I had known Jack Burdette all his life. Or all of it, that is, except for the four years in the early 1960s when he was in the Army and in Holt and I was in college and then again later for those eight years after he had disappeared when no one in Holt knew him, that period when he was out in California living on his charm and that sum of money which he must have thought would last him a lifetime until one day the money gave out and he discovered he had only the charm left and not much of that. But yes: I knew him. We had grown up together. For a long time I had even liked him.
His father, whom people here still refer to as John Senior, was a well-known figure in town. He worked at Nexey’s Lumberyard on Main Street near the railroad tracks and he was a big man too—like Jack was, or like Jack was to become anyway—with a considerable gut and a big loud voice that was exactly like a bull’s bellow and of about that appropriateness. Still he was a likable man, I suppose. People in Holt thought so. He wore pressed overalls to work at the lumberyard, and in the evenings before he went home for supper he always drank for an hour or two in the bars out along Highway 34, in the Legion bar or at the Wagon-wheel Lounge, with some of the other men in town who were his contemporaries.
Jack’s mother, on the other hand, was a very small woman, very thin and pinched-looking. She wore scrupulously clean round wire glasses on the bridge of her nose and she combed her hair in a style that would have been fashionable in the 1920s when she was young, a kind of permanent sheared-off bob. She was a very serious woman. She never drank or raised her voice much above a whisper, so we understood in Holt that she tolerated her husband’s excesses because she was a good Catholic. She played the organ at St. John’s Church and made confession faithfully to old Father O’Brien who wore a hearing aid. She hadn’t much else in her life, so it must have been Father O’Brien and the Catholic Church which sustained her.
They lived, during the years I am talking about, over there on the north side of town on Birch Street across the tracks. It was an old yellow stucco house and behind it they had a vacant lot, overgrown with cheat weed and redroot, which ran back for fifty yards toward the fairgrounds. This was the poorer part of town then, before the new tract houses were annexed into the city in the 1970s, but people in Holt still considered the Burdettes to be an average family with adequate income and status. If nothing else, they were interesting. There was sufficient tension in the family to make them worth watching.