Where You Once Belonged(36)
The second time, that second Saturday—this would have been about the middle of May now—she drank a small glass of straight vodka at home in the kitchen before she went out. Also, she was dressed differently this time. There was more blue makeup over her eyes and she was wearing a dark red dress with a low neckline which showed a good deal of her full breasts, a dress which made no pretense of disguising her pregnancy; it was stretched tight across her stomach and hips. Preparing to go out, she combed her hair close against her cheeks, partially obscuring her face, and then she entered the Legion again, walked down the steps into that noise and intense Saturday night revelry a second time. And as before, she mounted a barstool, ordered a drink, and then she turned around, with that short red dress hiked two inches above the knees of her crossed legs, with a look of expectation, of invitation almost, held permanently on her beautiful face.
Well, it was pathetic in its lack of subtlely. But subtlety and pathos are not qualities which are much appreciated at the Legion on Saturday nights, so she only had to sit there for an hour this second time before Vince Higgims, Jr., asked to her to dance. Vince was one of Holt County’s permanent bachelors, a lank, black-haired man, a man considered by many of us to be well-educated in the ways of strong drink and ladies in tight dresses. “Come on, girl,” Vince said. “They’re playing my song.”
They were playing Lefty Frizzell’s “I Love You in a Thousand Ways,” with its promise of change, the end of blue days—a song with a slow enough tempo to allow Vince, Jr., to work his customary magic. He led Jessie out onto the crowded floor and pulled her close against his belt buckle; then he began to pump her arm, to walk her backward in that rocking two-step while she held that permanent look of invitation on her face and he went on smiling past her hair in obvious satisfaction. They danced several dances that way, including a fast one or two so that Vince could demonstrate his skill at the jitterbug—he twirled her around and performed intricate movements with his hands—then they cooled off again with a slow song.
And that’s how it began: innocently enough, I suppose, because unlike some of the others in town, at least Vince Higgims meant Jessie Burdette no harm. I doubt that Vince even had hopes of any postdance payoff. It was merely that he was drunk and that he liked to dance. The same cannot be said about the others, however. These other men were still remembering the grain elevator.
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.