They all began to dance with her. It was as if Vince had broken some taboo, some barrier of accepted behavior, so that now it was not only acceptable to dance with Jack Burdette’s pregnant wife, it was required; it was a matter of community honor and restitution. And so, ten or fifteen men took their turns with her that night. They danced her hard around the floor. They swung her violently around; they held her clenched against themselves, forcing their own slack stomachs against her swollen hard one. From that point on they danced every song with her. And all that time Jessie seemed to welcome it, to smile and speak pleasantly to all the men who held her. When it was over, though, when the band finally stopped playing and the lights were turned on once again, she was very pale; she was sweating and her dress looked wrinkled, worn out, stained, as if it had been cheapened. She went home exhausted.
But the local routine was established now—that three-week-long Holt County system of payment was initiated and accepted. And so the third time, that third Saturday night in May, it was just the same—only it was worse. This time the men not only danced with her in the same fierce vindictive manner but they also insisted on buying her drinks. She was wearing that same red dress too, washed and pressed again but showing the additional week of pregnancy. It looked tighter on her now, riper, as if the seams would burst at any moment, while above the deep neckline the blue veins in her full breasts showed clearly. Nevertheless, she danced with every man who asked her. They danced and danced—waltzes, jitterbugs, country two-steps, a kind of local hard-clenched fox-trot—anything and everything the men thought they knew how to do, regardless of the violence and energy it required. And this dancing, if you can call it that, this intense communal jig, stopped only when the band stopped. Then, during those ten minutes of brief rest between sets, they drank. They sat her on a barstool and three or four of them stood around her, telling jokes and buying drinks—taking turns with this too, ordering her double shots of scotch or whiskey or vodka—it didn’t matter what the combination or how unlikely the mix—they ordered liquor for her to drink and insisted that she drink it. And she did that too. She accepted it all, seemed to welcome it all, as if she were privately obliged to honor any demand.
Of course by the evening’s end she was even more exhausted this time than she had been the previous Saturday night. Also, she was very close to being drunk. When the lights came on at last, when the last man stopped dancing with her, she could barely walk off the dance floor. She was weak on her feet; there was a drunken waver in her step. She didn’t say anything, though. Nothing in the way of complaint, I mean. And when that last man thought to ask her if she were coming back again the next week, she said: “You want me to, don’t you?”
“Why course,” he said. “Don’t you know I’ll be here? We’ll all be here.”
“Then I will too,” she said.
And she was. Only, by this time, many of the women and at least some of the men in town were growing a little uneasy, a little uncomfortable with this particular form of weekly gambol and amusement. So not everyone showed up the following week, that last Saturday in May. Jessie did, though. It was the last time that she went to the Legion for a long time.
But again it was the same. She was wearing that same red dress, as if it were a uniform now, an essential part of the routine, and there was the same excessive amount of makeup on her face. She was drinking too—it was obvious in fact that she’d been drinking heavily even before she arrived at the Legion. She entered the bar-and-dance room about nine o’clock and didn’t even bother this time to lift herself onto a barstool. She merely waited inside the door, with the music and smoke and laughter already at full strength around her. She didn’t have to wait long: two or three men discovered her at the same moment and ushered her in.
“What are you drinking?” one of them said.
“Don’t you want to dance first?”
“No, let’s have a drink. I’m buying.”
“All right,” she said. “A whiskey sour, then.”
“Make it a double,” he said.
She drank it fast, as if it were no more than water or lemonade, as though she was no more conscious of what she drank than she was of the banter around her. When she had finished it, she set the glass down and said: “Now who’s going to ask me to dance? I thought you boys knew how to dance.”