Kent Haruf - Where You Once Belonged

“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.”

For 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.

When they had settled in and after new curtains had been hung over the windows — heavier ones to block any view from the street — Jessie began to take care of the money end of it as well. She began to earn a living. She took a job at the Holt Cafe on Main Street. Six days a week she worked as a waitress, rising each morning to feed TJ and Bobby and to play with them until just before noon when the sitter, an old neighbor lady — Mrs. Nyla Waters, a kindly woman, a widow — came to watch the boys while Jessie worked through the noon rush and the afternoon and the dinner hour, and then returned again each evening about seven o’clock to bathe and put the boys to bed and to read them stories. She often sang to them a little too, before they slept.

And working in this way — being pregnant and having to spend that many hours away from her children — was not the optimum solution to all her problems either, of course, but she didn’t have many alternatives. She refused to consider welfare. Accepting Aid to Dependent Children, or even food stamps, was not a part of her schedule of payments — that local balance sheet of hers, I mean — since any public assistance of this kind came from taxes. A portion of that public tax money would have originated, at least theoretically, in Holt County. She knew that. And she didn’t want anything from people in Holt. Not if she hadn’t paid for it, she didn’t. Doyle Francis was right about that.

But then, toward the end of spring that year, she discovered a way to make the final payment. She began to go out dancing at the Holt Legion on Saturday nights.

But no one would dance with her at first. She came down the stairs that first Saturday night early in May and walked over to the bar, lifted herself onto a barstool, ordered a vodka Collins, and waited. And nothing happened. Maybe it got a little quieter for a moment, but not very much, so she couldn’t be certain that she’d even been noticed. She looked lovely too: she had made herself up and had put on a deep blue dress which was loose enough that her stomach showed only a little, as if she was merely in the first months of pregnancy; she was wearing nylons and heels; her brown hair was pulled away from her face in such a way that her eyes appeared to be even larger and darker than they were ordinarily. Sitting there, she waited; no one talked to her; nothing happened; finally she ordered another drink. On either side of her, men on barstools were talking to one another, so she swung around to look at the couples in the nearby booths. They were laughing loudly and rising regularly from the booths to dance. Maybe they looked at her; maybe they didn’t — she didn’t know. So that first night she sat there at the bar, waiting, for almost two hours. Then she went home.