Home Fires Burning
Page 44
At first there was only memory, scenes of such exquisite detail that he became a passenger on a time transport, not so much remembering the past as re-entering it. Only now the scenes were even more real than the original, vivid in color and dimension, purified through the filter of age.
He saw things he had missed before — tiny droplets of water on the leaves of an azalea bush just beyond his mother’s elbow as they sat on the front steps of the house right after a rain; a splash of rouge on the cheeks of the woman in the long bustled dress and plumed hat in the lithographed calendar that hung behind the cash register in the mercantile store; the pungent smell of decay when he kicked aside a certain small pile of leaves beneath a particular poplar tree on a singular day. He studied them intently, intrigued by the knowledge that they had been there all this time, waiting to be discovered if only one were quiet and still enough. A man need not have eyes to see such things — only time and patience.
Later, there were richly evoked scenes full of life and movement, smell and color.
He stood for a long time on the top step of the eastern entrance to the courthouse, looking out across the lawn at the row of store buildings that bounded that side of the square. At the corner, four old men played pinochle at the small table under the pecan tree, their movements slow, their bent forms dappled by sunlight filtering through the leaves above them. He knew their names, the precise route each had taken from home to the pinochle table earlier in the morning (it was morning because the buildings across the street cast a long shadow across the courthouse lawn, the grass dark green/light green along the razor edge of the roofline’s shadow). He watched the old men for a long time as they played at their game, gnarled hands clutching the cards, their gestures ancient and crotchety. They seldom spoke. Old men had said everything already, it seemed.
Across the way, the door was ajar at the Jitney Jungle grocery store as a woman with a shopping basket on her arm stopped on her way out, letting the flies in, talking with someone inside.
Next door was the barbershop with its single wide window and the red-and-white candy-striped pole on its fixture next to the door, a bright light hanging above the first chair, which was occupied now by the barber, who smoked a cigar and waited for a customer. He took the cigar out of his mouth, waggled it between his second and third fingers, said something to one of the other men in the shop, laughed, stuck the cigar back in his mouth. He imagined himself inside the barbershop, sitting in the first chair with a pinstriped sheet draped over him, pinned at the back of his neck, watching time and space disappear in a succession of receding images in the big mirrors that faced each other on opposite walls of the shop. Was there a place on the other side of one wall or the other where they ended? Or did the images reverse themselves somewhere and come echoing back? And when they did, would your hair be parted on the other side?
At the end of the block, a man came out of the hardware store carrying a brown-wrapped package under his left arm, crossed the street and lawn to the courthouse steps, paused on the top step towering above him, spoke to his father.
“Trial still going?”
“Yes, it is.”
The man with the package under his arm passed them, disappeared into the dark cool hallway of the courthouse. Above them now, from the open window of the second-floor courtroom, he could hear the singsong drone of a lawyer questioning a witness, the answers faint and halting, all of it a dull buzz that floated softly on the cushion of morning and sunlight.
He felt his small hand in his father’s hand, turned, looked up into his father’s face. There was nothing there. It was the only missing detail.
Other than that, his recall was total. They were perfect crystals suspended in his mind, powerfully evoked — place and time, sight and sound, touch and emotion — and uncluttered by the baggage of all that had happened since. He remembered them just as they were. They came unbidden, some of them more than once, and there were long silences between when he waited for another re-creation from memory. They came without warning, emerging full-blown, so sharp and real they were almost painful, like stepping from a dark room into blazing sunlight. And they came without rhyme or reason, without chronology. One moment from his childhood might be followed by another in which he sat at the keyboard of the Linotype machine, pecking out the words of a story or column that could only have been recent.
Through it all, though, there was a sense of a moment anticipated but unrealized. “No,” he said to himself after each had passed, “that wasn’t it.” It was as if his mind, floating in the great silence, worked itself slowly toward some event so cataclysmic that it had to be approached cautiously, from downwind, as you would approach a beast.
Suddenly, there it was. The beast leaped. It was the clear, terrifying memory of the fire truck sitting in the middle of the street, the flash of orange and deafening roar from Hilton Redlinger’s big pistol, Jake running, blood everywhere, Jake reaching to catch Lonnie as he fell. Then a searing flash tore through his own head. Jake thought he had been shot. His legs crumpled under him and the weight of Lonnie’s body carried them both to the ground. Then blackness, out of which grew the great silence and the re-creation of his past.
When it finally came, Jake recognized it for what it was. He had had a stroke. What’s more, he had been waiting for it a long time without realizing it. Something deep and secret inside him had known of the microscopic weakness in that certain blood vessel buried deep in his brain. It had whispered to him in a breath so small and fleeting it had seemed a wisp of smoke. But it was there. That was the beast, his beast, a small silent beast. He wondered how it had subtly altered his life. Had he held back from anything in fear? Had there been a trace of dread at the edge of all he did and thought? Probably.
Then he remembered Captain Finley Tibbetts, how they had found him sprawled on the parlor floor with a twisted snarl on his lips, the silver sword in his hand, a deep slash across the flowered brocade of the sofa. They had wondered. But Jake knew, at least now he did. Back then, he had seen only the twisted face, the death mask, as his grandfather lay in his casket in the parlor. He remembered the hushed surprise of the people who streamed in to see Captain Finley. Why, they asked in shocked mutters, had they opened the casket with the old man looking like that? His widow, Henrietta, had looked at him and shuddered.
Jake had waited until long after midnight when they were all gone, had slipped down the stairs past the dozing uncle who slumped in a chair at the parlor entrance, then stood on tiptoe and peered into the open casket in wonder. Captain Finley’s face was waxen, colorless, the eyebrows and lashes starkly black against the pallor, the features molded of putty. Except for the snarl. Captain Finley’s lips were twisted around to the left, the muscle along that side of his jaw bunched like a fist, the yellow-stained teeth showing. Jake stared at him, fascinated, until he felt something cold and hairy crawling up his back. He turned quickly, but there was nothing there, only the sleeping uncle in the chair and the soft emptiness of the death room. He went quietly back to bed. Remembering it, he knew that the cold hairy thing crawling up his back had been his own beast, burrowing itself into his skull to hibernate for a long, long time until it was Jake Tibbetts’s turn. And his turn had come, as had Captain Finley’s. The beast inside the old man’s head had broken loose and Captain Finley had fought it with one last desperate slash of the sword that had laid low the Yankees at Cemetery Ridge. Too late. Beasts weren’t as easy to kill as Yankees.
So Captain Finley had had a beast. Well, so had Albertis, his son. Only it was not the kind that suddenly leaped forth, clawing and slashing. Instead, it slowly ate away at Albertis’s mind, a small sneaky beast that nibbled and nibbled until there was nothing but melancholia, driving Albertis to the locked room upstairs where he alternately paced and slept in the horror of his own inner sanctum. In the end, the beast had won, but by then there was nothing left for it to exist on. Albertis, defeated, simply gave up and the beast went away, leaving a carcass.
And he, Jake Tibbetts, victim of a beast that leaped suddenly from hiding, tore at the flesh of his brain, felled him as it had felled his grandfather, Captain Finley. Only this beast hadn’t done its job as completely as it had on the old man.
So. There seemed to be two species of the Tibbetts beast, existing in alternate generations. He and Captain Finley. Albertis and Henry. Had Lonnie, then, inherited the vicious one? Would he someday crumple with a searing flash of white heat across his brain? Then Jake remembered Lonnie falling from the high seat of the fire truck, the blood. Oh, Lonnie! Oh, Lonnie! Deep in the prison of his own mind, Jake Tibbetts cried out in grief and anguish. But of course there were no real tears because he had no real body. The beast had torn it apart. And of course no one could hear him when he cried.
After that, the memories ceased.
There was a long period of blank silence. A month? A year? Was he dead? There were no devils or angels lurking about. Purgatory, perhaps, but not heaven or hell. Just silence, colorless and odorless. No, he decided, he wasn’t dead yet. It was just a period of waiting, after which he would either get better or he would die.
Then Albertis came to see him.
The sad, raspy voice broke the silence like the crumpling of parchment paper. “So, what is it you want to know, Jacob?”
Jake didn’t answer right away. He studied the voice, recognized it.
“Open your eyes, Jacob.”
He did. Albertis sat in a straight-backed chair next to the bed, close enough for Jake to touch if he could reach out. But nothing moved except his eyelids and his mouth. He blinked, ran his tongue across cracked lips. It took great effort.
It must be late afternoon because the light at the window behind Albertis was waning. September, he guessed from the certain quality of the light. A man didn’t live sixty-four years (almost sixty-five) without learning how light betrayed seasons. September. He had been held prisoner in his inner sanctum for a month.
“I took over the paper, you know.”
“Yes,” Albertis said. His legs were crossed, one thin limb hitched across the other, bony knees outlined by the thin fabric of his pants.
“I was wondering, does every man have a beast?”
The trace of a smile passed Albertis’s face and then was gone. Albertis answered with a question of his own. “It wasn’t as easy as you thought, was it, Jacob?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your trouble was, you always made up your mind.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Jake asked.
“Things change. People change. And then there’s always the ‘beast,’ as you call it. You never learned that you can’t make up your mind about too many things.”
Jake studied the gaunt face for a moment. Albertis was an unkempt man. His hair was matted and tousled, his face rough with unshaven black stubble. He remembered that Albertis would go for days without shaving when the melancholia hit him, that the rank odor of his unwashed body would fill the hallway outside his room, that he would allow nobody to touch him until the spell had passed. Then there would be a great airing-out with Albertis splashing in the tub and the windows of the room thrown wide and sour bedclothes piled on the back porch, gray with dinge, Albertis emerging pale-eyed and frail in freshly starched clothes with little blood specks on his face where he had shaved off the stubble. He looked now, sitting by Jake’s bed, as if a spell were just beginning. He would be quite lucid for a while, but soon the door to the room would close and the pacing would start and then even that would end and Albertis would take to his bed.
“You were always so sure that you knew what you knew,” Albertis said, breaking the silence. “You made up your mind too much. You judged.”
“Yes,” Jake said. “Maybe I did.” He would have nodded, but only his lips and eyelids moved and he realized how crippled a man can be without his gestures. “But,” he went on, “a man has to take his life in his own hands and shake it for all it’s worth.”
Albertis dismissed him with a snort.
“A man has to take control of his life …” Jake started.
“Hah! Control, you say! Just look at you, Jacob. You can’t even control your own bowels. Can you?”
“No,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t mean …”
“Every man does what he can with what the Lord doles out,” Albertis said.
Now it was Jake’s turn to snort with derision. “You think the Lord does it, eh? Well, you’re wrong! The Lord doesn’t meddle.”
Albertis gave him a long, slow smile. “And who do you think invented the beast?” he said quietly. He uncrossed his legs, crossed them the other way. There was such an air of futility and resignation about the act that it made Jake furious. That was the way it had been all along. Albertis had given in to the beast and let it gnaw and gnaw and gnaw.
“You just ran away. You just ran under a rock and hid,” Jake said accusingly.
Albertis wouldn’t argue. “You don’t run away from a beast, Jacob. It’s always with you. Look at Henry. Did he escape?”
“Henry!” Jake spat, disgusted.
“And what about you, Jacob?” Albertis leaned forward against the bed. “Did you escape? Look at you. And you were always so certain of what you knew. Always so sure of your opinions.”
“Based on fact!”
Albertis gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Give us less fact and more possibilities. What’s a fact, anyway, but what you want it to be?”
“Henry disgraced himself, that’s a fact.”
“Were you there? Do you know what happened?”
“I could see. I could see what a mess he left,” Jake said hotly. “I saw what a bloody mess he left on the front of that car, what was left of Hazel when he got done. I could see that. You should have been there to see the blood and the gore! She wasn’t a saint, but my God!”
Albertis sat back in his chair, stared at Jake for a long time. Jake felt weak with anger. Albertis shouldn’t be here, getting him riled up like this. Albertis showed up when you didn’t need him. And when you did need him, he was up there in his room, pacing the floor with his own little beast gnawing, gnawing at his mind.
“Pastine never gave up on him,” Albertis said quietly.
“Pastine’s a woman,” Jake said. “All Pastine ever did was wrap her skirt around Henry and tell him everything was going to be all right. She wiped his snotty little nose and let him keep screwing up. She did it even when he disgraced himself. What does a woman know about a man’s honor and dignity?”
“Maybe more than you think, Jacob,” Albertis said quietly.
“Hah!”
Albertis hung fire for a moment, and then said, “I could tell you something.”
Then it was Jake’s turn to give pause, because he could see in his father’s face, could feel palpably in the room, some secret that, once told, would make everything irreversible. Be careful, he told himself. He wanted Albertis to go away now.
“Well, Jacob?” Albertis insisted. “You’re a man of fact, as you say. Opinion based on carefully considered fact, eh? You can’t decide, not really, unless you know.”
The hell with him, Jake thought. “All right. Tell me.”
“Pastine kept the paper afloat all these years. It hasn’t made money since you took it over, Jacob. You were such a stickler for your almighty fact and so proud of your precious opinion. But a disaster as a businessman. A disaster, that’s all you can call it.”
He stopped for a moment, gave it time to wrench like a knife in Jake’s gut.
“You were so busy making great journalism you didn’t have time to keep up the subscription files or sell advertising. Look at it, if you ever get up, Jacob. Go back and look at the
paper when I had it and compare the advertising space with what you have now. A third, perhaps. And you never raised the rates. And the bills? They just kept piling up on your desk the way they did on mine, until Pastine would finally come and get them and pay them. Not out of what the paper brought in, Jacob. Out of her money. Pastine is a wealthy woman. It wasn’t much, really, not to her. She paid the bills and kept the paper going. And you say she doesn’t know anything about a man’s honor and dignity? Bullshit, Jacob. Bullshit. She kept it from you, the fact that you were a godalmighty failure.”
“No!”
“Oh, yes.” There was a hard, insistent edge to Albertis’s voice, something Jake had never heard there before. Albertis had no backbone, no gumption, no pride. Did he? What right did he have after all these years to use that tone of voice? Albertis was a weakling, a man who ran away and hid in dark rooms when others needed him. A Judas. A betrayer. He had no right …
“So, Jacob. You make up your mind about so much. When you know so little.”
“Go away!” Jake squeezed his eyes shut, pressed the lids together so hard it was like two fists jammed against his face. But he could hear Albertis moving from the chair, rising, bending toward him.
“No! No!”
And then he could feel the hands on him, on his shoulders, sliding up toward his neck. But they were strong hands, big beefy hands and now they were shaking him and the voice above him wasn’t sad and raspy at all, but a big booming voice that yelled, “Pastine! Pastine! Come here, he’s opened his eyes!”
And Jake jerked his eyes open again to see Rosh Benefield towering over his bed, big fat Rosh with his face all flushed and his eyes bright, and then steps in the hall, Pastine running toward the bed and then bending over him, pushing Rosh out of the way.
“Oh, my God, my God,” she moaned, clutching him in her strong arms, choking back a sob.