It destroyed him, but it didn’t kill him. The bullet had lodged in his brain in such a way that he was still alive.
He was slumped against the chimney when his wife ran upstairs to find out what had caused the noise. The gun was still between his knees. There was considerable blood running down onto his shirtfront and his head was thrown back horribly. He was still breathing, though. There were red bubbles coming up out of his mouth. Looking at him, Mrs. Soames became hysterical. She began to scream. Then the neighbors arrived and it was one of them who called the police.
They flew him immediately to a hospital in Denver. And in Denver the surgeons did what they could; they closed the hole in the roof of his mouth and made other repairs. But in the end they decided to leave the bullet where it was. They said it might kill him to try to remove it. Afterward when he was well enough to be released from the hospital he was brought back home again to Holt.
And so he looked all right, more or less, when we saw him again. He still resembled himself; he was still a neat tidy little old man. It was only his eyes that looked different. His eyes appeared to be blank now, expressionless, as if there was nothing behind them. He could eat and he could drink liquids. He could still function. He could even talk a little, in a harsh lisping monotone. But it didn’t matter if he could talk. What he had to say now was all nonsense, mere jabber and repeated dribble about nothing.
So old Mrs. Soames didn’t know what to do with him then. She dressed him and fed him every day, and sat him on the swing on the front porch. And occasionally she stood him out in the front yard where he could hold a garden hose in his hands. But, if she let him, he would stand there all afternoon, slapping water on the grass. He seemed to like playing with water. Then people would walk by the house and see him. And sometimes they would say something to him, something cruel and nasty, something vindictive like: “You old son of a bitch. Why don’t you try it again? Why don’t you use a deer rifle this time? Just try it once. Oh, goddamn you, anyway.” And Charlie would simply go on spraying the grass with water while some of it ran off his elbow onto his shoes; he would nod and jabber at the people passing by and he would seem to listen to their talk, cocking his head like some ancient, confused little bird. And when they moved away down the street he would even seem to follow them with his blank eyes. But none of that meant anything to him. It was all a mere show to him, a display of shadows that happened to move and talk. None of it held any significance.
If he had only known it then, I suppose he might even have been happy. He couldn’t understand anything his wife or anyone else in Holt had told him, and he couldn’t recall the first thing about debits and credits and about double entry bookkeeping. Consequently he knew nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, about his involvement in the embezzlement of Co-op funds.
So he was in a perfect state now: he was mad. He couldn’t be bothered anymore and he was completely beyond the reach of the law. There wasn’t any way to punish him for what he had done. He was beyond all of that. Any thought of putting him on trial was out of the question.
8
Now people in Holt felt they had to turn elsewhere for some form of restitution. They felt doubly cheated. Burdette had disappeared at the end of December and every day he was gone it became more obvious that the police were never going to locate him and bring him back. Now his accomplice wasn’t even going to be put on trial.
So in time people began to turn on his wife, on Jessie. They wanted satisfaction from someone and she was still here, she was still in Holt, and it made it easier that they thought of her as an outsider. She had been in Holt for almost six years, but she had always been too aloof for her own good, people said. From the day she had arrived she had held herself apart. It was as if she felt she were too good for them — that’s what people thought. So they were naturally a little in awe of her, and a little antagonistic. They didn’t understand her; they thought of her as that woman Jack Burdette had discovered in some Holiday Inn in Oklahoma, that small quiet overly independent woman he had met and married in Tulsa when he should have married Wanda Jo Evans, a local girl whom everybody liked and admired. No, she had not grown up here, and there wasn’t anyone in town who knew very much about her.
So perhaps it was inevitable, given the pitch of emotion and the nature of people, that since there was no one else in Holt who was still available to them, they turned on Jessie Burdette. They were outraged by what had happened and nearly everyone had been affected by it in some way. They began to associate the problems at the elevator with Jessie’s arrival. The notice she had printed in the Mercury ended up not making any difference to anyone. Too much had happened since then, and now no one quite believed her.
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?”