Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Good souls in our fine community have brought to the attention of the editor their displeasure over the use of the word “urine” in these pages. In using the word “urine,” the editor meant to give offense to no one, feeling that “urine” is a natural product of that sublime creation of the Almighty, the human body, and that it is as fit a subject for discourse as the liver or the pancreas or the thyroid. However, in all things, the editor wishes to be circumspect and ever mindful of the sensibilities of his readers and the prevailing sense of modesty abroad in the community. The word “urine” is henceforth banned from the pages of this newspaper.

  But the deed was done. Ideal Benefield banned the Free Press from her home and made sure that Pastine’s social isolation was complete. Women who depended on Ideal’s regard held Pastine at arm’s length, like a leper. Marvel Renfroe even suggested to Tunstall that they move, as if the Tibbettses’ social disease might steal down Partridge Road in the dark of night and envelop their own house.

  But Rosh had stuck. He stayed away until the furor died down, and then he came ambling in one Wednesday evening about dusk carrying a paper sack and they got good and tight and Rosh never mentioned the column.

  But now, Rosh had poured the whiskey on the ground. He had called Jake a sonofabitch and now a horse’s ass. And he said it with conviction.

  “You and Pastine,” Jake had said accusingly. And that, he realized now, was what had really ripped it. Not what he had done at the cemetery, but what he had said in Redlinger’s back lot. He had said it not knowing exactly what he meant, giving vent in a rush of emotion to something that had been festering inside him for a long, long time.

  He knew Pastine had an existence quite outside his own. She had money. Henry Cahoon had left what must have been a sizeable inheritance — the manufacturing business, rich farmland and timberland, perhaps other holdings. Jake would have none of it, of course, and so she had taken her business to a lawyer. Rosh Benefield. Who had once been her suitor. Now he was financial advisor, confidant, intermediary to whom Henry had addressed letters. And what else? Nothing, of course. But Jake Tibbetts, in his perversity, had said, “You and Pastine.” And that had ripped it. He had done that most unspeakable of all things a man can do to a friend, especially a friend like Rosh Benefield. Jake had questioned his integrity. So now Rosh was gone and Jake wondered if there was any hope whatever that it could be patched up. Rosh had stuck through everything else. But this … Jake was sick with despair and loneliness. The fact of imprisonment, of isolation, of banishment, suddenly struck him full force.

  Night came, finally, and he lay awake for a long time in the damp, hot darkness, forlorn in the awakening revelation that a man could take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it was worth and make a goddamn mess of it. He cried into the darkness of his own soul, racked with doubt, before he finally slept, exhausted, near morning.

  When he woke, Francine was there to tell him that Henry had been found — wounded, suffering from amnesia, but recovering — in an Army hospital near Paris. And that Billy Benefield was missing in the South Pacific.

  Three

  THEY LET JAKE OUT of the county jail on a Monday morning in late July, four weeks to the day after he had entered it. He stood for a moment outside the front gate after the sheriff’s wife locked it behind him, holding the paper sack containing his clothing and toilet articles under his arm, blinking in the welcome sunshine, feeling the prickle of sweat on the raw tender skin of his freshly shaved face. He felt like a stranger here, back from a long journey. They had left him alone, all of them. It had been three weeks since he saw anyone he knew, anyone he cared about. It could have been three years.

  The door of the newspaper office was open and he stood just outside on the sidewalk for a moment, hearing the muffled droning of the big window fan at the back of the print shop, feeling the hot breeze it sucked in the front door. The fan was the only noise inside. Monday morning, a newspaper to get out, and it was quiet. He stepped in, saw Francine sitting at his desk in the front office. She had a leather-bound ledger in her lap, the one Pastine had used all these years to keep the paper’s accounts.

  “Hi,” she said.

  His desk was bare except for Captain Finley’s photograph, the old Underwood typewriter, and a neat inch-high stack of clean white paper next to it. All the clutter — bills, flyers, letters, galley proofs, sheafs of copy — gone. There was a new wooden three-drawer filing cabinet next to the desk on the far side. The typewriter itself was scrubbed and shiny.

  He looked around the front office. The head-high row of shelves that divided front office from print shop was nearly bare, except for small stacks of newspapers — back issues, he supposed — and the few office supplies he kept for local merchants arranged in small piles and rows, ink blotters, boxes of paper clips. Boxes of old subscription records, worn-out parts for the equipment in back were all gone. A broken chair that had been propped in a corner next to the kerosene stove for years was sitting upright with a new leg. The front windows were clean. And on one shelf — a radio.

  He took it all in, and finally he said, “Hello.”

  “Gladjerback,” Francine said.

  He set his paper sack down on the chair next to his desk, the chair Rosh Benefield always used. “Where’s Pastine?”

  “Home. She’s expecting you for dinner.”

  “And what are you doing?” he asked, staring at the ledger.

  “Doing the books,” she said.

  “Pastine does the books,” Jake said, his voice rising.

  “Not anymore. She quit.”

  “Then …” Jake hung fire, “I’ll do my own books.”

  Francine closed the ledger slowly and sat back in the chair. His chair. “Fine. But Pastine told me you once said you were a newspaperman, not a business tycoon. I’m a qualified bookkeeper, and right now you need a bookkeeper, since Pastine has quit.”

  “Quit,” he said.

  “That’s right. She said she’d rather be a business tycoon than a newspaperwoman. She walked out at the end of last week and she says she isn’t coming back. But she showed me what’s what before she left.” Francine patted the big ledger. “I’ve got it all organized.”

  “Organized.” Jake spat out the word.

  “So you can be a newspaperman and not worry with the tycoon part.”

  “God knows this place needs a newspaperman,” he snapped, feeling the heat rising in him. They had made his newspaper a farce in the space of one month. Recipes and sermons on the front page! They had let him sit there and rot in the county jail while they filled the pages of his newspaper with chicken noodle casserole and religious homilies! They had not once communicated with him, had not once asked him to contribute a single word to his newspaper. And they had cleaned up the goddamn place, to boot.

  “You’re right about that,” Francine said. “I hope I never have to go to another Town Council meeting. I don’t know what you find about it that’s worth putting in the paper, anyway.”

  “Well, I’m back,” he said stiffly. “And we’ll settle this business about the books later.”

  “Okay,” she said, and sat there.

  He walked into the back shop, wandered around for several minutes, touching things — the Linotype, the Kluge, makeup tables, type cases — feeling the cool smooth metal, breathing in the smell of ink and glycerin and paper, listening to the hiss and pop of the Linotype as it sat waiting for him. The women had not messed with anything back here, but the printer, the man they had brought in to help them with the paper, had moved a few things about. Nothing major — an ink roller here, a type stick there — but it would take Jake a few days to get things back to normal, back where he could reach blindly and feel every item exactly where he knew it would be. God, he had missed this abominable business.

  “Jake …”

  He turned and saw George Poulos standing there in the opening between front office and shop, a folded paper bag in his hand.

  “I
brought my copy over,” George said, holding up the bag.

  Jake blinked at him. “Why’d you do that? I always come get your copy.”

  “Well, I was over this way.”

  “Doing what?”

  “On business.”

  Jake motioned him into the back shop. “Well, come on back.”

  George offered his hand, a bit tentatively, and Jake took it. “Good to see you back, Jake,” George said.

  “Humph.”

  “The, ah …” — he indicated the front office with a toss of his head — “the ladies took care of me just fine while you were, ah, gone …” He paused and the silence hung between them for a moment. “But it’s sure good having you back.”

  Jake heard voices up front and he looked over George’s shoulder to see Fog Martin come in, Francine rise to greet him.

  “Be with you in a minute,” Jake called.

  “That’s okay, Jake,” Fog said. “Miz Francine here can take care of me. Just need to order a rubber stamp. For the filling station. Good to see you, Jake.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jake turned back to George and they went over the items and prices George had printed neatly on the paper bag for this week’s advertisement, Jake making notes about how each would be set in type and displayed. It took them fifteen minutes, and during that time, two more people came in the front office — a woman with a wedding announcement and an overalled farmer renewing his subscription.

  “Stays right busy around here,” George Poulos said.

  Jake gave him a long look. “What the hell for?”

  George blushed. “Well,” he said in a low voice, “she’s young and good-looking, and folks like to hear her talk.”

  “Humph.”

  When George had left, he sat down at the Linotype machine, checked it over, ran his fingers over the keyboard, tapped out a line of type to make sure that everything was all right. The machine wheezed and clattered and popped the slug out of its belly. Jake plucked it from the tray at the side of the machine, held the hot slug gingerly in his hand, examined it, then tossed it in the box of used slugs to be melted down and reused.

  He got up, walked to the front office. Francine was still sitting at the desk, leaning over the open ledger. She looked up at him.

  “Has anybody done anything about getting out a newspaper this week?”

  She opened the middle drawer of the desk, drew out a handful of papers. “Just this stuff. Some things the rural correspondents brought in, mostly. By the way, do you mind if I play the radio?”

  “Hell, yes, I mind if you play the goddamn radio!”

  “Fine, fine,” she said, shoving the papers toward him. “Don’t get overheated.”

  Jake took the papers, thumbed through them. “George Poulos says people like to come in here and look at you and listen to the way you talk.”

  Francine considered that. “Does anybody ever come in here and watch you set type?”

  Jake looked at her a moment, then turned on his heel and went back to the Linotype.

  At home that night, in the privacy of their room, they settled the business of who would do the books at the newspaper.

  “Not me,” Pastine said firmly. “I’ve quit. My boy’s coming home, and I’ve got a new grand-baby to take care of. I’ve had it with your newspaper.”

  “You’re just mad at me,” Jake said.

  “Yes, you’re right about that,” she flashed. “I’m mad at you. I’m furious. I tell you this, Jake, and I want you to understand me. If things had not turned out like they did with Henry, I would have left you.”

  Jake blanched. “You wouldn’t,” he whispered.

  “I would.”

  And he could tell that she meant it, as surely as she had meant to chop his head off with his grandfather’s sword when she chased him out of the house on Christmas morning.

  “But I’m not just mad at you. I’m simply going to do what I want to do.”

  Jake waited a moment, and then he said, “I’ll do my own books.”

  “You’ll be out of business in six months,” she said.

  She was right. He would. And that was why Francine stayed on at the newspaper.

  At two o’clock in the afternoon of Monday, August 6, 1945, Biscuit Brunson stepped out the door of Brunson’s Cafe, followed by a small knot of patrons, knelt on the sidewalk, cracked open an egg, and dumped its contents onto the concrete. Then Biscuit stepped back and they all stood in a loose circle, giving the egg plenty of room, watching as it began to turn white around the yolk and the edges began to curl. They watched it for perhaps five minutes, gabbling idly among themselves, until the yolk was glazed over and the white was gnarled and brown at the edges. Then Biscuit knelt again and scooped up the egg with a spatula and they all went back inside. The thermometer in the window at City Hall read ninety-eight degrees, and that was in the shade. But the temperature didn’t mean so much as the fact that Biscuit Brunson had fried an egg on the sidewalk.

  A man with an appreciation for irony could have made a good deal of the fact that about the same time, an American B-29 was dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The plane was piloted by a man named Tibbets.

  They didn’t hear anything about it, of course, until the next day, and then only a terse announcement from the War Department. Jake heard it first from Francine, who called from home on the telephone.

  “Do you know anybody named Paul Tibbets?”

  “Who’s he?” Jake asked. It was Tuesday morning and he had interrupted a pitched battle with the snorting, clanking Linotype machine to answer the insistent ringing of the telephone in the front office.

  “He’s a colonel in the Army Air Corps,” Francine said.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, you will. He just dropped a big bomb on Japan. An atomic bomb. They just announced it on the radio.”

  Jake started to turn on the radio on the shelf in the front office, then changed his mind. He shut down the Linotype machine, closed up the newspaper office, and walked around to Brunson’s Cafe, where a small crowd was huddled around the Sylvania set on Biscuit’s counter, listening to Ollie Whittle repeating over and over the few scant details that were coming over the wires. They could have all trooped up the stairs to Ollie’s radio station over the bank and looked at the wire copy for themselves, but the news seemed to carry more weight coming over the airwaves like this. Jake stood at the back of the crowd, chewing on a cold cigar, listening.

  “… what the War Department calls an atomic bomb, with the power of twenty thousand tons of TNT, if you can imagine that, ladies and gentlemen. The early reports speak of terrible destruction in the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and thousands of people killed and injured. Imagine that, ladies and gentlemen, a single bomb of unprecedented power …”

  Hilton Redlinger, sitting on a stool next to the radio, stood up, hitched up his gun belt, and said, “Well, that ought to just about do ’er.”

  Jake walked back to the newspaper and found Francine at work in the front office. “It sounds awful,” she said.

  “It’s a big hit with the crowd at Biscuit’s. They’re all over there listening to Ollie on the radio.”

  “Do you think it will end the war?”

  “I imagine,” he said. “As Hilton Redlinger said, This ought to just about do ’er.’ “

  “I guess we’re all ready.”

  “Yes, I think we all are.”

  Jake cranked up the Linotype again, but he sat for a long time at the keyboard, thinking about the bomb. He decided it was a little bit of a cheap shot. He thought about all of the millions of square feet of bloody geography all over the globe, fought for bitterly, inch by inch, all the great desperate battles and private individual horrors. And now to have it end with one big cheap bang.

  Then he felt ashamed for having thought that way. If the bomb ended the war, it would end the horrors, great and small. It was obscene for Jake Tibbetts to contemplate the death of one more boy. They should all,
friend and foe, lay down their arms and go home. Enough had been done in the name of honor.

  He thought about Billy Benefield, lost in the vastness of the Pacific, his entire flight vanished in a huge storm that nobody had known was there. Weeks, and no word. Rosh had not come around. He kept to himself, waiting.

  And he thought about Henry, coming home tomorrow, lost and then found.

  After dinner, they left Francine at home to tend to the baby and Jake and Lonnie walked back to the newspaper office together, Jake keeping a brisk pace, arms swinging, legs pumping, Lonnie trudging along beside him, slump-shouldered and terribly quiet, the way he had been ever since Jake had gotten out of the county jail. It had been a month, and Lonnie had scarcely said a hundred words to him, or to anybody else for that matter.

  “I would have to say that was first-rate okra,” Jake said as they rounded the big curve on Partridge Road, trying to make conversation.

  Lonnie grunted.

  “Not everybody knows how to cook okra, you know. Your Mama Pastine, she’s a marvel as an okra cooker. Some women try to stew their okra, and I had just as soon be forced to eat a rutabaga as to have to eat stewed okra floating around in a puddle of potlikker.” He cut his eyes over at Lonnie. “But your Mama Pastine, she fries okra. The way it’s supposed to be done.”

  Another grunt.

  “Do you have any particular thoughts on okra? It is, after all, the Queen of Vegetables.”

  “Nosir,” Lonnie mumbled.

  They walked a little ways and then Jake said, “Boy, if your bottom lip sticks out any further, you’re gonna trip over it.”

  That didn’t even elicit a grunt. They marched on in silence through the blasting heat that made the sweat pop out on Jake’s brow and course down the sides of his face. His shirt was wringing wet by the time they had gotten halfway to the paper and his underwear clung uncomfortably around his crotch.

  “How long you gonna keep sulking?” Jake demanded finally, breaking the awkward silence.