Where You Once Belonged

  The next day, on Sunday morning, most of the men in town, and many of the women and children too, came out to look at the car. In the night the snow had stopped and it was very bright and cold.

  I was there too, with my father. At the time he was still teaching me to take photographs for the local newspaper, for the Holt Mercury, which he owned and edited. When he woke me that morning he said that I should bring the camera.

  He parked the car on Main Street and then we got out and walked along the tracks. There were deep scars in the railroad ties where the iron wheels of the old man’s Buick had gouged the ties after the rubber had been torn off. The scars made it look as though some madman had plowed a furrow along the railroad tracks with a single-bottom plow. One of the ruined tires was down in the weeds and there was another one ahead of us where we could see the trail it had made in the snow before it tipped over. I took a picture of it.

  Then we went on, walking along the tracks beside the train. Ahead of us we could see that there were people gathered around the smashed Buick. It was shoved free of the train now, into the ditch below the engine. There were men and women peering inside the car and talking to one another.

  “You had better take photographs of that,” my dad said. “But stand up here so you can get the side of the train in it.”

  I crowded the boxcars and snapped photographs of what I saw through the camera. Then my dad took several pictures too, to be certain he had something suitable for the front page. Afterward he gave the camera back to me and we went on.

  When we arrived at the car it was standing upright in the ditch weeds on its bent rims. The driver’s door was crushed in, shoved against the passenger’s side. In the door there was the deep impact, as in a clay mold or a piece of tin, where the train engine had hit it. All the glass had been popped out and scattered.

  Off to the side, George Foley, who was a barber in Holt and who lived near the tracks, was explaining to two or three other men what had happened. My dad and I stopped to hear what he was saying.

  He was saying in the night how he had heard a sudden bang and immediately afterward a continuous screeching; he had gotten up to see what it was. The train had almost stopped then, he said, but down the tracks in front of it there was a car that was caught and the car was still being shoved along ahead of the engine and there were sparks flying off into the air. So he had gotten dressed and had run outside down the tracks to the head of the train. By then it was stopped completely. “But it didn’t make no difference,” he said. “It was already too late. He was already dead.”

  “How do you know that?” my dad said.

  “What?”

  “How do you know that he was already dead?”

  “Well wouldn’t he be?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to think he was anyway.”

  “That’s what I mean. If a goddamn freight train hits somebody in the middle of the night and it’s going sixty miles a hour—if that don’t kill him outright, I don’t know what else will.”

  “Probably,” my dad said. “What else did you see?”

  “Plenty,” George Foley said, “I saw enough.”

  He told us the men were already out of the train engine by the time he ran up to the car. They were moving about, trying to pull the car away from the front of the engine by hand, but it was stuck fast, enmeshed with the engine, and meanwhile the big headlight still worked back and forth above them, shining down the tracks into the snow. Then he looked inside the car.

  “And my god, he was just meat. That’s all he was. He was just hamburger with clothes on. And his clothes, why they was just bloody rags.”

  Then he told us that the police had arrived. However, there was still some confusion about what to do. It would have been faster to have used cutting torches, but there was gasoline dripping out of the car and they were afraid of starting a fire. Finally somebody thought of hydraulic jacks. Just before morning, then, by working in shifts they were able to pry the car loose and to remove the body. They brought it out in pieces. The police took what they could of it over to John Baker at the Holt Mortuary to prepare for burial.

  “And I seen it all,” Foley told us. “I seen everything.”

  Then he was finished. There were others walking along the tracks toward us to look at the car: Ed Taylor and Mrs. Taylor, who had come into town to attend church; they were dressed up. Foley walked over to them and began to tell them his story.

  My dad watched him for a moment. “That’s the trouble with eyewitnesses,” he said. “They just think they’ve seen it all. And every time they tell it they think they have to improve on what they’ve already told somebody else.”

  “Didn’t you believe any of it?” I said.

  “Maybe. But George Foley likes to hear himself talk. It’s how he makes his living.”

  “I thought he was a barber.”

  “He is.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “So now I’m going over to the depot,” my dad said, “to see if I can find the engineers. I want to hear what they have to say. Then I’ll check with the police. In the meantime you can take some more pictures.”

  He walked away toward the depot. I didn’t know what more he had in mind for me to take pictures of. But I moved around to the far side of the car and took several photographs from that angle, with the car in the foreground and the train risen up black and massive behind it. There was still snow on the ground where people had tracked it and the contrast of the snow and the train should have made a good picture, but I forgot about facing into the sun so that later when the photographs were developed it all looked washed out. There was a lot that I didn’t know yet.

  When I had finished I decided I wanted to look inside the car. I hadn’t done that yet and thought I wanted to. Afterward I was sorry I had. There was blood on the crushed dashboard and there were ragged bits of the old man’s coat stuck to the driver’s door. And hanging from one of the rags was a flap of skin which still had hair growing from it. I felt sick. I walked away from the car back along the tracks toward Main Street.

  I intended to wait for my dad in our car, where we had parked it at the curb in front of Kinsey’s Hardware. But before I got there I met Jack Burdette.

  Jack was alone. He was walking toward me along the tracks in his winter coat; his face looked pasty and he hadn’t shaved yet. I stopped when we were close to one another.

  “Did you see it?” he said.

  “Yes. But I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Everybody is,” he said.

  Then I didn’t know what to say. I thought of warning him. But I didn’t.

  He went on and I turned to watch him walk along the tracks. Beside the train he looked cold and dark and solitary. Then he reached the car and I could see that George Foley had discovered him. Foley was already beginning to talk. He put his arm around Jack, while the other people stepped back a little, but I didn’t want to watch it. I knew what Foley had to tell him. I went on and got into our car and turned the heater on and waited for my dad to come back from the depot.

  • 3 •

  They buried Jack’s father on the following Tuesday in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town. In the nights preceding the funeral there was a wake, then on the day of the funeral there was a Mass of the Dead in the morning at St. John’s Church. Afterward, outside, it was very cold standing at the gravesite. Old Father O’Brien said quickly what he had to over the closed casket and spoke in Latin while he scattered ashes. When it was over those of us who attended the gravesite rites filed past Jack and his mother and took off our gloves to shake their hands. Then we went home, or back to school or back to work, and they were left alone.

  Things were tight then. Don Nexey, who owned the lumberyard, gave Mrs. Burdette a check equal to two months of her husband’s salary—which was generous of him, people said; he wasn’t required to do that—but the extra money would not have gone far, probably not much beyond the cost of the funeral and the old man’s cas
ket. As a result, in the middle of January Mrs. Burdette, who had never worked outside the home before, took a job at Duckwall’s Store on Main Street. They hired her as a clerk. And every day now if you looked through the big display windows you could see her inside the store, wearing a thin green smock over her plain dresses and standing at the cash register or working farther back, dusting and tidying the racks of picture frames and cheap toys. In this way they still had a small regular income each month and I suppose by being very frugal were able to make ends meet. Still I don’t think money was the only consideration. At school we began to notice that Jack had changed. He was brooding and surly now. Things had gotten difficult for him.

  It had to do with his mother. I think Mrs. Burdette believed that she had been given a new chance. It was as if she thought with the old man’s death that she had been given a fresh opportunity. To save Jack, I mean; to prevent his becoming what she had only been able to tolerate in his father—tolerate simply because, given her beliefs and the tenor of the times, the thought of divorce was completely and utterly intolerable. So she tried to assert herself. I suppose she even harbored the notion that Jack might yet turn out to be one of God’s children and suffered to come unto Jesus. I don’t know. I can’t say what went on in her head or how she thought. But I know that Jack was pretty miserable for a time. And I don’t think it had a lot to do with grieving over his father’s death.

  This went on for about two months, until about the end of February. Then he broke with her. He did something which alienated his mother forever and which at least temporarily astonished the rest of us. And looking at it now in retrospect, it seems to have established a pattern for him—or to have confirmed one anyway—a pattern which involved both a sudden move and a rash concomitant act. He left his mother and moved into the Letitia Hotel.

  It was an old ramshackle two-story frame building with a deep long porch on its north side. It was built in 1914 by an early resident, an Irishman who had arrived some twenty years earlier as a small boy in the company of his parents. Then the mother died of influenza while he, the immigrant boy, watched, and so years later when he built the hotel he gave it her name out of lingering grief and old affection. It stood (and still stands, though a rooming house now for old men and migrant laborers and drunks) on the corner of Second and Ash streets, a block west of Main. Across the street there is an old hackberry tree which isn’t doing very well. The local historical society claims that it was one of the first trees planted in Holt County and they’ve erected a cement curb around it to protect it.

  Jack’s room was on the second floor. There wasn’t much in it: an old iron bed and wooden dresser and a gauzy-curtained window overlooking Second Street. It didn’t have any sink or bathroom; the only bathroom on the second floor was at the end of the hall, a space about the size of a walk-in closet. But it didn’t cost much to room at the hotel and he took his meals (when he wasn’t eating at Wanda Jo Evans’s house or with one of the rest of us) in the little dining room on the first floor.

  He paid for these—the rent and the occasional dinners—by working at the Farmers’ Co-op Elevator beside the railroad tracks. He had first begun to work at the elevator in the summer when he was sixteen. They had put him to work scooping wheat and unloading grain trucks and running the big augers. Now he began to work there in the afternoons after school and on the weekends as well. The work suited him exactly. It gave him another opportunity to sweat, to display that considerable strength of his, to expand himself amongst the exhaust of trucks and the clouds of grain dust. They were even paying him something for his efforts. Then, too, there was always that rough backslapping of the men who worked there, their sardonic talk and their jokes. For the men liked him, of course: Jack was a local phenomenon. They talked football to him. They remembered each game he had played better than he did himself, and not just the scores but the individual plays and the records he had set as well. They kidded him, they slapped his back; it was a kind of grown-man’s adulation, a form of praise he needed and enjoyed.

  So now, once he had left his mother’s house, he had all of that again, every day. But also, for the first time, he had a room he could call just his and the liberty to come and go from it as he would, with a steady diet of free meals, or at least cheap ones, and enough money left over in his pocket to spend on beer and poker and nickel cigars, and still enough left over to buy gas to put in his pickup and then occasionally even something yet remaining to spend on Wanda Jo Evans. Because he wasn’t cheap: if Jack had money he always spent it. So he might take her out to a movie, say, or treat her to a hamburger at the Holt Cafe, with an order of French fries on the table between them to share equally. Then we would see them together: Wanda Jo leaning toward him across the table, her hand with the gripped hamburger arrested before her face, while he talked and ate and chewed and while she went on watching him out of those gray and wondering eyes.

  But what I remember most about that time were those evenings in the hotel room. Jack and the rest of us would be playing poker. We would be betting our nickels and dimes at a wooden box upended in the center of the room, under that high old ceiling, under that single dim light bulb suspended from a cord, while off in the corner sitting on the bed Wanda Jo Evans would be bent over the books and the cheap tablets on her lap. She would be attempting to complete Jack’s and her own English and math assignments in time to hand them in the next morning, and only now and then would she even stop long enough to look up from under her strawberry hair, to glance quickly at Jack when he laughed or thought to say something that included her.

  We played most of these poker games on Sunday nights. There would be beer then too. Jack was nineteen and the rest of us were eighteen now. We were legally of an age not only to be drafted to fight this country’s wars but to buy beer too, which if we drank enough of it, and God knows we tried, would give us the necessary recklessness and the urge to shout that we believed were essential for any poker game involving high-school boys.

  We had a good time that winter and spring. At school it became a point of honor and a matter of high privilege to say that you had been allowed to sit in, that you had entered Jack’s room at the hotel and had lost your dollar or two at cards on Sunday night and had drunk a six-pack of beer. It gave you the right to boast the next morning—on Monday, at Holt County Union High School—to boast and complain of a headache while old Mrs. Lindquist tried once more to explain to us The Importance of Being Earnest.

  But there was at least one snag in these Sunday night proceedings: the beer was warm. It had to be bought on Saturday night because none of the bars or liquor stores was open in Holt on Sunday. And since Jack’s room didn’t have an ice chest or a refrigerator (and since none of the rest of us was quite fool enough to store the beer at home in his own refrigerator where his mother would sure as hell find it and ask questions), the beer, by Sunday night, was approximately the temperature of blood.

  We attempted several solutions to this problem. We tried, for example, stacking the cartons of beer on the window ledge outside Jack’s room. And that kept it cool overnight, but sometimes it kept it too cool: it froze. Then we had Popsicles while we played cards. Which was a funny thing for a while. But the bite was gone out of the beer. It was like kissing your own sister, Bobby Williams said.

  “Hell,” Jack said. “It’s more like kissing my old lady. Which ain’t even worth trying once.”

  In the middle of that next week, then, after midnight, Jack Burdette and Tom Crossland and Bobby Williams and I crowded into the cab of Jack’s old pickup. Wanda Jo Evans was there too. Jack was driving and Wanda Jo was sitting on my lap—which was about as close to a high-school boy’s notion of heaven as I was ever to come. We drove across town that way. Then Jack eased the pickup into the alley behind Burcham Scott’s old house. When we entered the alley Jack turned the lights off and coasted to a stop. Then we got out and whispered to one another and slunk along in the dark away from the pickup into the old man’s backyard, p
ast his cement-block incinerator and his fallow garden and finally up onto his back porch, where, pushed off into a corner, there was an ancient Majestic refrigerator which everyone in Holt County knew about. It was a part of the legend we’d all grown up with. We all knew that Burcham Scott was a fisherman, that he was an old freckled-headed man who had long ago retired from the pretense of ever doing anything else but fish and we knew the refrigerator was a part of his equipment. He kept his night crawlers and red worms in the refrigerator so they would stay lively and unspoiled until he needed them.

  But it was only the middle of March now, too early for Burcham to begin fishing again, so the refrigerator was empty and unplugged. We began to slide it away from the wall. Then we tried to pick it up. But we were fumbling in the dark and the porch was narrow and we kept bumping into one another. Finally Jack hissed:

  “Get back, you damn morphadites. I’ll do it myself.”

  And he did. He was that big, that strong. He stooped in front of it, threw his arms around the old Majestic as if it were no more than some heavy tractable farm girl who had come into town for a squeeze and a dance, and then stood up with it. He turned, pivoting, and waltzed off the porch with the refrigerator hugged up into his arms and carried it out to the alley, while behind him Bobby Williams and Tom Crossland and I followed like children, punching one another and giggling.

  At the pickup Jack said: “You think one of you runts could at least open the goddamn tailgate?”

  So we drove back across town that night with the old refrigerator riding up white and square in the back of the pickup, the four of us sitting around it while Wanda Jo Evans drove, and at the hotel we didn’t even attempt to help him. We merely held the hotel door open while he lifted the refrigerator out of the pickup once more and then carried it against his chest, as if it were still only a farm girl or a crate of peaches, say, on up the stairs to his room. There we opened that door for him too and watched him set it down.