Where You Once Belonged

by Kent Haruf

  “But listen,” I said. “Think about it for a minute. Isn’t there something we can do about this?”

  He stopped watching TV, briefly. He looked at me. “Yeah,” he said. “You can loan me some money. I missed breakfast. You can do something about that if you want to.”

  So I did. I gave him a couple of dollars. I was glad to do that much for him and was ready to do more, although I couldn’t have said then what it might have been. He folded the bills I gave him and put them away in his jeans pocket. I watched him for a while longer. But when he didn’t say anything more I left. He was still lying on the couch watching somebody else win money in a California studio. That seemed to please him.

  Then on Friday, when his hearing came up, the student judiciary found against him. It was an open-and-shut case and after they had heard the evidence they recommended that he be expelled from school. There had been a number of thefts on campus already that fall. Consequently the administration accepted the students’ recommendation and decided to make an example of him. But it didn’t matter to Jack what they did; he didn’t contest the charges or even defend himself. In fact he didn’t even attend the hearings. Instead that morning he had gone to the Army recruiter on campus and had enlisted; so now he was obligated to two years of military service, and the Army was glad to have him swell their numbers.

  He came over to see me before he went back to Holt. He said he didn’t have to report to boot camp until the end of October and he thought he’d go home in the meantime and work at the elevator and see Wanda Jo Evans. He wasn’t dissatisfied by the turn of events at all.

  “Well,” I said. “Maybe it’s for the best.”

  “Why not?” he said. “I might even learn something in the Army.”

  “Take care, then.”

  “But just a minute. You got any more money?”

  “Probably.”

  “Because I could use something to get home on.”

  So Jack Burdette went back to Holt County where he was still a hero and where no one knew about Curtis Harris’s radio, or would have cared very much if they had known about it; and then at the end of October he went off to Texas, to boot camp at Fort Bliss. I doubt that the irony of that name occurred to him since he wasn’t one to pay much attention to such things and I don’t suppose the Army is either. Anyway he was there for almost two months. Then I saw him again just after boot camp was finished. Before being reassigned he had come home on leave and I had gone home at semester break. It was Christmastime. Jack looked thinner and harder now, although it might have been just that his head had been shaved; his cropped head made his neck look taller and now his ears stuck out. In any case all the time he was home he insisted on wearing his uniform and his Army cap about the town. He stayed at the Letitia Hotel while he was home, sleeping through most of the day in his room and spending his nights at the tavern with Wanda Jo Evans, the two of them drinking late into the night while Jack told her stories about things he’d already seen and done in basic training in Texas. I don’t know how she stayed awake for all of that since she still had to get up early in the morning to work as a secretary at the phone company every day. But she did; she stayed awake; and it was obvious that if anything she was even more in love with him than she had been before. Then he left again, for Fort Ord in California where he underwent two more months of training—as an assistant machine gunner this time—and afterward he was sent overseas to Germany. So none of us saw him again until he was finally discharged late in 1962. He had stories about all of it. He had liked the Army.

  In the meantime I was still in college. By the end of my sophomore year I had managed to pass most of the required courses that everyone had to take and so I was beginning to concentrate on journalism. Much of the classwork was mere theoretical posturing, of little practical use once I had returned to Holt two years later to work on the Mercury where people were more interested in who had visited whom over the weekend than they were in the ethical paradoxes presented in the First Amendment. But I didn’t know that yet. So I attended class regularly and took notes, and when I was a junior I began to cover various campus events for the Colorado Daily. It was heady stuff for a while. It was just beginning to be a willful and exciting time on campus and at the paper we had the illusion that we were a part of it all and that we were speaking in the voice of the people even if the people didn’t know it yet or want us to. I remember, for example, that it was about this time that Barry Goldwater came to speak on campus and in the paper we said that Goldwater was a fascist, no better than a murderer. After this statement appeared there was a considerable outcry all over the state and finally the chancellor was compelled to remove the student editor who was responsible for it. Then there were demonstrations on campus. The due processes of law had been abrogated and we all felt hot about it. But the editor was never reinstated and it turned out to be a lost cause.

  Still I was beginning to get hot about something else just then. I had met Nora Kramer by that time and for a year or more she seemed very much like a lost cause too.

  Now I am not very eager to talk about Nora Kramer. And certainly she is less than eager to have me talk about her. For Nora was—and is—a very private person and she will no doubt resent this invasion of her privacy. But I can’t help that: like it or not she is a part of this account. We were together for eighteen years, after all, and we had a daughter together. And it was only a good deal later, after Nora left Holt and and moved to Denver, that I turned finally, out of loneliness and admiration and love too, toward Jessie Burdette, who was as different from Nora Kramer as fire is from ice.

  But my god, she was a beautiful young woman when I first knew her in Boulder. She had astonishing black hair then. It was as dark and shiny as coal and wonderfully thick and clean. And her skin was so white that it was like porcelain, or like ivory, and it was almost transparent so that you felt that if you were only permitted to look at her long enough you might actually see the slow movement of blood at her temples and wrists. She was a very small person, very bright and intelligent and all neat and tidy, and she seemed as self-sufficient as a bird.

  But she was living with her father at the time. Dr. Kramer was a well-known professor on campus. He wore bow ties and dark suits to class every day and taught graduate seminars in the English Department. His concentration was in the Puritans. He was great for John Bunyan and thought The Pilgrim’s Progress was literature. He had studied at Yale as an undergraduate and I believe he considered the students at Colorado to be beneath his abilities. Nevertheless he had been able to resign himself to teaching at Colorado for more than thirty years. He was not a lot of fun to meet in the living room when I called on Nora for a date.

  I never knew her mother. Mrs. Kramer had died a number of years earlier. I have seen pictures of Mrs. Kramer, though. The pictures show her to have been a small woman with dark hair like her daughter’s, parted severely to one side, and she appears to have had a thin little mouth, which at least while she was being photographed she held tightly closed. But I know very little about her; Nora did not talk readily about her mother. For Mrs. Kramer had died horribly when Nora was eleven years old. And Nora had seen it happen.

  She told me about it once, just once, speaking in a monotone voice as if she were reporting some event which had happened not to her but to someone else, as if what had occurred when she was eleven didn’t concern her at all anymore.

  It happened that she and her mother had gone to Denver on a Saturday morning to shop at May D & F’s, which was a big department store downtown, and it was just before Christmas, a bright clear day, so the sidewalks were crowded with people carrying packages and calling pleasantly to one another, dropping coins into the red Salvation Army buckets. And then while she and her mother were standing at the street corner waiting for the light to change, Mrs. Kramer had been pushed or jostled by the crowds so that she was shoved off the curb out into the path of one of the big city buses that was coming up the street. Mrs. Kramer was able t
o avoid being hit head-on by the bus, but as it went by, her winter coat was caught by something and suddenly she was being pulled along beside it; then she lost her footing and she was being dragged along on her back beneath the bus. Nora began to run after her. But the bus driver didn’t see her, or see her mother either, apparently. Then up the block Nora saw that her mother’s coat had torn free, so that she was no longer being pulled along the street on her back. But though her mother had stopped moving, the bus hadn’t. And then Nora saw the black wheels of the bus roll over her mother’s chest and head. She stopped running then. She began to scream. She screamed and screamed, she told me, until finally someone came and put his coat over the thing in the street, which had been her mother, and she remembers that she continued to scream until the ambulance arrived at last and one of the attendants gave her a shot. Later at the hospital she was asked to provide identification. She was able to do that. But when she was asked whom they should call, she couldn’t remember her father’s phone number and she began to scream once more.

  She told me this story one night in our bedroom, early in our marriage. Afterward I turned in the bed and held her and brushed my hand over her face, expecting tears on her cheeks. But there weren’t any tears. And after a while she went to sleep. Then the next morning she would not say anything more about it.

  Thus, so far as I know, that long-ago Saturday morning in Denver was the last time that Nora Kramer ever screamed about anything. She would not allow herself to show intense emotion ever again. Not even when Toni, our daughter, was sixteen and there was good reason to show emotion.

  But no: I do not wish to cause her further harm. She’s had enough. I am not at all eager to stir up things for her. I am merely glad she seems to be happy again. Still I do feel compelled to make this account of things as accurate as I can. For my own reasons.

  But perhaps it’s enough to say that after two years of dating Nora Kramer in Boulder, after two years of turning myself inside out for her, so that I hardly knew myself who I was anymore, and after meeting her father repeatedly in the living room where he would be sitting in a chair beside a lamp, reading Bunyan and maybe a little of Milton too, a little of Paradise Lost for variety’s sake, to clear his palate—those nights when I tried to make conversation with him while he read and while I waited for his black-haired daughter to come down the stairs so we could leave the house and go outside where I thought I might remember how to breathe once more—after all of that Nora and I were married in the summer of 1964 and we moved to Holt where I began to work for my father on the local paper. But Nora didn’t like Holt very much, even from the beginning. It wasn’t a thing like Boulder and Denver were. And I recall now what Stewart Fliegelman said about our prospects.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You still think she’s some kind of violin and you just haven’t learned the fingering yet?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said, ‘She isn’t a violin,’ for Chrissakes. Aren’t you listening to me?”

  “I’m trying to,” I said. “But it’s so goddamn loud in here I can’t hear anything. And you never make any sense anyway.”

  Then Fliegelman leaned across the picnic table and started to shout into my face.

  We were sitting in the Sink, one of the student bars on the hill near campus. You sat on wood benches at picnic tables; the tables were all carved and scarred on top and around you all of the walls and the low ceiling were painted black. There were beatnik sayings and slogans on the walls, spray-painted over the black in dripping colors, and toward the back there was a room which had a dirt floor. It was always crowded in the Sink, but it was especially crowded on Friday nights when everyone was trying to make a date for the weekend: an intense place then, packed and smoky and loud and really filthy and still wonderful, with students drunk on the seventy-five-cent pitchers of beer and shouting to people three feet in front of them above the scream of the jukebox. It was the place to go on a Friday night if you were a student in Boulder. It and Tulagi’s. Tulagi’s had a big dance area and live music while the Sink had atmosphere and also Sink Burgers with special sauce that ran down your chin.

  That evening I had just come in and I had sat down on the picnic bench, after a date with Nora Kramer, looking characteristically confused and hang-faced, no doubt, wanting consolation and understanding, or at least a Sink Burger, and now Fliegelman was shouting into my face about violins.

  “Because there isn’t any music there,” he shouted. “You hear me?”

  “I hear you. But what the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s an extended metaphor, for Chrissakes. Don’t you know what that is?”

  “What?”

  “It’s what you and Nora Kramer aren’t. That’s what it is.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I shouted back at him. “You’re drunk, Fliegelman. You’re from Chicago and you’re drunk and you’re full of shit.”

  “Like hell,” he said. He sat up straight from the picnic table as if I’d said something which offended him. “It’s beer. And I’ve done all I can for you, Arbuckle. I’m going to go liberate my bladder. It’s my right as a citizen.” Then he stood up from the table and made his way drunkenly back across the dirt floor toward the rest room, moving through the dense pack of student bodies as if he were some redheaded gnome at a bacchanal.

  Well, our generation was full of talk of rights and liberation then and of music too (though more about electric guitars than of violins), and as it turned out, although I paid no serious attention to him at the time, Stewart Fliegelman was right about Nora Kramer and me. There wasn’t any music there. Nor much that resembled liberation. And as for Fliegelman himself, his first attempt at marriage wasn’t exactly Beethoven’s Ode to Joy either.

  • 5 •

  Jack had been home from the Army for almost two years by the time Nora and I moved to Holt. After graduation in June we were married in Boulder in the Episcopal church. Stewart Fliegelman stood up with me and Nora had a friend of hers as attendant. Then when it was time for Dr. Kramer to escort his daughter down the aisle toward the altar he did so without once looking at her—it was as though he just happened to be passing through the church on his way to work, or as if he were still deep in thought about Milton and Bunyan—and Nora looked lovely too, in her white veil and white dress and with her dark hair pulled away from her face like a young girl’s. Afterward, though, perhaps as an offering of consolation to her (for the old man certainly felt she deserved consolation, marrying me), he insisted that we take a week’s honeymoon in New York at his expense.

  So we flew to New York, attended a play on Broadway, saw the sights, ate in restaurants with male waiters in white jackets standing over us, and we held hands under the table—all as you’re supposed to do—and it was in New York that we began those icy exchanges in bed which not only characterized that first week of our marriage but the next eighteen years as well. Then in the middle of that week Nora got sick with something, a summer cold or the flu, so we cut short the time in New York and flew home again. The change in air pressure in the plane caused her ears to pain seriously, I remember, and her face was chalk-white when we walked down the ramp. We stayed that night in Boulder with her father and the next day when Nora felt better we drove the three hours east to Holt. The day after that I went to work at the paper and Nora began to plant rosebushes behind our house in the dirt along the garage. It was not a pleasant beginning for either one of us.

  But Jack Burdette seemed to be doing very well. He was home from the Army and it was obvious that he still thought of himself as having had a very good time for those two years while he had been in the service. That is, being a soldier, he had perfected his beer drinking and his poker playing and he had seen something of the nightlife in the towns near the bases he was sent to. Also, he had discovered that money, if he had enough of it, would buy many things that he hadn’t known before that it would buy, not excluding the temporary services of other human beings. He told
us that he had developed a respectful view of the healing powers of penicillin. We heard all about it once he was home again. There was one story in particular that he told. It involved three German girls and two bottles of champagne and one hotel bed, the kind of arithmetic Jack said he understood. “Them German fräuleins won’t refuse you nothing,” he said. “You ought to try one yourself.”

  Thus the Army had served as a kind of finishing school for Jack, a form of postgraduate work in the essential life skills. They had even given him a diploma in the guise of an honorable discharge to prove that he had passed, to show that he had learned their fundamental lessons.

  Late in 1962 then, after spending his last paycheck in a final protracted binge, he had returned to Holt. He was heavier and stronger now, beginning to spread out and to take on mass, to develop a heavy gut which daily beer drinking had something to do with, and certainly he was more experienced than he was when he left, but he was probably not any wiser. That didn’t matter, though; Wanda Jo Evans was still here and so was his job at the Co-op Elevator. In short time he had taken up both.

  In the meantime Wanda Jo Evans had undergone some changes herself. She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more beautiful than she had been before and that she was still warmhearted and utterly devoted to Jack. At twenty-one she had reached that brief moment of physical perfection. The baby fat was gone, her strawberry blonde hair grew long and full to her shoulders, and now each morning when she walked to work at the phone company she wore nylon hose and heels and a nice skirt and blouse. Consequently it was at about this time that some of the men in town began to make it a point to be drinking coffee at the front tables at the Holt Cafe so they could stare out the windows and watch her walk across Main Street. The men hoped that a sudden gust of wind would rise and lift her skirt to reveal more of her legs, or that a sudden breeze would come up and blow her skirt tighter against her thighs. Failing these, they were there every morning anyway, to watch her mount the curb when she reached the other side of the street. For she was something to see. But she was still a very nice girl, still entirely innocent and guileless, and she herself cared only about seeing Jack Burdette.