Where You Once Belonged (12 page)

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 •

T
hat 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.

S
he 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.

I
t 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.”

“What’s wrong? Is it Toni?”

“It doesn’t look very good.”

“You mean she’s badly hurt?”

Willard didn’t say anything.

“Tell me,” I said. “Is she badly hurt?”

“You better come down to the hospital. I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“You mean it’s worse than that.”

Willard looked at me quickly. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then there wasn’t anything more to say. He turned and walked off the porch. But he stopped again and turned back. “I’ll wait for you in the car. If you want me to.”

I stood watching him a moment. He walked on out to the county’s blue police car where it was parked at the curb and got in and closed the door quietly and then sat waiting with his hands on the steering wheel, looking straight ahead out through the windshield. I couldn’t move yet. It was cool outside on the porch. There was a slight breeze blowing. The stars were very high and clear overhead.
Oh, god
. Finally I went back upstairs to tell Nora.

She was awake, sitting up in the bed in her nightgown. Her hair appeared very black against her nightgown and her pale shoulders. “Who was it?” she said.

“Dale Willard.”

“What did he want? Doesn’t he have something to do with the police?”

“He’s the deputy sheriff.”

“What did he want?”

“It’s about Toni,” I said. “She’s at the hospital. He said Toni’s been hurt.”

“No,” Nora said. “Oh no. No.”

She didn’t say anything more. Her eyes widened and then narrowed, and her lips moved, but there was no other sound now. She seemed to be holding herself from any further display of emotion. She got dressed and we went downstairs.

Outside Dale Willard was still sitting in the county police car in front of our house.

“Do you want to ride with him?” I said. “He’s waiting for us.”

Nora shook her head.

So I walked over to the car and told him we would drive ourselves. We got into our own car and drove to the hospital. The streets were empty and quiet and the houses were all dark, but Dale Willard followed us anyway. I believe he felt responsible for seeing that we got there safely.

At the hospital one of the nurses met us at the back entrance and showed us into a waiting room. Then she left. In a moment Dr. Martin came in and we stood up while he told us about it. One of the other kids in a car driving home from the party half an hour later had discovered them. Toni and the Pohlmeier boy had left the party together, at about two-thirty, and apparently he was driving too fast and he had gotten over too far onto the loose sand at the side of the country road. Then he must have tried too quickly to correct it—the car had rolled over four or five times. They couldn’t be sure how many times it had rolled over, but when it had stopped it was in the barrow ditch, upside down. There was glass everywhere and the roof was smashed down level with the hood and trunk.

“Where is Toni now?” I said.

Dr. Martin ignored that for the moment. He went on. He said he thought that Danny Pohlmeier was going to live. There was a good chance of it, he said. He was a healthy young boy. It was too soon to tell, though. They were making arrangements to fly him to Denver.

“Where is Toni?” I said.

Dr. Martin looked at Nora. “We have your daughter in a room just down the hall here. But I don’t think she suffered. It was too sudden. I feel certain she didn’t suffer.”

“Where is she? We want to see her.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Yes,” I said. “We want to see her.”

He looked at Nora again. She was standing very rigidly, watching him. “Very well,” he said.

I took Nora’s arm and we followed Dr. Martin down the hallway to one of the rooms in the emergency area. Inside on an examining table there was a small figure with a white sheet pulled over it.

“We want to be alone now,” I said.

Dr. Martin took my hand and pressed it and put his arm around Nora’s shoulders. He was going to say something more but evidently thought better of it. He went out and shut the door.

After he was gone Nora lifted the sheet. We could see Toni’s poor face then. Her black hair was matted at the side of her head and her face was swollen and discolored. Her eyes were only half-shut. Her face had been badly cut up and she had bled from the nose and mouth. There was dried blood in her nostrils and there was more blood at the corners of her mouth.

“Oh god,” I said. “That’s enough, Nora. Put it back now. Jesus god.”

But Nora lifted the sheet so that she could see all of Toni’s body. They had cut her clothes off. Our daughter looked very small and broken. Nora moved her fingers gently over the bruised arms and then she walked over to the counter and pulled a Kleenex from a box and moistened it with her tongue so she could removed the dried blood from Toni’s mouth. She bent and kissed the forehead and put the sheet back.

After that we went home again. It was beginning to be daylight now. And later in the morning John Baker, who owned the mortuary, came to the house and we made the arrangements for the funeral. A couple of days later Toni was buried in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.

It was a large funeral; all of her friends from school were there and many of their parents and various townspeople. There were a great many flowers at the altar of the church. The minister spoke and there was some music, I remember, and afterward, at the cemetery, after the brief prayers and rites, people filed past us to shake our hands while we stood in the shade under the green awning at the gravesite. For the funeral John Baker had done what he could with Toni’s face, but it was not recognizable. It was merely the mask of a dead child, caked with powder and waxen-looking. So we had not permitted the casket to be opened and we had not allowed anyone to view her at the mortuary in the evenings before the funeral. When it was all finished and everyone had driven away, Nora and I went home again to a house that seemed utterly quiet. None of the public ceremonies had helped.

* * *

B
ut as it turned out Danny Pohlmeier did live, as Dr. Martin said he might. He was in the hospital in Denver for two or three months and then he was in a cast for another half year or so. When he was home again he came to the house one night to talk to us. He sat on the couch and cried into his hands while he told us about it. After he had stopped talking there was nothing more to say. We walked him to the front door and he left. Nora and I did not blame him for what had happened. We did not feel that way about it. He was a nice boy and it was obvious that he felt very badly. Still we never mentioned his name to one another again.

In fact we were hardly speaking at all. It was an awful summer. Nora was quieter and even more withdrawn than she had ever been. She couldn’t sleep at night and she had begun to take things to make her sleep. Then she would get up late in the morning with a headache and move silently about the house. In the evenings she would still garden a little, among her roses, pulling weeds and dusting the flowers with insecticide, but she wasn’t much interested in her roses anymore and she had begun to wear white gloves whenever she worked outside. They were the same gloves she had worn previously to church and for women’s society meetings; now she was using them to protect her hands from the soil in the backyard. It was as though she were afraid of being contaminated by even that much of Holt County. Finally at the end of summer we agreed that it would be better if she left town for a while.

We gave people another reason for her leaving, however. Earlier that spring her father had been forced to retire from teaching at the university and he had decided that he wanted to move to Denver, to be in a larger city. He needed help to make the move. So at the beginning of September, Nora went to Boulder to assist in making the arrangements. We were both relieved that she was going to be gone for a time.

Then she refused to come back. It was at this time that Nora rented for her father the large apartment on Bannock Street, on the ground floor of an old Victorian house. It was a roomy place. It had leaded windows and outside there was ivy growing on the brick walls, with a black wrought-iron fence separating the house from the sidewalk and street, and evidently the whole thing suited the old man so well that he was quite pleased with his daughter and even told her so. Consequently Nora stayed awhile longer to help him establish his desk and his books. Then she decided to stay with him permanently. She took a job at the city library downtown and returned every evening to cook supper for him. It was an arrangement they both seemed to like. She wrote me a letter about it. That was how I learned that she was not coming back.

I wasn’t certain how I felt about this. The truth is, I did not miss her particularly. It was easier in the house without her there, without having to watch her every day. But a week or two later, on a Sunday, I drove to Denver to see them. I took Nora and the old gentleman out to eat at a restaurant. It was a place they suggested. There were white linen cloths and linen napkins folded in cones on the tables and heavy silverware beside the white plates. There were several wineglasses too. Dr. Kramer ordered the wine and when the waiter brought the bottle to the table the old man made a bit of dignified show, sniffing the cork and feeling it with his papery fingers. He decided the cork was sufficiently moist and told us it proved that the bottle had been placed on its side, that the cork hadn’t been allowed to dry out. Then the waiter poured wine into his glass and he tasted that and it seemed that the wine was satisfactory too. We all had a glass of wine.

So it was a long complicated meal of four or five courses. But Nora and the old man appeared to enjoy it. I had to admit that Nora’s face looked lovely again; the rigid control she had held on herself during the summer seemed to have been relaxed and she looked almost girlish once more. She sat beside her father and was very attentive to him. They discussed each course as it was brought by the waiter, sampling the food the other had ordered and making comparisons. Later we had dessert and coffee. Then we were finished with dinner and so we drove around in the city for an hour, across town through the city park and past the zoo and the museum, and back through the Cherry Creek retail area toward Broadway and Bannock Street. At the apartment again, Dr. Kramer decided he would take a short nap.