Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

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?”