People laughed once more, and when he carried the box over to his chair and set it down and then bent and kissed his white-haired wife loudly on one of her red cheeks, kissing her with obvious good humor and genuine affection even after more than forty years of marriage, people applauded.
So that much of Doyle Francis’s retirement banquet was a success. People in Holt felt good about it. And I believe they felt good about the final proceedings that night too.
Because what happened next was the public announcement that Jack Burdette had been chosen to succeed Doyle Francis as manager of the Co-op Elevator. Arch Withers made the announcement. Leaning heavily on the lectern, speaking solemnly to the audience, he said that he and the board recognized that it would be hard to fill Doyle’s shoes, but that they had decided to look no farther than right here at home. After thinking about it thoroughly they had come to a unanimous decision; they had all agreed to promote Jack to manager.
People applauded once more. Everyone approved. And while Jack walked up the lectern to shake hands with Arch Withers, one of the farmers in the audience said: “Well at least his feet are big enough. Burdette ought to be able to fill Doyle’s shoes, or anybody else’s, with them big boats.”
Sitting in the middle of the room at one of the long tables, Wanda Jo Evans might have said something about Jack’s having clean socks too. But she didn’t — although when I looked at her there were tears shining in her eyes, tears of love and approval, I suppose, but also of private expectation. For I think Wanda Jo Evans must have thought that now, with his promotion, Jack might want to settle down, that he might be ready to make their relationship — that almost-eight-year-old Saturday night transaction of theirs — not only a weekly exchange but a daily and permanent condition.
* * *
Then it was 1971. It was spring. Jack had been the manager of the Co-op Elevator for about six months. At the beginning of April that year the board decided to send him down to Oklahoma, to Tulsa, so he could attend a weekend convention for the managers of grain elevators. It was the board’s belief that it would be worthwhile for him, and the elevator too, if he would attend the convention, sit in on the seminars and workshops, and then return with the latest predictions about the futures market as well as any new information he might collect about the prevention of grain dust explosions. An under secretary of agriculture, several economists and university scientists were to be there, to lead the workshops and seminars.
So Jack drove down to Tulsa. He went alone, driving one of the company pickups with two or three different company charge cards in his pocket. He left on Thursday. The convention was to begin at noon on Friday at the Holiday Inn, and it was understood that he would stay through the weekend, return on Monday sometime late in the afternoon or early evening, and then make his report to the board at a special meeting on Tuesday. And apparently Jack arrived in Tulsa on Thursday evening just as planned. He found the Holiday Inn, checked himself into the motel, located the dining room and the bar, hobnobbed with some of the other elevator managers, listened to their stories and told some of his own, went to bed at a reasonable hour, and afterward there is reason to believe that he even attended some of the meetings on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday. But by Saturday night, apparently, he had had enough.
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.