Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

“It took them long enough. I expected you a month ago.”

“I’m here now. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Ready?” Mrs. Soames said. “Ready for what?” She was still standing in the doorway, displacing air. Her hair stood out from her pink head. “Where are you taking him?”

“Your husband’s got himself into trouble.”

“My husband? What do you mean? What could he do?”

“Enough,” the sheriff said. “Now maybe you’d better go into the other room for a minute.”

“I’m not going into the other room. So he has done something. The old fool! He’s done something and now what am I supposed to do?”

“For one thing,” Sealy said, “you’re going to be quiet.”

“I didn’t do anything. You can’t tell me in my own house to—”

“Yes. You’re going to be quiet. Or I’m going to gag you.”

Mrs. Soames glared at the sheriff. “You wouldn’t touch me. You wouldn’t dare touch a lady.”

“Try me,” he said. He took a step toward her and she backed up.

“Oh!”

Then she began to shriek. Sealy shut the door on her. They could hear her excited noises. But after a moment the noises stopped.

“That’s better,” he said. He turned back to her husband.

Charlie Soames was still seated silently at his clean desk. It was as if he had been waiting for this too. Now he stood up and Sealy told him he had the right to remain silent. Then he put handcuffs around Soames’s thin wrists. Afterward they walked out of the tidy little office and on through the house. Mrs. Soames was waiting for them in the dining room; she followed the two men toward the front hallway. When they stopped at the door so the sheriff could open it, Mrs. Soames began to shriek again. She rushed her husband and began to slap at him, at his face and neck. Soames fell down under her hands. She slapped at his head. Finally Bud Sealy shoved in between them, pushing Mrs. Soames away.

“Quit that,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing? Goddamn it, stop that now.”

He lifted the old man by the arm and they went outside. Mrs. Soames followed them out onto the front porch. She stood watching angrily as the car drove away.

When they arrived at the courthouse Sealy walked Charlie Soames down to the basement to the sheriff’s office and booked him for the suspected embezzlement of Co-op funds. Afterward he fingerprinted him and then he led Soames back to a cell. He stood over him while the old man sat down on the cot. Soames looked very small and tired. But he wasn’t quite defeated yet.

“Well,” the sheriff said. “You want to tell me about this?”

“What’s there to tell?

“Oh there ought to be something.”

“Do you mean you want a formal confession?”

“Something like that.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well. For starters — I’m just curious — why in hell didn’t you take off too? You had your chances, didn’t you?”

“You mean why didn’t I leave?”

“Sure. Like Jack Burdette did. You and Burdette were in this together, weren’t you? Why didn’t you jump up and leave when he did? You could of left with him.”

“Him,” Charlie Soames said. The mention of Burdette seemed to awaken something in him. He sat up straight, agitated now. “Why that man … that—”

“What about him?”

“He didn’t even tell me he was leaving. We agreed on it. He promised me. He wasn’t supposed to leave yet. Then he—”

“Sure,” Sealy said. “Then he.”

“But you don’t understand.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. Because we were waiting for it to amount to two hundred thousand. That’s why. And I kept telling him we ought to leave now. I told him we have to take it and get out now. Before the auditors find out, I said. They were getting suspicious. I could tell that. I knew they were. I tried to tell him. But my god, that man kept saying: ‘Just another fifty. Just another fifty.’ Like it was play money or something. Oh, he didn’t understand the risks. He didn’t understand anything. And it was his idea from the beginning. I let him talk me into it. But I was the one that had to do the books, wasn’t I? Not him. And he kept promising me: ‘Wait until it’s two hundred thousand, then we’ll leave together.’ That’s what he said. We agreed on that. He promised me. But then he—”

“Yeah,” Sealy said. “Well. You poor dumb old son of bitch. So he didn’t tell you he was leaving either.”

“I thought I could trust him.”

“Of course. Except you weren’t the only one in town that thought that, now were you?”

“I trusted him, though. And what was I going to do now? Where was I going to go? He had the money. He took everything. He withdrew it all out of the bank over in Sterling. And—”

“Sterling? You mean you kept the money over in Sterling?”

“That’s where we had our account. I thought it would be safer. But I still thought I could trust him. I still believed he was trustworthy.”

“That’s right,” Sealy said. “Because he promised you. Because you agreed on it.”

Soames stopped talking for a moment. He looked at the sheriff.

“But wouldn’t you have said he could be trusted? Didn’t you think Jack Burdette was a trustworthy man?”

“I don’t know,” Sealy said, “Probably. But I might of said the same thing about you too, Charlie. And now look at you. Jesus Christ, look how you turned out.”

* * *

By evening everyone in Holt County knew about the arrest of Charlie Soames. They had heard about the embezzlement of Co-op funds and about his three-year involvement in it. So the panic and outrage had already begun. The Co-op Elevator was owned in shares by half the people in the area and they all wanted blood.

They would have preferred Jack Burdette’s and Charlie Soames’s blood, both, but Burdette had disappeared. Burdette was already in California, lost somewhere in the streets of Los Angeles. The police had finally managed to trace him that far, but then they had lost track of him. Consequently people in Holt began to understand that they were going to have to content themselves with the arrest of his accomplice, with the indictment and conviction of old Charlie Soames, and then with his rightful punishment. They expected to get something satisfying out of him at least.

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.