UNDER WIDE SKIES

     The few hundred houses in the little town of Oldham are surrounded by corn and sunflower fields, pasture lands dotted with sheep, cattle, horses, and hay and bean fields; the huddled town is bordered on one side by the slow, winding, muddy James River, which cuts its cedar- and cottonwood-lined banks through the rolling hills; and is served by the Interstate, which passes within a mile of most of its front doors.  All summer long thereabouts under the big sky the ancient shelter belts, blocking wind and the drift of soil across the prairie, drowse in the hum of bees and the furtive activity of squirrels and foxes.  Pheasants scratch in the fields, and the occasional badger raises its wedge-shaped head over a heap of stones to survey the world around.  In late September, especially when the weather has been gentle, the blackened sunflowers droop from the heaviness of their heads, and huge rolls of hay sit scattered through the fields.  The corn has turned yellow-brown and has begun to dry enough for harvest to begin.  The nights start to turn cold, and during the day the black and red box elder beetles cling to the sunny sides of the houses.

     On such a morning in late September, a woman came walking down the center of Oldham’s Main Street.  At its south end, this street intersected the main county road which ran alongside the railroad tracks, and at that place were located the two huge grain elevators, and thereabouts were also the seed store, the Casey’s gas station, and a farm equipment outlet.  To the north, at the four-way stop, the black-top street turned into a concrete, two lane highway, which carried the area’s traffic northwards from the Interstate.  As Oldham’s Main Street, it was three wide blocks long, and these blocks were lined on both sides by cars parked diagonally in front of the various shops, some with and some without awnings.

The woman walked down the center of the street.  Mrs. Lily Wagner, a white-haired widow who left the farm and came to live in town, out this morning on her way to the post office and then to the market, which had half of one block to itself with parking behind, slowed down as she approached the woman in the road.  It was mid morning, about half-past nine, crisp and cold yet, with few people about. 

“What should I do?” Lily thought, all a-fluster.  The woman was near naked!  She wore a light, short-sleeved, short-wasted blouse through which, even at that distance, Lily could plainly see she was braless; and below, she wore a pair of worn out white panties, which did not conceal at all the dark delta between her inner thighs; and on her naked feet she wore clunky, unlaced, platform shoes.  The woman’s hair was unbrushed and tangled and matted against her head, as though she had been out in the wind all day and then slept on it.  But, after the shock of the first glimpse, it was none of these things that most troubled Lily.  What troubled her most was the look in the woman’s eyes.

     Lily stopped in the middle of the street and put the car, her dark blue Riviera, in park and turned off the engine.  Tall, heavy set, and somewhat weak in the knees, she extricated herself from the car with her usual difficulty and stood in front of it as the near-naked woman approached.  Lily felt a stony dread as she waited for the poor soul, who gave off the curious impression that she was totally unaware of where she was and what she was doing, yet seemed perfectly focused and aware of both.

     Before the strange wandering soul reached the car and the waiting older woman, Mary Strethor, a working mother who kept the register at the Casey’s gas station, slowed down in the other lane passing, and stopped, herself, out of sheer curiosity.  She was a naturally nosey and interfering woman and couldn’t help herself.  It was not everyday a near naked woman walked down the center of Main Street towards a waiting Lily Wagner.  She had stopped beside the Riviera and said out of her window, “Who’s that, Lily?  What’s going on?”

     “Never seen her,” Lily said, walking back to the door of her own car.  “You know her?”

     “Can’t say I do,” Mary said, after craning her head around out the window and taking a good long look.  With a broad smile on her face, she said, “You think she’s drunk?”

     “I dunno!” Lily said, as the walker reached the front of the car.

     Her way seeming blocked, the walking woman stopped.  She didn’t acknowledge the two women beside her nor look around to spy out an alternative way.  She just stood in front of Lily’s car, looking into its windshield.  Again, she gave Lily the unnatural impression she was both aware and unaware of where she was.

     “I’ll be. . . !” Mary whispered.  “Don’t you think we should call O’Brian?”  Raymond O’Brian was Oldham’s police department.  His office was the back room, with its own entrance, of the town hall.  To call him, one needed merely to lean on one’s horn.  In half a minute, O’Brian would show up, curious, concerned, and eager to have something to do. 

     “I dunno. . . !” Lily hesitated.  “I guess I should try talking with her.”

     Putting her hand on the woman’s shoulder and gently turning her in order to see her face more fully, Lily asked, in a raised, concerned voice, “Are you all right?  Would you like me to take you somewhere?”  Lily looked right into the woman’s face and saw that it registered no comprehension.  A bouquet of sweet-scented soap emanated from her, which made Lily imagine the woman had just stepped from the shower and walked out of her home amid her morning’s preparations.  But what home?  “Who could she be?” Lily thought?  “Where could she have come from?”  Never having seen her before, she suspected the poor soul was abandoned on the street by a passerby.  Lily shook the woman’s shoulder and asked again, “What’s your name, miss?  Can you tell me your name?”

     The woman seemed to become conscious then and looked into Lily’s face, into her eyes, and said, in a tone of explanation, “They all had powder on their noses.”

     “Oh!” Lily responded, in her best motherly manner.  “Oh!  Powder!” saying it as though she understood perfectly.  She looked over her shoulder at Mary, who raised her eyes as if to say, “Nuts!”

     “What’s your name?” Lily repeated, her hand again on the woman’s shoulder, keeping her turned so she could look into her face.

     The woman had resumed her staring, but she responded, “My name’s Michelle.”

     “Where do you live, Michelle?”

     “In Oldham.”

     “Here?  You live in town?” Lily said incredulously,  “What’s your address?”

     But now the woman fell back into her earlier state.  She brushed off Lily’s hand and started to walk around the parked car.  Lily went after her and said, grabbing her arm, “You can’t walk around like that, Michelle—is that your name?” saying this last as though she were talking to a wayward child in the supermarket.  “You’re not dressed.  You’ll catch your death, for sure!”  But the woman pushed on, deliberately, as though she had somewhere to get to and the older woman was an obstacle.  Lily fell back a step at the force of the woman’s forward thrust and watched her pass along the side of the car, get back into the middle of the lane behind it, and leave her staring at her backside.

     Upset and disturbed by the woman’s nakedness, Lily returned to the driver’s-side door of her car and said to Mary, who was sitting there with her mouth hanging open, “Something’s wrong with that woman.  She’s not right in the head.”  Her motherly and protective instincts aroused, however, she set off to overtake the hapless soul, leaving Mary in the middle of saying, “She’s none of your business, Lily!  Better leave her to O’Brian.” 

     A woman’s nakedness in public, Lily thought, as she made after the retreating form—a vulnerable woman’s unintended exposure—is every woman’s business.  It’s every woman’s shame, she said to herself as she willed her knees to make haste.  Her cheeks reddened as she saw how Michelle’s buttocks showed through her threadbare panties.  She felt obligated not only by her sense of modesty but also by her sense of duty—to that poor creature, of course; but also to something more that she didn’t know how to explain to herself.  She knew it had fallen to her to take what care was needed, and she intended to do it, in spite of Mary’s caution.

     As Lily neared the woman, however, and reached out to grasp her shoulder, Mary rolled her car along side them and began to lean on her horn.  The long silence-splitting wail startled people from their morning tasks, and the sidewalks came alive.  The presence of others looking on now filled Lily with a sense of urgency.  She grasped the woman’s shoulder and forcefully stopped and turned her.  Then she stepped in close to shield her from view.  The woman stood, in spite of the horn blaring right beside her, in her same unconscious way, seeming to stare at nothing. 

     “I wish I knew what was wrong with you,” Lily said, both her hands on the woman’s upper arms. 

It was still quite chill, for the morning was not as yet very far advanced, and Lily could feel how cold the woman was.  She vigorously rubbed the woman’s arms as she shielded her from the view of the crowd, mostly men, collecting from both sides of the street on the sidewalk in front of them.  The woman seemed not to comprehend. 

Mary let off the horn when she saw the prowler in her rear view mirror turn onto Main Street.  Then she hastily got out of the car, for, as an early presence on the scene, she felt she had a right to be part of the official proceedings. 

“For goodness sake, won’t someone get a blanket?” Lily shouted, as she saw how people on the sidewalk were just staring at them.  No one, however, came forward with a blanket.  Seeing the prowler approach, they were all rooted to the scene, unwilling to leave it long enough to fetch one.  O’Brian pulled up, slowly went around Mary’s black Tempo, and turned into the oncoming lane just in front of Lily and the strange woman, blocking any traffic that might come south on Main Street.  He got out, looking very policeman-like, and stood beside Lily, who was still rubbing the near naked woman’s arms, and saying over and over, “Lord, almighty, poor thing; Lord, almighty; what a poor thing.”

Mary stepped into the little group, then, and took charge by saying, “This here’s a crazy woman, O’Brian; just look at her!  Maybe she’s drunk, maybe not.  That’s your job to find out.  She says she lives in Oldham. . . .”

O’Brian pulled a deep frown, glaring at Mary as if trying to frighten her into shutting up.  But, sitting as she did as the gatekeeper of Oldham’s gossip from her perch at the register at Casey’s, she was not going to be decentered so easily, in spite of the fact that Lily was the one protecting the stranger.

“. . . Isn’t that what she said, Lily?  Didn’t she say Oldham when you asked her where she’s from?  Lily’s trying to keep folks from seeing her nakedness.  Good for you, Lily.  What do you think?  Ever seen her before?  I know everyone that lives in Oldham, and I never did.  More likely she got dropped here by someone didn’t want her.”  

“Let’s get her into my car,” O’Brian said to Lily, and stepped over to open the door.  Lily guided the woman to the car, and, O’Brian holding the door open, the woman unprotestingly got in.

“You come, too,” he said to Lily, glaring at Mary, who snapped her jaws shut. 

“I’ll have you know, O’Brian. . . .”

“You can park Lily’s car,” he said to her, gesturing down the block, and, amid her continuing protest, turned on his heel and got into the patrol car. 

The three of them rolled away, leaving the crowd gawking at the curb and Mary standing alone in the middle of the street.

“Any of you know that woman?” Mary finally shouted at those who were hanging around at the curb, waiting to hear what gossip would emerge.

But they shrugged their shoulders and broke up into twos and threes, and the murmur of rumor began its mysterious journey into the furthest reaches of Oldham. 

The woman, now wrapped in an olive woolen army blanket, sat in O’Brian’s office as the policeman made phone calls and talked with Lily about her.  She just stared at the top of the computer-cluttered desk, saying not a word.  O’Brian was explaining to Lily what the law required him to do when the door opened and someone came in.  He had been expecting it.  He assumed, however, that since the stranger woman lived in town unknown to its people, her guardian’s discretion would cause him or her to wait a good deal longer before making contact.  He was surprised to see it was old Jonathan Beckwith, who came in wearing his floppy-brimmed felt hat and ancient black suit, shiny in the elbows and knees and missing one shoulder pad.  The old gentleman walked slowly with the aid of a cane, which lent an air of septuagenarian dignity to what otherwise appeared as the ruin of a man.  The stranger woman paid him no heed, but O’Brian sat expectantly, and Lily was hushed.

     “May I speak with you alone?” the old man said to O’Brian, making a point of looking past Lily.

     Jonathan Beckwith, around whom there clung a mingled air of arrogance and decay, was the town’s mayor for over forty years and, though he earned a generous livelihood as the only veterinarian the area had known until his retirement some ten years before, when his practice was taken over by a young husband and wife team newly out of college, he was notorious for his stinginess, and in his later years seldom appeared in public.

     Lily realized she was going to be dismissed.  Feeling like she would die of consternation not knowing the answers to the mystery of the stranger woman, she played her objection in as angry a tone as she could muster.

     “I’m not leaving, Jonathan Beckwith, just because you order me to!  I’m here for a reason and I’m not leaving.”

     The old man leaned on the cane placed between his feet and, bending slightly over the desk, said to O’Brian, “Get the fool out of here.  We have to talk.  These are private matters.”

     O’Brian looked sympathetically at the irate old woman but said, nevertheless, “Sorry, Lily, you have to go.”  Whereupon he rose from behind the desk and gently took Lily’s elbow to raise her from the chair.  She didn’t protest, to avoid making a scene with the policeman, but she paused to look again at the stranger woman, sitting wrapped in her blanket with a dream-like smile on her face, then turned a heated and angry countenance upon Jonathan Beckwith, who coolly ignored her.

     Thus Lily was able to learn nothing at all about the stranger woman, who, for the present, remained as much a mystery as she first appeared when Lily saw her walking so strangely down the middle of Main Street.  O’Brian was saying nothing, as was his duty.  And Lily, visited by the policeman after his interview with the old man, kept even that matter to herself, with the understanding that old Beckwith would pay her a visit someday—but not soon, not so soon after the incident.

     The mystery was hardest on Mary, who had to swallow her urges every day as she listened to the ever more bizarre accounts of perversion and abuse and worse that supposedly explained the stranger woman’s condition.  She had forced from Lily the appearance of the old mayor at the police station, and Lily had bought Mary’s silence by promising to reveal what the old man had to say when he finally paid his visit, a visit that surely would not happen if he became the subject of rumor in the town.

“Gossip’s gossip,” she would say from behind her register at Casey’s, “and not to be listened to.  No one but one knows anything about that woman, and he ain’t sayin’.” 

And then the corners of her mouth would ever so slightly tilt upwards.  There were not a few people in Oldham who thought it would not be a bad thing if there were a murder in town as well. 

The kitchen lights of Oldham burned late into the nights well into October, so extraordinary was the gossip.  The stranger woman not only appeared out of nowhere, dressed as she was—or rather, undressed—but disappeared right back into it, and, maddeningly, everyone knew she was in their midst and had been for they didn’t know how long!  But not one person had any information about her or any recollection of her, nor knew anyone who did.  Those who had had a glimpse of her from behind Lily Wagner’s shielding body estimated her age at around thirty years.  And so the town’s older residents spent their evenings trying to recall who had had children at around that time.  It didn’t take long before everyone was accounted for, alive and dead, and the stranger woman was not among them.  This was the town’s first conclusion, and it was fairly well certainly held—the stranger woman was not born to anyone who lived in Oldham. 

That left all the rest of the world as holding any answers, and the folk of Oldham were thoroughly frustrated.  The routines of harvest at this time, however, were not being neglected.  The golden crops were taken in, the elevators were full, and the last cutting of the hay was rolled.  The fields, under skies darkened by surging clouds already threatening snow, were now being walked by pheasant hunters in red and yellow vests and matching caps and their excited dogs crisscrossing the stubble furrows.  And all eighty-two of Oldham’s elementary school children were costuming themselves for Halloween.

Although talk about the stranger woman never faded away, it was at this time that people’s attention began to shift to other of life’s concerns: the young men’s football season was turning out triumphant, and women’s basketball was for the first time putting Oldham on the map in this sport.  Thanksgiving and Christmas were looming.  And not a few of Oldham’s residents were starting up their snowblowers and removing the storage tarps from their snowmobiles, mulching leaves like crazy in their yards and winterizing their houses.  For most, awareness of the stranger in their midst became submerged finally in the rituals of everyday life.

For most.  Not for Mary Strethor.  In the middle of a Wednesday morning during the second week of November, she was bored to death behind her register at Casey’s.  No one had mentioned the stranger woman for some time, gossip being mostly about the winning football team and Mick McGreavey’s son, who was quarterbacking, and what a great career he was going to have.  But for the moment, no one was gossiping about anything.  Ron Lightfoot and Woodrow Higgins were sipping coffee, looking out the window at the white haired Lily Wagner gassing up her car.  Holly Bains, a retired school teacher, was thumbing through magazines at the rack on the wall by the restrooms.  And Linda Neugebauer was emptying the left-over morning’s coffee from the urn on the counter into a pot. 

The unearthly silence, which seemed to be choking the chattering imaginings of Mary’s brain, was broken finally when she said, “I don’t know about powder on his nose, but I know who’s got that stranger woman holed up in his house.”  It was as though she said there was a fire in the place!  The two men leaped to their feet and excitedly crossed to the register, where Mary was all bright eyes and smiles.  Linda Neugebauer, being already there, stopped what she was doing, all perked up, and Holly Bains dropped her magazine and stared opened-mouthed.  Just as Mary was about to explain, having the undivided attention of an audience, Lily Wagner pulled open the door and walked in. 

“What’s so interesting?” she said to no one in particular, catching the look of expectation in all their faces.  She was looking down into her purse, fishing for her wallet, and then up at them, when she realized she was interrupting something.
     “Oh, nothing much, Lily,”  Holly Bains said indifferently.  “Mary was just saying she knows who’s got that stranger woman holed up.  She was about to say his name, right out loud, so everyone in Oldham would finally know.”

“You just shut that mouth of yours, Mary Gossipface,” Lily said animatedly.  “You’ve known all this time and ’ve said nothing?  And now you’re going to yell it all over Oldham?  Don’t you know there are reasons for nobody’s knowing?”

“I should say there are reasons. . . .,” Mary stammered, mortified by Lily’s tone of chastisement.

“And you’re going to shut your mouth!  There’s someone in this town won’t take your gossip idly.  You’re playing with fire, Mary Strethor, and you’ll get burned.”

Mary’s face was on fire already from embarrassment and frustration.  She had given in to temptation and been caught up by Lily and shut up by her for reasons she knew herself were right and true.  What was she doing?  How could she have been on the verge of saying what she knew right out loud?  She hated Lily for coming in at the crucial moment, yet realized Lily saved her—the image she conjured of that crooked-shouldered old man filled her suddenly with terror.  The only good thing to come of her slip was that everybody would now know she knew.  She decided she could live with that.

But Lily only made matters worse by saying that the person who was responsible for the stranger woman wouldn’t take gossip idly, and that Mary was playing with fire.  Lily’s hint spread like an August prairie fire.  She might just as well have let Mary say her say, for it didn’t take people long to realize who Lily was referring to.  There was only one person in town who could take reprisals against gossips, and that was it’s mayor—he had been mayor for so long that people never thought of him any other way, even all these years after his retirement. 

Jonathan Beckwith knew every living soul in town and knew everything about every living soul in town.  Every one feared him, and no one wanted to anger him, least of all be responsible for exposing whoever he was hiding in his house.  But the revelation seared itself into every imagination in Oldham, and the town became obsessed with the stranger woman once again.  Although she was a wounded bird, she remained for months the theme of kitchen talk, Oldham’s mystery, in which the threadbare old mayor, for whom no one felt compassion, loomed portentously as an object of fear.