by Kent Haruf
But finally Withers accepted this new fact and went on. He said: “All right, then, so you’re married. You married some good-looking girl in Oklahoma. But Jesus Christ, man, didn’t you even go to a single meeting we sent you down there to go to?”
“Sure,” Burdette told him. “I went to some of them. I went to a goodly number. I didn’t meet her till Saturday.”
“Then how come you never come back until Wednesday? You was supposed to report to us here on Tuesday.”
“I remember,” Burdette said. “But you don’t expect them to open that office of theirs on the weekends, do you?”
“What office?”
“The one so we could get our blood tested.”
“You mean you got married on Monday?”
“That’s right.”
“But that still leaves Tuesday.”
“No it don’t.”
Withers stared at him.
“Tuesday was our honeymoon,” Burdette said. “We was still in bed on Tuesday.”
Withers took the toothpick out of his mouth then and threw it away. He said he didn’t have any more use for it now. It didn’t taste good to him.
Nevertheless he went on once more. “All right,” he said, “I guess some kind of congratulations are in order. And I do congratulate you—I wish you both well. Still I’m only going to hope for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m just going to hope that this doesn’t spoil your good judgment.”
“It never has before.”
“Goddamn it—you haven’t never been married before either.”
“That’s a fact,” Burdette said. “I haven’t even been to Tulsa before. It might get to be a habit.”
Burdette slapped Withers on the back then. But Arch Withers still wasn’t amused. He climbed into his pickup and started it. Through the open window he said: “How was your blood anyway? That report you had. It might be of interest to the board.”
“Arch,” Burdette said, “it was hot. You just wouldn’t believe how hot it was.” He began to laugh. “And hers was too,” he said.
Then Withers drove away, across the gravel out onto the road and over to Main Street to Bradbury’s Bakery. For an hour before going home again, before returning to the tractor waiting for him in the half-plowed field which he admitted he had left for too long already over this damned business, he sat drinking black coffee and eating cream-filled doughnuts while he told some of us what he had just heard. He said he believed that Burdette had stopped laughing as he drove away but that he was pretty sure Burdette was still grinning.
“So,” one of us said. “He’s married now, is he? Well hell’s bells.”
“Except you mean wedding bells, don’t you?” one of the others said.
“No, I don’t. I mean, that son of a bitch. I wonder what she looks like.”
As a result of all this there was a considerable crowd at the Holt Cafe on Main Street that Thursday noon. People in Holt knew Burdette ate lunch there and they hoped that his new wife would join him. They wanted to see this new woman for themselves. They wanted to examine her and confirm their expectations. By twelve o’clock all of the tables and booths at the cafe were occupied and there was an increasing number of people standing up at the front door waiting for the possibility of a vacated table. Meanwhile the special of the day—Swiss steak and potatoes and green beans and hot apple pie—had already been used up.
Then a little after twelve Burdette walked in. He stood just inside the doorway a moment, scanning the tables and booths, looking across the steamy overfilled room for a place to sit. A couple of the local men waved at him, motioning for him to come join them at a center table opposite the salad bar. He acknowledged the men, but then he walked past their table and over to a booth in the corner. There was a young woman sitting in the booth, alone.
She had come in earlier. I believe she had been there for about thirty minutes; maybe more than that. When she had entered the cafe late that morning people had noticed her—anyone new in town would be noticed—but I don’t think they had thought much about it. I suppose they—we—had all assumed that she was just some single woman from out of town who was passing through Holt on Highway 34 and that she had only stopped for lunch and maybe for an hour of rest at the cafe. Still there were people who were annoyed with her too; those men and women who were standing up at the doorway kept glancing at her, indicating by their quick harsh glances that she ought to have the decency to get up and leave. She was occupying an entire booth by herself, a booth which they themselves had more immediate and urgent need of.
Then Burdette did something which surprised everyone in the cafe. He sat down with her—not across from her but beside her—and he put his arm around her. He pulled this new unknown young woman to himself and kissed her.
And suddenly it was as if you could actually hear the insuck of breath from the men and women sitting in the cafe that noon when they realized who she was, when they understood who she had to be. It was like that moment that comes in a movie when everything—music, motion and sense—is stopped for a few seconds and the figures on the screen are held temporarily in silent stasis and arrest. People in Holt felt shocked. She wasn’t anything like what they expected her to be. There were some in the cafe who even wondered if she weren’t part Indian.
For Jessie Burdette, it turned out, was a very quiet and solitary woman. She had brown eyes and dark brown hair and beautifully clear skin, and she was of less than medium height and she was quite slim, but she wasn’t petite. She didn’t make you think of girlish debutantes or of retiring primroses. She wasn’t even pretty really. That is, she was attractive, she was very attractive; and later, thirteen years later, when I came to know her well I thought she was the most attractive woman I’d ever known and absolutely the finest person. And in the end I was ready to do anything at all for her. Still she was not pretty in any conventional sense. She wasn’t at all the positive and cute, sunny little pert-nosed girl next door; nor was she any form of that brash California idea of female pulchritude either. Instead she was rather small and dark and quiet and obviously strong-willed. She seemed capable of a great deal. She seemed independent. Even on that first day, when I saw her for the first time in the Holt Cafe, there seemed to be a quality of aloofness about her, as if she preferred really to be left alone, or as if she knew very well what she wanted and if that happened to preclude being close to others—so that she must always seem a little set off and separate from other people in Holt, or, for that matter, from people anywhere else in the world—she was willing to accept that too.
So I don’t know why she married Jack Burdette. Not absolutely, at any rate. On the other hand, as I’ve suggested before, I think I do know why Burdette married her: out of boredom. He decided that charming Jessie was at least preferable to attending any more convention workshops. Then, too, he had those company charge cards in his pocket. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste an opportunity to spend money which did not belong to him, especially if it was simply a matter of having to scribble his name on a piece of paper. But I can’t say absolutely why Jessie married him.
I suppose part of it had to do with the fact that she was only twenty years old in 1971. She was still very young, although she was not entirely ignorant of the ways of the world and men. She had had some experience of both, some limited experience. But the point is, she was very young even so. She was not much more than a girl yet. Besides, she had lived her entire life in Tulsa. And I don’t think, at twenty, that Jessie Burdette believed that Tulsa was all there was in the world worth seeing.
So in April that year Jack Burdette arrived at the Holiday Inn. He was a big man and jovial, and he was ten years her senior and he was from Colorado. And so he charmed her. And then, rather than return to any more convention workshops, he proposed marriage to her. And, for her own reasons, she accepted. But there was one other little bit of play in this weekend romance too: sometime during those days and nights in the motel ro
om Burdette managed to convey the impression to her that Holt was better than it is. He told her, for example, that you could see the mountains from Holt.
You can’t of course. You have to drive at least forty miles west of here to see the mountains. And then it has to be a very clear day, coming after it has rained or after the wind has blown hard for five or six hours so that the brown cloud hanging over Denver has been driven away or been blown off, and then what you see of mountains is merely a faint blue jagged line on the horizon some hundred miles farther to the west. But to Jessie Burdette, as later she would describe the manner in which Jack had told her about it, Holt County would at least have seemed different from Tulsa, Oklahoma. And she thought she had good reason to want out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
She was the oldest of three children. The two others were boys, younger than she by five and six years. Her mother was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair, and her father was an implement salesman who was gone from home most of the time. As a teenager then, after her mother was crippled, she had spent many hours taking care of her mother and her two little brothers. She knew a great deal about cooking and cleaning and washing clothes and changing bedpans and emptying urine bags, and she had worked part-time in the evenings at fast-food restaurants, and she had even saved a little money to buy material to make clothes for herself. But she didn’t know much about fun. It was all a kind of gray reiteration of things to her, an endless unhappy routine. Then she graduated from high school. And after graduation she had worked as a temporary secretary on several occasions. But none of that was taking her anywhere. Then it was about this time that her father, because of business associations, heard about the weekend job at the elevator convention at the Holiday Inn. So she applied for the job and she was hired to show the film about hybrid seed corn in the motel lobby. She wore the miniskirt they required her to wear and the short-sleeved white blouse with the low neckline, and all the time she managed to smile congenially at the men at the convention. Then Jack Burdette showed up and began to talk to her. And soon it was more than just talk, and then on Monday he married her.
So for the next five years, after seeing her for the first time in the Holt Cafe that Thursday noon, like everyone else in town I still only saw her infrequently. And then it was only causally, remotely, as from a safe and necessary distance. On those occasions when she happened to be shopping on Main Street, or on those rare weekend nights when she would agree to go out to the bars with Burdette, I would see her, just as everyone else did, and pay attention to her.
She was still doing some of that then—going out to the bars, I mean. During those first seven or eight months after Wanda Jo Evans had left town and while she herself was still new among us, we would see her every once in a while at the Legion or at the Holt Tavern on Saturday nights. And we would all watch her then. Typically, she would be sitting quietly in a corner booth by herself, sipping some sugary drink very slowly while the ice in her glass melted away, thinning the pink liquor to mere colored water, while Burdette himself (since marriage hadn’t changed him; since marriage was merely a change in his weekend companion, not a real break in his Saturday night routine, that masculine habit and custom of his) would be standing off at the end of the bar away from her, drinking whiskey or scotch, the center of that constant and admiring group of backslapping men, while he told his jokes and stories and they all laughed.
That wasn’t often, though; we didn’t see much of that. Jessie Burdette did not go out to the bars very regularly. And when she did go out she was always pleasant and would talk to you if you said something to her, but she would never volunteer anything herself. Instead she seemed to prefer to sit quietly sipping her watery drink, watching others have what she maybe didn’t even consider then as being a very good time.
But in the meantime the local women had begun to work on her, to pay special attention to her. I suppose the women in town wanted to be friendly. They began to ask her to join their social clubs and their church organizations. Wouldn’t she like to come to tea, to join Rebecca Circle, to play bridge, to be a member of the Legion Auxiliary, to golf with them on Saturday mornings, or maybe—wouldn’t she like to participate in Bible study?
But she wouldn’t, she told the women. She refused them outright, although when they called on her she was pleasant about it all. Nonetheless she was certain about it too.
So the women felt a little hurt by this, a little bit rebuffed and rejected. It put them off. But a month or two later they decided to ask her again. She only needed more time, they told one another; she was merely being polite. She probably wanted to settle in more thoroughly and to look about her, as anyone would, moving to a new town. With the passage of time, she would feel differently, they said. In the middle of fall that first year they began to ask her again.
But again she refused their invitations, rejecting that female attempt at communal neighborliness and sociability a second time. She hadn’t changed her mind at all, it turned out. While we understood that she was still quite cordial to them, in that typical, quiet and pleasant manner of hers, she was also absolutely certain about it. She was not in the least bit interested.
And now the women felt more than a little put off. They were offended. They felt wounded by her rejection. As a result, they stopped asking Jessie Burdette to join anything at all.
* * *
Then in March of 1973, almost two years after she had arrived in town, she had a baby. She delivered a little boy whom she named Thomas John. Later, when that became too much of a mouthful, she shortened it to TJ. He was a handsome little boy. He had his mother’s dark hair and her sober brown watchful eyes. And it was obvious to us, seeing them on Main Street, what she thought of him. She was delighted with him. We would see them together: the young woman, small and quiet and trim again after her pregnancy, pushing the handsome little boy along the street in a baby carriage, the two of them going in and out of the stores, looking as content with themselves as if nothing else mattered. She would be smiling at him too, talking to him quietly as though he could already understand what she was saying. Then later when he was a little older and when it was summertime we began to see them in front of the house on Gum Street (for Burdette had made a small down payment on a two-bedroom house by that time; it was in the middle of town, near the railroad tracks)—this new mother and her little boy would be playing together on a blanket spread out on the grass in the shade under the elm and hackberry trees. He was a little more than a year old when she delivered a second child.
This one was a boy too, named Robert and called Bobby, who was almost the exact twin of his older brother: a handsome little boy with the same brown hair and the same brown watchful eyes. She was pleased with him as well. She was delighted with both of her sons.
Consequently there were three of them now for us to watch in town. Three of them to notice on Main Street or to observe in the yard in front of the house, playing games on the front lawn or making little farmsteads in the dirt with miniature cows and horses and bits of sticks—this young woman whom nobody knew at all yet, whom we had expected in the beginning to be some playgirl, some Oklahoma Monroe or Mansfield with a heaving bust and a cinched-in waist above wide hips and long legs, but who, it happened, wasn’t like that at all.
Thus there developed a kind of mystery about Jessie Burdette in Holt. None of us knew what to think of her. Who was she, really? We didn’t know. It was as if she were some fine and exotic bird that had flown in here one spring and had then decided to stay—but one which didn’t seem to expect any sustenance or even association from anything or anyone around her.
So for five years she was left almost entirely alone. She was merely here, living in a town of three thousand where everyone knew everyone else. And no one knew her.
Then everything changed, for her and for those of us who were still watching her. It had to do with her husband. Sometime in the middle of the afternoon on the last day of December in 1976 Jack Burdette disappeared. And in the end he di
d not return to Holt for a very long time, not until a great deal of damage had already been done.
• 7 •
At first people in Holt were not alarmed by his disappearance. On the contrary, they were rather amused by it. They thought of it as a kind of joke, as another of his sudden and outlandish acts which in time would be explained, or at least accepted, as just another installment in that ongoing legend that followed him about the town.
Then he’d been gone for about a week. And it began to get about—in the bakery and the pool halls and the tavern, wherever people were talking—that he had charged some things on Main Street before he left.
We learned that on that Friday afternoon on the last day of December he had gone into Foster’s Jewelry Store and after looking at several men’s rings and old-fashioned pocket watches he had chosen the most expensive 14-carat gold Bulova wrist-watch that Lloyd Foster had to offer. And he hadn’t paid for it; he had merely signed his name to a charge slip. Then he walked out of the store with the new gold watch on his wrist and went next door to do the same with Ralph Bird.
And there, at the Men’s Store, he charged a new maroon sport coat and a pair of good gray wool slacks, a leather belt and three long-sleeved oxford-cloth shirts—all of which satisfied Ralph Bird so well (since Bird hadn’t expected to conduct any business at all in that dead time following the Christmas rush) that he decided, uncharacteristically, to throw in a good new striped tie to boot.
And Burdette thanked him. He slapped Ralph on the back and signed his name to another charge slip. Then he walked out of the Men’s Store wearing the coat and the slacks and the belt and one of the shirts—with the other things (the two extra shirts and the bonus tie and his old clothes) all stuffed into a plastic store bag. Once he was outside, he walked up to the corner to Schulte’s Department Store.
