Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

I don’t know; perhaps he was just bored. Perhaps he was tired of it all already. Attending convention workshops and seminars would no doubt have been too much to him like taking high-school classes and college instruction. There would have been all that talk in those close windowless rooms, with the pitchers of ice water and the urns of coffee set out on a table in the back, but nothing stronger, nothing for a man to drink really: those experts up at the front of the room talking on and on, speaking learnedly, humorlessly, professionally about corn futures and grain dust explosions, with the accompanying racks of charts and diagrams beside them and the sheaves of documented scientific research, all of which he was not only supposed to believe and make sense of but to take careful notes about too with that ballpoint pen and that new tablet they would have given him, sitting there at some table with his big muscled arms resting out over the table in front of him like two oversized ham steaks while he calculated the hours and minutes until dinnertime and the first drink of the evening, though not necessarily in that order. And meanwhile the experts would still have been talking and he would still have been trying to stay awake. Consequently I believe he must have been good and bored by Saturday night, tired of it all. But also, I know, by that time, he had met Jessie Miller. And Jessie Miller, as she was known then, would have been enough to make him want to disappear even if he weren’t bored.

She had been hired by one of the sponsors of the convention to stand behind a table set up in the lobby. She had been instructed to wear a white blouse and a black miniskirt, to smile congenially, to pass out glossy colored brochures, and to show continuously a film extolling the virtues of a particular species of hybrid seed corn. And she had been doing all of this faithfully all of Friday afternoon and all of Saturday. So Jack must have met her, or at least have talked to her, several times already.

Then on Saturday evening, after he had been released at last from the last workshop late that afternoon, he began seriously to charm her. For he was capable of charm. I may not have made that clear, the fact that Jack Burdette could be attractive to women, that he was capable of exercising considerable charm and persuasiveness where women were concerned. Still it’s true; on those occasions when it mattered to him what women thought of him and whenever it made any difference to him how they responded to his talk — that is, when he wanted something from a woman — he was in fact capable of great leverage and conviction. But he had that effect on men too. He dominated any room he entered. But it wasn’t all conscious and deliberate on his part. Most of it was a matter of impulse and instinct, the result of native vitality and energy. He was full of himself. Domination came naturally to him. And in any case, he was huge, and he still wasn’t bad-looking at that time. He hadn’t gotten sloppy yet.

So he began to charm her. She was just twenty years old in 1971 and he was already thirty. He wined her and dined her, bought her steak in the dining room and danced with her in the lounge until late that night, swirling her around the floor to the live music played by the country band hired by the sponsors of the convention, and he mixed it all with a variety of expensive wines which he charged on the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator’s charge cards. Then he disappeared with her. They went upstairs to his motel room and didn’t come out until Monday morning — not until everyone else at the convention had already checked out and had gone home — leaving the motel room only then to have their blood tested and afterward to locate the nearest justice of the peace before returning once more to the privacy of Jack’s room at the Holiday Inn.

Thus he didn’t return to Holt again until late Wednesday night. And when he did return he was already married. He moved Jessie into his old room at the Letitia Hotel, just a block off Main Street.

This surprised and astonished everyone in Holt. But it was more than mere surprise and astonishment to Wanda Jo Evans. To her it was nearly a lethal shock. And it wasn’t even Burdette who informed her of the fact that he was married now. On the contrary, she discovered this in the same way that everyone else in Holt did: by hearsay on Thursday morning, after he had returned from Oklahoma and had already spent that first night with Jessie in the Letitia Hotel.

Still Wanda Jo knew that he was going down to Tulsa. She was aware that the board had sent him to the convention. But I don’t believe she thought much about it. No one did. It was simply part of his new responsibilities as manager of the elevator. To Wanda Jo, then, it must have been merely that he would be gone for the weekend and that she would miss their weekly dancing and drinking and later their lovemaking in the back bedroom. So perhaps while he was gone she decided to make good use of her time. Perhaps she gave her little house a thorough cleaning; maybe she had a permanent curl put into her hair and did things like balance her checkbook and sew buttons on one of Jack’s shirts. Then it would have been Monday and Jack would have been due to come back.

Except that he didn’t come back on Monday. He was still in Tulsa on Monday. He was busy. He was occupied. He was having his blood tested. He was pulling strangers in out of the courthouse hallways to act as witnesses, and he was standing up in front of an unknown justice of the peace, promising the twenty-year-old girl beside him whom he had known now for maybe forty-eight hours that he would continue to love her and take care of her, whether they ever got rich or not, whether they managed to stay well or happened to turn sick, till death did them part. So it was late on Wednesday night before he returned to Holt. It was long after midnight and consequently for another night Wanda Jo Evans must have given up waiting for a phone call that didn’t come and she must have gone to bed at last, in confusion and wonderment, beginning now to worry. But finally she must have gone to sleep. Then the next day she discovered that he was married.

It was Joyce Penner, one of the women at the telephone office where Wanda Jo worked, who told her. Joyce heard about it in the bakery. About nine-thirty that morning Joyce walked around the corner to Bradbury’s Bakery on Main Street, to buy sweet rolls for the women in the telephone office, and by that time people in town were already talking about it. So, as we all heard later, Joyce went back immediately, without even buying the rolls for the women. Reentering the telephone office she leaned over Wanda Jo’s desk and said: “Honey, come back to the ladies’ with me.”

“What’s wrong?” Wanda Jo said. “Is something wrong?”

“Just come back to the ladies’ with me.”

“Well. Something must be wrong,” Wanda Jo said.

But Joyce was already walking away from her, past the other women at their desks. Wanda Jo stood up and followed Joyce back to the rest room, to that little square pragmatic space where there is no window, where there is barely room enough for one person and the fan comes on according to code when the light switch is turned on and it makes a tinny noise, and then Joyce locked the door behind them and told Wanda Jo to sit down. “Why?” Wanda Jo said.

“Just do,” Joyce said. And then she told her.

So I suppose bad news can be lethal for some people. Especially if it is sudden and unexpected. That is, if you are not used to it, if you have gone along passively, hoping for the best despite all the evidence to the contrary, if you are twenty-nine years old and still believe that a man will marry you simply because you have washed his dirty socks for eight years and have slept with him on Saturday nights during all that time, then I suppose bad news can kill you. In any case it was something like that for Wanda Jo Evans. Because, in a way, Wanda Jo Evans did die that Thursday morning in April. I do not mean that she slit her wrists with a lady’s razor that she happened to be carrying in her purse, nor that she did anything so suicidal as to stab herself with a fingernail file. I simply mean that she stopped caring what happened to herself anymore.