In Broad Daylight Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    Q (for Quentin) Goslee has lived all his life on the land his great grandfather bought two miles east of Skidmore. If a storm wakens him in the night, as it did when he was a boy, he might step out on the east porch to feel and smell the air. Or he might lie in bed and listen to the currents of the winds as they bend and twist the tree limbs, lash the rain against the house, and rattle the windows. He knows which hills are likely to run first and where the gullies will form. And he knows that if the wind picks up another notch, he will find broken limbs on the tall walnut trees behind the house. He knows without thinking where he is in the planting, growing, or harvesting cycle and what each hundredth of an inch of rain will mean to each of his crops at a particular moment. The loamy soil is a part of him like his skin or his hair, and he knows how it reacts to the sun and wind and water the way he knows the feel of the summer sun on the back of his neck or the sting of a February wind in his eyes. Q might well have sprouted from the dark soil himself, perhaps as a walnut tree in the heavy timber to the north or a stalk of corn somewhere on the fifty acres sloping gently west to the hedge trees. When he was young, Q told his wife Margaret-who already knew it-that he couldn't even stand to think about living anywhere but on that piece of land.
    Route V is one of two roads linking Maryville and Skidmore. A narrow blacktop with no shoulders, it twists and turns over the hilltops and through the troughs. In the spring and fall, after a heavy rain, tractors and combines track mud from the fields and dirt roads onto the highway, creating slicks that send unwary