by Kent Haruf
But we discovered that he wasn’t quite so successful there. It happened that old Mrs. Thompson was the only clerk available at the moment and it was she who waited on him. In no uncertain terms Mrs. Thompson informed Burdette that the store had specific limits on how much they would allow anyone to charge. Burdette took this amiss. “But look here,” he said. “You know me. You know who I am.”
“I certainly do,” Mrs. Thompson told him. “I’ve heard more about you than I ever want to, ever since you were an ornery little boy. Your mother is a friend of mine.”
Consequently, at Schulte’s, Burdette was somewhat obstructed in his Friday afternoon shopping; that is, he was allowed to charge only a pair of dark socks and a set of blue underwear. And before he left the store he must have thought better of changing into the socks and the underwear and wearing them out onto the street. Mrs. Thompson was still watching him.
Despite these new stories about Burdette which everyone in town heard and afterward repeated, people in Holt were still not alarmed. They were still amused by his disappearance and by his post-Christmas shopping spree. If nothing else, there was a good deal of joking and fun to be had at Lloyd Foster’s and Ralph Bird’s expense. People said that either man could profit by hiring Mrs. Thompson to clerk in his store. They said Mrs. Thompson would at least have cut their losses.
But then that first week of Burdette’s disappearance turned into a second week. And then gradually the jokes in the bakery and the pool halls and the tavern began to grow stale and there began to be other people in Holt, besides Ralph Bird and Lloyd Foster, who were growing doubtful that Burdette was ever going to return. No one had any idea where he was and there wasn’t anyone in the county who could imagine what was keeping him away.
It was the middle of January then. It was late on a Friday afternoon and it was at this time that Jessie Burdette came into the office of the Holt Mercury. During the afternoon it had been snowing and now it was very cold outside. There was little traffic on Main Street and the wind was blowing the dry wisps of snow along the sidewalk. Above the storefronts it was beginning to turn dark.
Jessie Burdette came into the Mercury just before five o’clock. She had the two little boys with her. TJ was almost four years old then and Bobby was almost three. They came in bundled up in their winter clothes, the boys in matching snowsuits and Jessie in a navy blue wool coat which was still loose enough that she could button it over her stomach; for, although we didn’t know it yet, she was pregnant again; she was already in her fourth month. Inside the office she sat TJ and Bobby down together on a wooden chair against the wall. The little boys looked handsome as ever and red-cheeked. She unzipped their snowsuits and smoothed the hair back from their foreheads. “Now sit still, please,” she told them. Then she stepped up to the counter and waited for Mrs. Walsh.
Mrs. Walsh was the office receptionist. My father had hired her to work in the office twenty years earlier as copy editor, and she had stayed on all those years although my father himself had retired in 1970 and had left the daily management of the paper to me. Now she stood up from her desk and approached the counter. From across the room I watched her talking to Jessie Burdette.
“Yes?” Mrs. Walsh said. “Can I help you?”
“I want to print something in the paper.”
“Is it an ad?”
“No. It’s not an ad.”
“Ads are fifty cents per line.”
“It’s not an ad, though.”
“What is it, then? Do you have it with you?”
I watched Jessie reach into her coat pocket and draw out a sheet of yellow tablet paper. She began to unfold it on the counter. When it was completely unfolded she pushed it across the counter toward Mrs. Walsh.
Mrs. Walsh picked it up and held it close to her face under the light. Immediately she put the paper down again. She stood up very straight. “Why,” she said, “we can’t print this. This is … We can’t print this.”
“I intend to pay for it,” Jessie said. “Is that the problem?”
“No that is not the problem.”
“What is the problem, then? Why can’t you print it?”
“It’s simply unprintable.”
Jessie looked past Mrs. Walsh, looking across the room at Betty Lucas who was typing at her desk, and then at me. “Is there someone else I can talk to?” she said.
“What?”
“I’d like to talk to someone else, please.”
“But they’ll just tell you the same thing I have.”
“What about Mr. Arbuckle? He’s the editor, isn’t he?”
“Mr. Arbuckle is busy.”
“I’d like to talk to him.”
“But I’ve just told you. He’s busy.”
“Yes, but would you ask him to come over here?”
I stood up from my desk and walked across the room to the counter. Mrs. Walsh had begun to shake. The dark veins at the side of her head stood out beneath her white hair. “Is there something wrong, Mrs. Walsh?”
“This young woman thinks we will publish this in the paper.”
“What is it?”
“Here,” she said. “You read it. I refuse to.” She handed the tablet paper to me.
“Thank you, Mrs. Walsh,” I said. “Maybe you can begin closing up now.”
She turned and sat down at her desk. I could hear her behind me. She was upset. She had begun to whisper in the direction of Betty Lucas.
I read what was on the paper. It was a brief notice. It had been written in pencil and the paper it had been written on had been folded many times, into small squares, and at the edges it was frayed and ragged as though she had been carrying it around in her pocket for a week waiting for the right moment to bring it in. Then I looked at Jessie. Her eyes were very brown and her cheeks were still red from having been outside in the cold. I thought she looked very beautiful. There were bits of dry snow on the shoulders of her blue coat.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve heard your husband was gone. I suppose we’ve all heard that much. But I take it you haven’t heard from him yet either. Is that what this is about?”
“No. I haven’t heard from him.”
“Where do you think he is?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t any idea where Jack Burdette is.”
“You’ve notified the police, though?”
“Yes. But yesterday there was a bill in the mail.”
“A bill?”
“For some clothes he charged,” Jessie said. “So I called them back and told them they could stop looking for him. He isn’t lost.”
“I see,” I said. “I think I do, anyway.” Because it seemed obvious to me now, having read what she’d written on the piece of tablet paper, that she had come to a thorough understanding about the charges Burdette had made on Main Street and also about what those charges indicated about his disappearance. She hadn’t had to be present for the jokes and the talk in the bakery, or later to be there to hear the growing alarm people felt. She seemed to understand all too well what those things would mean to her as his wife in Holt.
I looked outside for a moment. On Main Street it was fully dark now. The streetlights had come on and it was snowing again. Behind me Mrs. Walsh and Betty Lucas had begun to put their coats on, preparing to go home for the evening. I waited until they had gone out through the back room into the alley. Then I turned back to Jessie.
“I wonder, Mrs. Burdette,” I said, “I wonder if you don’t think this is a little bit drastic? After all he might come back. Don’t you think? Maybe he’s just taking a vacation.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that. I’ve stopped thinking that. It’s been two weeks.”
“Yes. But two weeks aren’t a lifetime.”
“They’re long enough.”
“And so you still want me to print this in the paper? You do want that?”
She began to open her purse. “How much is it?”
“But wait a minute,” I said. “I haven’t said I
will yet.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were very large and dark. I picked up the penciled notice once more, reading it again while she turned to see that the two little boys were still seated quietly on the chair behind her. They were watching her like little birds.
Finally I said: “Very well, then. I’ll agree to print this. Although I don’t think it will do you any good. In fact I’m afraid it will do you a great deal of harm in town.”
She still wanted it printed. So I took out a form from a shelf under the counter. I copied her note onto the form as she had written it and afterward she paid for it.
She began to prepare TJ and Bobby to go outside again. They sat solemnly in front of her while she knelt to zip up their snowsuits; she helped them pull their mittens on.
I was standing behind the counter, watching her. Her blue coat was smooth and neat across the hips and her hair looked dark and lovely. “Listen,” I said, “will you let me drive you and your boys home? I’m leaving now anyway.”
She looked out the front window. Outside it was worse: it was snowing harder and the wind was blowing the snow horizontally along the street. “If it’s not any trouble,” she said. “I don’t want them to get cold again.”
“I’ll get my coat.”
Thus she allowed me to drive them across town to Gum Street that first time because it was snowing and because it was cold outside. I don’t recall that we said anything of significance. TJ sat on the seat between us and she had Bobby on her lap and I suppose during the six- or seven-block ride one of us managed to say something about the accumulation of snow. It was a quiet and awkward ride. But at the curb when I stopped to let them out I remember watching her take the boys up the sidewalk into their small house in the snow and I recall how she looked in her blue coat when she opened the door and then how the house itself looked after she had turned the lights on. Afterward I drove home again to the house where Nora and Toni were waiting for me to eat supper with them. But I wasn’t very much interested in supper just then, nor in going home again, nor even in my wife and daughter. I suppose by that time I was already a little in love with Jessie Burdette.
So in the following week I ran her notice as a kind of display ad on the back page of the Holt Mercury just as she had wanted it. I offset it with the announcements for Sunday church services and the obituaries for two longtime Holt County residents. Her notice said: I’m not responsible for whatever Jack Burdette did or will do. He’s no good. It doesn’t matter what people say. He’s a son of a bitch and I don’t care anymore.
I had my own reasons for printing it.
This public declaration of hers caused a stir in town when people read it. My father, for one, called me on the phone and said I was crazy to print such a thing. What did I think I was doing? It was unprofessional, he said; it was bad business practice. This was Holt County, Colorado, not San Francisco, California. Did I think he’d turned the paper over to have it ruined?
Of course other people in town felt similarly, as I knew they would, although their annoyance and their objections had more to do with moral considerations than with any concern over practical issues. Some of the older women were particularly incensed: they wrote letters to the editor about the appearance of profanity in the Holt Mercury. They didn’t like it, not the profanity nor the public display of raw emotion, and a number of the women canceled their subscriptions as a result.
Nonetheless, the commotion Jessie’s notice caused in Holt County that week was soon forgotten. It was a minor episode compared to what happened in the weeks and months that followed. And all of that got into the paper too.
Then there was one other small event which reflected on what was printed in the Mercury at about that time. It was in a minor key. It had to do with Jack Burdette’s mother.
She was an ancient woman now, gray-haired and very thin and even more severe than she had been before, but still living alone in the house on North Birch Street and still attending the Catholic church on Sunday mornings when she was able. After her son had been gone for about a month, in a kind of desperate form of masculine absurdity—since no woman would have even considered such a thing—several of the men in town decided that they would call on old Mrs. Burdette to ask her some questions. They thought it would be worthwhile to inquire if she had heard from her son. They hoped, if nothing else, that she might be able to suggest where he had gone.
So one afternoon they walked up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. But after Mrs. Burdette had opened the door to them she didn’t ask them in. She merely waited inside, in the dark front hallway of the house, listening to their questions and foolish talk from beyond the scarcely-opened door. They continued to explain to her what they had come for. Then they stopped talking; she hadn’t said anything yet. She had simply stared at them out of those clean little wire-rimmed glasses while she studied one face and then another. She didn’t seem to know or even to care what they were talking about. In exasperation, one of the men said to her: “But, Mrs. Burdette, look here: you do know Jack’s gone, don’t you? You do read the local newspaper? Why, it’s been in the Mercury. Haven’t you seen it?”
When she spoke finally, her voice sounded harsh and rusty, as if she hadn’t used it in days. “I don’t know anything about your newspapers,” she said. “And I don’t want to. I read the Bible.”
Then she shut the door in their faces. They could hear her locking it. Afterward they could hear the faint sound of her steps retreating into the interior of the silent house. So the men were left standing on the front porch. They felt foolish. They looked at one another and moved quickly down off the porch like little boys who had done something silly.
In any case, by the end of January the alarm in Holt had turned at last to shock and fear. People had finally grown afraid that something serious had happened to Jack Burdette and they were disturbed to think so. They still liked Burdette and thinking something bad had happened to him made them feel less secure for themselves in their corner of Colorado. The police had begun to send out all-points bulletins across the state, hoping that might turn him up. But nothing did. Burdette had disappeared without a trace.
Meanwhile at the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator things were a mess. Without Burdette there to manage the elevator every day, nothing was getting done properly and Arch Withers and the other members of the board of directors didn’t know what to do. Finally they decided to ask Doyle Francis to come back. They wanted Doyle to run things again, on a temporary basis, so that the routine shipment of corn and wheat might continue once more, until Burdette turned up, or until … well, until they had to hire his replacement. Still they refused to think it would come to that.
Then, about the middle of February, that private feeling of shock and fearfulness in Holt turned suddenly to hostility and public outrage. For, by that time, Doyle Francis had had sufficient opportunity to examine the books at the elevator. And in going over the books he had discovered that something was wrong. He called a special meeting of the board to tell them about it. It was on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Jesus Christ,” he told the men when they were assembled before him in his office. “What in the goddamn hell were you boys thinking of anyhow?”
“What do you mean?” Arch Withers said.
“Didn’t you even check on him? Didn’t you even think to look at these books yourselves?”
“Of course we did. We looked at them. Charlie Soames went over these books every year with us. So did Jack Burdette. What’s wrong with them?”
“Plenty,” Doyle said.
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like this, goddamn it.” Doyle pointed to the books spread out before him on the desk. “As near as I can tell, you’re missing about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That’s what’s wrong with them.”
“What? Hold on now. You mean to say—”
“I mean that’s just an old man’s estimate. It’s been going on for three or four years.”
“What’s be
en going on? What are you talking about?”
Doyle explained it to them. In careful, rational detail, he showed the men sitting across from him what had happened, how the books had been manipulated, how they had been juggled by someone who knew what he was doing. But just a little at first, Doyle said, pointing to the pages of neat figures, then in larger and larger amounts as the months passed. And all very cleverly, in a kind of sleight of hand, as a CPA might do it if he had in mind to do something neat and criminal. Doyle said it had taken him days to understand how it had been done. Finally he had, though. “Oh, it was careful,” he said. “I’ll give them that much.”
The men sat silently, looking at the opened books on the desk. They picked at their hands and refused to look at one another. For his part, Doyle Francis sat back in his chair watching them.
At last Arch Withers said: “All right. If what you say is true, who did it? Who’s them?”
“What?”
“You said them. Who do you mean by that?”
“Who do you think I mean?”
“How the hell do I know? Do you mean Charlie Soames?”
“Why not? Charlie did the books, didn’t he? He did the books when I was here before and I assume you boys kept him on after I left.”
“That son of a bitch,” Bob Wilcox said. Wilcox was the young man on the board. “Goddamn that old—”
“And Burdette?” Withers said, interrupting him. “What about him? Was he in on this too?”
“Of course he was. Don’t you think he had to be? Why else was he going to charge those new clothes on Main Street and then disappear and not come back home again?”
“By god,” Wilcox said. “He’s another son of a bitch. We ought to—”
“Shut up,” Withers said. “It’s too late for any of your hysterics.”
“That’s right,” Doyle said. “It’s too late for a lot of things. Except I believe that Charlie’s still in town, isn’t he?”
“He’s still in town.”
“Then I’ll go get him, if none of you will. I’ll bring that—”