Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Daddy Jake was there so quick Lonnie thought he must have leaped over the casket in one gigantic bound. But he didn’t grab Chief Hilton Redlinger and demand that he let Lonnie Tibbetts loose. No, he stepped back behind Chief Redlinger and slipped the big pistol out of his holster so fast that it suddenly just appeared in his hand. Then he stepped back a couple of paces, holding the pistol pointing down toward the ground, and said, “The whole mess of you. Get away from here.”

  “Jake!” Mama Pastine screamed.

  “Back!” he bellowed, raising the pistol, waving it. “Back!” And KER-WHOOM, he fired a shot into the air. People began to scatter wildly, women screaming, men cursing and yelling, the lot of them stampeding across the little double-rutted road, diving for cover behind the cars and tombstones, the American Legionnaires dropping their blank-loaded rifles and racing pell-mell with the rest. They panicked and ran, all except for Chief Hilton Redlinger and Grandaddy Rosh Benefield and Lieutenant Grover Whalen and Mama Pastine and Francine. They stood rooted to the spot, gape-mouthed.

  “Jake Tibbetts, you sonofabitch, you’re under arrest,” Chief Hilton Redlinger cried.

  “Bullshit, Hilton,” Daddy Jake said. “You ain’t gonna arrest nobody without a pistol. Let go of that boy and get over there with the rest of ’em. And take Pastine and Francine with you. Now!” KER-WHOOM. He let go with another thunderous shot and Chief Redlinger dropped Lonnie’s arm and backed away, a look of rage and mortification on his face.

  “I said, you’re under arrest.”

  “Fine. I’ll be with you in a minute. Now git.”

  Hilton Redlinger turned and looked at Mama Pastine and she said, “Hilton, the man’s crazy. Don’t mess with him.” Then she turned to Grandaddy Rosh, standing next to her, and said, “Rosh, do something.”

  “Jake,” Grandaddy Rosh said, “put down the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t do this, Jake.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “I know what you’re about to do, and it’s sacrilege.”

  “You’re probably right,” Daddy Jake said, “but I’m gonna do it anyway. Lieutenant Whalen, did you bring that special wrench you told me about?”

  Lieutenant Grover Whalen looked stricken. “Yes sir.”

  “Well, come here with it. Lonnie, you go over there with your Mama Pastine and Francine and you take them over yonder across the road a ways.” He waved the gun, giving directions. Lonnie stood there and stared at him for a moment. “Move!” Daddy Jake yelped. He moved, and Chief Hilton Redlinger moved, too, because they could all see the crazy look in Daddy Jake’s eyes and Lonnie thought for the first time in his life that Daddy Jake had gone stark raving mad and was entirely capable of gunning them down. “Rosh, you and Lieutenant Whalen stay put.”

  They did what he told them, moving back across the road next to Cosmo Redlinger’s hearse, behind which Cosmo himself knelt, ashen-faced. They watched in the unbearable heat as Daddy Jake stood guard with Hilton Redlinger’s big pistol and Lieutenant Grover Whalen, the sweat pouring off him and drenching his uniform, removed the American flag from atop the casket and handed it to Grandaddy Rosh, then moved around the casket with a funny-looking wrench in his hand, undoing the bolts one by one. It took a good ten minutes to do it, and by this time, people had begun to edge into their cars and back them out of the cemetery and roar off down the paved road. There were only a handful left when Lieutenant Whalen finished and turned to Daddy Jake.

  “That’s it,” he said.

  “Lift it up,” Daddy Jake said, motioning with the gun.

  “Mr. Tibbetts …”

  “I said open it.”

  Lieutenant Grover Whalen pushed up on one side of the casket and the top swung open and he stared inside, then turned his head away. Daddy Jake stepped over to the casket and looked himself, then turned to Grandaddy Rosh. “Come see, Rosh.”

  Grandaddy Rosh walked over and looked inside, and then he put his hand on Lieutenant Grover Whalen’s shoulder and said, “Son, you go tell the United States Government to come get this poor boy, whoever he is.”

  Lieutenant Whalen nodded weakly, then closed the casket lid.

  Grandaddy Rosh lumbered across the little road to where Lonnie and Mama Pastine and Francine stood, and he looked Mama Pastine in the eye and said, “It’s not Henry. I don’t know who it is, but it’s not Henry.”

  Mama Pastine fainted in a heap on the bare clay next to the road, and as Lonnie knelt over her, he could hear Daddy Jake saying softly, “That damn Henry has tricked us again.”

  BOOK FOUR

  One

  OLD HENRY KNEW who he was before anybody else did, but not by much. He hardly had time to enjoy being somebody else before the jig was up and he had to go back to being Old Henry again.

  For a good while, several months in fact, he didn’t know who the hell he was and he decided he didn’t give a rat’s ass. He did know one thing about his past, and that was that he had long been a person who didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass, but really did deep down inside, and now it was a great relief to actually not give a rat’s ass. A man can know a good deal about himself without knowing exactly who he is, especially when it comes to something like giving a rat’s ass.

  He knew a few things about how he got where he was. He knew that the very first thing he recalled was hearing voices and remembering that he was a soldier and there had been a battle and that if there were voices, they might shoot his ass. One of the voices even poked its head up under the tank where he was huddled with some dead men. But Henry played possum, even when the voice threw some pieces of metal up under the tank. They went away after a while, and Henry waited a long time before opening his eyes and seeing that the pieces of metal were dogtags. He put one of them around his neck and crawled out from under the tank and that’s when he discovered that his left leg hurt like hell. It was encrusted with blood, the pants leg caked and frozen to his flesh. He lay there a moment in the snow, hurting and getting very cold, and then he looked up and saw an old man looking down at him. With that, Henry passed out.

  The next time he woke up, he was in a first aid station and his leg still hurt like hell and they were calling him Farquhar. Henry thought about that for a while. Farquhar? It didn’t sound right, but it didn’t sound especially wrong, either. He told somebody his leg hurt like hell and they stuck him with a hypodermic needle and as he drifted off to sleep again, he thought that Farquhar would do just fine for now, considering the lack of alternatives. As a matter of fact, he thought, he didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  They had been calling him Farquhar for several months as they moved him from aid station to field hospital to the big red brick monstrosity just outside Paris where he was now. It had been a Nazi headquarters during the war and before that a girls’ school, and neither group of occupants had been long on amenities. Still, it was a fairly comfortable place and the third-floor ward where Henry mended from his leg wound had a big, airy dayroom at the end of the building where you could sit and stare out the window at Paris in springtime a few miles away and generally not give a rat’s ass. A nurse came one day and told him that his family in Idaho had been notified that he was alive and getting along. Did he want to write? Dictate a letter? Well, no, he’d never been much for writing letters. He came close to telling the young nurse that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about anybody in Idaho, but he decided to let it lie.

  It was in the dayroom that he discovered who he was, or at least began to. He was sitting there, legs crossed, hands folded in lap, in a green-upholstered chair, when the major stalked through the room — a cigar-chewing surgeon wearing a white smock over his uniform, a bandy-legged little guy with great bushy eyebrows and gold major’s leaves on his collar.

  Suddenly, as clearly as if it were there before him, Henry could see a column of type on the left-hand side of the front page of a newspaper:

  As anyone knows, the work of the military is done entirely by those of the rank of Captain and b
elow. The decisions are all made and the orders all given by the Colonels and Generals.

  This leaves the Majors. The sole job of the Major is to jump through his skin whenever a Colonel or General barks, and to make life miserable for those in the ranks below him.

  A Major’s sole recompense in life is the hope that he may one day rise to the rank of Colonel.

  In any walk of life, there are Majors, whose duty it is to bow and scrape to the gentry and needlessly complicate the lives of common citizens.

  One must, in any endeavor, determine who the Majors are, and stay out of their way.

  Henry could hear great noises in his head, clangings and bumpings, painful flashes of light, then an overwhelming weakness in his body. There was nothing physically wrong with him. It was just that he recognized the newspaper column, realized that he definitely was not Farquhar, and figured he might have to give up not giving a rat’s ass.

  Henry sat there a moment and gathered his faculties, then got up from the chair and followed the major down the long corridor until he turned into an office. Henry walked through the door just as the major sat down at his desk and said, “Have you jumped through your skin today?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Well, I’m not Farquhar.”

  The major turned him over to a captain, a psychologist who wore wire-rimmed glasses. They sat across a desk from each other in another office just down the hall.

  “So you don’t think you’re Farquhar?” the captain asked.

  “I’m pretty sure of it,” Henry said.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t believe I’m Farquhar. And I don’t give a rat’s ass about anybody in Idaho.”

  The captain went out for a moment and came back with a roster of names, three pages of it, perhaps a list of all the patients in the hospital. He sat down and passed the roster across the desk to Henry.

  “Look it over,” he said, and watched as Henry scanned the names from A to Z.

  “See anything that looks familiar?” the captain asked.

  “Well,” Henry said, considering it, “I’m quite taken by Lothar.”

  “Is that your name?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The young captain took off his wire-rimmed glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose where they had made twin red indentions, then put them back again. “Would you look once more?”

  “Ah,” Henry said after a moment.

  “What is it?”

  “Jeremiah.”

  “Is that your name?”

  “I think … yes, I believe maybe it is. It has a good sound to it, don’t you think?”

  “Splendid. Think now, does it suggest anything else to you?”

  “Camels?” Henry said tentatively.

  “Why camels?”

  “Well, it’s a biblical name, I believe.”

  “Yes. Quite. Anything else?”

  “No, not a damn thing, Doc.”

  “But you think Jeremiah may be it? Your name?”

  “Yes, I believe so. My first name, anyhow.”

  He told the captain then about how he had come to under the tank, how he couldn’t remember anything about how he had been wounded, how they kept calling him Farquhar all these months. He didn’t tell the captain he didn’t give a rat’s ass, but he did say he was quite confused about the whole thing and had decided to keep his mouth shut until he could figure something out. Just now, he had seen the major stalking through the dayroom and it had convinced him that his name was definitely not Farquhar. Jeremiah, maybe. But not Farquhar. How did he get Farquhar’s dogtags? Damned if he knew.

  Henry was a bit of a hospital celebrity for a week or so. They poked and prodded, ran all sorts of tests, plied him with questions, had him look through geography and history books, magazines and newspapers, trying to recapture the rest of his identity. Some of the things he read tantalized him, but there was nothing he could definitely put his finger on and say, “That’s me.” Still, bits and pieces began to come to him, little parts of the puzzle. He mulled them and kept his mouth shut. He was in no hurry. No hurry at all.

  They put him in a room with another amnesiac, a swarthy-faced young man of twenty-five or so. The doctors called him Joe for lack of anything better. Unlike Henry, Joe was looking high and low for himself.

  “I don’t know who the fuck I am,” he said to Henry. Joe sat propped on his bed, looking at Henry over the top of a recent issue of Life magazine, while Henry arranged his toilet articles on the top of a metal washstand. Joe had bright eyes, a lively face. “I mean, ain’t that somethin’! Fa’chrissake, I rack my brain, y’know? I mean, it ain’t like I ain’t tryin’.” His brow knitted fiercely and he laid the magazine down across his legs. “And all I draw is a great big fat zero.” He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, then smote himself on the side of his head with the heel of his hand. Then he grinned. “But I’ll get it. I’m workin’ on it, Jack. I’m beginnin’ to get little flashes.”

  “I’ll bet you’re from New York,” Henry said helpfully.

  “Doc says with an accent like mine, prob’ly da Bronx.”

  “That ought to narrow it down a little.”

  “Jeez, you know how many sonsabitches there are in this man’s army from da Bronx? Prob’ly fifty million.”

  “That many.”

  “How da fuck y’figger the Army loses a guy, huh? That’s what happened. They just fuckin’ lost me, Jack.”

  Henry finished laying out his toilet articles — shaving mug and brush, soap dish, safety razor, toothbrush, styptic pencil — and stepped back to survey his work. “Have you asked them how that happened? How they lost you?”

  “Shoor, I ast ’em. They say you got these millions of dickheads runnin’ around, big battle goin’ on, lots of guys blown up so’s you can’t even find a little sliver of ’em, lots of others goin’ out of their gourds, y’see? You got some missing, some don’t know who the fuck they are. Like me.”

  “And me,” Henry said.

  Joe grinned. “We’re sorta like the Lost Tribe, huh?”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  “I guess they figure you put two of us wackos together, we’ll figger somethin’ out, huh?”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I just hope somebody finds me,” Joe said wistfully. “I just wanna go home.”

  But Henry never found out what happened to Joe. Two days later, the captain called him in, offered him a chair and said, “Your name is Henry Tibbetts.”

  “Oh, shit,” Henry said. Because the jig was up. By now, he knew that his name was Henry Tibbetts. He was beginning to add some other big chunks to the puzzle, too, and he wasn’t happy with what he was finding. Not one little bit.

  “Is that right?” the doctor asked.

  Henry nodded. “Yes. That sounds exactly right. Henry Tibbetts. I’m a first lieutenant.”

  “Yes. Anything more?”

  “No. Not yet. There’s a lot of stuff.” Henry closed his eyes and tried to shut it out.

  “It’ll take some time,” the captain said. “There’s no hurry. It’ll come to you. We’ll help.”

  “Oh, boy,” Henry said.

  “You don’t sound too excited.”

  Henry opened his eyes. “Oh, no. It’s not that.”

  The captain took off his glasses, played with them a moment, then gave Henry a thin smile. “The way I hear it, they almost buried you. The report from the War Department says the casket was opened for some reason just before the burial. They found out it wasn’t you at all. Some kid, I understand. With a stomach wound.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Henry said. “You got a cigarette?”

  The captain pulled a pack of Camels out of his middle desk drawer, pushed it across the desk. Henry took one. The captain leaned across the desk and lit it with his Zippo. Henry inhaled deeply and the smoke rushed into his lungs in a hot flood. He hadn’t had a cigarette in months. He felt light-headed. An o
ld habit resumed, an old hand of stench and guilt tightening its grip around his neck, old poisons flooding his mind and body. Old Henry was back.

  Two

  THE ONLY THING he could see from the high window of his second-story cell was the big pecan tree in the front yard of the county jail, and through a single break in its thick summer foliage, the clock tower of the courthouse a block and a half away. Jake stood there at the window most of the first day he was in the county jail, staring at the greenery and the clock tower and wondering what the hell they were doing with his newspaper.

  Hilton Redlinger had taken him first to the little two-cell city jail that everybody called the calaboose in the alleyway behind City Hall. Two tiny cells and a corridor next to the outside wall — damp, filthy, reeking of urine and rot. Jake had gone meekly after he had given Hilton back his huge revolver at the cemetery. Hilton didn’t handcuff him. Hilton didn’t have any handcuffs. Anybody who balked at going along when Hilton arrested him, Hilton simply knocked him out. Jake went meekly, once he had surrendered the pistol. Hilton might be getting old, but he was still a helluva man.

  Jake stood quietly in the alleyway while Hilton unlocked the big iron door of the calaboose, followed him down the dark, damp corridor to the second cell, stepped in, sat down on the cot. The mattress smelled like a thousand years of mold and mildew and excrement, but there was no place else to sit.

  Hilton stood there filling the doorway of the cell, hands on hips, the big revolver slung low on his right side. Even in the gloom, Jake could see that Hilton’s face was still flushed with anger. “I ought to beat the shit out of you, Jake,” he said quietly.

  Jake felt a sick lurch of fear in his stomach. Hilton could do it here in the dark, quiet, reeking calaboose and nobody would know it, could probably do it in a way that would leave no obvious marks, just a pulverized gut and internal bleeding. He was mad enough, Jake could see that.