“I’ll get my coat.”
Thus she allowed me to drive them across town to Gum Street that first time because it was snowing and because it was cold outside. I don’t recall that we said anything of significance. TJ sat on the seat between us and she had Bobby on her lap and I suppose during the six-or seven-block ride one of us managed to say something about the accumulation of snow. It was a quiet and awkward ride. But at the curb when I stopped to let them out I remember watching her take the boys up the sidewalk into their small house in the snow and I recall how she looked in her blue coat when she opened the door and then how the house itself looked after she had turned the lights on. Afterward I drove home again to the house where Nora and Toni were waiting for me to eat supper with them. But I wasn’t very much interested in supper just then, nor in going home again, nor even in my wife and daughter. I suppose by that time I was already a little in love with Jessie Burdette.
So in the following week I ran her notice as a kind of display ad on the back page of the Holt Mercury just as she had wanted it. I offset it with the announcements for Sunday church services and the obituaries for two longtime Holt County residents. Her notice said: I’m not responsible for whatever Jack Burdette did or will do. He’s no good. It doesn’t matter what people say. He’s a son of a bitch and I don’t care anymore.
I had my own reasons for printing it.
This public declaration of hers caused a stir in town when people read it. My father, for one, called me on the phone and said I was crazy to print such a thing. What did I think I was doing? It was unprofessional, he said; it was bad business practice. This was Holt County, Colorado, not San Francisco, California. Did I think he’d turned the paper over to have it ruined?
Of course other people in town felt similarly, as I knew they would, although their annoyance and their objections had more to do with moral considerations than with any concern over practical issues. Some of the older women were particularly incensed: they wrote letters to the editor about the appearance of profanity in the Holt Mercury. They didn’t like it, not the profanity nor the public display of raw emotion, and a number of the women canceled their subscriptions as a result.
Nonetheless, the commotion Jessie’s notice caused in Holt County that week was soon forgotten. It was a minor episode compared to what happened in the weeks and months that followed. And all of that got into the paper too.
Then there was one other small event which reflected on what was printed in the Mercury at about that time. It was in a minor key. It had to do with Jack Burdette’s mother.