by Robert Inman
“Yeah,” Rosh nodded. “What the hell. You’ve been through a lot, son. Come on home and take time to sort it out.”
Billy sat there a moment longer, pondering it, and then got to his feet with a jerk, reaching for his uniform cap in the overhead rack and jamming it on his head. He managed a grin, almost the kind he used to have when he was a kid full of mischief, Rosh thought. At the front of the car, Billy kissed Ideal on the cheek to let her know everything was okay, gave Alsatia his arm, and stepped out onto the platform. There was a moment of silence and then the applause started and the band struck up “Red Red Robin” again.
Rosh held back, watching as the crowd pressed in around Billy and Alsatia, and Billy reached out to touch them, grinning and squeezing their flesh with both hands. He looked very handsome in his uniform, the winter tans resting easily on his shoulders, the cap cocked back on his head a bit, the way fly-boys wore them. He must look very dashing and a little exotic to them. Rosh could feel the tears welling up behind his eyes, very close to the surface, tears he had carefully held back all those long months when there had no longer been any reason to hope Billy was alive. What an amazing thing it was for God to return a man’s son to him. And if a man could see the miracle in that, was it unreasonable for him to want much for such a son? Maybe it was a sin, even a great one, but the kind that would surely be forgiven.
There was a brief ceremony. Cosmo Redlinger gave a little speech on behalf of the Town Council and presented Billy with a large brass key to the city, handmade at the Harsole Bingham plant. A young girl from the First Baptist Church gave Alsatia a big bouquet of flowers, a significant thing because it meant her peccadillo was officially forgiven and that Ideal Benefield, who ran the First Baptist Church, had put her blessing on the business.
Then Tunstall called on the colonel from Billy’s air base and the colonel, a decorated bomber pilot himself, stepped forward and read the citations for Billy’s Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, Silver Star, and Purple Heart. He handed the boxes containing Billy’s ribbons to Rosh, Ideal, and Alsatia, and they took turns pinning them on the front of his tunic. Alsatia was last and when she was finished, she gave Billy a long kiss while the crowd hooted and cheered and the high school band played “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays,” and that was when Rosh Benefield cried. He stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks and Billy, seeing him, walked back to where he stood and gave him a big hug. There wasn’t a dry eye in the crowd except for Cosmo Redlinger, who had trained himself as an undertaker to keep careful check on his emotions.
The band stopped and then started immediately into “Red Red Robin” again and Francine Tibbetts shouldered her way to the front of the crowd with Henry in tow. Henry was holding Jake Tibbetts’s big Speed Graphic camera as if it were a time bomb. “Let’s get a picture, folks,” Francine called out.
Billy stared at Henry for a long moment. “Mr. Jake?”
The mistake was natural. Henry looked ancient and frail, his complexion sallow and mottled, hair thinning. Then, too, he had Jake Tibbetts’s bushy, riotous eyebrows and his stubborn jaw. Rosh could feel Ideal bristle beside him. After all these years, she still had the great hate inside her.
“No, Billy, this is Henry,” Rosh said, stepping forward. “Henry Tibbetts. And his wife Francine.”
“Henry, my God,” Billy said, reaching out, pulling Henry’s hand into his own. “Gee, it’s good to see you. And Francine, is it? Well, my God.” He pumped Henry’s hand, and Henry just stood there, looking as if he didn’t know what to do.
“Okay,” Francine interrupted, “let’s get everybody in here. All the Benefields and the Renfroes, and Mr. Redlinger of course. And you, Colonel.” She took charge, arranging the group while Henry stood back holding the camera gingerly. When she had them set, Henry fumbled with the camera for a long awkward moment while the smiles froze on their faces, then raised it to his eye and mashed the shutter release. It clicked and Henry lowered the camera, looked at the flash attachment, mumbled, pulled a flash bulb from his pocket and inserted it, then changed the plate in the back of the camera and took another shot. This time the flash popped, leaving a small bright spot in front of their eyes. Francine stood to the side, silent, watching patiently until Henry got it done.
“Where’s Mr. Jake?” Billy asked when they were finished.
Henry blanched and it was suddenly very quiet. Rosh moved quickly, grabbing arms, moving the crowd down the platform. “Well, time to get on to the house and get these young folks some rest,” he boomed. “Where’s the car? Oh, yes. Over here.” He pointed and just kept shoving them ahead of him toward the end of the train station where he had left the Packard when they boarded the northbound train three days ago. Billy gave him a funny look, but Rosh shook his head. He kept himself between Billy and Ideal because he just knew Ideal was dying to say something, say it loudly right there so everybody could hear it. By the time they got to the car, she was fuming.
“Damn you, Rosh,” she hissed in his ear when they reached the car, “don’t you ever curse at me again, you hear me!”
“What?” he said in surprise. “I haven’t said a word, hon.”
“Yes, you did. On the train. You uttered a curse word at me. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”
“Sorry, hon,” he mumbled.
“And just now …”
“Okay, hon, later. Okay?” And he opened the rear door of the car and shoved her in. He would pay for that, he thought to himself.
They drove home in stony silence, Ideal sitting ramrod straight and red-faced in the front beside him, Billy and Alsatia in the back. There was another big crowd waiting for them, people milling through the house (Rosh wondered how they had gotten in), huge piles of food in the kitchen, the dining room table set for dinner. The women of the First Methodist Church had organized it, had brought whole hams and turkeys and roasts, casseroles, plates and bowls of vegetables, big urns of sweetened tea, enough to feed them for weeks. They hugged and kissed and shook hands for a long time and then sat down, exhausted, to eat while the churchwomen hovered over them. It was midafternoon before they got the house cleared and Ideal retired upstairs with a headache and Alsatia went not long after to take a nap in the spare bedroom, leaving Rosh and Billy alone in the living room with all the unanswered questions.
Billy slumped into an overstuffed chair, coat off, collar undone, tie loose. Rosh sat across from him on the sofa and, since the ladies were gone, undid the top button on his trousers and let his stomach take ease.
“Tired?” he asked Billy.
“Not especially. I’ve had a long time to rest up.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not yet,” Billy said. “I’m not sure why. There’s really not much to tell about it. I just sat around for two months waiting for somebody to find me. Nothing very glorious or heroic about that.”
Rosh grunted. The room was warm, he was full of food. He could feel sleep coming on.
Billy took off his shoes and placed them neatly beside his chair and began massaging his left foot, the one the shrapnel had pierced. “The Army says I have a drinking problem,” Billy said. “I stayed drunk most of the time, I guess. I found some Jap wine.”
Rosh opened his eyes and blinked. “You don’t look like an alcoholic to me,” he said.
“What does an alcoholic look like?” Billy asked. “Henry Tibbetts?”
Rosh knew it was time then to tell him everything. And he did. How Henry came home and got drunk and stole the fire truck and wrecked the telephone office and scared Em Nesbitt half out of her wits. How Hilton Redlinger stopped him in the middle of the street and fired his pistol and the shot ricocheted and hit Lonnie. How Jake came running up and saw it all and had a stroke on the spot and spent a month in a coma. Rosh told it all, organizing the story as he would a presentation to a jury, and Billy sat there rubbing his foot and listening. One part of Rosh’s mind told the story and another part listened to it, analy
zing, thinking how the lives of Jake Tibbetts and his kin had dissolved into utter chaos.
“And Lonnie?” Billy asked when Rosh was through.
“He wasn’t too badly hurt. The bullet must have hit him a glancing blow. It went in up here”— Rosh tapped his chest just above the breastbone —”and went out here”— he pointed to his left side below the rib cage —”and broke a couple of ribs along the way, but it didn’t hit anything vital. He’s back in school now.”
“What about Mr. Jake?”
“Ah, Jake,” Rosh said with a long sigh. “He lives but he doesn’t. He’s recovering from the stroke pretty well. It’s downright remarkable, in fact. He’s beginning to get up and around. But I think with the weeks he was just lying there unconscious, his body came out of it in better shape than his mind. At first, he was just plain nasty. Now, he just sits there for hours and says nothing. I don’t know,” Rosh threw up his hands, “he’s just waiting for something. Maybe to die.”
Billy lowered his foot, wiggled the toes inside the tan sock. “You and Mr. Jake have always been pretty close, haven’t you? Even …”
“Yes,” Rosh nodded. “Even with that.” It loomed large before him now, the always-unspoken thing that had hovered over Jake Tibbetts and himself.
“Jake always blamed Henry for Hazel’s death,” Rosh said.
“Well …”
Rosh shook his head. “It’s not as easy as that. Hazel” — he took a deep breath — “was difficult.”
“What do you mean?”
Rosh searched his soul for the right words. How did a man deal with a truth so painful and so hidden that it festered like a wound deep inside him? How did he pass judgment on his own flesh? He thought about it for a long time, feeling Billy’s eyes on him. Finally he said, “They were just terrible for each other. Hazel picked at Henry until he bled. And Henry just cowered down and took it and took it until you wanted to pick him up and shake him. Then he’d go off and get drunk and stay that way for days at a time. I don’t know what happened in the car that night on the way back from Taylorsville, but something awful had been building for a long time.”
“But Mother …” Billy started to say.
“I know,” Rosh interrupted him gently. “Your mother won’t ever get over the hurt, and the only person she’s got to blame is Henry. She deals with it as she has to.”
“And you blame Hazel,” Billy said.
“No, I don’t blame anybody,” Rosh said, suddenly feeling very tired. “Blame is a difficult thing, Billy. I think only God can assign blame. Maybe it’s that I’m too much the lawyer, but I’m condemned to deal with what passes for fact. I can’t assess blame, not even here.”
Billy stared at him, then looked down at his hands clenched in his lap.
“It’s not fair to say all this to you, when you’re just home,” Rosh said.
“No,” Billy shook his head. “It’s not. It’s not something I need to deal with.”
“But one day, you’ll have to,” Rosh said.
“Yes.” He paused. “And Henry? What happened to Henry?”
Rosh told him how Henry spent two months in the county jail for stealing the fire truck and wrecking the phone exchange. It would have been more, but Henry had come back from the war with a Silver Star. How his feisty little wife had taken hold of him after he got out of jail, put him to work at the Free Press.
“They’re running the paper now,” Rosh said. “I think Lonnie goes down there after school. They hired a printer to run the Linotype machine and put the paper together. The paper is pretty awful, but they manage to get it out. They haven’t missed an issue.”
And, he told him about how Francine and Henry had married in Texas, and about how she had shown up in the middle of the night on Jake and Pastine’s front porch.
“Where was Lonnie today?” Billy asked. “You said he’s okay now.”
“He may have been there, back in the crowd someplace. He’s a funny little fellow. Quiet, mind going all the time. Too much, I think. I know Pastine’s worried about him. Since the, ah, incident he’s kept pretty much to himself. We don’t see much of him anymore.”
“What a mess,” Billy said.
“I suppose it is,” Rosh said, “but they manage to muddle through, all of them. We all, I suppose, manage to muddle through.”
He thought again how strange it was to be sitting here like this, talking to Billy this way, talking of things he would never have thought of discussing with him before. There had been no call to before. Billy had gone off to war a boy, but he had come back with the look of the world on his tanned face. Rosh felt a pang. There was something here forever lost, and it wasn’t just Billy’s youth and innocence. He grieved a bit for himself, for all men who must grow old and face the certainty of their own mortality, knowing that for all their age and wisdom, they go naked and blind into the dark night.
“Billy,” the velvet voice floated down to them from the top of the stairs. “Billy, don’t you want to come up and take a nap with me, darling. I know you must be worn out.” There was in the voice alone, Rosh thought, enough to make a man’s blood run hot.
Billy flushed. “Geez,” he said quietly so that only Rosh could hear. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, then rose from his chair, looked down at his father.
“Don’t worry, son,” Rosh said. “An old country doctor told me one time that it’s impossible to wear it out.”
Billy grinned and then he left Rosh alone there in the living room with his vast belly hanging out of his trousers and the clock in the front hall ticking away the afternoon.
Rosh thought suddenly of Lightnin’ Jim, of clear fiery liquid in mason jars, and of Buffalo, New York. He smiled to himself, thinking that no one in this small Southern town would guess that its wealthiest man and its wealthiest woman — Lightnin’ Jim and Pastine Tibbetts, one black, one white — jointly owned a goodly share of Buffalo’s real estate. There was something perfectly delicious about that, something a lawyer who had managed their affairs could enjoy in the most confidential moments. Each client knew there was another, silent partner. But neither knew the identity of the other. Both, he thought, would take a particular delight in it. But it would not do to tell, here or in Buffalo, New York. And it was time for him, their lawyer and confidant, to advise them to sell out. The postwar boom meant that the value of their property was already skyrocketing. Take it and run and let no one be the wiser. There was another reason, too. The sharp pains in his chest that took his breath were coming more often now. If he was careful, if he got his rest and kept agitation at a minimum and took a daily dose of Lightnin’ Jim’s Best for medicinal purposes, he could last another year or so. Time enough to set things in order. Time enough, perhaps, to see what happened to that old ornery sonofabitch Jake Tibbetts. God save a man from having such a friend.
Rosh Benefield went to sleep on the sofa thinking of Jake and his dreams were full of devilment.
Ten
JAKE TIBBETTS AWAKENED from his long sleep in mid-September, about the time the PBY discovered Billy Benefield on the Pacific island.
He woke to the knowledge that he had crossed an enormous expanse of time and space since August, and that he had washed up on the near shore in wretched shape, a shadow of the man he had been a few weeks before. He woke because his father appeared at his bedside and spoke vile things that altered all he had ever been and done in unspeakable ways.
A week later, Jake spoke himself. No one could understand him — it came out as a strangled, guttural, animal noise — but he knew damned well what he meant to say. He meant to say, “Goddamn you all, leave me alone.” Pastine and Francine and Charlie Ainsworth and Rosh Benefield were all hovering over him, clucking and prodding and farting about, and all he wanted them to do was go away. He wanted to die, but they would not let him go in peace.
In fact, he kept getting better. In another week, he got some control of his mouth and vocal cords so that he could cuss them and they knew they had
been cussed. By this time, they had him sitting up on the side of the bed, a person on each side to prop him up. And then, as October came and Billy Benefield came home on the train, the feeling returned to him in a rush. The broken connections in his brain somehow fused again, as Ainsworth said they might. Jake was, essentially, over the stroke, except for some lingering numbness on his left side and a bit of a droop on that side of his face. But what the stroke had left was a shell. He had lain flat on his ass longer than a sixty-four-year-old man can afford to do. Muscles had atrophied, coordination was gone, he had even lost his sense of up and down, right and left. Still, he would not die, at least not yet.
Since he could not die, he could make the rest of them wish he had. He lashed at them with his tongue, the only thing that worked right, until he drove them all away. Except for Pastine. She stuck, even when the vilest things spewed from the poisoned recesses of his brain — stuck, suffering silently through his abuse. She cleaned him when he fouled himself, kneaded his ruined flesh for hours, while all the time, he raged at her for his own humiliated helplessness.
But she could only take so much at a time, so she left him alone for long periods. With no one to rail at, his anger spent itself and he was forced to consider what made him unable to act like anything but an unreconstituted sonofabitch. He began to understand that one reason he railed was so he wouldn’t have to face other things — for one, the unspeakable thing that Albertis told him Pastine had done; and the other, what had happened at dusk on the courthouse square on August 7. So one evening in early October, he faced it. She had brought him his supper, propped him up in bed with a towel under his chin to catch the pieces of food that spilled from his mouth when he tried to feed himself. He mumbled a thank-you and otherwise held his wicked tongue in check. She gave him a curious look, and after she had left him with the tray, she came back with a bowl of bread dough and sat in the rocker by the window as dusk fell, kneading the dough, concentrating on the work.