So of course she helped him. She made neat little precise crib sheets for him and she learned to compose his term papers in his own sprawling and childish hand, receiving as reward for this constant adoration and these daily efforts at school the exclusive right to ride beside him, to hang on his arm in the middle of the front seat of his old Ford pickup while he raced and helled up and down Main Street on Friday and Saturday nights with the gear-shift stuck up between her creamy white knees.
We envied them all of that then. Such things matter in high school. They seem primary at the time, essential. At least they seemed that way to us who were Jack’s classmates.
But it was on the football field that he made his real mark during those years. In public, I mean. For, as I have said already, he was a hell of a football player: peerless and incredible and brutal. The whole town thought so. Indeed there are men in Holt today who will still tell you, even taking into account what he did later, that Jack Burdette was the best fullback and linebacker that Holt County ever produced. And no doubt they are right. The coaches from all the area colleges and universities thought so too; they began to pay attention to him when he was still only a sophomore.
Consequently it was about then that his father, old John Senior, began to pay attention to him as well. The old man came to all of the games and when something happened on the field you could hear him yelling obscenely from the stands. Afterward he came down into the locker room and stood around between the benches, smelling of beer and whiskey and slapping us on the shoulder while we got out of our pads. He made drunken little speeches to us. “By god,” he’d say. “Goddamn it, you boys, you sure …” And so on. His face would be inflamed with the drama of it all, with his own high emotion and the pregame mix of liquor, and then the spit would begin to fly. Meanwhile we would be waiting for him to finish, or at least to get out of the way, so we could take a shower. But he was proud of all the boys, though he was proudest, of course, of Jack. There was a lot to be proud of. In the fall during those years the old man made money by betting on all of the high-school football games with the men from other towns.
Then in the winter of 1959, about a month after we had played our last game, the old man died. That is, he was killed. By a freight train in the middle of town. Later the railroad company would put up crossing guards and flashing lights, but there were neither of these then.
It was early in December on a Saturday night. The old man had been drinking as usual in the Legion. He had been telling stories at the bar in his loud voice and leaning drunkenly on the barmaids whenever they stood beside him to give their orders to the bartender. Pulling the young girls toward himself into his thick arms, he had kissed their cheeks and had asked them his salacious little joke: don’t you want to come out to my car and test my heater? When the girls had said no, he had thrown his head back and laughed.
Thus he had had his usual satisfactory time of it, people say. Then the Legion closed. But outside, when they left the bar, they found that it had begun to snow; it was coming down under the streetlights and beginning to collect along the gutters. So the old man drove home in the snow, just as everyone else did that night, except that driving north up Main Street he would have passed the three blocks of stores, shadowy-looking and quiet now, with the store windows decorated for the holiday with cotton and tinsel and the lamp poles at the corners festooned with Christmas lights. And so, feeling pleased with it all, perhaps even feeling a little satisfied with his own place in the great scheme of things, he must have begun to sing. For he was a great singer when he was drunk. Consequently when he came to the railroad tracks at the center of town he didn’t hear the train at all or even see it coming. He drove directly onto the tracks and was hit at once.
The next day, on Sunday morning, most of the men in town, and many of the women and children too, came out to look at the car. In the night the snow had stopped and it was very bright and cold.
I was there too, with my father. At the time he was still teaching me to take photographs for the local newspaper, for the Holt Mercury, which he owned and edited. When he woke me that morning he said that I should bring the camera.
He parked the car on Main Street and then we got out and walked along the tracks. There were deep scars in the railroad ties where the iron wheels of the old man’s Buick had gouged the ties after the rubber had been torn off. The scars made it look as though some madman had plowed a furrow along the railroad tracks with a single-bottom plow. One of the ruined tires was down in the weeds and there was another one ahead of us where we could see the trail it had made in the snow before it tipped over. I took a picture of it.
Then we went on, walking along the tracks beside the train. Ahead of us we could see that there were people gathered around the smashed Buick. It was shoved free of the train now, into the ditch below the engine. There were men and women peering inside the car and talking to one another.
“You had better take photographs of that,” my dad said. “But stand up here so you can get the side of the train in it.”
I crowded the boxcars and snapped photographs of what I saw through the camera. Then my dad took several pictures too, to be certain he had something suitable for the front page. Afterward he gave the camera back to me and we went on.
When we arrived at the car it was standing upright in the ditch weeds on its bent rims. The driver’s door was crushed in, shoved against the passenger’s side. In the door there was the deep impact, as in a clay mold or a piece of tin, where the train engine had hit it. All the glass had been popped out and scattered.
Off to the side, George Foley, who was a barber in Holt and who lived near the tracks, was explaining to two or three other men what had happened. My dad and I stopped to hear what he was saying.
He was saying in the night how he had heard a sudden bang and immediately afterward a continuous screeching; he had gotten up to see what it was. The train had almost stopped then, he said, but down the tracks in front of it there was a car that was caught and the car was still being shoved along ahead of the engine and there were sparks flying off into the air. So he had gotten dressed and had run outside down the tracks to the head of the train. By then it was stopped completely. “But it didn’t make no difference,” he said. “It was already too late. He was already dead.”
“How do you know that?” my dad said.
“What?”
“How do you know that he was already dead?”
“Well wouldn’t he be?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to think he was anyway.”
“That’s what I mean. If a goddamn freight train hits somebody in the middle of the night and it’s going sixty miles a hour — if that don’t kill him outright, I don’t know what else will.”
“Probably,” my dad said. “What else did you see?”