In Broad Daylight (4 page)

The town sits on a low ridge a quarter mile east of the Nodaway River, which runs south and pours into the Missouri River a few miles above St. Joseph. The hilly countryside is crisscrossed with hedge trees, or osage orange, planted by the settlers in the 1840s to mark their fields and pen their animals. Groves of sturdy oak, walnut, hickory, maple, and cottonwood grow along the edges of the fields, in the folds of the hills, and beside the stream beds. In early October the hedge and timber, adorned in autumn's reds and golds, flash like brilliant stripes through the fields of ripening grain.

White frame farmhouses, sheltered from the elements by encircling pine, maple, and walnut trees, occupy occasional hilltops. Off to the side and behind the houses are wood and metal buildings, some empty and others filled with animals or machinery. Metal hog feeders squat in the middle of barren lots. Dirt roads wind through rich fields of corn, wheat, milo, and soybeans, and large rolls of last summer's hay lean against wire fences. Small ponds, broken windmills, and tall wire grain bins with pointed metal hats speckle the hillsides.

To the north about twenty-five miles lies Iowa and to the west about thirty miles is the Missouri River and Nebraska. Northeast about thirteen miles lies Maryville, the home of Dale Carnegie and Northwest Missouri State University, and a town of about 10,000 people. St. Joseph (where Jesse James was killed), the closest city, sprawls alongside the Missouri River about forty miles south, and below that another thirty miles is Kansas City. Judging by its geographical location, northwest Missouri might appear to be a continuation of the great Midwest of Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, but history has shown that a good many of its roots run south.

A place out of time, Skidmore seems to have slipped outside the streams of commerce and contemporary culture. There are no laundromats, no ice cream parlors or video shops, no gays, blacks, or Chica-nos, no runners or bikers or teenagers with punk haircuts. People pretty much dress the same way and talk about the same things their parents and grandparents did.

The town has two paved streets but no stoplights. Vehicles slide through the stop signs after only a casual glance by the driver, and hardly anyone signals a turn. The town doesn't have a marshal, the last one having been let go after only a month because he took his job too seriously, busting speeders and trying to enforce angle parking on Elm Street.

Cable television has come to town, and a few farmers have satellite dishes in their yards. Drugs hit the area like the rest of the country in the sixties and the seventies, although perhaps not as hard. A few farmers own fancy cars, but the most common vehicle is still the pickup. The high school kids go to Maryville to dance and party and listen to live music. The only airwaves that successfully cross the rolling hills to Skidmore carry country music. On moonlit nights pickups with two or three young men in the back holding high-powered rifles race across the fields in search of coyotes.

Life is steady and predictable in Skidmore. The residents have known each other all their lives; the farmers who drink coffee each morning at Mom's Cafe went to grade school together and took part in each other's weddings. They know each other's family histories and jokes as well as they know their own. From years of attending church bake sales, they know who makes the best blueberry pie and who makes the best German chocolate cake. The residents are for the most part decent, law-abiding people who share a few basic values, one of which is that the less interference people have in the way they run their farms or their lives, the better off they are. People should also take care of their own problems; to seek outside help is an admission of weakness and only invites interference.

Farmers, particularly the older ones, view work as the very measure of a person's character. How hard a man works tells you most of what you need to know about him; if he's ready to go when the sun comes up and stays until the job is done, or until it's too dark or wet to finish it, almost anything else can be forgiven.

A stoic strain runs through the character. The only legitimate complaints concern the weather, crop prices, and the government. Personal problems, physical ills, are usually borne privately.

For all the cherished sense of privacy, true secrets in Skidmore are hard to come by. A farmer passing through town can tell who is shopping for groceries, who is drinking coffee, who is in the tavern, who is buying fertilizer, and who is applying for a loan, just by glancing at the location of the vehicles parked up and down Elm Street. If a married woman or man goes out dancing at the saloons in Maryville on Friday night, it will be old news by church on Sunday.

Although the people are friendly to each other and to outsiders, there is a distinct difference between friendliness and openness. And different boundaries exist for different people. One respected community leader, who was responsible for reviving the long dormant Punkin' Show, the town's annual celebration, concluded after living in Skidmore for fourteen years that because he was born and raised elsewhere, he would never truly be accepted.

Skidmore is not class-oriented, probably because there are so few classes. With the exception of a banker, a few cashiers, a clerk or two, and a few shopkeepers, it is a blue collar town: farmers, mechanics, hired hands, 'dozer operators, repairmen, people who work with their hands. The biggest distinctions exist within farming. The rich farmer-the man with lots of land, most of it paid for-is at the top of the heap. Next comes the yeoman farmer, the one with a couple hundred acres and six kids, who makes it from year to year, until one year maybe he doesn't. After that comes the renter or sharecropper, who works someone else's land in exchange for a share of the crops.

At the bottom is the furtive subculture of the lowlifes, a midwestern version of the southern rednecks, made up of people who exist on the outermost fringes of the community. The lowlifes live in rundown houses or trailers, drink a lot, fight, never pay taxes, have probably spent time in jail once or twice-usually for assault, or stealing, or discharging a weapon -and are terribly suspicious of strangers. The men, usually unkempt with scraggly beards and dirty hair, are most at home in the timber, working their dogs or hunting coon.

Despite the commonality of values and the similarity of life experiences of most of the residents, Skidmore does not have a strong sense of community. Partly because of the values themselves-independence, self sufficiency, dislike of outside authority-and partly because of the economic decline of the community and the continuing loss of the young people, the community doesn't steer a strong course; it seems, instead, to maintain barely enough momentum to avoid losing steerage way altogether.

Coming into Skidmore from the east, Route 113 rounds a wide curve and disappears under a canopy of tall maples, ashes, and elms. The trees bend slightly to the north at the top from the persistent blowing of the south winds. All the streets in town are named for trees, and Route 113 becomes Elm, the wide, paved main street of town. Flanked by narrow gravel shoulders, Elm runs through four blocks of quiet neighborhood before sloping into the depression where the railroad once ran. Most of the houses are one-or two-story white clapboards, plain but well maintained, set back from the street fifteen or twenty feet, with gravel drives and occasional garages. Narrow sidewalks, cracked here and there, bisect well-cared-for lawns. Metal mailboxes on posts stand where the curbs would be, if there were curbs. The houses sit far apart, and in midsummer most of the spacious backyards contain large vegetable gardens brimming with sweet corn, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, squash, cucumbers, beans, and peppers. Summer evenings in the neighborhood are quiet; a few people sitting out on their steps or porch swings, others working in their gardens or leaning against their pickups and chatting with their neighbors.

As the road descends into the depression, it passes the large red-brick Methodist Church. With a pair of tall spirals and several large oval stained-glass windows, it is the town's most striking building. Across the street and down a few yards, just before the bottom of the hill, is the seat of town government-a converted gas station with large black letters spelling out SKID MORE across the top. The board of aldermen meets once a month in the former station's office, which also houses the town clerk. Attached to the city hall is the Skidmore Community Fire Department, which contains three trucks of varying vintage.

Thirty yards down the road, where the depression flattens out, sits the old Skidmore Depot, a red wooden building which was recently fixed up to serve as the town museum. Hot dog and marshmallow roasts are held here on Halloween night in a futile attempt to distract teenagers from shooting out street lights and setting bales of hay on fire in the middle of bridges.

Rising on the other side of the depression, Elm becomes the one-block business section and reveals with uncompromising clarity the extent of the town's economic decay. The few businesses that remain are barely hanging on. In place of the big hotel is an empty wooden garage with splintered wooden slats where the front door used to be. In a squat, cinder-block building attached to the garage is Mom's Cafe, where farmers, seed dealers, and the few remaining merchants gather during the day.

Further on up the hill is the D & G Tavern, named for owners Del and Greg Clement. A long building of corrugated metal, with a nearly flat roof and an air conditioner in the only window, the tavern has a bare cement floor, two pool tables, and booths along the east wall. Much larger than it looks from the outside-it sometimes hosts dances on Saturday nights-the tavern is the sole source of night life in Skidmore.

Across the street from the tavern is the post office, and a few feet to the east of that sits the Masonic Building, a two-story brick building with a large arch over the front door. The building, which has been a drugstore, a barber shop, and an opera house in years past, now serves as the town library, but it is really only an empty building with books piled in it. In the little park on the corner, just west of the post office, a flagpole has been planted in cement next to a plaque honoring local men who died in various wars. Brief services are conducted in the park every Memorial Day for the town's veterans, and frog jumping contests are held here in August during the annual Punkin' Show. A wire fence runs along the edge for posting community notices.

The intersection at the top of the hill, where Elm Street turns back into Route 113 and heads south out of town, is Four Corners, the crossroads of town. On the northwest corner, across from the little park, sits Sumy Oil, a gas station and repair shop and one of the enduring businesses in town. The Sumys are a third-generation Skidmore family, and Marvin Sumy, like his father, sells most of his gas and does most of his repair work on credit. Each spring, his gasoline truck makes the rounds to the farms, and the farmers settle up with him on the way back from the grain elevator in October. On the southwest corner sits a combination gas station and convenience store. Next door is the American Legion Building, Sam Albright Post No. 411. (Sam, from another old Skidmore family, went down with his ship in World War II.) The brick building is large (for Skidmore), with an exterior like a 1930s five-and-dime store. A battered wooden bench sits outside the door, a convenient roost for old-timers on summer days.

Route 113 emerges from Skidmore to meet the corn and bean fields growing up to the backyards of the houses on the southern edge of town. From there, the road begins a long, gradual descent, passing the water-treatment plant on the right and swinging west to cross the Nodaway River. A half mile before reaching the river, the road cuts through the river bottoms, an alluvial plain carved out by the constant meandering and flooding of the river.

Route DDa minor artery, heads north out of town and swings west to cross the Nodaway River. On the way, the road passes the Christian Church, a homely brown stucco building with a shingled roof that slopes off in an assortment of arbitrary angles. A fundamentalist church, it is distinguished by an unshakable belief that baptism by total immersion is the only gateway to eternal life in Christ.

Just before dropping down to the river, DD passes a large house with towers and bay windows, built either by the town's founder, Martenay Skidmore, or his son William-no one is quite sure which. On a small plateau just above the river is the Masonic cemetery, where the Skidmores and many other local families are buried.

A chalkboard in front of the post office displays the weekly and cumulative rainfalls for the current summer compared to last summer, giving everyone a common basis for speculating on how high the bean plants will grow and how big the ears of corn will be by harvest.

As it always has, the weather-the sun, the wind, and the rain, particularly the rain-affects all the rhythms of life in the community. If the moisture falls in the right amount and at the right time, if the sun shines the other days, and if the river doesn't flood, there might be a good harvest. If the farmers prosper, the waitress and the bank clerk and the fertilizer salesman prosper, and there might be money to buy a new car or to put a new roof on the house. If the rain falls too late in the summer to provide the critical early nourishment, the yield per acre drops, and the farmers work only to pay their loans and stay alive. If the farmers are gloomy, everyone is gloomy.

Many of the farmers include the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the settlers who moved to northwest Missouri in the 1840s. Large numbers of them came from the southeastern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland to clear the land, work the soil, grow crops, and raise animals. Their descendants are now the town elders, approaching the end of their time on the land.