“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.
The second time, that second Saturday — this would have been about the middle of May now — she drank a small glass of straight vodka at home in the kitchen before she went out. Also, she was dressed differently this time. There was more blue makeup over her eyes and she was wearing a dark red dress with a low neckline which showed a good deal of her full breasts, a dress which made no pretense of disguising her pregnancy; it was stretched tight across her stomach and hips. Preparing to go out, she combed her hair close against her cheeks, partially obscuring her face, and then she entered the Legion again, walked down the steps into that noise and intense Saturday night revelry a second time. And as before, she mounted a barstool, ordered a drink, and then she turned around, with that short red dress hiked two inches above the knees of her crossed legs, with a look of expectation, of invitation almost, held permanently on her beautiful face.
Well, it was pathetic in its lack of subtlely. But subtlety and pathos are not qualities which are much appreciated at the Legion on Saturday nights, so she only had to sit there for an hour this second time before Vince Higgims, Jr., asked to her to dance. Vince was one of Holt County’s permanent bachelors, a lank, black-haired man, a man considered by many of us to be well-educated in the ways of strong drink and ladies in tight dresses. “Come on, girl,” Vince said. “They’re playing my song.”
They were playing Lefty Frizzell’s “I Love You in a Thousand Ways,” with its promise of change, the end of blue days — a song with a slow enough tempo to allow Vince, Jr., to work his customary magic. He led Jessie out onto the crowded floor and pulled her close against his belt buckle; then he began to pump her arm, to walk her backward in that rocking two-step while she held that permanent look of invitation on her face and he went on smiling past her hair in obvious satisfaction. They danced several dances that way, including a fast one or two so that Vince could demonstrate his skill at the jitterbug — he twirled her around and performed intricate movements with his hands — then they cooled off again with a slow song.
And that’s how it began: innocently enough, I suppose, because unlike some of the others in town, at least Vince Higgims meant Jessie Burdette no harm. I doubt that Vince even had hopes of any postdance payoff. It was merely that he was drunk and that he liked to dance. The same cannot be said about the others, however. These other men were still remembering the grain elevator.