankly at the work, mouth open. Jake worried, but he took Pastine’s advice and left the boy to his thoughts, whatever they were, of the father he had never really known and now never would.