Later it was obvious that the pains had already begun while she was so still on the dance floor—those who were there remember seeing her eyes focus peculiarly, a kind of brief intermittent stare—but she refused any assistance. She walked off the dance floor by herself, past the bar and up the stairs to the rest room near the front entrance. She went inside, into one of the toilet stalls, and sat down. They waited for her to come back. When she was still there ten minutes later, a couple of women went in to check on her. She was still seated on the toilet, still conscious but quiet and very white. She was bent forward over her knees. There were clots of blood in the toilet. One of the women came outside into the hallway and said they should call the ambulance.
The ambulance got there in five or six minutes. The attendants went in and brought her back out in a wheelchair, tipping it backward to get down the front steps, and then they pushed the chair up a ramp into the ambulance and drove to the hospital. None of that took very long—the hospital is only three or four blocks east of the Legion—but it wouldn’t have mattered if it had taken an hour.
When they arrived at the hospital, they wheeled her into the emergency room and Dr. Martin laid her down on a bed and examined her. He lifted her dress and noticed the blood. Then he listened for fetal heart tones. He couldn’t hear anything, though: the little girl inside her was already dead. Afterward he said the placenta and uterine walls had separated. When she fell, she had gone immediately into labor, and because its source of oxygen had been cut off, the baby had died within minutes—probably during the time Jessie was still in the rest room. He didn’t tell her that, though. He didn’t want to upset her: she still had to deliver the baby.
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 ?
That 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.