Where You Once Belonged

by Kent Haruf

  People applauded once more. Everyone approved. And while Jack walked up the lectern to shake hands with Arch Withers, one of the farmers in the audience said: “Well at least his feet are big enough. Burdette ought to be able to fill Doyle’s shoes, or anybody else’s, with them big boats.”

  Sitting in the middle of the room at one of the long tables, Wanda Jo Evans might have said something about Jack’s having clean socks too. But she didn’t—although when I looked at her there were tears shining in her eyes, tears of love and approval, I suppose, but also of private expectation. For I think Wanda Jo Evans must have thought that now, with his promotion, Jack might want to settle down, that he might be ready to make their relationship—that almost-eight-year-old Saturday night transaction of theirs—not only a weekly exchange but a daily and permanent condition.

  * * *

  Then it was 1971. It was spring. Jack had been the manager of the Co-op Elevator for about six months. At the beginning of April that year the board decided to send him down to Oklahoma, to Tulsa, so he could attend a weekend convention for the managers of grain elevators. It was the board’s belief that it would be worthwhile for him, and the elevator too, if he would attend the convention, sit in on the seminars and workshops, and then return with the latest predictions about the futures market as well as any new information he might collect about the prevention of grain dust explosions. An under secretary of agriculture, several economists and university scientists were to be there, to lead the workshops and seminars.

  So Jack drove down to Tulsa. He went alone, driving one of the company pickups with two or three different company charge cards in his pocket. He left on Thursday. The convention was to begin at noon on Friday at the Holiday Inn, and it was understood that he would stay through the weekend, return on Monday sometime late in the afternoon or early evening, and then make his report to the board at a special meeting on Tuesday. And apparently Jack arrived in Tulsa on Thursday evening just as planned. He found the Holiday Inn, checked himself into the motel, located the dining room and the bar, hobnobbed with some of the other elevator managers, listened to their stories and told some of his own, went to bed at a reasonable hour, and afterward there is reason to believe that he even attended some of the meetings on Friday afternoon and again on Saturday. But by Saturday night, apparently, he had had enough.

  I don’t know; perhaps he was just bored. Perhaps he was tired of it all already. Attending convention workshops and seminars would no doubt have been too much to him like taking high-school classes and college instruction. There would have been all that talk in those close windowless rooms, with the pitchers of ice water and the urns of coffee set out on a table in the back, but nothing stronger, nothing for a man to drink really: those experts up at the front of the room talking on and on, speaking learnedly, humorlessly, professionally about corn futures and grain dust explosions, with the accompanying racks of charts and diagrams beside them and the sheaves of documented scientific research, all of which he was not only supposed to believe and make sense of but to take careful notes about too with that ballpoint pen and that new tablet they would have given him, sitting there at some table with his big muscled arms resting out over the table in front of him like two oversized ham steaks while he calculated the hours and minutes until dinnertime and the first drink of the evening, though not necessarily in that order. And meanwhile the experts would still have been talking and he would still have been trying to stay awake. Consequently I believe he must have been good and bored by Saturday night, tired of it all. But also, I know, by that time, he had met Jessie Miller. And Jessie Miller, as she was known then, would have been enough to make him want to disappear even if he weren’t bored.

  She had been hired by one of the sponsors of the convention to stand behind a table set up in the lobby. She had been instructed to wear a white blouse and a black miniskirt, to smile congenially, to pass out glossy colored brochures, and to show continuously a film extolling the virtues of a particular species of hybrid seed corn. And she had been doing all of this faithfully all of Friday afternoon and all of Saturday. So Jack must have met her, or at least have talked to her, several times already.

  Then on Saturday evening, after he had been released at last from the last workshop late that afternoon, he began seriously to charm her. For he was capable of charm. I may not have made that clear, the fact that Jack Burdette could be attractive to women, that he was capable of exercising considerable charm and persuasiveness where women were concerned. Still it’s true; on those occasions when it mattered to him what women thought of him and whenever it made any difference to him how they responded to his talk—that is, when he wanted something from a woman—he was in fact capable of great leverage and conviction. But he had that effect on men too. He dominated any room he entered. But it wasn’t all conscious and deliberate on his part. Most of it was a matter of impulse and instinct, the result of native vitality and energy. He was full of himself. Domination came naturally to him. And in any case, he was huge, and he still wasn’t bad-looking at that time. He hadn’t gotten sloppy yet.

  So he began to charm her. She was just twenty years old in 1971 and he was already thirty. He wined her and dined her, bought her steak in the dining room and danced with her in the lounge until late that night, swirling her around the floor to the live music played by the country band hired by the sponsors of the convention, and he mixed it all with a variety of expensive wines which he charged on the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator’s charge cards. Then he disappeared with her. They went upstairs to his motel room and didn’t come out until Monday morning—not until everyone else at the convention had already checked out and had gone home—leaving the motel room only then to have their blood tested and afterward to locate the nearest justice of the peace before returning once more to the privacy of Jack’s room at the Holiday Inn.

  Thus he didn’t return to Holt again until late Wednesday night. And when he did return he was already married. He moved Jessie into his old room at the Letitia Hotel, just a block off Main Street.

  This surprised and astonished everyone in Holt. But it was more than mere surprise and astonishment to Wanda Jo Evans. To her it was nearly a lethal shock. And it wasn’t even Burdette who informed her of the fact that he was married now. On the contrary, she discovered this in the same way that everyone else in Holt did: by hearsay on Thursday morning, after he had returned from Oklahoma and had already spent that first night with Jessie in the Letitia Hotel.

  Still Wanda Jo knew that he was going down to Tulsa. She was aware that the board had sent him to the convention. But I don’t believe she thought much about it. No one did. It was simply part of his new responsibilities as manager of the elevator. To Wanda Jo, then, it must have been merely that he would be gone for the weekend and that she would miss their weekly dancing and drinking and later their lovemaking in the back bedroom. So perhaps while he was gone she decided to make good use of her time. Perhaps she gave her little house a thorough cleaning; maybe she had a permanent curl put into her hair and did things like balance her checkbook and sew buttons on one of Jack’s shirts. Then it would have been Monday and Jack would have been due to come back.

  Except that he didn’t come back on Monday. He was still in Tulsa on Monday. He was busy. He was occupied. He was having his blood tested. He was pulling strangers in out of the courthouse hallways to act as witnesses, and he was standing up in front of an unknown justice of the peace, promising the twenty-year-old girl beside him whom he had known now for maybe forty-eight hours that he would continue to love her and take care of her, whether they ever got rich or not, whether they managed to stay well or happened to turn sick, till death did them part. So it was late on Wednesday night before he returned to Holt. It was long after midnight and consequently for another night Wanda Jo Evans must have given up waiting for a phone call that didn’t come and she must have gone to bed at last, in confusion and wonderment, beginning now to worry. But finally she must have gone to s
leep. Then the next day she discovered that he was married.

  It was Joyce Penner, one of the women at the telephone office where Wanda Jo worked, who told her. Joyce heard about it in the bakery. About nine-thirty that morning Joyce walked around the corner to Bradbury’s Bakery on Main Street, to buy sweet rolls for the women in the telephone office, and by that time people in town were already talking about it. So, as we all heard later, Joyce went back immediately, without even buying the rolls for the women. Reentering the telephone office she leaned over Wanda Jo’s desk and said: “Honey, come back to the ladies’ with me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Wanda Jo said. “Is something wrong?”

  “Just come back to the ladies’ with me.”

  “Well. Something must be wrong,” Wanda Jo said.

  But Joyce was already walking away from her, past the other women at their desks. Wanda Jo stood up and followed Joyce back to the rest room, to that little square pragmatic space where there is no window, where there is barely room enough for one person and the fan comes on according to code when the light switch is turned on and it makes a tinny noise, and then Joyce locked the door behind them and told Wanda Jo to sit down. “Why?” Wanda Jo said.

  “Just do,” Joyce said. And then she told her.

  So I suppose bad news can be lethal for some people. Especially if it is sudden and unexpected. That is, if you are not used to it, if you have gone along passively, hoping for the best despite all the evidence to the contrary, if you are twenty-nine years old and still believe that a man will marry you simply because you have washed his dirty socks for eight years and have slept with him on Saturday nights during all that time, then I suppose bad news can kill you. In any case it was something like that for Wanda Jo Evans. Because, in a way, Wanda Jo Evans did die that Thursday morning in April. I do not mean that she slit her wrists with a lady’s razor that she happened to be carrying in her purse, nor that she did anything so suicidal as to stab herself with a fingernail file. I simply mean that she stopped caring what happened to herself anymore.

  It began immediately. For the rest of that morning she sat in the telephone office rest room, staring at the tiled floor, wiping her nose on cheap toilet paper, crying quietly, her recently curled strawberry blonde hair fallen forward about her abashed and stricken face and her slim white neck bowed and exposed as if she were waiting for some final blow of some Holt County inquisitor’s ax. All of that—that dreadful individual remorse and despair and submission—while the fan overhead went on making its maddening little noise and while the other women out in the front office continued to talk about her and to send a representative from among themselves every fifteen minutes or so to check on her. She stayed in the rest room all that morning. Then at noon one of the women drove her home.

  For the rest of that spring she drank. In the evenings she went home after work and sat in front of the television, drinking cheap wine or vodka until she fell asleep. And on the weekends that spring she went out to the bars in town, going out alone now to the same places where previously she and Jack had gone together. Invariably she drank until the bars were closed. Then, in time, she began to take someone home with her too. She brought them back to that little bedroom in the house on Chicago Street, and the bed wasn’t even made anymore and the sheets smelled of sweat and the stale smoke of old cigarettes. But none of that was important to her now. It was only important to her that he—whoever he was, and there were a lot of them during those months of late spring and early summer, and even occasionally more than one at the same time—it was only important that he do his own laundry. She insisted on that.

  By June she was a mess. She was completely lost and pitiable. And people in Holt did pity her too—the women, in particular, but some of the men as well, when they thought about it. They all felt sorry for her. But no one knew what to do for her either. Finally, however, some unexpected help came from the outside. It came in the guise of a little mousy middle-aged man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a white shirt and tie: a Mr. T. Bleven McGill. He was a telephone company supervisor and it turned out that he had a heart. T. Bleven McGill persuaded Wanda Jo to apply for a transfer to another office. Thus, at the end of June in 1971, she moved to Pueblo. And so far as I know she is there still.

  But before she left she did one thing—something which has become a part of Holt County legend too—she delivered that last brown paper bag of clothes to Jack. They were all clean and dutifully laundered of course. In fact they still smelled faintly of soap. She had washed them during that week just prior to the time that Jack had gone down to Tulsa to the manager’s convention, and naturally when he returned he hadn’t thought to pick them up. Now Wanda Jo presented them to him one afternoon while he was at the elevator office. Bob Thomas and several other men were there too. She didn’t say anything to Jack, nor to any of the others. She merely set the bag on the counter, looked at Jack, stared at him, met his eyes, and then swept her glance over the other men. Finally she turned and walked out.

  After she had gone Burdette looked inside the paper bag. He recognized the contents; they were his clothes all right, but they had been changed. They had been cut by a razor or by a pair of scissors, sliced methodically, bitterly, into tiny pieces, the biggest of which was no larger than a single square in a checkerboard or a little girl’s hair ribbon: all his socks and shirts and pants and underwear. Burdette dumped the things out onto the counter.

  “Huh,” he said to other men in the office. “You reckon this means we’re through? You suppose this means she won’t be doing my laundry no more?”

  Bob Thomas and a couple of the men laughed.

  “But hell,” Jack said. “She was a nice girl. Only she always was a little short on a sense of humor.”

  PART TWO

  • 6 •

  She was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would be. That is, she was the exact opposite of what people in Holt thought she would have to be. If Burdette was going to marry her, if he was going to leave someone as beautiful and selfless and long-suffering as Wanda Jo Evans was and then marry someone else, she would have to be something. At the very least she would have to be some husky-voiced Oklahoma version of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe.

  She wasn’t, though. She wasn’t like that at all.

  Still from the very beginning Burdette himself misled people about her. That Thursday morning in April, after he had come back from Tulsa the night before and had then returned to work at the elevator the next day, he told Arch Withers about her. And what he told Withers at least implied that she was the kind of woman people still expected her to be. Also, since it was from him, from Arch Withers, that people first heard about her and since no one had met her yet or had seen her on Main Street, and wouldn’t see her or meet for another three or four hours—not until noon when she would leave the Letitia Hotel and meet Burdette at the Holt Cafe for lunch—for the length of that one morning (which was still the same morning that Wanda Jo Evans was crying privately, miserably, in the telephone office rest room) people in Holt assumed that she would have to be blonde at least, even if she wasn’t also brassy and vacuous and loud, a kind of empty-headed lipsticky Sooner starlet.

  That Thursday morning back in April, Arch Withers had been waiting for Burdette near the rough plank steps leading up to the elevator office. He was standing on the gravel in the morning sun, leaning up against the fender of his old black pickup, chewing on a flat toothpick and cleaning his fingernails. By the time Burdette arrived at eight o’clock that morning Withers had been waiting for him for nearly an hour. Then Burdette drove up in the company vehicle he had taken down to Tulsa. He got out and walked over to Withers.

  “Well,” Withers said. “What happened? Did you get tired of motel food and decide it was time to come home again?”

  “No. I liked their food all right,” Burdette said. “Their beds was satisfactory too.”

  “So it wasn’t that. Well that’s something at least. I wouldn’t wa
nt to think you missed any meals or lost any sleep on our account—just because you finally come back two days after you was supposed to and never called nobody the whole time and never even answered the phone when somebody else tried to call you.”

  “Arch,” Burdette said, “you sound a little upset.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah you do. And it doesn’t become you.”

  “Then you’ll have to excuse me,” Withers said. “Maybe I ought to apologize. Because I’m not upset, goddamn it. I’m mad. Just where in the goddamn hell have you been all this time anyhow?”

  Burdette told him about Jessie Miller then, about meeting her in the Holiday Inn lobby where she was showing that continuous monotonous film about hybrid seed corn. He told Withers about dancing with her. “She was pretty good-looking too,” he said.

  “Was she?” Withers said. “Then I guess I’m glad for you. But what the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Quite a lot,” Burdette said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well. I married her.”

  “What?”

  “I married her.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “That’s right. I’m a old married man now. Like everybody else.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Withers said. “I thought you had better sense.”

  Then, as Arch Withers told it later himself, he chewed his toothpick for a while and studied Burdette, looking him up and down as if Burdette were some sudden bump in the evolution of humankind, and not an attractive one necessarily but as if he were a talking mannequin, say, or an enormous and potentially dangerous aberration.