She continued to stare back at him, to watch him, her eyes steady and deep brown.
Finally Doyle said: “All right, you’re not going to tell me. You don’t have to tell me; I think I know anyway. But listen now. Listen: let an old man ask you this. Don’t you think you’re going to need that house anymore? I mean, if you give it up like you’re proposing to do, just where in hell are you and these kids going to live afterwards?”
“That’s my concern,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course it is, but—”
“And you agree it’s legal, don’t you?”
“Yes. As far as I can tell.”
“So will you please give that piece of paper to the board? You can tell them we’ll be out of the house by the first of May.”
“But listen,” he said. “Damn it, wait a minute now—”
Because Jessie had already stood up. She was already leaving. And Doyle Francis was still leaning toward the chair she had been sitting in. Those good intentions of his were still swimming undelivered in his head and his arms were still resting on that quitclaim deed on his desk. She walked out through the hallway and on outside.
In the scale room Bob Thomas watched her leave. When she had driven away he went in to see Doyle. “Well,” he said, “she was here long enough. What’d she want?”
“What?”
“I said, ‘What’d she want?’ Burdette’s wife.”
“Nothing. She didn’t want anything.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I don’t care what you believe. That woman doesn’t want a goddamn thing from any one of us.”
“What do you mean she doesn’t want anything? She’s a Burdette, isn’t she?”
“I mean,” Doyle Francis said, “get the hell out of here and leave me alone. Goddamn it, Bob, go find something else to do with yourself.”
For some of the people in Holt that was enough. I suppose they felt about it a little like Doyle Francis did, that she deserved the magnanimity of their good intentions. Privately, they understood that she was innocent, or at least they knew that she was ignorant. It wasn’t her fault, they told themselves; she wasn’t involved. They could afford to be nice to her. Anyway, they could refrain from actually wishing her harm.
For others, though, who were more vocal and more active, it still wasn’t sufficient. These people argued that the house didn’t amount to enough. It didn’t matter that it was all that she had, that it was the sum total of her collateral and disposable property. It was merely an old two-bedroom house in the middle of town. It needed tin siding and new shingles; it needed painting. Besides, there was still a fifteen-year lien against it when she signed it over, so that when the board of directors became the fee owners of the house and then sold it at public auction, it didn’t even begin to make a dent in that $150,000 that her husband had disappeared with. No, they weren’t satisfied. A house wasn’t alive and capable of bleeding, like a human was. It wasn’t pregnant, like Jessie was.