Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Jake was standing over the layout table, staring at the skeleton of the front page, thinking about Lonnie and Billy Benefield, when Whit Hennessey stuck his head into the back shop. “Jake,” he called.

  Jake jerked his head up and blinked at him. “Hi, Whit.”

  Whit held up the envelope. “I was coming by this way, so I thought I’d drop this off. Just came in. Looks pretty official.” In the front office, Jake wiped his hands on his shop apron and took the envelope, holding it by the edges so he wouldn’t soil it. He held it up to the light from the window. The return said simply, “The War Department, Washington, D.C.” It was addressed to Mrs. Henry F. Tibbetts.

  Whit studied him. “About Henry, I imagine.”

  Jake nodded. “I imagine.” He looked at it for a moment. “Second one in a week,” he said. “They wrote Francine the other day telling her they’d be sending the life insurance. Ten thousand.”

  “Well, she’s got a baby to raise,” Whit said. “Guess it’ll come in handy.”

  “Yeah. It’s a good thing, I suppose.”

  “A good thing,” Whit repeated.

  “I guess they’ve got a policy on every boy in uniform, huh?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “I never had a cent of it myself,” Jake said. “I guess I’m getting too old now. Nobody wants to insure a worn-out carcass.”

  “I’ve got a little,” Whit said. “Lots of folks lost their insurance in the Depression, you know. Couldn’t keep up the payments. I was lucky enough to keep mine.”

  Jake said, “I always thought Roosevelt should have invented something called reverse life insurance if he really wanted to help out the little fellow.”

  “What’s that?” Whit asked.

  “That’s where a fellow takes out a policy and the insurance company pays him the full amount right on the spot. Then when he dies, they collect from his relatives.”

  Whit laughed. “Sounds like that might make a good front-page column, Jake.”

  “It did,” Jake said. “About six years ago.” It was funny, he thought. He could remember the columns from six years ago better than he could the one he wrote last week.

  “Well,” Whit said after a moment, “I guess I’d better get on …”

  “How’s Arthur, Whit? Did he make lieutenant?”

  “Oh, yes.” Whit brightened. “A shavetail. What they call one of those ninety-day wonders, he says. He’s with the Ninety-ninth Infantry.”

  “From the look of things, he ought to be coming home before too long.”

  Whit shook his head. “I imagine they’ll be sending everybody the other way, Jake. Getting ready to invade Japan.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe we’ll figure something out.”

  “Yeah.”

  He saw the way Whit looked at him, the way the change registered with people. And there was a change. Henry’s death had taken the edge off him. He felt old and tired and he just didn’t want to fight with anybody anymore. It was not the way a newspaperman was supposed to be, but it was the way he had become in three months. You couldn’t get a rise out of Jake Tibbetts these days — not that anybody tried, considering the circumstances.

  “Arthur’s a good boy. And not a boy anymore.”

  “Yes,” Whit said. “They’ll all be grown up when they get back. Grown older than us in some ways, I imagine.” He hesitated for a moment. “I’m sorry … I’m sorry Henry didn’t get a chance to, ah …”

  “Come back and make something of himself,” Jake finished for him.

  “That’s right.”

  Jake rose from his desk. “Well, I guess I’ll get on home and see what’s in this,” he said, holding up the letter.

  Whit reached out and offered his hand and Jake shook it, a good firm handshake, a sign between himself and Whit Hennessey that there was a bond that Jake had been unwilling to admit until now. Sons off at war, one gone for good, the other in harm’s way. Jake could speak of the war now and say “we.” It had become a personal thing, the way it had been all along to Whit Hennessey and Biscuit Brunson and George Poulos and Fog Martin and all the rest who had lived through the long months of dull aching apprehension, dreading the phone call or telegram that would tell them the war had snatched a piece of them and devoured it. Jake had had to come to grips with the war because Henry’s death forced it on him. And having done that, he had to come to grips with Henry, to make peace with him. Whit understood that, and understanding it, put aside whatever Jake had said or been before, war memorial and all.

  Jake walked home in the warmth of midday with the fullness of spring exploding around him, engorging the very air he breathed, and he was a bit winded and sweaty when he mounted the porch and opened the screen door. Pastine was in the kitchen fixing dinner, the smell of cooking greens heavy in the room. Francine was sitting at the table with the baby. Emma Henrietta they had named her, after Jake’s mother and grandmother. Francine had come to them the day after the news of Henry’s death, asked for some Tibbetts family names, and settled on Emma Henrietta. If she considered anything from her own lineage, she never mentioned it. She was very matter-of-fact about the whole business, as she was about everything. Now the baby sat on her lap, head bobbing unsteadily toward the sound of Jake’s entrance, eyes dancing. At four months, she could hold her head up and make bubbles with her lips.

  “You’re early,” Pastine said, wiping her hands on her apron and brushing a strand of hair from her face.

  “Whit brought this,” he said, placing the letter on the table in front of Francine. They all stared at it for a while.

  Francine looked at the envelope, then up at Jake. “You open it,” she said.

  Jake and Pastine sat down at the kitchen table, and Jake opened the envelope carefully and took out the single typed sheet. He sat there reading it, the tears filling his eyes and spilling over down his cheeks while they stared at him. And then he folded up the letter and slipped it back into the envelope and set it down in front of Francine. “They gave Henry a medal,” he said. “The Silver Star. The Army says he died leading his platoon in a fight with the Germans near some little town in Belgium. I can’t pronounce it.” Jake wiped his face with his hands. “They say he was a hero. They’re sending the medal.”

  They sat there for a long time when he had finished, the baby making gurgling sounds, Tunstall Renfroe’s car rumbling past on Partridge Road as he headed home for dinner, a catbird scolding in the pecan tree in the side yard, and here inside, at the table, something of Henry so alive and present you felt you could reach out and touch it. Henry, who had been a ghost at this kitchen table for so very long, was — for a brief moment — back.

  A hero. Jake was stunned. He thought Henry incapable of it. But there it was, from the War Department. In the last terrifying moment of his life, Henry Tibbetts had done the one thing he had never done before: He had taken his life in his own hands and shaken it for all it was worth. Poor, lost, wretched Henry — he who had slunk whimpering from every conflict with his own devils and archangels — had this once, faced with death, done mortal combat with his soul and won.

  Jake looked over at Pastine, she who had been so incredibly stoical since the first outburst of grief. “Well …” he said, and trailed off. There seemed nothing to say. “He did his duty,” he said finally.

  “You’re surprised,” Pastine said.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t be, Jake.”

  Jake reached for the envelope, picked it up, toyed with it. “There were just so many times he didn’t. This one time, he did.”

  “And look what it got him,” Pastine said. She was completely dry-eyed. There was not the slightest break in her voice. It was as if she had steeled herself against it. And maybe that was a good thing, because it took a long time for a soldier to become truly dead to the people he left at home. The government sent letters and medals, meaning well, but every time they did it was a chance to hurt all over again unless you were steeled again
st it. Pastine had never been an emotional woman, but now, her control was a bit awesome.

  “There was another time,” Francine said, breaking the silence. It surprised them both — him and Pastine. She didn’t have much to say, particularly about Henry. She was a very private, very self-contained young woman, obviously used to making do, making her own way. She occupied a space, as she sat now in the kitchen chair with the gurgling baby in her lap, in a manner that said, “This is mine. For the time being.” She revealed little, volunteered almost nothing. They knew little about her past, only that she was from Cleveland and she came from a large family, second-generation immigrants. Polacks, from the sound of her maiden name. And Jake knew that Pastine was afraid she would leave, take the baby with her and leave, now that there was no Henry to tie her here and ten thousand dollars was on its way in the mail. Pastine said nothing about it, but Jake could tell.

  “He came to see me when the man I was with got killed in a jeep accident,” Francine said. She looked straight at Jake in that strange unblinking way she had, that tough little Cleveland, Ohio way of hers, spoke in those clipped, harsh sentences that he was just beginning to understand. The man I was with. She hit him right between the eyes with it.

  “He came to tell me,” she went on. “He didn’t have to. Nobody had to tell me a thing. I mean, I wasn’t married to the guy or anything. But Henry came and told me, and then he came back later to see how I was doing. I was lousy, that’s how I was doing. But he took care of me. He didn’t have to give me the time of day, but he took care of me. And later on, when he asked me to marry him, I thought to myself, Ain’t nobody ever taken care of me before, and what’s a better reason to get married to a guy?”

  Jake just sat there, not knowing what in the hell to say.

  “So now Henry’s gone and done his duty again,” she finished. She didn’t sound bitter about it. Just matter-of-fact. She slid her chair back from the table with a squeak and stood up, hoisting the baby to her shoulder and turning toward the door.

  “You can leave her down here with me if you want,” Pastine said, perhaps a bit too quickly.

  Francine stopped, turned back to them. “You’re afraid I’m going to leave,” she said. “When the check gets here.”

  “Yes,” Pastine said.

  “I guess I can go anytime I want to.”

  “Yes. Or you can stay.”

  “Because I owe it to Henry?”

  Pastine sat very still in the chair, her voice low and measured. “You don’t owe Henry a thing. You can stay or not stay depending on whether you want to. That’s all. If it’s a matter of going where you’re wanted, there shouldn’t be any question of that.”

  The baby began to whimper in Francine’s arms and reached for a fistful of her hair. “No,” Francine said, “there’s no question of that.”

  “So, will you stay?”

  Francine looked at the baby and back at them. “Yeah,” she said. “For now.” Then she turned and went upstairs, leaving the letter from the War Department on the kitchen table.

  Pastine got up and went back to the pot of greens cooking on the stove. Jake sat quietly, thinking that these two women were the people who had a claim on Henry, not he. He had had reason enough to wash his hands of poor, wretched, disgraced Henry who refused to take responsibility for himself. But the fact remained that the hand-washing had been done. Now, about all he could do was to make peace with his lost soul, let bygones be bygones, accord Henry the dignity a dead man deserved and marvel that Henry had died a hero. Other than that, he had no claim. And in this, he was a stranger at his own table. The way Henry had been for so long.

  Six

  IT WAS JUNE when they sent the body home, and by then the fighting was over in Europe. There was still the Pacific, but MacArthur had been doing brilliantly with the leftovers from the Big Conflict, and now that the full wrath of the Allies could be turned on the Japs, they wouldn’t last long. That’s what people said.

  George Poulos’s boy, with the 82nd Airborne, finished the business in Czechoslovakia as the Americans threw their might at ghosts — the myth of Hitler’s secret fortress in Bavaria — while the Russians marveled at their good fortune and raced alone into ruined Berlin. George Poulos, Junior, having fought through the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge with nothing worse than blisters, was wounded in the arm by flying shrapnel when a burning German Tiger tank exploded in an alleyway in a small Czechoslovakian village. It was a minor wound, but it earned him a Purple Heart to go with the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster and the Distinguished Service Medal he had won in combat. He was recuperating in England.

  Biscuit Brunson’s boy was frazzled from lack of sleep during the month of June. His Seabee unit was bivouacked next to the huge airfield at Tinian, and the coral and sand shook with the roar of the B-29S lifting tons of bombs from the runway at all hours of the day and night, forming an airborne bridge you could almost walk across to the incendiary hell that Japan was becoming. Iwo Jima had fallen, Okinawa had been stormed on Easter Sunday. Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent, had already headed for the Pacific. Ernie Pyle wrote about men at war, and men were no longer at war in Europe.

  But Europe still smelled of death. Allied troops opened the wretched doors of Birkenau and Auschwitz and saw carnage that made even them, battle-hardened men, weak. There was a sickening odor that hovered over the ravaged fields and villages and cities of Europe and haunted the eyes of the survivors. American soldiers wanted to leave it behind, to get home and see if there was any sanity left in the world.

  All in good time, the generals said.

  But a minor general in Eisenhower’s headquarters, with an eye toward public relations, suggested that if live troops could not be shipped home immediately, why not dead ones? A few hundred bodies, he said — to give the signal that things were done with in Europe. Eisenhower liked the idea. So two thousand were chosen, exhumed from battlefields across Europe, men from every corner of the nation. On a day in early June when several thousand Japanese burned to a crisp as eight hundred Superfortresses turned Tokyo’s paper houses into a holocaust, a plain gray metal casket bearing the stamp TIBBETTS HENRY F ILT 02049466 was loaded with hundreds of others onto a transport ship in the port of Cherbourg. In Cherbourg, it was a dark, wet day, the air thick with the cool rains that presage the slipping of spring into summer in northern France. In Tokyo, a globe away, night was day, brighter than sunshine.

  It took two weeks for the dumpy little Liberty Ship to make the voyage to Wilmington, North Carolina. From there, the caskets headed homeward, each escorted by a member of the Armed Forces of suitable rank.

  They had been expecting the lieutenant. The War Department had telegraphed to say the casket bearing Henry’s body would be arriving on the train, accompanied by an escort officer. But still it gave Jake a start, seeing him through the screen door, standing in the shade of the front porch with the late afternoon glare of June behind him. He thought for a brief, stupid moment of Henry. He was tall and bit slope-shouldered, the way Henry had been — tall like the Cahoons. But then he saw it was not Henry, couldn’t be, of course. This young man was broader across the shoulders and he had fine sandy hair, close-cropped and matted wetly to his skull in a neat narrow line where his campaign cap had been. The cap was in his hand.

  “Mr. Tibbetts?” The young lieutenant squinted into the semidarkness of the hallway at Jake.

  Jake opened the door. “Yes.”

  “Grover Whalen, sir. From the Army.”

  “Come in, come in,” he said, grabbing the lieutenant’s hand, pumping it, pulling him into the hallway. “You’ve brought Henry home.”

  There was a little snap to the lieutenant’s head, as if it had caught him by surprise to have it put just that way. Jake could see how it must have been, riding the train with the casket back in the baggage compartment, riding down through the hot green countryside with nothing but the monotony of steel clacking on steel, keeping company with a dead strang
er whose only kinship was that he, too, had been an officer and a warrior, wondering how the hell it would go with the family, perhaps dreading it. Strange town, strange people, dead soldier.

  Jake smiled to reassure him. “You’ve come a long way, I imagine.”

  “Yes sir,” Grover Whalen said. “Fort Benning.” He stood now in the hollow coolness of the entrance hall, cap in hand, silver bar gleaming on one collar point and crossed infantry rifles on the other. Jake noticed the beads of sweat on his forehead, the wet splotches under his armpits. He looked past him at the vacant front yard.

  “Did you walk all the way out here?”

  “Yes sir. It’s not far, really. They gave me directions at the funeral home.”

  “Not far,” Jake repeated. “I walk it twice a day myself, back and forth. But you’ve got a limp.”

  “Nothing much,” he said, and Jake noticed then the semicircular RANGER patch on his left shoulder next to the seam.

  “Well, come on in,” Jake said, pulling him farther into the house. “Have a seat in here” — he directed him toward the parlor — “and I’ll get my wife and Henry’s wife.” Whalen sat down in the wing-backed chair next to the fireplace while Jake went upstairs and fetched Pastine and Francine. Whalen was looking at Captain Finley Tibbetts’s sword, hanging above the fireplace in its gleaming silver scabbard, when they entered.

  He stood. “Ma’am,” he said to both the women.

  “Lieutenant Grover Whalen,” Jake said. “Come from Fort Benning.”

  There was a brief bad moment for Pastine, seeing a tall young man in uniform there in her parlor. Jake could see her eyes go soft and he thought for a moment she might let go of her terrible control. But then she squared away her jaw and crossed the parlor to Lieutenant Whalen and gave him her hand. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “it means a lot to us.” Jake could see, too, the relief in Grover Whalen’s eyes as he realized that these people had a handle on themselves, that it would not be a messy business. “And this is Francine,” she said. “Henry’s wife.”