That Night at the Palace (2 page)

Jesse shut off the motor and put both hands on the wheel. He was still trembling. Gemma, who had been sitting in the center seat, slid away from him. This was the opposite of their normal procedure when the two were parked alone together. She leaned back against the closed door and stared at him.

“I can’t believe he did that to Jettie,” Jesse remarked after a long silence.

“You want me to believe that you almost beat Cliff to death because of Jettie?” She asked in a steady tone that made it clear she wasn’t buying any of it.

“It’s not what you think.”

“Why don’t you start by telling me what I think?”

“There’s nothing between me and Jewel.”

“Yes there is,” she replied, making it clear that there was no room for argument.

“I’ve never kissed her or anything like that.”

Gemma just stared at him with almost no emotion showing.

“It’s not like that.”

“You can’t lie to me, Jesse. I’ve known you all of your life. And why wouldn’t you kiss her? She’s tall, she’s beautiful, she has all that blonde hair, and God knows you’ve had plenty of opportunity.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“I used to be jealous of her. You three would spend the entire summer playing together. I remember having to work in Mama’s shop and I’d look out the front window and you three would be sitting on the curb laughing and sipping RCs. I was so in love with you back then, and you hardly noticed me at all. Why would you? You had the prettiest girl in town. She was as much a boy as either of you and twice the girl as me.”

Jesse still had his hands on the wheel, looking forward. “Did you ever wonder why we sat on the curb across from your mom’s shop drinking RCs?”

He turned to look at Gemma who simply shook her head.

“Your shop’s two blocks from McMillian’s, where we got the soda pops. We’d go there because I wanted to see you. We’d sit there an hour or more in the burning sun hoping you’d pass that window. The two of them were always laughing because they were making fun of me for not having the courage to walk in and talk to you.”

Gemma continued to watch him. He was trembling more than ever, and there was a noticeable shake in his voice.

“Do you remember our first date? The carnival?”

“We rode the Ferris Wheel.”

“It was Jewel who talked me into asking you. I was scared to death. I was convinced that there wasn’t a chance you would go with me, but she insisted that you would.”

“Okay, but that was when we were kids. What’s going on now? And don’t tell me that it’s nothing. I’ve watched you and Cliff fight since first grade, but the two of you never fought like that. Cliff’s nose is definitely broken, and when you said you’d kill him, I believed it - and so did everybody at the Palace.”

“I lost my temper, Gem.”

Gemma wasn’t buying it, “And?”

As Jesse looked at her, his face began to change. His eyes began to moisten. He looked down at the seat between them, wishing that he could escape, but Gemma wasn’t letting go.

“I can’t tell you,” he finally answered.

“Yes you can,” Gemma countered, clearly not willing to yield any ground.

Finally he looked up at her. “We were there that night; the night her mama died.”

Gemma’s brow wrinkled as she tried to recall. “I always heard that her mother ran off with someone.”

“Cliff made up that story. She was dying. We were just a couple of kids, and we didn’t know what to do. She shot herself. I held her head. Cliff held her hand. She didn’t want anyone to know the truth. She thought too many people would get hurt. She was going to have a baby, and it wasn’t Mr. Stoker’s. She had been raped. Don’t ask me how I know that. I just know. When the chief started lookin’ for her, Cliff said that he had seen her talking to one of the carnival men. I said that I’d seen the same thing. By then the carnival was long gone.”

“You two stayed with her as she died?” Gemma asked, now trembling herself.

“Yeah. She was real beat up. I think she was going to lose the baby. She tried to kill the man that got her pregnant, but he smacked her around and left. She put the gun to her head, but I startled her just as she shot, so the bullet went through the neck and into her chest. We couldn’t stop the bleeding. She begged us not to tell anyone about the baby or the men. She wanted to protect everybody. She asked us to hide her in the woods, then she made us promise to take care of Jewel.

“When Mr. Stoker said that about Cliff, I don’t know, I just lost it. Me and Cliff, well, it’s our job to take care of her. It’s our job to keep things like that from happening to her.”

Gemma was stunned. She slid over to Jesse, who had tears running down his face. The two held each other tightly.

“I always felt responsible for Jewel. Her daddy drank a lot. He was real rough with her mother. I don’t think that he ever hurt Jewel, but he was real rough with Mrs. Stoker. She wanted Jewel to have it better.” He paused for a moment, finding it hard to speak and then added, “I always thought we did a good job taking care of Jewel until tonight. I never imagined Cliff would do that.”

#

301 RED OAK AVE.,

ELZA, TEXAS

12:01 a.m. Sunday November 16, 1941

Jesse was lying in his bed with his eyes wide open when he heard the familiar sound of pebbles hitting the window. Jesse’s room was on the second floor. Though Jesse’s house wasn’t the largest on the block, it was still quite big by Elza standards, with two stories and brick outside walls. Jesse’s father was an area manager for the
Powhatan Oil Company, and though the depression had hurt almost everyone in Texas, the oil business continued strong. So when Mr. Davidson closed up the smaller of the town’s two banks, Jesse’s parents, Murdock and Garvis, got the house at the corner of Red Oak and 2
nd
Street for a considerable bargain. Of course, Jesse’s dad would have been perfectly happy living in a tent, but when Garvis Hamilton Rose saw a chance to get a house on Red Oak, they were taking it “come hell or high water,” as Jesse’s grandfather would say.

Jesse climbed out of bed and pulled on his pants. He then opened the window and reached his hand out to pull Cliff in.

“Come on,” Cliff said with a wave of his hand rather than climbing in.

“No. Get out of here, so I can go back to sleep.”

“You weren’t asleep, and you’re not going back to bed, or you wouldn’t have your pants on. Now, come on.”

Jesse shrugged and grabbed a pair of shoes and a t-shirt, and then followed his friend out the window and onto the porch roof. At the corner of the house, the two jumped down to the ground and trotted up to Main Street where Cliff had left his 1929 Chevy Coupe. The car had almost no paint and sounded like the motor would fall out at any moment, but it was still a coupe. Short of a Packard convertible, there was just nothing better on the road.

Cliff drove out to State Highway 84 and then took a left onto a dirt county road for about a mile until they came to a railroad where he parked and the two got out.

“Come on.” Cliff ordered.

“What are we doing out here?” Jesse protested as he stepped out of the coupe.

“Shut up and follow me,”

Jesse paused for a moment but finally complied. Cliff’s disposition was normally quite jovial. For obvious reasons his mood was different, but Jesse had never seen his friend like this.

After a long walk along the tracks they came to an old iron railroad trestle that crossed the Neches River.

“Come on,” Cliff ordered one more time as he began to climb to the top of the ironworks on the right hand side of the tracks. He then sat down on the wide beam high above the river.

Jesse hesitated, but it was too late to protest. Besides, it had been years since he and Cliff had sat on that bridge tossing stones into the river. Just before he began his climb, he reached down as he had done a thousand times before and picked up a few stones from beside the tracks.

Jesse climbed the trestle with ease just as he had so many times when they were kids. When he sat down, Cliff reached to his left to grab a long cotton rope that was tied to the trestle and hung down into the river below. He pulled up two beer bottles that had been cooling in the flowing water. He removed the bottles from the rope and handed one to Jesse. The two boys popped the bottle tops off on the side of the trestle.

“You want to explain what we’re doing here?”

Cliff took a long pull on his beer. “The last time I saw Jewel was two months ago. We were sitting right here.” He paused and looked at his friend. “I swear, Jesse, I’m not the reason she’s pregnant.”

Jesse paused for a long moment, looking at Cliff.

“Do you know who she’s been seeing?”

“Some guy up in Jacksonville. I ain’t ever seen him.”

“I haven’t talked to her in ages,” Jesse confessed. “I know she’s been working at that Chevy dealership. Do you know anything about the guy? Will he take care of her?”

“I hope so. He was all she could talk about. She said that she was in love.”

“Why did her old man think it was you?”

Cliff shrugged, “He was on the porch when I drove her home. She didn’t want me to take her to the house. You know old Irwin never liked us, but I figured, you know, we’re practically grown.”

“Yeah, he’s never liked us hanging around with her. So he’s not met this guy?”

“No. She’s scared to death that he will find out. You know how he is with her. You can hardly blame him, after his wife leaving and all.”

The two locked eyes.

“I told Gemma tonight,” Jesse solemnly confessed.

“You what?”

“Just the part about Sarah dying. I didn’t tell her the rest.”

“If she talks…”

“She won’t,” Jesse said, cutting his friend off with definitive assurance.

“You better be sure. If anyone finds her bones, our butts will end up in prison. I don’t know what the charge would be, but throwing a dead woman into a mineshaft ain’t legal, I can tell you that. And if anyone ever puts the pieces together, they’ll find what else we did, and they’ll put us in the electric chair for sure.”

“No one’s going to find out, and if someone does find the bones they’d never figure out it was her,” Jesse said evenly as he took a sip of beer. “And if so, they couldn’t connect us to it.”

“That Texas Ranger came pretty close,” Cliff replied. “He came real close, as a matter of fact. He knew that we did something. He just didn’t know what.”

“She won’t say anything,” Jesse repeated. Gemma was the one thing in the world that he was sure of. She wasn’t about to tell anyone. He could have told her everything, and she wouldn’t talk. Of course, there’s no way he could tell her everything. It would hurt her too much to know what her father did, and he couldn’t do that to the woman he planned to marry.

Jesse’s life was all but planned out. In May he would graduate high school, and in the fall he would begin his career with the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets. Louie Sherman from over in Maydelle had arranged everything. Louie had just graduated from A&M and knew all the strings to pull. Jesse really wouldn’t have had any problems anyway. He was going to graduate at the top of his class, and he’d already passed the Aggie Corps exams with ease. And it didn’t hurt that the outgoing Corps Commander was an old family friend.

Gemma would bide her time at her mom’s shop until Jesse got his army commission. With any luck they could get married at the chapel on campus. Jesse had heard that it was a real honor to get married there, but it was sometimes hard to get on the waiting list. He’d have to look into that as soon as he got enrolled. If not, Brother Bill at First Baptist Elza would happily marry them. It would just mean a lot more to both him and Gemma to do it at the University Chapel with him in his new 2nd Lieutenant’s uniform and the two of them leaving under the drawn swords of an honor guard.

The two hadn’t openly discussed marriage just yet, but Jesse didn’t doubt she would marry him. He knew she loved him. They had said it many times in the years that they had been together. He knew he loved her all the way back to third grade when he first could recall having seen her. Something about her stole his heart, and he’d not given a serious thought to another girl since. Everyone in town knew good and well that the two of them were made for each other. They were a regular topic of discussion at the First Baptist Church Women’s Auxiliary, and Jesse’s father, Murdock Rose, couldn’t get a haircut without someone asking if he knew when Jesse would pop the question. That, of course, had little to do with people caring about the couple. Jesse and Gemma were both fully aware, though they never let on to one another, that the old boys at the domino hall had a couple of hundred dollars riding on whether or not he would pop the question before he left for College Station. A fellow stood to make a pretty penny if he could get a little inside information.

The fact was that Jesse himself didn’t know. He’d given it a lot of thought, and he knew he had to make up his mind soon, but he just didn’t know if it was a good idea or not. When he decided, he planned on sending Cliff down to the domino hall to place a bet, though it was unlikely that anyone would take it. It would be worth trying, nevertheless.