Where You Once Belonged(14)

“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.