Where You Once Belonged

by Kent Haruf

  “Damn it,” Withers said. “I already told you to shut up. Now do it.” Young Bob Wilcox started to say something more, but Withers turned and stared at him. Then Wilcox closed his mouth tight and Withers turned back to Doyle Francis. “So what do you suggest we do about this? You seem to of thought about it.”

  “Oh yes. I’ve thought about it,” Doyle said. “It’s about all I have thought about for the last two weeks.”

  “So? Are you going to tell us what to do or not?”

  “There’s only one thing to do. We let the sheriff’s office handle it now. We call Bud Sealy and tell him to go over to Charlie Soames’s house and arrest him and lock him up and then we wait for the trial. What else is there?”

  “But there’s still the money, isn’t there? What about the money?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well goddamn it. It was our money. It was all us shareholders’ money.”

  “Sure it was,” Doyle said. “And you can tell that to the judge too, when you get the chance. But I don’t suppose that will get it back for you. Jack Burdette’s been gone for a month a half and god only knows where he’s gone to. But wherever he is, he’s already begun to spend it. You can count on that.”

  There was silence again while this new thought sank in. The men stared hatefully at the accountant’s books on Doyle’s desk. After a time, Arch Withers roused himself once more.

  “Go on, then.” he said. “What are you waiting on? Make your goddamn call. Call Bud Sealy.”

  “No,” Doyle Francis said. “I don’t think I will. I think one of you boys ought to be able to call him. It’s your funeral. I’ve been thinking about this mess for too long already.”

  So Arch Withers, as president of the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator’s board of directors, called Bud Sealy from the manager’s office that Tuesday afternoon, with the books still spread out on the desk before him and while Doyle Francis and the other men watched him.

  And subsequently that same afternoon Bud Sealy arrested Charlie Soames at his home in the six hundred block on Cedar Street, where Soames had a small office at the back of the house. Sealy drove over to the house, parked and knocked on the door. He was let in by Mrs. Soames. She was an excitable old woman with heavy breasts and meaty arms. She led the sheriff back to Charlie’s little office and stood in the doorway.

  When Sealy entered the room—it was all neat and tidy as ever—Charlie Soames seemed to be waiting for him. He was sitting at his desk with his hands folded and he seemed to have everything in order. It was as though he had prepared himself for Sealy’s arrival, as if he were glad that it was over now. “So you know,” Soames said.

  “Yeah. I just got a call from Arch Withers.”

  “It took them long enough. I expected you a month ago.”

  “I’m here now. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ready?” Mrs. Soames said. “Ready for what?” She was still standing in the doorway, displacing air. Her hair stood out from her pink head. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Your husband’s got himself into trouble.”

  “My husband? What do you mean? What could he do?”

  “Enough,” the sheriff said. “Now maybe you’d better go into the other room for a minute.”

  “I’m not going into the other room. So he has done something. The old fool! He’s done something and now what am I supposed to do?”

  “For one thing,” Sealy said, “you’re going to be quiet.”

  “I didn’t do anything. You can’t tell me in my own house to—”

  “Yes. You’re going to be quiet. Or I’m going to gag you.”

  Mrs. Soames glared at the sheriff. “You wouldn’t touch me. You wouldn’t dare touch a lady.”

  “Try me,” he said. He took a step toward her and she backed up.

  “Oh!”

  Then she began to shriek. Sealy shut the door on her. They could hear her excited noises. But after a moment the noises stopped.

  “That’s better,” he said. He turned back to her husband.

  Charlie Soames was still seated silently at his clean desk. It was as if he had been waiting for this too. Now he stood up and Sealy told him he had the right to remain silent. Then he put handcuffs around Soames’s thin wrists. Afterward they walked out of the tidy little office and on through the house. Mrs. Soames was waiting for them in the dining room; she followed the two men toward the front hallway. When they stopped at the door so the sheriff could open it, Mrs. Soames began to shriek again. She rushed her husband and began to slap at him, at his face and neck. Soames fell down under her hands. She slapped at his head. Finally Bud Sealy shoved in between them, pushing Mrs. Soames away.

  “Quit that,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing? Goddamn it, stop that now.”

  He lifted the old man by the arm and they went outside. Mrs. Soames followed them out onto the front porch. She stood watching angrily as the car drove away.

  When they arrived at the courthouse Sealy walked Charlie Soames down to the basement to the sheriff’s office and booked him for the suspected embezzlement of Co-op funds. Afterward he fingerprinted him and then he led Soames back to a cell. He stood over him while the old man sat down on the cot. Soames looked very small and tired. But he wasn’t quite defeated yet.

  “Well,” the sheriff said. “You want to tell me about this?”

  “What’s there to tell?

  “Oh there ought to be something.”

  “Do you mean you want a formal confession?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Well. For starters—I’m just curious—why in hell didn’t you take off too? You had your chances, didn’t you?”

  “You mean why didn’t I leave?”

  “Sure. Like Jack Burdette did. You and Burdette were in this together, weren’t you? Why didn’t you jump up and leave when he did? You could of left with him.”

  “Him,” Charlie Soames said. The mention of Burdette seemed to awaken something in him. He sat up straight, agitated now. “Why that man … that—”

  “What about him?”

  “He didn’t even tell me he was leaving. We agreed on it. He promised me. He wasn’t supposed to leave yet. Then he—”

  “Sure,” Sealy said. “Then he.”

  “But you don’t understand.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No. Because we were waiting for it to amount to two hundred thousand. That’s why. And I kept telling him we ought to leave now. I told him we have to take it and get out now. Before the auditors find out, I said. They were getting suspicious. I could tell that. I knew they were. I tried to tell him. But my god, that man kept saying: ‘Just another fifty. Just another fifty.’ Like it was play money or something. Oh, he didn’t understand the risks. He didn’t understand anything. And it was his idea from the beginning. I let him talk me into it. But I was the one that had to do the books, wasn’t I? Not him. And he kept promising me: ‘Wait until it’s two hundred thousand, then we’ll leave together.’ That’s what he said. We agreed on that. He promised me. But then he—”

  “Yeah,” Sealy said. “Well. You poor dumb old son of bitch. So he didn’t tell you he was leaving either.”

  “I thought I could trust him.”

  “Of course. Except you weren’t the only one in town that thought that, now were you?”

  “I trusted him, though. And what was I going to do now? Where was I going to go? He had the money. He took everything. He withdrew it all out of the bank over in Sterling. And—”

  “Sterling? You mean you kept the money over in Sterling?”

  “That’s where we had our account. I thought it would be safer. But I still thought I could trust him. I still believed he was trustworthy.”

  “That’s right,” Sealy said. “Because he promised you. Because you agreed on it.”

  Soames stopped talking for a moment. He looked at the sheriff.

  “
But wouldn’t you have said he could be trusted? Didn’t you think Jack Burdette was a trustworthy man?”

  “I don’t know,” Sealy said, “Probably. But I might of said the same thing about you too, Charlie. And now look at you. Jesus Christ, look how you turned out.”

  * * *

  By evening everyone in Holt County knew about the arrest of Charlie Soames. They had heard about the embezzlement of Co-op funds and about his three-year involvement in it. So the panic and outrage had already begun. The Co-op Elevator was owned in shares by half the people in the area and they all wanted blood.

  They would have preferred Jack Burdette’s and Charlie Soames’s blood, both, but Burdette had disappeared. Burdette was already in California, lost somewhere in the streets of Los Angeles. The police had finally managed to trace him that far, but then they had lost track of him. Consequently people in Holt began to understand that they were going to have to content themselves with the arrest of his accomplice, with the indictment and conviction of old Charlie Soames, and then with his rightful punishment. They expected to get something satisfying out of him at least.

  And that was awful, really. Charlie Soames was already seventy years old by that time. Like Jack Burdette, he had grown up here. And everyone knew him just as they thought they had known Jack Burdette, except that Soames hadn’t any of Burdette’s flair for sudden and outlandish acts. He was merely an old man who had always lived here. He had spent his entire life being steady and normal and unremarkable. For almost half a century he had been a bookkeeper and accountant for various businessmen in town, and at forty he had married a woman who was only a year or two younger than he was, a woman who dominated him completely, and together they hadn’t been able to have any children. Or perhaps they hadn’t even tried to have children. No one knew about that. His wife liked to talk, but that didn’t happen to be one of the topics she liked to talk about. No, the truth was, Charlie Soames’s entire life had been about as gray as a man’s life can be. Now suddenly he had done this.

  So he was arrested. And in very short time he was indicted. Then he posted bail and he was released to await the trial. He made the bail payment out of his own meager life’s savings, out of money which he had accumulated over years of frugality; it had nothing to do with the embezzlement; he had earned this particular money by doing bookwork for others—the police had checked. So he was released and then he went home again to his wife. But that must have been worse than sitting in a cell in the basement of the Holt County Courthouse on Albany Street. He would have been left alone for a few hours in jail. There would have been silence there. But now, once he was home again, Mrs. Soames must have made it hot for him. She was capable of that. She must have ground him like hamburger.

  Perhaps that was why, about a week after he was released, he showed up on Main Street once more. It was in the middle of a weekday morning. He walked into Bradbury’s Bakery to have coffee. I don’t know, perhaps he had in mind to test the water, to take a kind of reading of Holt County feelings about things. The bakery was crowded as usual at that time of day. Businessmen and housewives and store clerks and one or two farmers were drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, sitting about the room at the various tables. They were all talking.

  Then Soames walked into the bakery and everyone got quiet. They watched this small tidy familiar old man fill his coffee cup at the urn at the front counter, watched him pay for it and then turn to find a seat. Across the room there was a vacant chair at a table near the wall. Ralph Bird and a couple of other men happened to be sitting at the table. Soames approached them.

  “Wait just a goddamn minute,” Ralph Bird said. “Where do you think you’re going with that?”

  Soames stood beside the table staring at him.

  “Get the hell out of here. You ain’t sitting here with us.”

  Soames looked at the other men. He had done books for each of them. They stared back at him.

  And he was just an old defeated man now and he knew everyone in the room. His hand began to shake. The coffee in the cup spilled out over his hand and shirt cuff and dripped onto the floor. He was making a mess. He continued to stand there, his hand shaking and the hot coffee burning his hand, while his eyes clouded over. His eyes seemed to lose their focus.

  At last one of the girls came out from behind the counter and removed the cup from his hand. “Here,” she said, “give me that.” It was as if he were a child. She wiped his hand with a dishrag and knelt to wipe the floor.

  Then Soames looked once more at the people in the bakery. They were still watching him. He turned and walked out of the store onto the sidewalk. They could see him through the plate-glass windows. He stood for a moment, looking up and down the street. Finally he went home again.

  At his home on Cedar Street he entered by the front door and climbed the stairs to the attic. His wife was at the back of the house, peeling carrots at the kitchen sink. Later she would tell people that she didn’t even know he was home yet. He was always so quiet.

  She did hear the explosion in the attic, however. Several other people did too. The neighbors heard it.

  Because, after he had mounted the stairs, he had entered the dusty box-filled room and had sat down on an old trunk near the chimney, under a single dim light bulb suspended from one of the rafters. Sitting on the trunk, he had put a shell in the chamber of an old .22 single-shot rifle. Then he had placed the butt of the rifle on the floor between his feet and had closed his tired little mouth around the gun barrel. And whether he paused once to look about him, as people do in movies, to take one last look out the attic window toward the tops of the trees standing up in the backyard, no one knows. We simply know that he fired a single sphere of lead up through his palate into his brain and that this little sphere of lead destroyed him.

  It destroyed him, but it didn’t kill him. The bullet had lodged in his brain in such a way that he was still alive.

  He was slumped against the chimney when his wife ran upstairs to find out what had caused the noise. The gun was still between his knees. There was considerable blood running down onto his shirtfront and his head was thrown back horribly. He was still breathing, though. There were red bubbles coming up out of his mouth. Looking at him, Mrs. Soames became hysterical. She began to scream. Then the neighbors arrived and it was one of them who called the police.

  They flew him immediately to a hospital in Denver. And in Denver the surgeons did what they could; they closed the hole in the roof of his mouth and made other repairs. But in the end they decided to leave the bullet where it was. They said it might kill him to try to remove it. Afterward when he was well enough to be released from the hospital he was brought back home again to Holt.

  And so he looked all right, more or less, when we saw him again. He still resembled himself; he was still a neat tidy little old man. It was only his eyes that looked different. His eyes appeared to be blank now, expressionless, as if there was nothing behind them. He could eat and he could drink liquids. He could still function. He could even talk a little, in a harsh lisping monotone. But it didn’t matter if he could talk. What he had to say now was all nonsense, mere jabber and repeated dribble about nothing.

  So old Mrs. Soames didn’t know what to do with him then. She dressed him and fed him every day, and sat him on the swing on the front porch. And occasionally she stood him out in the front yard where he could hold a garden hose in his hands. But, if she let him, he would stand there all afternoon, slapping water on the grass. He seemed to like playing with water. Then people would walk by the house and see him. And sometimes they would say something to him, something cruel and nasty, something vindictive like: “You old son of a bitch. Why don’t you try it again? Why don’t you use a deer rifle this time? Just try it once. Oh, goddamn you, anyway.” And Charlie would simply go on spraying the grass with water while some of it ran off his elbow onto his shoes; he would nod and jabber at the people passing by and he would seem to listen to their talk, cocking his head like some
ancient, confused little bird. And when they moved away down the street he would even seem to follow them with his blank eyes. But none of that meant anything to him. It was all a mere show to him, a display of shadows that happened to move and talk. None of it held any significance.

  If he had only known it then, I suppose he might even have been happy. He couldn’t understand anything his wife or anyone else in Holt had told him, and he couldn’t recall the first thing about debits and credits and about double entry bookkeeping. Consequently he knew nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, about his involvement in the embezzlement of Co-op funds.

  So he was in a perfect state now: he was mad. He couldn’t be bothered anymore and he was completely beyond the reach of the law. There wasn’t any way to punish him for what he had done. He was beyond all of that. Any thought of putting him on trial was out of the question.

  • 8 •

  Now people in Holt felt they had to turn elsewhere for some form of restitution. They felt doubly cheated. Burdette had disappeared at the end of December and every day he was gone it became more obvious that the police were never going to locate him and bring him back. Now his accomplice wasn’t even going to be put on trial.

  So in time people began to turn on his wife, on Jessie. They wanted satisfaction from someone and she was still here, she was still in Holt, and it made it easier that they thought of her as an outsider. She had been in Holt for almost six years, but she had always been too aloof for her own good, people said. From the day she had arrived she had held herself apart. It was as if she felt she were too good for them—that’s what people thought. So they were naturally a little in awe of her, and a little antagonistic. They didn’t understand her; they thought of her as that woman Jack Burdette had discovered in some Holiday Inn in Oklahoma, that small quiet overly independent woman he had met and married in Tulsa when he should have married Wanda Jo Evans, a local girl whom everybody liked and admired. No, she had not grown up here, and there wasn’t anyone in town who knew very much about her.