Then Burdette did something which surprised everyone in the cafe. He sat down with her — not across from her but beside her — and he put his arm around her. He pulled this new unknown young woman to himself and kissed her.
And suddenly it was as if you could actually hear the insuck of breath from the men and women sitting in the cafe that noon when they realized who she was, when they understood who she had to be. It was like that moment that comes in a movie when everything — music, motion and sense — is stopped for a few seconds and the figures on the screen are held temporarily in silent stasis and arrest. People in Holt felt shocked. She wasn’t anything like what they expected her to be. There were some in the cafe who even wondered if she weren’t part Indian.
For Jessie Burdette, it turned out, was a very quiet and solitary woman. She had brown eyes and dark brown hair and beautifully clear skin, and she was of less than medium height and she was quite slim, but she wasn’t petite. She didn’t make you think of girlish debutantes or of retiring primroses. She wasn’t even pretty really. That is, she was attractive, she was very attractive; and later, thirteen years later, when I came to know her well I thought she was the most attractive woman I’d ever known and absolutely the finest person. And in the end I was ready to do anything at all for her. Still she was not pretty in any conventional sense. She wasn’t at all the positive and cute, sunny little pert-nosed girl next door; nor was she any form of that brash California idea of female pulchritude either. Instead she was rather small and dark and quiet and obviously strong-willed. She seemed capable of a great deal. She seemed independent. Even on that first day, when I saw her for the first time in the Holt Cafe, there seemed to be a quality of aloofness about her, as if she preferred really to be left alone, or as if she knew very well what she wanted and if that happened to preclude being close to others — so that she must always seem a little set off and separate from other people in Holt, or, for that matter, from people anywhere else in the world — she was willing to accept that too.
So I don’t know why she married Jack Burdette. Not absolutely, at any rate. On the other hand, as I’ve suggested before, I think I do know why Burdette married her: out of boredom. He decided that charming Jessie was at least preferable to attending any more convention workshops. Then, too, he had those company charge cards in his pocket. He wouldn’t have wanted to waste an opportunity to spend money which did not belong to him, especially if it was simply a matter of having to scribble his name on a piece of paper. But I can’t say absolutely why Jessie married him.
I suppose part of it had to do with the fact that she was only twenty years old in 1971. She was still very young, although she was not entirely ignorant of the ways of the world and men. She had had some experience of both, some limited experience. But the point is, she was very young even so. She was not much more than a girl yet. Besides, she had lived her entire life in Tulsa. And I don’t think, at twenty, that Jessie Burdette believed that Tulsa was all there was in the world worth seeing.
So in April that year Jack Burdette arrived at the Holiday Inn. He was a big man and jovial, and he was ten years her senior and he was from Colorado. And so he charmed her. And then, rather than return to any more convention workshops, he proposed marriage to her. And, for her own reasons, she accepted. But there was one other little bit of play in this weekend romance too: sometime during those days and nights in the motel room Burdette managed to convey the impression to her that Holt was better than it is. He told her, for example, that you could see the mountains from Holt.
You can’t of course. You have to drive at least forty miles west of here to see the mountains. And then it has to be a very clear day, coming after it has rained or after the wind has blown hard for five or six hours so that the brown cloud hanging over Denver has been driven away or been blown off, and then what you see of mountains is merely a faint blue jagged line on the horizon some hundred miles farther to the west. But to Jessie Burdette, as later she would describe the manner in which Jack had told her about it, Holt County would at least have seemed different from Tulsa, Oklahoma. And she thought she had good reason to want out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
She was the oldest of three children. The two others were boys, younger than she by five and six years. Her mother was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair, and her father was an implement salesman who was gone from home most of the time. As a teenager then, after her mother was crippled, she had spent many hours taking care of her mother and her two little brothers. She knew a great deal about cooking and cleaning and washing clothes and changing bedpans and emptying urine bags, and she had worked part-time in the evenings at fast-food restaurants, and she had even saved a little money to buy material to make clothes for herself. But she didn’t know much about fun. It was all a kind of gray reiteration of things to her, an endless unhappy routine. Then she graduated from high school. And after graduation she had worked as a temporary secretary on several occasions. But none of that was taking her anywhere. Then it was about this time that her father, because of business associations, heard about the weekend job at the elevator convention at the Holiday Inn. So she applied for the job and she was hired to show the film about hybrid seed corn in the motel lobby. She wore the miniskirt they required her to wear and the short-sleeved white blouse with the low neckline, and all the time she managed to smile congenially at the men at the convention. Then Jack Burdette showed up and began to talk to her. And soon it was more than just talk, and then on Monday he married her.
So for the next five years, after seeing her for the first time in the Holt Cafe that Thursday noon, like everyone else in town I still only saw her infrequently. And then it was only causally, remotely, as from a safe and necessary distance. On those occasions when she happened to be shopping on Main Street, or on those rare weekend nights when she would agree to go out to the bars with Burdette, I would see her, just as everyone else did, and pay attention to her.
She was still doing some of that then — going out to the bars, I mean. During those first seven or eight months after Wanda Jo Evans had left town and while she herself was still new among us, we would see her every once in a while at the Legion or at the Holt Tavern on Saturday nights. And we would all watch her then. Typically, she would be sitting quietly in a corner booth by herself, sipping some sugary drink very slowly while the ice in her glass melted away, thinning the pink liquor to mere colored water, while Burdette himself (since marriage hadn’t changed him; since marriage was merely a change in his weekend companion, not a real break in his Saturday night routine, that masculine habit and custom of his) would be standing off at the end of the bar away from her, drinking whiskey or scotch, the center of that constant and admiring group of backslapping men, while he told his jokes and stories and they all laughed.