I was standing behind the counter, watching her. Her blue coat was smooth and neat across the hips and her hair looked dark and lovely. “Listen,” I said, “will you let me drive you and your boys home? I’m leaving now anyway.”
She looked out the front window. Outside it was worse: it was snowing harder and the wind was blowing the snow horizontally along the street. “If it’s not any trouble,” she said. “I don’t want them to get cold again.”
“I’ll get my coat.”
Thus she allowed me to drive them across town to Gum Street that first time because it was snowing and because it was cold outside. I don’t recall that we said anything of significance. TJ sat on the seat between us and she had Bobby on her lap and I suppose during the six- or seven-block ride one of us managed to say something about the accumulation of snow. It was a quiet and awkward ride. But at the curb when I stopped to let them out I remember watching her take the boys up the sidewalk into their small house in the snow and I recall how she looked in her blue coat when she opened the door and then how the house itself looked after she had turned the lights on. Afterward I drove home again to the house where Nora and Toni were waiting for me to eat supper with them. But I wasn’t very much interested in supper just then, nor in going home again, nor even in my wife and daughter. I suppose by that time I was already a little in love with Jessie Burdette.
So in the following week I ran her notice as a kind of display ad on the back page of the Holt Mercury just as she had wanted it. I offset it with the announcements for Sunday church services and the obituaries for two longtime Holt County residents. Her notice said: I’m not responsible for whatever Jack Burdette did or will do. He’s no good. It doesn’t matter what people say. He’s a son of a bitch and I don’t care anymore.
I had my own reasons for printing it.
This public declaration of hers caused a stir in town when people read it. My father, for one, called me on the phone and said I was crazy to print such a thing. What did I think I was doing? It was unprofessional, he said; it was bad business practice. This was Holt County, Colorado, not San Francisco, California. Did I think he’d turned the paper over to have it ruined?
Of course other people in town felt similarly, as I knew they would, although their annoyance and their objections had more to do with moral considerations than with any concern over practical issues. Some of the older women were particularly incensed: they wrote letters to the editor about the appearance of profanity in the Holt Mercury. They didn’t like it, not the profanity nor the public display of raw emotion, and a number of the women canceled their subscriptions as a result.
Nonetheless, the commotion Jessie’s notice caused in Holt County that week was soon forgotten. It was a minor episode compared to what happened in the weeks and months that followed. And all of that got into the paper too.
Then there was one other small event which reflected on what was printed in the Mercury at about that time. It was in a minor key. It had to do with Jack Burdette’s mother.
She was an ancient woman now, gray-haired and very thin and even more severe than she had been before, but still living alone in the house on North Birch Street and still attending the Catholic church on Sunday mornings when she was able. After her son had been gone for about a month, in a kind of desperate form of masculine absurdity — since no woman would have even considered such a thing — several of the men in town decided that they would call on old Mrs. Burdette to ask her some questions. They thought it would be worthwhile to inquire if she had heard from her son. They hoped, if nothing else, that she might be able to suggest where he had gone.
So one afternoon they walked up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. But after Mrs. Burdette had opened the door to them she didn’t ask them in. She merely waited inside, in the dark front hallway of the house, listening to their questions and foolish talk from beyond the scarcely-opened door. They continued to explain to her what they had come for. Then they stopped talking; she hadn’t said anything yet. She had simply stared at them out of those clean little wire-rimmed glasses while she studied one face and then another. She didn’t seem to know or even to care what they were talking about. In exasperation, one of the men said to her: “But, Mrs. Burdette, look here: you do know Jack’s gone, don’t you? You do read the local newspaper? Why, it’s been in the Mercury. Haven’t you seen it?”
When she spoke finally, her voice sounded harsh and rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in days. “I don’t know anything about your newspapers,” she said. “And I don’t want to. I read the Bible.”
Then she shut the door in their faces. They could hear her locking it. Afterward they could hear the faint sound of her steps retreating into the interior of the silent house. So the men were left standing on the front porch. They felt foolish. They looked at one another and moved quickly down off the porch like little boys who had done something silly.
In any case, by the end of January the alarm in Holt had turned at last to shock and fear. People had finally grown afraid that something serious had happened to Jack Burdette and they were disturbed to think so. They still liked Burdette and thinking something bad had happened to him made them feel less secure for themselves in their corner of Colorado. The police had begun to send out all-points bulletins across the state, hoping that might turn him up. But nothing did. Burdette had disappeared without a trace.
Meanwhile at the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator things were a mess. Without Burdette there to manage the elevator every day, nothing was getting done properly and Arch Withers and the other members of the board of directors didn’t know what to do. Finally they decided to ask Doyle Francis to come back. They wanted Doyle to run things again, on a temporary basis, so that the routine shipment of corn and wheat might continue once more, until Burdette turned up, or until … well, until they had to hire his replacement. Still they refused to think it would come to that.
Then, about the middle of February, that private feeling of shock and fearfulness in Holt turned suddenly to hostility and public outrage. For, by that time, Doyle Francis had had sufficient opportunity to examine the books at the elevator. And in going over the books he had discovered that something was wrong. He called a special meeting of the board to tell them about it. It was on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Jesus Christ,” he told the men when they were assembled before him in his office. “What in the goddamn hell were you boys thinking of anyhow?”
“What do you mean?” Arch Withers said.
“Didn’t you even check on him? Didn’t you even think to look at these books yourselves?”
“Of course we did. We looked at them. Charlie Soames went over these books every year with us. So did Jack Burdette. What’s wrong with them?”
“Plenty,” Doyle said.
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like this, goddamn it.” Doyle pointed to the books spread out before him on the desk. “As near as I can tell, you’re missing about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s what’s wrong with them.”
“What? Hold on now. You mean to say—”
“I mean that’s just an old man’s estimate. It’s been going on for three or four years.”
“What’s been going on? What are you talking about?”
Doyle explained it to them. In careful, rational detail, he showed the men sitting across from him what had happened, how the books had been manipulated, how they had been juggled by someone who knew what he was doing. But just a little at first, Doyle said, pointing to the pages of neat figures, then in larger and larger amounts as the months passed. And all very cleverly, in a kind of sleight of hand, as a CPA might do it if he had in mind to do something neat and criminal. Doyle said it had taken him days to understand how it had been done. Finally he had, though. “Oh, it was careful,” he said. “I’ll give them that much.”