Home Fires Burning

by Robert Inman

  Henry’s face went blank again. “Okay. Okay.”

  Rosh and the conductor appeared at the front of the car then, Rosh peering over the conductor’s shoulder. “Jake,” he called. “Everything all right?”

  “Train’s leaving,” the conductor said, marching down the aisle toward them. “You gotta get off or get a ticket to ride.”

  Jake turned to the conductor. “My son’s got a couple of bags.”

  “Well, he better get ’em off in the next forty-five seconds, or they’re heading for the next stop,” the conductor said officiously. “We’re running late as it is.”

  Jake stared at him. “Kiss my ass,” he said.

  “Jake …” Rosh started.

  “Now, just lissen here, mister …” the conductor said.

  Jake pushed up close to him. “Look, lardbutt, you pull out of here with my son’s bags in that baggage car, and I will beat the be-jeezus out of you and sue the be-jeezus out of your scumbag railroad.”

  “Jake, THAT WILL BE ENOUGH!” Rosh Benefield said, pushing his massive form between them. The conductor backed away, red-faced and sputtering. Rosh turned to him. “Just go get the bags, will you?”

  The conductor stormed back up the aisle. “Jake, for goodness’ sake,” Rosh said, passing a hand through his thinning hair. He looked down at Henry then and Jake could see the shock in Rosh’s eyes. “Henry, welcome home.” He stuck out his hand and Henry shook it silently. “I guess you can see your father hasn’t changed much.”

  “I didn’t expect he would,” Henry said.

  The conductor was tossing Henry’s two bags out the open door of the baggage car when they emerged from the train — Rosh first, then Jake, Henry standing for a moment in the open doorway as if he were afraid to take the last step onto the platform. But then he straightened, tilted his chin up, gave them a thin haunted smile, and stepped down into their arms.

  Pastine enveloped him with tears streaming down her face, whispering, “Oh, Henry! Oh, Henry!” But she held him for only a moment and then passed him on to Francine, who stood a little way back holding the baby, who was quiet now, sucking on her fist. They stood there for a moment, staring at each other, time suspended. There was a flash of panic in Henry’s eyes. Francine reached for him and gave him a quick awkward hug. “This is Emma Henrietta,” Francine said. Henry touched the baby’s cheek tentatively and she gave him a wide-eyed look. “Ah,” he said quietly. And finally he turned to Lonnie, reached out and put his hands on Lonnie’s shoulders, looked down into his face. “Lonnie,” he said. His hands shook and Jake thought for a moment that Henry was going to cry. But then he dropped his hands and stood there while they all looked at him and saw how marked and changed he was. And how frightened he looked. There was a long awkward moment before Rosh Benefield stepped up and broke the silence.

  “Henry, I’m here to represent the townsfolk. You’re our first returning war hero.” Henry flinched at that. “I’ve asked your mama and daddy to let me pin on your medal and tell you how proud” — another flinch — “we are of you. Pastine, do you have the medal?”

  Pastine opened her pocketbook and took out the small rectangular box with the medal in it, and a handkerchief. She handed the box to Rosh and dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief while Rosh opened the box, took out the medal, and handed the box back to her. Then he stepped forward and pinned the medal on Henry’s chest just above the left pocket of his khaki shirt, smoothed the bit of bright ribbon with his finger, and stepped back. “Welcome home,” he said.

  Henry looked down at the medal and then he looked up and gave Rosh a salute and said, “Thank you, sir. It’s good to be back.” Then he asked, “How’s Billy doing?”

  There was a long terrible silence. Jake felt a rush of despair, an agony for all of them — for Rosh, whose son and heir was lost in the vastness of the Pacific; and for Jake and all his kin. The United States Army had taken a drunk off their hands and sent them back a ghost, a thirty-five-year-old man who wasn’t even sure of where he was and who looked as if he might bolt and run like a frightened horse. And all the baggage that Henry had taken off to war — all of what he had done and been — he had brought back home. And more. Goddammit all! he wanted to cry out.

  It was breath-sucking hot on the platform and they all just stood there looking stricken.

  “Billy is …” Rosh started to say, and his voice sounded far away, as if it came from the other end of a great empty room. Jake strained to hear. The sun was excruciatingly bright. It hurt his eyes terribly and made a bitter, vile taste rise up in his throat, something foul and polluted. He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, to explain, to make amends. But nothing would come out. He stood there with his mouth open, his tongue huge and swollen, blocking the sound from his throat. And then he summoned all his strength and forced out a strangled, anguished sound — “aaarrrrrggghhhh” — and they all turned and stared at him as his knees buckled and everything went black.

  When he came to, he was sitting spraddle-legged on the platform, head forward between his knees, the rest of them hovering anxiously over him, Rosh’s huge shadow blocking out the awful sun. “ ‘Mawright,” he mumbled. His head throbbed. He could feel the blood pounding through every nook and cranny of his brain.

  “It’s the heat,” Henry said. “It sneaks up on you. I saw a lot of it in Texas.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. Then he looked up into Henry’s eyes and saw the unspoken words: Keep your shirt on, old man. I’ve been dead and it’s not so bad.

  “Well, I ain’t ready yet,” Jake said out loud. He damn well wasn’t ready. Not now, not when things seemed so inside out, not with him sixty-four years old and nothing tied up neatly like it was supposed to be when a man cashed in his chips. Besides, he had a newspaper to put out this afternoon.

  “No rush,” Rosh said. “You just tell us when you’re ready.”

  But Henry knew what he meant. Henry nodded.

  After a moment they helped him up and got him steady on his feet. And then they all went home in the first automobile a Tibbetts had ever owned.

  Six

  LONNIE SAT FOR a long time in the shade of the open-sided lean-to behind the toolshed, feeling the clammy coolness of the bare earth beneath him, gusts of August afternoon heat on his face and arms like fingers of fire licking in from the sunshine outside. It was hot, awful hot, here in the shade — but nothing like it was out in the open, where the heat would suck the breath right out of your lungs and the blinding light made your eyes hurt.

  It was the time of day when nothing moved. The only thing in motion downtown would be the rhythmic waving of the cardboard church fans held by the old men who played pinochle in the shade of the big pecan tree on the east side of the courthouse square across from the Jitney Jungle Super Saver. The pinochle players were there regardless of the heat. They were dried up like prunes anyway. The only thing that drove them inside was a thunderstorm. If you were almost thirteen years old you knew enough to stay away from the old men and their pinochle game. If you stopped to watch, even from twenty or thirty feet away, they would put down their cards and turn and stare at you like a gaggle of old pointy-beaked mud turtles until you went away.

  Early one morning, before the courthouse square had begun to stir, Lonnie and Bugger Brunson had climbed up in the pecan tree and waited, as still as Indians, until the old men shuffled up and sat down to their game. They hadn’t been there five minutes, sitting at the little rickety wooden table in their cane-bottom chairs, when one of the players, Old Man Fillingim, had put down his cards with a slap and said, “I think there’s a couple of little pissants up in the tree.” Lonnie and Little Bugger clung there, frozen in discovery, until they mustered enough courage to shinny down the tree, blushing under the glares of the old men, and slink off. Bugger said that Old Man Fillingim must have eyes in the top of his head, but Lonnie guessed it was a tiny mirror fixed somehow to the old fart’s eyeglasses, perhaps a trick he had learned as a spy in the Spanish�
��American War, a trick for fighting Cubans hiding in palm trees.

  Thinking about it, he blushed again with the embarrassment of discovery. It was like being caught down by the creek with your pants down, rubbing yourself. Embarrassing and unfair. Folks ought not to know your secrets — words or deeds. God, now, He knew everything. But you just had to accept that and say, “God, listen up, I’m fixing to …” whatever, and go on about your business and settle up later. God was just one Big Secret, and you had to figure out for yourself what He was like. They talked a lot at Sunday School about “knowing God” and “taking Jesus into your heart,” but if you asked them what He looked like, they just gave you a funny look as if you had just cut a fart.

  What he wished for sometimes was that he could be God for just about five minutes and look down and see what kind of secrets people were carrying around with them. If he could do that, he could figure out some things. Like why people said one thing and did another. Or, just now, what Henry Tibbetts had in his heart.

  He had tried not to stare at his father as they all sat at the table eating the huge dinner Mama Pastine had fixed. Henry had been ill at ease, eyes darting, squirming in his chair like his underwear was bunched up, fingers picking at little bits of food around the edge of his plate. He didn’t eat much and he didn’t have much to say. Mama Pastine kept piling stuff on his plate — okra, squash, congealed fruit salad, fried chicken, biscuits — and keeping up a steady stream of chatter. But Henry just sat there in agony, smoking cigarette after cigarette, filling the room with smoke, stubbing out the butts on the edge of his plate until he finally ran out of cigarettes and crumpled up the red-and-white Lucky Strike package and dropped it in the middle of his squash. The baby was fussy, Francine distracted, Daddy Jake withdrawn, still looking a little peaked after he had passed out on the train platform. Lonnie just ate and watched, wondering what the rest of them were thinking, especially Henry. They had struggled through the meal and then Daddy Jake had gotten up and said he had to finish getting the paper out and Henry had gone upstairs to take a nap, leaving the rest of them sitting there exhausted.

  Lonnie would have gone to the newspaper office, but there was nothing left for him to do. Daddy Jake had done the press run and the folding this morning while Lonnie was sleeping off his night in the woods. So there was nothing to do on this incredibly long and empty August afternoon but come out here and sit in the shade of the lean-to with his back to the rough wall of the toolshed and his fanny and legs on the cool black dirt and think.

  There was not much left to the lean-to. It was ancient, used once upon a time, he had been told, to store stovewood. That was back in the days when Daddy Jake’s mama, Emma Tibbetts, had cooked on a wood stove. Now, one of the corner posts had rotted clean through so that the tin roof sagged like a drooping eyelid. Wild hedge had grown up around the lean-to until it was all but hidden. From inside the dark nest, he could see the path that led from the backyard down toward the pine thicket, but he could not be seen from the outside unless somebody got right up close and poked his head through the hedge. The place was not a hideout, not in the way you would stock a hideout with a favorite book and a half-box of saltine crackers snitched from the kitchen and an old apple crate to keep stuff in. It was just a place where he came when he wanted no intrusion on his thoughts, the kind of place he didn’t even tell Bugger Brunson about. Bugger wouldn’t understand about the need to be absolutely still inside a secret place on a boiling afternoon so that the bubbling pot inside his head could simmer down.

  So when Bugger came by in the early afternoon, Lonnie stayed quiet. Bugger and Mama Pastine called him from the back porch. “Hoooooo, Lonnie, Lee Mason’s here. Hooooo, Lonnie …” But he kept quiet. “He’s probably back yonder in the woods, Lee Mason,” he heard Mama Pastine say. “You go on back and find him. And you boys be careful back there, you hear? Y’all watch for snakes.”

  “Yes’m.”

  He heard Bugger scrambling down the back steps, then in a moment the crunch of parched grass underfoot as Bugger rounded the corner of the toolshed and stopped on the path. “Hey, Lonnie! It’s me. You down yonder?” He looked in the direction of the ruined lean-to, took a step over, stared at the thick covering of wild hedge for a moment. Lonnie looked Bugger straight in the eye but Bugger couldn’t see him. It gave Lonnie a funny feeling of invisibility. He could leap up and yell and scare the piss out of Bugger Brunson, and on any other afternoon he might have done it. But not today. So he kept quiet and stared Bugger down and after awhile Bugger stepped back onto the path and started down toward the pine thicket. Lonnie heard him calling down there for several minutes and then he trudged back, head down, kicking at rocks on the path, moving slowly in the heat.

  After he was gone, Lonnie had a pang of remorse. But he would see Bugger later. He would go over there tonight and Bugger would climb out his window and they would do something. Maybe they would sneak downtown, skirting the edge of the square, darting in and out of the shadows like commandos, and then making a dash across the street in front of the Jitney Jungle to the great spreading pecan tree on the courthouse lawn to examine the old men’s rickety pinochle table. Maybe they would find the secret of how Old Man Fillingim had discovered them hiding in the pecan tree.

  But that was tonight. Right now, Lonnie Tibbetts needed some time to think, to puzzle over the Big Secret of his father, who had been a mystery, and then a dead man, and now was alive and home and just as big a mystery as ever. Lonnie had looked him over good. He had watched and waited and listened since Henry had stepped off the train. But there was nothing there to tell him who Henry was or what he had been. And so Lonnie Tibbetts was still in the dark about who he was and where he had come from.

  There had been a brief time a few months ago when he was actually relieved to think his father was dead. That meant the Big Mystery of Henry Tibbetts was unsolvable and Lonnie might as well get on with other things. But then Daddy Jake had opened the casket and Henry Tibbetts had, in a way, leaped out alive. So now it was writ in the Great Book of Sin that Lonnie Tibbetts had been relieved to think his father dead, and Henry was home, and Lonnie was just as puzzled as ever. Caught between sin and bafflement, he felt like Peter Rabbit, impaled on a thornbush in Mr. MacGregor’s garden while the angry farmer bore down on him. In the story, Peter Rabbit got loose at the last possible instant and suffered nothing more than a dose of camomile tea and the loss of his new jacket. In real life, Mr. MacGregor would reach down and clamp his gnarled hand over Peter Rabbit and pop his neck like you would crack a whip and then have him for dinner.

  Lonnie squirmed with shame and fear under the lean-to in the scorching hours of August afternoon while his brain rolled and tumbled and wrestled with itself until he felt faint with all the thinking. It put him in a kind of daze in which the scorched yellow world outside and the green dappled latticework of the wild hedge and the semigloom of the lean-to’s shade melted together and inflamed his mind like a fever.

  He woke with a hand on his shoulder, the touch light but insistent, and looked into his father’s face, the face of his dreams and night sweats. He drew in his breath in a rush.

  “You all right?” Henry asked.

  Lonnie tried to speak but nothing would come out. He nodded.

  Henry released his grip on Lonnie’s shoulder and sat next to him on the bare earth, back to the toolshed wall. He seemed more relaxed now. His eyes didn’t dart about like a bird’s. He was wearing only an undershirt and his khaki pants and there was the powerful gamy man-smell of travel and sweat about him. “Hoo, boy,” he said with a whistle. “It’s hot as blue blazes out there. It ain’t as hot as Texas, but it’s plenty hot.” He rubbed his hand over his face. “There ain’t nothing as hot as Texas.” Henry looked up at the sagging roof of the lean-to. “I’d have thought this thing would have tumbled down by now. I think Great-grandaddy Finley must have put it up when they built the toolshed.”

  “Were you alive then?” Lonnie blurted.

&n
bsp; Henry laughed. “No, old Finley was a little before my time. I didn’t even know my own grandfather, Albertis. He died before I was born.”

  Lonnie felt a pang of disappointment. Henry had no connection with the past, it seemed — at least, not the rich dark past that was peopled by gray men on fast horses.

  “You come out here much?” Henry asked.

  “Some,” Lonnie said.

  “It’s a good place to think.”

  Lonnie looked up at him. There were gray streaks in his hair, lots of wrinkles around his eyes, the eyes looking in your direction, but not looking at you. The boy in the photograph, grown old, still revealing nothing.

  “I used to come out here a lot,” Henry said.

  “What did you think about?” Lonnie asked.

  He laughed again, a quick dry laugh with no humor in it. “I used to think about crazy people. I used to think about Albertis. My grandfather. They said he was as crazy as a bedbug. He used to stay in his room for weeks at a time while Grandma Emma and Pa and Uncle Isaac put out the paper.” It took Lonnie a moment to realize that when Henry said “Pa” he was speaking of Daddy Jake. “When Albertis died, Pa had to come home from college and take over the paper.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did Albertis die of?”

  “They called it melancholia. Depression. He just wasted away.” He paused for a moment, stared up at the sagging roof of the lean-to. “Anyhow, I used to come out here and think about Albertis.”

  “Why?”

  But Henry didn’t answer that. He fell silent and Lonnie could hear only the echo of his words. Henry had a rich whiskey voice with a bit of a rasp in it and something sad about it. It made Lonnie think of the big bend in Whitewater Creek where the current etched into the limestone face of the bank and the water flowed swift and dark under the overhang of the trees with a low insistent murmur.