Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  “Yes sir,” Lonnie said. He stuck his index finger out and let the baby grasp it with her tiny hand.

  “Get in the car, Jake,” Francine said. “The train will be here in a few minutes.”

  “I’d rather …”

  “A mule,” Francine said, turning to look at Pastine in the back seat. “I never knew anything about mules until I came South.”

  Pastine nodded. “Get in the car, Jake. Act civilized for once.”

  So Jake went back inside the newspaper office and turned off all the lights, latched the back door, turned the sign in the front window to the GONE side, and locked the front door. He reached for the back door of the car on the driver’s side. It wouldn’t open. He yanked hard on it, but it was frozen shut.

  “It doesn’t work,” Francine said. “Go around.”

  He went around to the other side and Pastine slid across the seat and let him in. The interior of the car was rich with the smell of decaying upholstery. He slammed the door and Francine mashed down on the starter and the engine groaned in protest for several seconds before it caught with a roar. Billows of gray smoke poured from the rear and acrid fumes came up through the floorboard.

  Lonnie turned around in his seat and looked at Jake and Jake slapped his knee and said, “God, a smoke screen for the landing craft. What won’t these crafty Americans think of next!”

  Lonnie grinned and turned back to the front. “It’s got a great horn,” he said. “Do the horn, Francine.”

  “Not now,” she said. Francine eased the gearshift into reverse and backed slowly out into the street. Then she hauled down on the lever, trying to get it into first, and the gears clattered and ground like a jackhammer. She tried it again. “I think the clutch needs a little work,” she said, then jerked fiercely on the gearshift. It slipped into first and the car bucked twice and moved forward. She steered it into the street, gripping the wheel hard, then as it moved on at a stately pace, she settled back into the seat and pushed the horn button in the middle of the wheel. It bleated like a frightened goat.

  “By God!” Jake cried. “Gabriel cometh.”

  Lonnie turned to him again. “You gonna learn to drive it, Daddy Jake?”

  “Lord, no. I expect to be chauffeured about like royalty in my old age. Pastine, do you plan to learn the art of the motorcar?”

  “It’s Francine’s car,” Pastine said stiffly. “Francine and Henry’s car.” She is on edge, Jake thought to himself, and I had better watch my smart mouth. He vowed not to cross her, not in the slightest way, because by God he loved the woman and he would get back into her good graces and her sweet loins if the Lord let him live long enough and gave him the wisdom to keep his mouth shut.

  “Well, I’m gonna learn to drive it,” Lonnie said. “Francine said she’d teach me. It’s got three forward gears and one reverse, I know that already.”

  “I think maybe only one of the forward gears works,” Francine said. “We’ll have to see Fog about that.”

  They turned the corner at the courthouse square and rolled down the south block, past Biscuit Brunson’s cafe and the bank building with the radio station upstairs.

  “Give ’er another honk, Francine,” Jake said, and she mashed down on the horn again. BLEEAAAT. Biscuit came to the big front window of the cafe, drying his hands on a dish towel. Jake stuck his head out the window and waved, and he could see Biscuit turn and say something to the stool sitters at the counter. Francine turned the corner at the end of the block and headed along the east side of the square just as Herschel Martin came out the door of the Jitney Jungle Super Saver, carrying two bags of groceries, headed for his three-wheeled delivery cycle parked at the curve. Jake leaned out again and gave Herschel a grand wave and Herschel stopped and stared over the tops of the grocery bags and cut loose a huge grin. “Howdy, Jake!” he called. “That Tojo, he sure is some sonofabitch!” Jake sat back in the seat, pulled the cigar stub out of his mouth and held it up like Churchill. “Ah,” he intoned, “give me a good ship and a few stout-hearted men …”

  “Shut up, Jake,” Pastine said without turning her head.

  Jake jammed the cigar back in his mouth and took note of what a fine day it was. Hot as blazes already, here at late morning, the way August was supposed to be. But very fine, the sky perfectly clear and blue. Things seemed infinitely more possible this fine August morning than they had just twelve hours ago when he had sat, drunk and racked with doubt, at his desk. The man coming on the train might change all that, but for the moment, things did indeed look possible. He knew this: He indeed meant what he had said to Lonnie yesterday; he was not mad at Henry Tibbetts anymore.

  “Why does Winston Churchill smoke cigars?” Lonnie asked from the front seat.

  “Because he’s a Navy man,” Jake said. “A good cigar is the mark of a sailor. Sailors smoke cigars to ward off beriberi and pellagra. It’s like an asafetida bag, only it doesn’t smell as bad.”

  “Humph,” Pastine grunted.

  Lonnie turned around to Pastine. “Is he telling the truth?”

  “Lord knows,” she said. “Fact and fancy dribble off his tongue in such torrents nobody can tell the difference.”

  “Nonsense,” Jake said, waving his cigar. “You can tell the difference, can’t you, Lonnie?”

  “Yes sir,” Lonnie said. “When you’re lying, your ears and your eyebrows twitch.”

  “Lying!” Jake cried, “why, you cut me grievously. I’ve never told a lie in my life. I admit I’ve indulged my fancy at times. But I’ve never told a lie. There’s a great difference.”

  He looked over at Pastine, but she wasn’t paying him any attention at all. She was somewhere deep inside herself, gathering strength.

  “Lies are an abomination, told by blackguards and rogues,” Jake went on. “Fancy is … well, fancy is harmless embellishment.”

  “Like pretending?” Lonnie asked.

  “That’s part of it,” Jake said.

  “Or magic?”

  Ah yes, there it was. Fancy, distilled. And reserved for young boys, who lost it by bits and pieces until they had only the haunting memory of fancy. As long as they lived, they would know bittersweet, fragmentary reminders of the fancy that had been — the soughing of wind through a pine thicket, the smell of a smoldering leaf pile, the ripple of a clear creek over half-buried stones, the high lonesome call of a crow over a winter-hardened field of corn stubble. Magic, too soon gone, leaving only its ghosts and a vague yearning that even an old man could know now and again.

  “Yes, magic. That especially,” Jake said quietly.

  But Lonnie was looking out the window now, lost in his own thoughts, lips slightly parted as if in silent conversation with someone or something out there in the fine August midday.

  The platform at the train station was nearly empty. There were two cardboard boxes, tied with twine, waiting for shipping; an old brown-and-black dog belly-flopped in sleep under a bench; and Whit Hennessey, leaning on the handle of the two-wheeled dray cart he would use to tote the mail bag the half-block to the post office. Rosh Benefield was not there yet.

  Jake shepherded his little crowd into the shade of the covered platform, shooed the dog away and seated Francine and Pastine on the wooden bench. Francine held the baby, Pastine held her pocketbook. Why, Jake marveled, would a woman come to the train station to meet her son coming home from war and bring a pocketbook? Because when a woman went to town, she took a pocketbook. Just as when she went to church, she wore a hat. Jake made a mental note of it — a good front-page column.

  Lonnie wandered down to the end of the platform where he could see the train when it rounded the curve after crossing the trestle over Whitewater Creek. Jake walked over to where Whit Hennessey stood with his mail cart. “Morning, Whit,” Jake said.

  “Morning or afternoon, I can’t decide which,” Whit said. “Never could decide whether noontime was morning or afternoon. You meeting somebody?”

  “Henry,” he nodded. “Henry’s coming in.�
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  Of course Whit Hennessey knew that Henry was coming in, everybody in town knew it. The question had been, Go down and meet him, or stay away? There was reason enough to go. Henry Tibbetts was a curiosity. He had won the Silver Star, hadn’t he? Been wounded in action, given up for dead? But there was more reason to stay away. So folks were staying away. Maybe even Rosh Benefield had decided at the last minute to stay away.

  “How’s Arthur?” Jake asked Whit.

  “Fine. His outfit’s getting ready to head for the Pacific, now that it’s all over in Europe.”

  “I don’t believe they’ll ever send ’em.”

  “The bomb?”

  “Yeah, the bomb.”

  “They say it killed a million Japs,” Whit said.

  “Well, the Japs can’t hold out like that very long. Maybe Arthur’ll be coming home before long.”

  “Sure hope so,” Whit said. “Henry. He’s all right?”

  “Fine, as far as we know. He got a leg wound at the Bulge, but I think that’s pretty well healed. And he had amnesia for a while. Didn’t know who he was or where he was. But he’s over that, too. We got a letter from the hospital in France a few weeks ago. He sounded fine.”

  “Haven’t seen Henry in a long time,” Whit said.

  “It was the fall of ‘forty-one the Guard got called up,” Jake said. “That’s the last we’ve seen of him.”

  “He hasn’t been back at all?”

  “No.”

  They heard the train for the first time then, the faint distant whistle as it approached from the north. Jake looked down the platform at Lonnie, standing at the edge with his arms folded across his chest, sun-browned arms and legs growing like strong ropy vines from the neatly pressed shorts and shirt. Henry would hardly know him. Henry had missed the magic years.

  Whit took out his pocket watch, snapped open the cover. “She’s a mite late today.” There was a touch of irritation in his voice. “It puts a crimp in things when you get a late start. Just you watch, there’ll be a lot of mail today. A big sackful. Always happens. When the train is late, there’s always more mail than usual.” Whit put the watch away, took a rumpled handkerchief from his back pocket, pulled off his wire-rimmed glasses and wiped them vigorously. His eyes were large and pale, strained by years behind the window of the post office, squinting in the dim light at the barely legible scrawl of other people’s names and addresses. Jake wondered for a moment how a man did that, how he labored for years in the small, circumscribed world of postal regulations, tucking his life’s work into pigeonholes, nettled by the tardiness of trains. There was that essential thing in Jake himself that abhorred order, made him a man whose eyebrows and thoughts ran riot, doomed to loose ends and shifting convictions, sentenced to wander eternity saying, “Yes, but …”

  He heard the train whistle again, closer now, and felt the hand on his arm. He turned, startled from his reverie. It was Rosh.

  “I’m getting old, Rosh,” he said. “I stand around daydreaming all the time. I’m glad you came.”

  Rosh nodded, then waved to Whit. “How’s it going, Whit?”

  Whit took his watch out of his pocket again. “Ten minutes late,” he said irritably. He shoved the watch back into his pocket and pushed his dray cart down to the end of the platform where the baggage car would stop.

  The train was rounding the curve now — hulking black engine slowing for the station with jets of steam spurting from its sides, three passenger cars, a baggage-and-mail car bringing up the rear. It lumbered slowly up to the platform and screeched to a halt with a spinning of wheels, clattering of couplings, and one last belch of black smoke. The baby bellowed with fright and Pastine and Francine got up from the bench and came to stand with Jake and Rosh at the platform’s edge, Francine holding the baby and jiggling her up and down. Jake looked around for Lonnie. He was down at the end of the platform with Whit Hennessey.

  “Lonnie,” Jake called, waving him back. He walked toward them, peering up into the windows of the passenger cars.

  “What’s the matter with Emma?” Lonnie asked.

  “The train scared her,” Francine said.

  Lonnie poked his fingers in his ears. The baby’s angry screams split the air and Pastine reached over and patted her on the back.

  Two people got off the train, a large puffing man with a bulging brown leather sample case — a drummer — and a young woman with a small child collapsed in sleep on her shoulder. They blinked in the bright sunlight. The woman sat down on the bench and the man disappeared around the corner of the station house, lugging the sample case with both hands.

  They waited another minute or so. The conductor swung down from the doorway of the last passenger car, fanned himself with his round blue cap, and walked over to the ticket window to talk with the agent. At the end of the platform, a man in the baggage-and-mail car hoisted two sacks down to Whit Hennessey, who stacked them on the dray cart. Whit pushed the cart back toward where Jake and his group waited.

  “See, I told ya,” he said. “Train’s late and there’s two sacks today. Never fails. Is Henry here?”

  “He hasn’t gotten off the train yet,” Jake said.

  “Maybe he missed the train. Coming on another one, huh?”

  “That’s possible.”

  “No,” Pastine said firmly. “We got a telegram. He’s on this one.”

  Jake looked up, scanned the windows of the cars, There were only a few faces, none of them Henry’s. In the second car, a young sailor slept, head pressed against the glass. “Wait here,” Jake said, and clambered up the steps of the first passenger car. It was almost empty — a man reading a newspaper, a boy about Lonnie’s age sitting with his suitcase beside him on the seat. Jake walked down the aisle, looking into the seats, went through the rear door and into the second car. It was sweltering in here. The handful of people looked wilted: collars open, hair matted with perspiration, fanning themselves. They paid him no attention. He walked the length of that car and into the third.

  Henry was sitting at the back, in the last seat on the side opposite the platform. He was staring out the window. Jake walked to the back of the car and stood in the aisle at the edge of the seat.

  “Henry,” he said.

  Henry turned to look at him. “Who, me?”

  Jake was stunned to see how Henry had aged. He was very thin, the flesh of his face tight around the bones, his jaw gray with a stubble of beard. His khaki uniform shirt looked two sizes too big in the collar. His hair was salt-and-pepper. But it was his eyes that made him look so terribly ancient — deep-set, framed by a network of crow’s-feet, unseeing. Henry turned, gave him a blank stare.

  “Henry,” Jake said again.

  Henry shook his head as if to clear it, then he craned his neck back, looking up at the ceiling. Then his eyes softened and he sighed. “Sometimes,” he said, “I don’t know exactly where I am. I’ve been sitting here thinking I might see something I recognize.” His voice was dull, lifeless.

  Jake sat down beside him. “Well, you’re home now.”

  Henry looked out the window again. “Yes, I can see that. I see the clock tower on the courthouse beyond the trees. And over there. That’s the back lot of the feed-and-seed store.” He turned to Jake. “Is that right? Have I got the right place?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated a moment. “The family’s here. They’re all waiting for you.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mama, and Lonnie, Francine and the baby. And Rosh Benefield. He wants to pin your medal on.”

  “Medal? What medal?”

  “Your Silver Star,” Jake said. “Didn’t they tell you you won the Silver Star?”

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe they did.” He looked at his hands. “I haven’t done anything to win a medal.”

  “Well, we’ve got the citation at home. You can read it.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t seem very interested. He seemed far away somewhere, maybe still in Europe or back in Texas, or
maybe even up in that big elm tree in Bugger Brunson’s front yard where they had dropped cowshit on passing cars. Henry had always been wherever he wanted to be, not where you wanted or maybe needed him. That much, Jake thought, hadn’t changed.

  “Your wife and baby are here,” Jake said.

  Henry nodded. Then he sat very still for a long time before he said, “I want you to know I haven’t had a drink in a long time.”

  “That’s good,” Jake said. “You never did handle it very well.”

  They sat there for a moment, and then Jake said, “You ready to go now?”

  Henry shook his head. “Not just yet. I’ve come a long way, you know.” He seemed very fragile. Jake wondered if the Army doctors should have told them something before they sent Henry home, or if they should have sent him at all.

  “You’ve been through a lot, Henry,” Jake said. “But you’re home now and you can just take it easy for a while. It’s going to take some getting used to. Nobody’s gonna rush you.”

  “I hardly remember …” Henry said.

  “Just take it one step at a time. But you’ve got to start somewhere.” He had indeed come from a very far place, Jake could see. Henry had been dead and gone in ways that only he could truly understand. Now he had to cross back over the great gulf that lay between the living and the dead. That was a tall order to ask of any man, maybe impossible for a man like Henry. But then, there had been that exquisite moment of truth in the snow of Belgium. Perhaps again …

  Jake stood up. “You’ve got a bag?”

  Henry nodded. “A duffel bag and a suitcase. Back in the baggage car.”

  Jake stood over him, waiting, not knowing quite what to do or say.

  “I want to tell you this, Henry, before you get off the train.” Henry looked up. “I ain’t mad at you anymore, Henry. Never mind what’s gone before. That’s all been and done. I’m proud of what you did.”

  “Proud?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hell,” Henry said, showing a spark of life for the first time, “I almost got my ass killed, and you’re proud?”

  “You finally hitched up your britches and did something, Henry,” Jake said evenly. “That’s what I’m proud of. Maybe that means you’ll do something else. Maybe you’re ready to take care of your family now. Anyhow, I ain’t mad anymore.”