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 casket. 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.