Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Ma’am,” Whalen said. They appraised each other, the young lieutenant and the young woman, and it occurred to Jake how much the world was given over these day to young people like this, how many young soldiers and young women had made brief lives together, private islands in the midst of chaos and fear and loneliness.

  “Ranger,” Francine said.

  Whalen nodded. “Second Battalion.”

  “Purple Heart.” She nodded toward the double row of ribbons above his left shirt pocket. “And a Bronze Star.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “And hungry,” Pastine said.

  Whalen grinned, a big easy grin, and Pastine took him by the arm and led him into the kitchen, shooing the rest of them away while she warmed a plate of the dinner leftovers — fried corn, snap beans, ham — and left him alone to eat.

  He emerged from the kitchen fifteen minutes later and they were waiting for him in the parlor, all five of them. The baby was up from her nap and Lonnie had come in and Pastine had sent him upstairs to wash his face and hands and slick down his hair so he could meet the young lieutenant who had come from Fort Benning, Georgia.

  “This is Emma Henrietta,” Jake said, nodding at the baby next to him in Francine’s lap. “And this is Lonnie. My grandson.”

  Whalen crossed the room to where Lonnie sat on the edge of a straight-backed chair and shook hands with him very formally. “Glad to meet ya,” Whalen said.

  Lonnie gave him a look of unabashed curiosity and stared at the double row of ribbons. “What are all them?” he asked, pointing.

  Whalen looked down at the medals and ticked them off with a finger. “Bronze Star, Purple Heart, European Theater medal, Distinguished Unit Citation …”

  “You get ’em in combat?” Lonnie interrupted.

  “Lonnie …” Pastine scolded.

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Whalen said, smiling. “Yeah, I got ’em in combat. But I didn’t last long. I got shot the second day.”

  “Second day of what?” Lonnie demanded.

  “The invasion. Normandy.”

  “Well, now,” Pastine said firmly, “that’s enough of that. Lieutenant Whalen didn’t come all this way to be bothered about his medals. Sit down, Lieutenant.”

  He sat in the wing-backed chair and looked up again at the sword.

  “My grandfather’s,” Jake said. “He was a Confederate cavalryman.”

  Whalen nodded and then there was a long silence while they looked at each other. Whalen crossed his legs and then uncrossed them and squirmed a bit in the chair. Finally, Jake said, “The casket. It’s here?”

  “Yes sir. At the funeral home. Redlinger’s.”

  The baby began to fidget and whimper and Francine got to her feet and put Emma Henrietta on her shoulder. “She’s hungry,” she said. “Excuse me.” Grover Whalen stood as she left the room.

  They listened to Francine climb the stairs and Whalen sat down again in the wing-backed chair, and then Pastine said, “We’ll receive guests at the funeral home tomorrrow night, Lieutenant. And then the services the next day. Saturday. I hope that’s satisfactory with the Army.”

  Whalen spread his hands. “Mrs. Tibbetts, it’s up to you. Completely. I’m here to help any way I can. I’ve got no deadline, ma’am.”

  Pastine held herself very straight on the green settee next to Jake. “I don’t know where you’re from, Lieutenant …”

  “Albuquerque.”

  “Well, I don’t know the custom in Albuquerque, but here, the family receives visitors at the funeral home one day and then has the services the next.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Where will that be?”

  “The services? At the Methodist Church,” she said. “That’s all arranged. Cosmo … Mr. Redlinger has taken care of the details.”

  “And the burial itself?” Whalen flushed. “I’m sorry, I hope I’m not … I mean, this is my first time …”

  “No,” she said quickly. “It’s all right, Lieutenant. We’ll have the procession from the church to the cemetery. It’s a mile or two, I suppose. Then something brief at graveside.”

  Whalen turned to Jake. “There’s a local American Legion post, I guess.”

  Jake nodded. “Some First War fellows, maybe a young man or two who came back early from this one. Fog Martin’s the, uh, what do you call it? Commander, I think. Fog runs a service station.”

  “Do you wish to have a rifle salute?”

  “No,” Jake said.

  “Yes,” Pastine said. They looked at each other.

  Jake asked, “Is it any trouble?”

  “I’m sure not. I’ll get Mr. Redlinger to put me in touch with them tomorrow. I imagine they’ve done it before.”

  “Fine. All right, then. That would be nice.” He looked again at Pastine. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No.” Whalen shook his head. “That’s part of what I’m here for. Make arrangements like that. I’ll get the squad together and make sure they know how to pull it off.”

  “Will they use bullets?” Lonnie asked. They had quite forgotten about him, sitting still and quiet in the straight-backed chair on the other side of the room, taking it all in.

  “Blanks,” Whalen said. “I’ve got some, if they don’t.”

  “Why you got blanks?”

  “We … ah …” Whalen looked at Jake and Pastine. “They issue us a kit … for these occasions … and, ah, it has blank cartridges in it.”

  “What else?”

  “Lonnie …” Pastine said.

  “Well, I just asked,” he shot back.

  “Well, it’s not something you need to know anything about,” she said firmly. “You go wash up now, I’ll have supper in a little while.”

  Lonnie got up and left and Whalen rose, too, pressing the palm of his hand against his left thigh. “I guess I’ll get on back to town and let you folks have a quiet evening,” he said.

  “We’ll be glad to have you stay here,” Pastine said.

  “Oh, no ma’am. I’ve got a room at the hotel.”

  “The Regal?” Jake blurted.

  “Yes sir.” Whalen gave him a curious look.

  “Fine, fine,” Jake said hastily. “Commodious. Very commodious. I’ve stayed there myself.”

  “Yes sir.” Whalen took his campaign cap out of his belt, where he had folded and tucked it, and held it in his hand. “Well …”

  “I’d take you back to town, but I don’t have a car. Never owned one.”

  “Sure. No problem. It’s not far.”

  Jake stuck out his hand. “Thanks again.”

  “Yes,” Pastine echoed.

  “My pleasure,” Whalen said, then stopped. “I mean …”

  “Your honor,” Jake said.

  “Yes sir. That’s right.” He hesitated. “I didn’t know your son, of course, but they gave me a little information about him. About his Silver Star and all. I, uh, I don’t know how you feel about all this, but I would have been proud to serve with him. I think … excuse me for putting it this way, ma’am, but I think he was a helluva soldier.”

  Pastine gave him a long look and then smiled just a bit. “I agree, Lieutenant Whalen. He was a helluva soldier.”

  They saw Whalen to the door and stood there as he went stiffly down the steps and across the yard and down Partridge Road, keeping to the side where Jake’s years of coming and going had worn a smooth bare pathway in the grass, limping slightly but walking very erect with his shoulders thrown back. They watched him until he rounded the curve by the pasture, standing there in the doorway together, not touching, Jake thinking that Henry must have looked something like that in uniform, perhaps on a parade ground in hot dusty Texas a brief year ago.

  When Whalen had gone, Jake turned to Pastine, but she cut him off before he could say anything. “Go away while I fix supper,” she said, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  He sat on the edge of the porch for a while, feet on the steps, thinking that there was still a lot to heal, that it mig
ht take a very long time, perhaps more time than was given to a man who was almost sixty-five. It would help if Pastine would cry, if she just needed him a little in a way that let him be the strong one. But she wouldn’t do that. She was taking this in the same quiet, stoical way she had taken Ideal Benefield’s ostracism for almost fifteen years now. It was, come to think of it, all part of the baggage that was Henry and the ghost of Henry. Pastine might have forgiven Henry everything he ever did (Jake imagined that she had) but she had not been immune. Jake had washed his hands of Henry. Pastine had refused to. And Jake was hard put to decide which was worse.

  He woke in the dead of night thinking the unthinkable. It didn’t come to him in a dream and there was no warning. It was just suddenly there, full-blown, and it jerked him awake so fiercely that he almost cried out. And it kept him awake the rest of the night, lying there in the double bed with Pastine sleeping easily beside him, unknowing. When dawn began to color the branches of the pecan tree outside their open window, he got out of bed and carried the unthinkable down the stairs with him like a beast of burden, knowing what he must eventually do, and dreading it terribly.

  But he held it inside all that day, avoiding the temptation to go round to Rosh Benefield’s office and unburden himself, perhaps because he sensed that Rosh would recoil at the unthinkable. He wandered muttering about the Free Press office all morning, making futile gestures toward the next week’s edition of the paper. When Lieutenant Grover Whalen came by late in the morning to tell him he had organized an American Legion squad for the military salute at graveside, Jake was vague and distracted. He wanted to blurt out the unthinkable, but something powerful kept him from it, perhaps the dread of knowing that when he did, things would come unhinged. He kept his mouth shut at dinner and all through a long afternoon of more wandering about the press room. He locked up early and walked home, feeling the unthinkable building in him and knowing that soon, it must come out one way or another.

  Twilight grew soft around them as they waited on the front porch for Rosh, who was coming in his car to take them to the funeral home. Jake hunched wan and exhausted on the top step. Pastine sat prim and self-contained in one of the wicker porch rockers, the one in which Emma Tibbetts had rocked her life away after she was done with Albertis’s ravings.

  Jake looked at his watch. Six-thirty-five. Rosh would get them there early, because that was the way it was done. It was an ironclad understanding that the family arrived first at the funeral home and gave itself a while to make peace with the deceased and compose itself before the community arrived.

  Francine, from the other rocker, asked, “Why haven’t you ever bought a car?”

  Why not, indeed? Maybe it was a self-imposed isolation out here near the end of Partridge Road. The mile and a half that separated them from the center of town might be a path worn smooth from their commerce, but they were a continent away in the utter stillness of their own dark. It suited Jake.

  “A car?” Jake said. “Never needed a car. Lots of folks don’t have cars.”

  “They don’t live halfway to East Jesus, either,” Francine said.

  She was a smart-ass woman, Jake had decided. He was getting to where he could understand what she said, and a lot of it was smartass. “You can stick a firecracker up a frog’s rump, and the frog will jump farther and faster than he ever did before.” Jake said, “but when he gets done, he’ll figure out he’s lost the use of his hind legs.”

  “Fer chrissake,” Francine said. “That’s a buncha baloney.”

  “Hah!” Pastine said from her rocker. “His middle name.”

  Perhaps it was something about the quality of evening and voices, but a snatch of memory came to him then. His mother’s voice, distant and wispy, encased in the rhythm of her creaking chair: “He was,” Emma had said, “a sweet man in his youth. He once jumped from the bridge into Whitewater Creek to rescue a child who had fallen from a rowboat. We drove by in the buggy and people were standing up in the boat screaming that they couldn’t swim. So he just leaped over the bridge railing and into the water and grabbed the child — a little girl, as I remember — and handed her up to the people in the boat. Then he swam to the bank and collapsed there and started crying, ‘She almost drowned. She almost drowned.’ As if his heart would break. Then I looked and there was something flopping around in his pocket and it was a minnow and we laughed about that.”

  Jake knew he had every word of it perfectly in his memory, just the way she had said it, more to herself than to Jake and Pastine, who had been sitting there, newly married, on the porch with her. He realized, remembering it, that she had been talking about his father, Albertis, in the days before the melancholia had got hold of him. He was, she had said, a sweet man in his youth.

  They heard Rosh’s Packard then, rounding the curve in the road, and Pastine got up and went inside to get her crocheted shawl, check on the baby (who was asleep with a Negro woman to stand guard until they returned), and get Lonnie, who came out and stood silently at the edge of the porch as Rosh pulled into the yard under the oak. Rosh hustled them into the car and drove them to Redlinger’s, where Cosmo and Grover Whalen were waiting, Cosmo sweating in a dark suit and Whalen crisp and tall in starched khakis, his double row of ribbons making a splash of color above his left breast pocket. They stood about and made quiet small talk in front of the plain gray stainless steel casket, and Jake began to feel the unthinkable welling up in him like a bilious volcano. There were flowers already, several wreaths and a blanket of carnations covering the top of the casket, and the room was thick with the sweet smell of it. There would be more tomorrow, at the service. Jake was a little giddy from fatigue and tension and blossom-smell, but he swallowed hard and let Cosmo arrange them in a little receiving line just to the right of the doorway so that people could speak to them first and then pass on to the closed casket where Grover Whalen stood at-ease, and finally into little knots and groups that would ebb and flow like backwater in the small receiving room and out into the hallway, where Rosh would move about, bowing, pressing hands and elbows, keeping things moving.

  They began to come promptly at seven-thirty and there was a steady stream for an hour. They all came, the people they had known well from their childhoods and some who were just acquaintances and a few they had seen scarcely at all, because coming here tonight was something you did. It was the proper thing, especially with a soldier come home from war. Everybody came they could have remotely expected to come — except for Ideal Benefield.

  Some of it was curiosity, Jake imagined. They would want to get a good look at Henry’s young widow from Cleveland, Ohio; or they would want to see how Pastine might have changed in several years of near-seclusion at the other end of Partridge Road (only the Methodists saw her regularly); or they might want to see how Jake Tibbetts was wearing his sackcloth and ashes these days.

  There might be some of the morbid in it. Most of the people who streamed through the funeral home had a relative or close friend at war. If Jake Tibbetts’s boy had made it home in a stainless steel box, did that improve the chances that theirs would be upright and breathing?

  And, too, Henry in death was something of a celebrity because his was one of the first stainless steel boxes to come home. Others had died on foreign battlefields, but most had been buried there and their bodies wouldn’t be shipped home until the war was well won. There had been several memorial services in this community, but Henry’s was the first sure-enough funeral.

  So they came in good numbers, mumbling and touching in the self-conscious way mourners do, not really knowing what to say. Jake had always thought it a ludicrous ritual, but he saw it differently now. They were good people who wanted to forget that Henry Tibbetts had made a godawful muddle of his life, and that Jake Tibbetts had been a burr under this town’s saddle with his newspapering, and simply accord a dead man and his family a bit of dignity. So he stood there and pumped and pressed and mumbled for longer than he would have thought possible.


  But he never stopped thinking the unthinkable, and after a steady hour of mumbling and pumping, it got the best of him. The crowd had thinned considerably; there were just a few stragglers drifting in from the warm June night. So Jake turned to Pastine and said, “I’m feeling a little faint. I’ve got to get some air.” She looked at him sharply, but didn’t say anything. He backed out of the receiving line and headed for the door, and as he passed Lieutenant Grover Whalen, he tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Come with me.” He bore through and around the small knots of people in the hallway, nodding and babbling, until he and Whalen burst free of the crowd and headed down the narrow hallway to Cosmo Redlinger’s small neat office at the rear of the building. Back here the sharp chemical smell of embalming fluid was strong, the walls and carpet permeated with it. You could probably bury the whole building, he thought, and dig it up only slightly decayed a thousand years from now.

  Jake closed the door. “Sit down.” He motioned Whalen into a chair and leaned against Cosmo’s desk. “Something’s on my mind, son, and I want you to level with me.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Jake took a deep breath and gave voice, finally, to the unthinkable. “How do you know that’s Henry in that box?”

  Grover Whalen propped his elbows on the armrests of the chair, clasped his hands in front of him, and stared at them for a moment. “Well, sir, the Army says it is.”

  “The Army says it is,” Jake repeated.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Excuse me for saying so, Lieutenant, but that ain’t good enough.”

  He could see a little flicker of “oh, shit” in Whalen’s eyes. “The way I figure it,” Jake went on, “is that thousands and thousands of boys have died in the war. So it must be easy for the Army to make a mistake.”

  Whalen looked a bit relieved. “Just the opposite, Mr. Tibbetts. Because there are so many, the odds against a mistake in any one case are very small, don’t you see?”