Where You Once Belonged(37)

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.