Where You Once Belonged (10 page)

And that was awful, really. Charlie Soames was already seventy years old by that time. Like Jack Burdette, he had grown up here. And everyone knew him just as they thought they had known Jack Burdette, except that Soames hadn’t any of Burdette’s flair for sudden and outlandish acts. He was merely an old man who had always lived here. He had spent his entire life being steady and normal and unremarkable. For almost half a century he had been a bookkeeper and accountant for various businessmen in town, and at forty he had married a woman who was only a year or two younger than he was, a woman who dominated him completely, and together they hadn’t been able to have any children. Or perhaps they hadn’t even tried to have children. No one knew about that. His wife liked to talk, but that didn’t happen to be one of the topics she liked to talk about. No, the truth was, Charlie Soames’s entire life had been about as gray as a man’s life can be. Now suddenly he had done this.

So he was arrested. And in very short time he was indicted. Then he posted bail and he was released to await the trial. He made the bail payment out of his own meager life’s savings, out of money which he had accumulated over years of frugality; it had nothing to do with the embezzlement; he had earned this particular money by doing bookwork for others—the police had checked. So he was released and then he went home again to his wife. But that must have been worse than sitting in a cell in the basement of the Holt County Courthouse on Albany Street. He would have been left alone for a few hours in jail. There would have been silence there. But now, once he was home again, Mrs. Soames must have made it hot for him. She was capable of that. She must have ground him like hamburger.

Perhaps that was why, about a week after he was released, he showed up on Main Street once more. It was in the middle of a weekday morning. He walked into Bradbury’s Bakery to have coffee. I don’t know, perhaps he had in mind to test the water, to take a kind of reading of Holt County feelings about things. The bakery was crowded as usual at that time of day. Businessmen and housewives and store clerks and one or two farmers were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, sitting about the room at the various tables. They were all talking.

Then Soames walked into the bakery and everyone got quiet. They watched this small tidy familiar old man fill his coffee cup at the urn at the front counter, watched him pay for it and then turn to find a seat. Across the room there was a vacant chair at a table near the wall. Ralph Bird and a couple of other men happened to be sitting at the table. Soames approached them.

“Wait just a goddamn minute,” Ralph Bird said. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”

Soames stood beside the table staring at him.

“Get the hell out of here. You ain’t sitting here with us.”

Soames looked at the other men. He had done books for each of them. They stared back at him.

And he was just an old defeated man now and he knew everyone in the room. His hand began to shake. The coffee in the cup spilled out over his hand and shirt cuff and dripped onto the floor. He was making a mess. He continued to stand there, his hand shaking and the hot coffee burning his hand, while his eyes clouded over. His eyes seemed to lose their focus.

At last one of the girls came out from behind the counter and removed the cup from his hand. “Here,” she said, “give me that.” It was as if he were a child. She wiped his hand with a dishrag and knelt to wipe the floor.

Then Soames looked once more at the people in the bakery. They were still watching him. He turned and walked out of the store onto the sidewalk. They could see him through the plate-glass windows. He stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Finally he went home again.

At his home on Cedar Street he entered by the front door and climbed the stairs to the attic. His wife was at the back of the house, peeling carrots at the kitchen sink. Later she would tell people that she didn’t even know he was home yet. He was always so quiet.

She did hear the explosion in the attic, however. Several other people did too. The neighbors heard it.

Because, after he had mounted the stairs, he had entered the dusty box-filled room and had sat down on an old trunk near the chimney, under a single dim light bulb suspended from one of the rafters. Sitting on the trunk, he had put a shell in the chamber of an old .22 single-shot rifle. Then he had placed the butt of the rifle on the floor between his feet and had closed his tired little mouth around the gun barrel. And whether he paused once to look about him, as people do in movies, to take one last look out the attic window toward the tops of the trees standing up in the backyard, no one knows. We simply know that he fired a single sphere of lead up through his palate into his brain and that this little sphere of lead destroyed him.

It destroyed him, but it didn’t kill him. The bullet had lodged in his brain in such a way that he was still alive.

He was slumped against the chimney when his wife ran upstairs to find out what had caused the noise. The gun was still between his knees. There was considerable blood running down onto his shirtfront and his head was thrown back horribly. He was still breathing, though. There were red bubbles coming up out of his mouth. Looking at him, Mrs. Soames became hysterical. She began to scream. Then the neighbors arrived and it was one of them who called the police.

They flew him immediately to a hospital in Denver. And in Denver the surgeons did what they could; they closed the hole in the roof of his mouth and made other repairs. But in the end they decided to leave the bullet where it was. They said it might kill him to try to remove it. Afterward when he was well enough to be released from the hospital he was brought back home again to Holt.

And so he looked all right, more or less, when we saw him again. He still resembled himself; he was still a neat tidy little old man. It was only his eyes that looked different. His eyes appeared to be blank now, expressionless, as if there was nothing behind them. He could eat and he could drink liquids. He could still function. He could even talk a little, in a harsh lisping monotone. But it didn’t matter if he could talk. What he had to say now was all nonsense, mere jabber and repeated dribble about nothing.

So old Mrs. Soames didn’t know what to do with him then. She dressed him and fed him every day, and sat him on the swing on the front porch. And occasionally she stood him out in the front yard where he could hold a garden hose in his hands. But, if she let him, he would stand there all afternoon, slapping water on the grass. He seemed to like playing with water. Then people would walk by the house and see him. And sometimes they would say something to him, something cruel and nasty, something vindictive like: “You old son of a bitch. Why don’t you try it again? Why don’t you use a deer rifle this time? Just try it once. Oh, goddamn you, anyway.” And Charlie would simply go on spraying the grass with water while some of it ran off his elbow onto his shoes; he would nod and jabber at the people passing by and he would seem to listen to their talk, cocking his head like some ancient, confused little bird. And when they moved away down the street he would even seem to follow them with his blank eyes. But none of that meant anything to him. It was all a mere show to him, a display of shadows that happened to move and talk. None of it held any significance.

If he had only known it then, I suppose he might even have been happy. He couldn’t understand anything his wife or anyone else in Holt had told him, and he couldn’t recall the first thing about debits and credits and about double entry bookkeeping. Consequently he knew nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, about his involvement in the embezzlement of Co-op funds.

So he was in a perfect state now: he was mad. He couldn’t be bothered anymore and he was completely beyond the reach of the law. There wasn’t any way to punish him for what he had done. He was beyond all of that. Any thought of putting him on trial was out of the question.

• 8 •

N
ow people in Holt felt they had to turn elsewhere for some form of restitution. They felt doubly cheated. Burdette had disappeared at the end of December and every day he was gone it became more obvious that the police were never going to locate him and bring him back. Now his accomplice wasn’t even going to be put on trial.

So in time people began to turn on his wife, on Jessie. They wanted satisfaction from someone and she was still here, she was still in Holt, and it made it easier that they thought of her as an outsider. She had been in Holt for almost six years, but she had always been too aloof for her own good, people said. From the day she had arrived she had held herself apart. It was as if she felt she were too good for them—that’s what people thought. So they were naturally a little in awe of her, and a little antagonistic. They didn’t understand her; they thought of her as that woman Jack Burdette had discovered in some Holiday Inn in Oklahoma, that small quiet overly independent woman he had met and married in Tulsa when he should have married Wanda Jo Evans, a local girl whom everybody liked and admired. No, she had not grown up here, and there wasn’t anyone in town who knew very much about her.

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.

I
t 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.”

F
or 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.