by Kent Haruf
So perhaps it was inevitable, given the pitch of emotion and the nature of people, that since there was no one else in Holt who was still available to them, they turned on Jessie Burdette. They were outraged by what had happened and nearly everyone had been affected by it in some way. They began to associate the problems at the elevator with Jessie’s arrival. The notice she had printed in the Mercury ended up not making any difference to anyone. Too much had happened since then, and now no one quite believed her.
Thus for three or four months that spring Jessie Burdette became public property. There was a kind of general insanity in Holt, a feeling that almost anything was possible. It was as if people had declared open season on her and thought of it as a matter of community honor.
At first there didn’t seem to be anything you could put your finger on. There seemed to be merely an increased watchfulness whenever she was present, an intensified correctness and communal coolness toward her whenever she appeared on Main Street. People talked to her now only when they had to, at the checkout stand in the grocery store, or at the gas station when she paid for gas. No one voluntarily greeted her.
Then one evening someone in a car ran over TJ and Bobby’s orange cat in the street out in front of the house. The little boys found it the next morning on the front step. Its death might have been an accident but whoever had killed it had brought the cat to the house without stopping to apologize or to offer any explanation. The cat was badly mangled; its fur had been torn open, exposing its insides, and it had been placed where Jessie and the boys were sure to see it. The boys were badly upset by this. Jessie helped them bury it beside the fence in the backyard.
Still, despite this increasing hostility, she continued to stay in Holt. I am not certain why that is, even now. Most of us, I think, would not have stayed here even for a week, not if we felt we had any alternative. But perhaps that had a good deal to do with it, the fact that she felt she had nowhere else to go. There was nothing for her in Oklahoma anymore; her parents had divorced and now her mother was in a home for invalids and she hadn’t heard anything from her father in years. She wasn’t even certain where he was. As for her brothers, they had both enlisted in the military as soon as they had graduated from high school, so she couldn’t have gone to them even if she had wanted to. And in any case, she didn’t want to. She seemed to want to stay in Holt, to see this out for her own reasons. It was as if she were determined to react even to these events in her own quiet and independent way, as if her opinion of herself depended upon this alone. It was as if she were trying to prove something.
So it was tragic finally. In the end it became more than just a matter of money. When it was over it was so painful to think about that there were very few people in Holt who ever wanted to remember it.
It began in April. At the beginning of April that year she appeared one afternoon at the elevator beside the railroad tracks. She walked up the plank steps into the outer office and scale room and told Bob Thomas she wanted to see Doyle Francis. This surprised Bob Thomas. It was just after lunch and Bob had eaten too much as usual and was half asleep. He was slouched at the desk behind the counter, shuffling through some shipping receipts. When he looked up there she was. “What?” he said. “What’d you say?”
“I’d like to see Doyle Francis, please. I believe he’s still working here.”
“I’ll go get him. No, I’ll go tell him. Hell. You wait here.”
She had her information right; Doyle Francis was in fact still working at the elevator. In the three months since her husband had left town, the board of directors had begun to advertise for a new manager, as they had promised Doyle Francis they would, but they hadn’t hired a permanent replacement yet because in the intervening days and weeks they had become suspicious of their fellow man. Deeply, excessively suspicious. They had begun to insist on researching each applicant’s past—and not just his work experience, as is customary when hiring somebody new, but his ethical and moral and religious history as well. It was as if they had begun to suspect everybody, to believe every man in the world who applied for the manager’s job at the elevator wanted only to take their money, to skip town with it. In the end, however, what they really only wanted to ask these men was: “Goddamn it, if we hire you now, how long are you going to be here working for us before you think you have to add to what we pay you, before you turn out to be another son of a bitch like Jack Burdette did? You ought to at least be able to tell us that much.”
No one blamed them for this attitude, for this new profound mistrust of others; most of the people in Holt felt similarly. But, because of the board’s suspicions, Doyle Francis was still there in April, still waiting for the board to hire someone else so he could relax into retirement again. That afternoon he was still in his old office when Bob Thomas burst in.
“She’s here,” Bob said. “She wants to see you.”
“Who does?”
“Her. That son of a bitch’s wife. She’s out there in the scale room.”
“What does she want?”
“How the hell do I know? She just said she wanted to see you. That’s all she said.”
“Well,” Doyle said. “Show her in, Bob. Or are you scared, if we get too close to her, she might steal your pocketbook or something?”
“By god,” Bob said. “I don’t trust none of them no more. That’s a fact.”
“Never mind,” Doyle said. “Ask her to come back here. Go on now, try to act like a gentleman for once in your life.”
“I don’t need to act like no gentleman. Not with her, I don’t.”
He turned and went back out to get Jessie. She was still standing at the counter.
“He said he’d see you. Come on, I’ll show you where he’s at.”
“Thank you,” Jessie said, “but I know where the manager’s office is.”
“Well don’t take too long. Some of us got to work for a living.”
Jessie walked around the counter and down the narrow hallway past the toilet and the storage room. She was wearing slacks and a loose green blouse. When she entered, Doyle Francis stood up. He was one of the few men in town then, at least of those connected to the elevator, who still treated her with respect and minimal courtesy. He offered her a wooden chair with armrests.
She sat down heavily, a little carefully—she was still pregnant then, still carrying that little girl of hers that Burdette had left her with; she was in her seventh month. She set her purse on her shortened lap, in front of her stomach.
“Now, then,” Doyle said. “What can I do for you, Jessie?”
“I don’t want anything. If that’s what you think.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think that. They don’t pay me enough to worry about what other people think.”
“Well I don’t,” Jessie said. “I didn’t come here to ask for anything. I came here to give you something.”
“Oh?” he said. “What is it you want to give me?”
“Not you. The board of directors. The elevator. All these people.”
“What is it?”
“Here.” She opened her purse and withdrew a legal document. She pushed it across the desk toward him. Doyle picked it up, looked at it.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Hold on now. This is some kind of a deed, isn’t it?”
“They said it was legal.”
“Who said it was legal? What are you talking about?”
“The people down at the bank. They said I could sign it over to whoever I wanted to, even if Jack wasn’t here to cosign it. They said considering the circumstances it would be all right.”
“Did they now?” Doyle said. “I’ll bet they did too.”
He looked at the document again, read it this time. It was a quitclaim deed transferring the title of a house and property over to the board of directors of the Holt County Farmers’ Co-op Elevator. Her signature was at the bottom in fresh ink.
“All right, then,” he said, “I suppose it is legal. I wouldn’t know;
I’m not a lawyer. But then I don’t suppose anybody around here would protest it very much, would they? Even if it wasn’t legal?”
“No. They wouldn’t protest it.”
Doyle laid the deed down on the desk. He folded his hands over it. He said: “How old are you, Jessie?”
“I’m twenty-seven.”
“And you have two boys?”
“Yes.”
“How old are they?”
“They’ve just turned four and three. But why are you asking me these—”
“And you’re going to have another one pretty soon, aren’t you?”
“In June,” she said. “But—”
“Do you believe in hell?” he said. “Is that it?”
She stared back at him.
“Is that why you’re doing this? Because, let me tell you, I don’t think there is any hell. No, I don’t. And I don’t think there’s any heaven either. We just die, that’s all. We just stop breathing after a while and then everybody starts to forget about us and pretty soon they can’t even remember what it is we think we did to them.”
“I don’t know what I believe,” she said.
“Then why are you doing this? Will you tell me that?”
“Because,” she said.
“Because? That’s all. Just because.”
She continued to stare back at him, to watch him, her eyes steady and deep brown.
Finally Doyle said: “All right, you’re not going to tell me. You don’t have to tell me; I think I know anyway. But listen now. Listen: let an old man ask you this. Don’t you think you’re going to need that house anymore? I mean, if you give it up like you’re proposing to do, just where in hell are you and these kids going to live afterwards?”
“That’s my concern,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is, but—”
“And you agree it’s legal, don’t you?”
“Yes. As far as I can tell.”
“So will you please give that piece of paper to the board? You can tell them we’ll be out of the house by the first of May.”
“But listen,” he said. “Damn it, wait a minute now—”
Because Jessie had already stood up. She was already leaving. And Doyle Francis was still leaning toward the chair she had been sitting in. Those good intentions of his were still swimming undelivered in his head and his arms were still resting on that quitclaim deed on his desk. She walked out through the hallway and on outside.
In the scale room Bob Thomas watched her leave. When she had driven away he went in to see Doyle. “Well,” he said, “she was here long enough. What’d she want?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘What’d she want?’ Burdette’s wife.”
“Nothing. She didn’t want anything.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I don’t care what you believe. That woman doesn’t want a goddamn thing from any one of us.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t want anything? She’s a Burdette, isn’t she?”
“I mean,” Doyle Francis said, “get the hell out of here and leave me alone. Goddamn it, Bob, go find something else to do with yourself.”
For some of the people in Holt that was enough. I suppose they felt about it a little like Doyle Francis did, that she deserved the magnanimity of their good intentions. Privately, they understood that she was innocent, or at least they knew that she was ignorant. It wasn’t her fault, they told themselves; she wasn’t involved. They could afford to be nice to her. Anyway, they could refrain from actually wishing her harm.
For others, though, who were more vocal and more active, it still wasn’t sufficient. These people argued that the house didn’t amount to enough. It didn’t matter that it was all that she had, that it was the sum total of her collateral and disposable property. It was merely an old two-bedroom house in the middle of town. It needed tin siding and new shingles; it needed painting. Besides, there was still a fifteen-year lien against it when she signed it over, so that when the board of directors became the fee owners of the house and then sold it at public auction, it didn’t even begin to make a dent in that $150,000 that her husband had disappeared with. No, they weren’t satisfied. A house wasn’t alive and capable of bleeding, like a human was. It wasn’t pregnant, like Jessie was.
In any case, by the first of May she and the two boys had moved out of the house as Jessie said they would—they had rented the downstairs apartment in the old Fenner place on Hawthorne Street at the west edge of town—and it was Doyle Francis who helped them move. They used his pickup. Jessie accepted that much assistance from him at least, although afterward she sent him a freshly baked chocolate cake on a platter, to square things, to keep that balance sheet of hers in the black.
Well, it was a nice enough apartment: they had five rooms—a kitchen, a living room, two small bedrooms, and there was a bathroom with a shower off the kitchen. They also had use of the front porch, a wide old-style porch with a wooden rail around it and with a swing suspended from hooks in the ceiling. From the porch, they could look west diagonally across the street toward open country since that was where Holt ended then, at Hawthorne Street: there was just Harry Smith’s pasture west of them, a half-section of native grass in which Harry kept some horses. So it was a good place for her boys to grow up; they would have all that open space available to them across the street.
When they had settled in and after new curtains had been hung over the windows—heavier ones to block any view from the street—Jessie began to take care of the money end of it as well. She began to earn a living. She took a job at the Holt Cafe on Main Street. Six days a week she worked as a waitress, rising each morning to feed TJ and Bobby and to play with them until just before noon when the sitter, an old neighbor lady—Mrs. Nyla Waters, a kindly woman, a widow—came to watch the boys while Jessie worked through the noon rush and the afternoon and the dinner hour, and then returned again each evening about seven o’clock to bathe and put the boys to bed and to read them stories. She often sang to them a little too, before they slept.
And working in this way—being pregnant and having to spend that many hours away from her children—was not the optimum solution to all her problems either, of course, but she didn’t have many alternatives. She refused to consider welfare. Accepting Aid to Dependent Children, or even food stamps, was not a part of her schedule of payments—that local balance sheet of hers, I mean—since any public assistance of this kind came from taxes. A portion of that public tax money would have originated, at least theoretically, in Holt County. She knew that. And she didn’t want anything from people in Holt. Not if she hadn’t paid for it, she didn’t. Doyle Francis was right about that.
But then, toward the end of spring that year, she discovered a way to make the final payment. She began to go out dancing at the Holt Legion on Saturday nights.
But no one would dance with her at first. She came down the stairs that first Saturday night early in May and walked over to the bar, lifted herself onto a barstool, ordered a vodka Collins, and waited. And nothing happened. Maybe it got a little quieter for a moment, but not very much, so she couldn’t be certain that she’d even been noticed. She looked lovely too: she had made herself up and had put on a deep blue dress which was loose enough that her stomach showed only a little, as if she was merely in the first months of pregnancy; she was wearing nylons and heels; her brown hair was pulled away from her face in such a way that her eyes appeared to be even larger and darker than they were ordinarily. Sitting there, she waited; no one talked to her; nothing happened; finally she ordered another drink. On either side of her, men on barstools were talking to one another, so she swung around to look at the couples in the nearby booths. They were laughing loudly and rising regularly from the booths to dance. Maybe they looked at her; maybe they didn’t—she didn’t know. So that first night she sat there at the bar, waiting, for almost two hours. Then she went home.
The second time, that second Saturday�
��this would have been about the middle of May now—she drank a small glass of straight vodka at home in the kitchen before she went out. Also, she was dressed differently this time. There was more blue makeup over her eyes and she was wearing a dark red dress with a low neckline which showed a good deal of her full breasts, a dress which made no pretense of disguising her pregnancy; it was stretched tight across her stomach and hips. Preparing to go out, she combed her hair close against her cheeks, partially obscuring her face, and then she entered the Legion again, walked down the steps into that noise and intense Saturday night revelry a second time. And as before, she mounted a barstool, ordered a drink, and then she turned around, with that short red dress hiked two inches above the knees of her crossed legs, with a look of expectation, of invitation almost, held permanently on her beautiful face.
Well, it was pathetic in its lack of subtlely. But subtlety and pathos are not qualities which are much appreciated at the Legion on Saturday nights, so she only had to sit there for an hour this second time before Vince Higgims, Jr., asked to her to dance. Vince was one of Holt County’s permanent bachelors, a lank, black-haired man, a man considered by many of us to be well-educated in the ways of strong drink and ladies in tight dresses. “Come on, girl,” Vince said. “They’re playing my song.”
They were playing Lefty Frizzell’s “I Love You in a Thousand Ways,” with its promise of change, the end of blue days—a song with a slow enough tempo to allow Vince, Jr., to work his customary magic. He led Jessie out onto the crowded floor and pulled her close against his belt buckle; then he began to pump her arm, to walk her backward in that rocking two-step while she held that permanent look of invitation on her face and he went on smiling past her hair in obvious satisfaction. They danced several dances that way, including a fast one or two so that Vince could demonstrate his skill at the jitterbug—he twirled her around and performed intricate movements with his hands—then they cooled off again with a slow song.
And that’s how it began: innocently enough, I suppose, because unlike some of the others in town, at least Vince Higgims meant Jessie Burdette no harm. I doubt that Vince even had hopes of any postdance payoff. It was merely that he was drunk and that he liked to dance. The same cannot be said about the others, however. These other men were still remembering the grain elevator.
