Where You Once Belonged(20)

“Boys,” he said, “I’m afraid you flatter me. The sad truth is, I’m too fat for one and too old for the other.”

Everyone laughed. Then one of the board members called out: “Yeah but, Doyle. What we want to know is, which one is it you’re too fat for?”

Then people did laugh. They turned to look at Doyle’s wife who was sitting at the head table beside Doyle’s vacated chair. She was a small plump kindly woman with white hair, and now her face was suddenly red and her hands were playing in embarrassment with a clubhouse napkin. Doyle spoke again:

“Course,” he said, “I suppose I could always lose some weight. I mean I might even manage to get skinny again. Don’t you think?”

People laughed once more, and when he carried the box over to his chair and set it down and then bent and kissed his white-haired wife loudly on one of her red cheeks, kissing her with obvious good humor and genuine affection even after more than forty years of marriage, people applauded.

So that much of Doyle Francis’s retirement banquet was a success. People in Holt felt good about it. And I believe they felt good about the final proceedings that night too.

Because what happened next was the public announcement that Jack Burdette had been chosen to succeed Doyle Francis as manager of the Co-op Elevator. Arch Withers made the announcement. Leaning heavily on the lectern, speaking solemnly to the audience, he said that he and the board recognized that it would be hard to fill Doyle’s shoes, but that they had decided to look no farther than right here at home. After thinking about it thoroughly they had come to a unanimous decision; they had all agreed to promote Jack to manager.

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.