Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

“All right, then. But what do you think’s going to happen?”

“I already told you: I don’t know. Besides, what difference does it make?”

“They might kick you out of school. That’s one thing.”

“I’m sick of school.”

“How do you know that? I mean, Jesus, you haven’t even been to classes yet.”

“I’ve been to enough. It’s just talk.”

I continued to look at him. There were dark bruises on his arms from practicing football and there was a scab on his nose between his eyes. Looking at him, he seemed exactly like a kid who’d fallen off a bicycle, like a great big kid who was now consoling himself by watching television from the living room couch.

“But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”

He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”

So I did. I gave him a couple of dollars. I was glad to do that much for him and was ready to do more, although I couldn’t have said then what it might have been. He folded the bills I gave him and put them away in his jeans pocket. I watched him for a while longer. But when he didn’t say anything more I left. He was still lying on the couch watching somebody else win money in a California studio. That seemed to please him.

Then on Friday, when his hearing came up, the student judiciary found against him. It was an open-and-shut case and after they had heard the evidence they recommended that he be expelled from school. There had been a number of thefts on campus already that fall. Consequently the administration accepted the students’ recommendation and decided to make an example of him. But it didn’t matter to Jack what they did; he didn’t contest the charges or even defend himself. In fact he didn’t even attend the hearings. Instead that morning he had gone to the Army recruiter on campus and had enlisted; so now he was obligated to two years of military service, and the Army was glad to have him swell their numbers.

He came over to see me before he went back to Holt. He said he didn’t have to report to boot camp until the end of October and he thought he’d go home in the meantime and work at the elevator and see Wanda Jo Evans. He wasn’t dissatisfied by the turn of events at all.

“Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

“Why not?” he said. “I might even learn something in the Army.”

“Take care, then.”

“But just a minute. You got any more money?”

“Probably.”

“Because I could use something to get home on.”

So Jack Burdette went back to Holt County where he was still a hero and where no one knew about Curtis Harris’s radio, or would have cared very much if they had known about it; and then at the end of October he went off to Texas, to boot camp at Fort Bliss. I doubt that the irony of that name occurred to him since he wasn’t one to pay much attention to such things and I don’t suppose the Army is either. Anyway he was there for almost two months. Then I saw him again just after boot camp was finished. Before being reassigned he had come home on leave and I had gone home at semester break. It was Christmastime. Jack looked thinner and harder now, although it might have been just that his head had been shaved; his cropped head made his neck look taller and now his ears stuck out. In any case all the time he was home he insisted on wearing his uniform and his Army cap about the town. He stayed at the Letitia Hotel while he was home, sleeping through most of the day in his room and spending his nights at the tavern with Wanda Jo Evans, the two of them drinking late into the night while Jack told her stories about things he’d already seen and done in basic training in Texas. I don’t know how she stayed awake for all of that since she still had to get up early in the morning to work as a secretary at the phone company every day. But she did; she stayed awake; and it was obvious that if anything she was even more in love with him than she had been before. Then he left again, for Fort Ord in California where he underwent two more months of training — as an assistant machine gunner this time — and afterward he was sent overseas to Germany. So none of us saw him again until he was finally discharged late in 1962. He had stories about all of it. He had liked the Army.

In the meantime I was still in college. By the end of my sophomore year I had managed to pass most of the required courses that everyone had to take and so I was beginning to concentrate on journalism. Much of the classwork was mere theoretical posturing, of little practical use once I had returned to Holt two years later to work on the Mercury where people were more interested in who had visited whom over the weekend than they were in the ethical paradoxes presented in the First Amendment. But I didn’t know that yet. So I attended class regularly and took notes, and when I was a junior I began to cover various campus events for the Colorado Daily . It was heady stuff for a while. It was just beginning to be a willful and exciting time on campus and at the paper we had the illusion that we were a part of it all and that we were speaking in the voice of the people even if the people didn’t know it yet or want us to. I remember, for example, that it was about this time that Barry Goldwater came to speak on campus and in the paper we said that Goldwater was a fascist, no better than a murderer. After this statement appeared there was a considerable outcry all over the state and finally the chancellor was compelled to remove the student editor who was responsible for it. Then there were demonstrations on campus. The due processes of law had been abrogated and we all felt hot about it. But the editor was never reinstated and it turned out to be a lost cause.

Still I was beginning to get hot about something else just then. I had met Nora Kramer by that time and for a year or more she seemed very much like a lost cause too.

Now I am not very eager to talk about Nora Kramer. And certainly she is less than eager to have me talk about her. For Nora was — and is — a very private person and she will no doubt resent this invasion of her privacy. But I can’t help that: like it or not she is a part of this account. We were together for eighteen years, after all, and we had a daughter together. And it was only a good deal later, after Nora left Holt and and moved to Denver, that I turned finally, out of loneliness and admiration and love too, toward Jessie Burdette, who was as different from Nora Kramer as fire is from ice.

But my god, she was a beautiful young woman when I first knew her in Boulder. She had astonishing black hair then. It was as dark and shiny as coal and wonderfully thick and clean. And her skin was so white that it was like porcelain, or like ivory, and it was almost transparent so that you felt that if you were only permitted to look at her long enough you might actually see the slow movement of blood at her temples and wrists. She was a very small person, very bright and intelligent and all neat and tidy, and she seemed as self-sufficient as a bird.

But she was living with her father at the time. Dr. Kramer was a well-known professor on campus. He wore bow ties and dark suits to class every day and taught graduate seminars in the English Department. His concentration was in the Puritans. He was great for John Bunyan and thought The Pilgrim’s Progress was literature. He had studied at Yale as an undergraduate and I believe he considered the students at Colorado to be beneath his abilities. Nevertheless he had been able to resign himself to teaching at Colorado for more than thirty years. He was not a lot of fun to meet in the living room when I called on Nora for a date.