Where You Once Belonged(38)

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.”