by Kent Haruf
They all began to dance with her. It was as if Vince had broken some taboo, some barrier of accepted behavior, so that now it was not only acceptable to dance with Jack Burdette’s pregnant wife, it was required; it was a matter of community honor and restitution. And so, ten or fifteen men took their turns with her that night. They danced her hard around the floor. They swung her violently around; they held her clenched against themselves, forcing their own slack stomachs against her swollen hard one. From that point on they danced every song with her. And all that time Jessie seemed to welcome it, to smile and speak pleasantly to all the men who held her. When it was over, though, when the band finally stopped playing and the lights were turned on once again, she was very pale; she was sweating and her dress looked wrinkled, worn out, stained, as if it had been cheapened. She went home exhausted.
But the local routine was established now—that three-week-long Holt County system of payment was initiated and accepted. And so the third time, that third Saturday night in May, it was just the same—only it was worse. This time the men not only danced with her in the same fierce vindictive manner but they also insisted on buying her drinks. She was wearing that same red dress too, washed and pressed again but showing the additional week of pregnancy. It looked tighter on her now, riper, as if the seams would burst at any moment, while above the deep neckline the blue veins in her full breasts showed clearly. Nevertheless, she danced with every man who asked her. They danced and danced—waltzes, jitterbugs, country two-steps, a kind of local hard-clenched fox-trot—anything and everything the men thought they knew how to do, regardless of the violence and energy it required. And this dancing, if you can call it that, this intense communal jig, stopped only when the band stopped. Then, during those ten minutes of brief rest between sets, they drank. They sat her on a barstool and three or four of them stood around her, telling jokes and buying drinks—taking turns with this too, ordering her double shots of scotch or whiskey or vodka—it didn’t matter what the combination or how unlikely the mix—they ordered liquor for her to drink and insisted that she drink it. And she did that too. She accepted it all, seemed to welcome it all, as if she were privately obliged to honor any demand.
Of course by the evening’s end she was even more exhausted this time than she had been the previous Saturday night. Also, she was very close to being drunk. When the lights came on at last, when the last man stopped dancing with her, she could barely walk off the dance floor. She was weak on her feet; there was a drunken waver in her step. She didn’t say anything, though. Nothing in the way of complaint, I mean. And when that last man thought to ask her if she were coming back again the next week, she said: “You want me to, don’t you?”
“Why course,” he said. “Don’t you know I’ll be here? We’ll all be here.”
“Then I will too,” she said.
And she was. Only, by this time, many of the women and at least some of the men in town were growing a little uneasy, a little uncomfortable with this particular form of weekly gambol and amusement. So not everyone showed up the following week, that last Saturday in May. Jessie did, though. It was the last time that she went to the Legion for a long time.
But again it was the same. She was wearing that same red dress, as if it were a uniform now, an essential part of the routine, and there was the same excessive amount of makeup on her face. She was drinking too—it was obvious in fact that she’d been drinking heavily even before she arrived at the Legion. She entered the bar-and-dance room about nine o’clock and didn’t even bother this time to lift herself onto a barstool. She merely waited inside the door, with the music and smoke and laughter already at full strength around her. She didn’t have to wait long: two or three men discovered her at the same moment and ushered her in.
“What are you drinking?” one of them said.
“Don’t you want to dance first?”
“No, let’s have a drink. I’m buying.”
“All right,” she said. “A whiskey sour, then.”
“Make it a double,” he said.
She drank it fast, as if it were no more than water or lemonade, as though she was no more conscious of what she drank than she was of the banter around her. When she had finished it, she set the glass down and said: “Now who’s going to ask me to dance? I thought you boys knew how to dance.”
“I’ll show you how to dance,” one of them said. “Come on.”
This was Alden Haines, a man of forty-three who was only recently divorced and who farmed a couple of irrigated circles of corn east of town. He was not a bad man really, but he was still angry at the time about the divorce: his wife had been the one to initiate the legal proceedings. More to the point, he was a shareholder in the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator. “See if you can keep up with this,” he said.
He took her out onto the dance floor. Pushing roughly through the other couples, he began immediately to swing her about the floor in circles and abrupt spins. Jessie kept up with him, moving him back and forth or circling at the end of his outstretched arm. Watching her, she seemed almost feverish with intensity, as if she were resolved to test some private limits. When the dance ended, she and Haines were both sweating. The band played a slower song next and Haines pulled her close to himself, clenching his hands behind her back while she held tightly to his neck. He rocked her backward across the floor in time to the slow music. Neither of them talked. When the song ended, someone else cut in, and so it began again, with the same intensity, with the same feverish resolve. It went on in that way until the end of the set.
Then the band broke for ten minutes and the local men bought her drinks again at the bar. While they stood around her, not speaking to her very much but merely talking and joking among themselves while still paying close attention to the level of liquor in her glass, the rest of the people in the Legion that night were also ordering fresh drinks. The two or three barmaids were kept busy carrying trays of glasses and bottles out to them in the booths. Across the room somebody started throwing ice cubes at one of the barmaids to get her attention. “Stop that,” she called. “I see you—I’ll be there in a minute.”
Then the ten-minute break was over. The band resumed their places at the far end of the room and began to play. And Alden Haines led Jessie out onto the floor again. It was a fast song, the band’s rendition of “That’ll Be the Day.” He swung her violently out at the end of his arm—and that was the end of it. Almost before it had begun, it was finished, completed. I suppose it was the ice cubes on the floor. Or perhaps during the break someone had spilled beer or liquor in the dance area. No one was certain what it was. But in any case, her foot slipped on something wet and she went down. She tried to catch herself when she fell but she couldn’t; she fell forward, hard, and didn’t get up immediately. Afterward she lay there in her red dress while the people around her stopped dancing. She turned onto her side, pulling her legs upward against herself. Haines leaned over her.
“You all right?” he said. “Can you get up?”
He lifted under her arm, helping her to stand. She was very pale. She was sweating again now, her face shining like wet chalk in the dim light. In the center of the dance floor she stood unsteadily on her feet while Alden Haines held her arm and people watched. “I think I need to go to the rest room,” she said.
“You want me to walk you upstairs?”
“No. I want to be alone.”
Later it was obvious that the pains had already begun while she was so still on the dance floor—those who were there remember seeing her eyes focus peculiarly, a kind of brief intermittent stare—but she refused any assistance. She walked off the dance floor by herself, past the bar and up the stairs to the rest room near the front entrance. She went inside, into one of the toilet stalls, and sat down. They waited for her to come back. When she was still there ten minutes later, a couple of women went in to check on her. She was still seated on the toilet, still conscious but quiet and very white. She was bent forward over her knees. There were
clots of blood in the toilet. One of the women came outside into the hallway and said they should call the ambulance.
The ambulance got there in five or six minutes. The attendants went in and brought her back out in a wheelchair, tipping it backward to get down the front steps, and then they pushed the chair up a ramp into the ambulance and drove to the hospital. None of that took very long—the hospital is only three or four blocks east of the Legion—but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had taken an hour.
When they arrived at the hospital, they wheeled her into the emergency room and Dr. Martin laid her down on a bed and examined her. He lifted her dress and noticed the blood. Then he listened for fetal heart tones. He couldn’t hear anything, though: the little girl inside her was already dead. Afterward he said the placenta and uterine walls had separated. When she fell, she had gone immediately into labor, and because its source of oxygen had been cut off, the baby had died within minutes—probably during the time Jessie was still in the rest room. He didn’t tell her that, though. He didn’t want to upset her: she still had to deliver the baby.
They gave her Pitocin to help stimulate the contractions. But she was in labor for nearly ten hours and there was additional loss of blood and she might have died. But finally she delivered the baby late on Sunday evening.
Afterward they held it up so she could look at it for a moment. The little girl was ashen but otherwise it looked quite normal. Jessie reached up and touched one of its feet. Then they took it away and one of the nurses said: “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Burdette.”
So people in Holt thought she would cry then. They thought she would break down at last. I suppose they wanted her to do that. But she didn’t. Perhaps she had gone past the point where human tears make any difference in such cases, because instead, she turned her face away and shut her eyes and after a while she went to sleep.
She stayed in the hospital for most of that next week. Mrs. Waters, her neighbor, took it upon herself to care for TJ and Bobby during that period. The old woman brought them in to see their mother as soon as she was able to have company and Jessie talked to them every day and held their hands and brushed the hair off their foreheads. She refused, however, to talk to any of the hospital staff about the little girl she had delivered and she refused absolutely to talk to a local minister when he came to her room to visit her. She preferred to lie quietly, looking out the window. When the week was over, they released her and she went home again, to the old Fenner house on Hawthorne Street. And then in another week she returned to work at the Holt Cafe. In the following months she continued to refill the townspeople’s cups with coffee and to bring them steak and potatoes from the kitchen.
And so I don’t know what monetary value people place on baby girls in other areas, but here we learned in May that year that $150,000—less the resale value of a two-bedroom house in the middle of town—was a figure that seemed appropriate.
• 9 •
That was in the spring of 1977. Afterward things in Holt returned to a quiet normalcy. Jessie continued to live at the west edge of town with her sons. The two boys were growing up and she went on working every day at the Holt Cafe and gradually people in town stopped talking about her husband. Of course Charlie Soames was still here. He was still nodding his head and lisping nonsense while he watered the grass or sat on the front porch swing. But in time people grew used to his altered presence, so that it was no longer maddening to see him. They began to forget about his part in the events of that spring. They thought of him now, if they happened to think of him at all, as just an old empty-headed man who lived in town on Cedar Street. Matters in Holt grew quiet and routine once more.
Then in the summer of 1982 another series of events began which ultimately had relevance for this story. These events began with the death of another girl in Holt.
She was a beautiful child. She resembled her mother. She had Nora’s rich black hair and white skin, and she was small-boned and bright and neat looking, and she had her mother’s blue eyes. But she was like me too, in some ways. She didn’t like to stay home. She wanted to be out where there was something happening; she wanted to know things.
So she was a favorite among her friends, and when she was a teenager she was out of the house most of the time, going places, even if it was only to ride up and down Main Street in someone’s car. She and her mother were very close, however. And I believe Nora was silently pleased that Toni was unlike herself in that one regard at least, that she was lively and gregarious and had friends, because Nora had very few friends and was often very lonely in Holt. Nora had never liked living here; it was too raw for her; there wasn’t the slightest hint of any culture that she could recognize. Consequently she spent much of her time alone, gardening in the backyard, growing roses, and she read a great deal. Then too, she would often drive to Boulder for a weekend, to visit her aging father, Dr. Kramer, the old professor. Afterward she would come back to Holt and appear to be cheerful for a day or two. But it would never last. After eighteen years of marriage we had achieved an unhappy and silent compromise: for Toni’s sake we stayed together. We didn’t talk about the future and while we were generally kind in our daughter’s presence and made a pretense at being contented, we were essentially indifferent to one another. But in the summer of 1982 even that seemed too much to pretend about any longer.
It was the custom in Holt County for graduating high-school seniors to have a keg party out in the country on the night of graduation. Usually some of the parents sponsored the party, thinking it would be better to have adults in attendance to ensure that the kids didn’t do anything too crazy, to see to it that when they left in the early hours of the morning someone in the car was sober enough to drive home. Besides the beer, the parents provided a midnight breakfast, enough for everyone, and such an arrangement had always worked satisfactorily. Afterward there would be something eventful for the kids to remember, to mark their passage into adulthood, and no one got hurt.
Toni, our sixteen-year-old daughter, had gone to the party that year. Not that she was graduating yet—she had just finished her sophomore year at the Holt County Union High School—but she was dating a boy who was a senior and so she had gone with him. He was a nice kid. Nora and I both liked him. He was generally a responsible boy and he had treated Toni with affectionate kindness. They had been dating for almost a year. His name was Danny Pohlmeier.
The night of the party Nora and I had gone to sleep as usual, after watching the ten o’clock news. Then about four o’clock the police woke us. It was Dale Willard, the deputy sheriff, who came and knocked on the door. I put my pants on to go downstairs. Willard was standing on the front porch in the dark. I turned the light on. Under the porch light Willard’s face looked pasty and tired. “There’s been an accident,” he said. “You’d better come down to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong? Is it Toni?”
“It doesn’t look very good.”
“You mean she’s badly hurt?”
Willard didn’t say anything.
“Tell me,” I said. “Is she badly hurt?”
“You better come down to the hospital. I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“You mean it’s worse than that.”
Willard looked at me quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then there wasn’t anything more to say. He turned and walked off the porch. But he stopped again and turned back. “I’ll wait for you in the car. If you want me to.”
I stood watching him a moment. He walked on out to the county’s blue police car where it was parked at the curb and got in and closed the door quietly and then sat waiting with his hands on the steering wheel, looking straight ahead out through the windshield. I couldn’t move yet. It was cool outside on the porch. There was a slight breeze blowing. The stars were very high and clear overhead. Oh, god. Finally I went back upstairs to tell Nora.
She was awake, sitting up in the bed in her nightgown. Her hair appeared very black against her nightgown and her pale shoulder
s. “Who was it?” she said.
“Dale Willard.”
“What did he want? Doesn’t he have something to do with the police?”
“He’s the deputy sheriff.”
“What did he want?”
“It’s about Toni,” I said. “She’s at the hospital. He said Toni’s been hurt.”
“No,” Nora said. “Oh no. No.”
She didn’t say anything more. Her eyes widened and then narrowed, and her lips moved, but there was no other sound now. She seemed to be holding herself from any further display of emotion. She got dressed and we went downstairs.
Outside Dale Willard was still sitting in the county police car in front of our house.
“Do you want to ride with him?” I said. “He’s waiting for us.”
Nora shook her head.
So I walked over to the car and told him we would drive ourselves. We got into our own car and drove to the hospital. The streets were empty and quiet and the houses were all dark, but Dale Willard followed us anyway. I believe he felt responsible for seeing that we got there safely.
At the hospital one of the nurses met us at the back entrance and showed us into a waiting room. Then she left. In a moment Dr. Martin came in and we stood up while he told us about it. One of the other kids in a car driving home from the party half an hour later had discovered them. Toni and the Pohlmeier boy had left the party together, at about two-thirty, and apparently he was driving too fast and he had gotten over too far onto the loose sand at the side of the country road. Then he must have tried too quickly to correct it—the car had rolled over four or five times. They couldn’t be sure how many times it had rolled over, but when it had stopped it was in the barrow ditch, upside down. There was glass everywhere and the roof was smashed down level with the hood and trunk.