The road west of Woodward was red dirt for the last four miles, with a cattle guard and a mailbox shaped like a barn. At the end of it, behind a windbreak of cedars, stood a white farmhouse with a red roof and a screened porch. A pumpjack nodded in a pasture behind it, slow and patient, like a giant bird drinking from the earth. I parked the Buick beside a pickup truck. My Bible was on the seat next to me. I put my hand on it, and I got out.
A woman sat in a rocker on the porch, shelling peas into a pan. She was eighty or so, small and bent, with white hair in a net and a pair of heavy work shoes on her feet. She watched me come up the walk. She did not seem surprised. When I reached the bottom step, she set the pan on her knees and said in a dry, soft voice, “Well. You must be the Enid one.” I told her my name was Joyce Haskell. She nodded. “So is mine. Come up and sit down. I have been expecting you since April.”
Her name was Wilma. She poured me a glass of iced tea in a jelly jar and told me, without ceremony, that she had married Odell Haskell in a courthouse in Woodward in 1966. She was nineteen. He was twenty five and worked for the county. She had never divorced him. She had never been asked to. In 1978, he told her he had a job offer in Enid, in crop insurance, and that he would be home on weekends. After that he came home one weekend a month for forty seven years.
I sat on that porch with the glass in my hand and the world tilting like a ship. I had been Mrs. Haskell for forty six years. I had ironed his shirts. I had buried his mother. And across the hills, a farm woman had been Mrs. Haskell for fifty nine, ironing nothing, waiting for a Buick. I did not cry. I could not. I only said, quite calmly, “Wilma, did you know about me?” She looked at me with her pale blue eyes for a long time.
Two women can be wronged by the same man and still find that the kindest person in the world is the one who shares the injury.
“I found out in 1994,” she said. “A woman at the bank mentioned it. I never said a word to him.” She set down her pan. “I figured one of us ought to have the peace of not knowing. I chose to be the one who knew, for your sake. I am sorry for what I have done by telling you now.” I stared at her. Thirty one years she had known, and never once come looking for me. “I thought you were happy,” she said. “I thought if you had been unhappy, it would have been because he was unkind. Was he unkind?” I said, “No.” We both sat with that for a minute.
The farm had belonged to her family. Her father signed the mineral rights over to Cimarron Ridge Energy in 2007, six months before he died, and put the royalties in the name of Odell, because Wilma had said she wanted nothing from men ever again. The money went into the bank in Woodward. Odell took nothing for himself. He drove out the first Tuesday of every month with a sack of fried pies from the gas station on the highway, because Wilma loved them, and he sat on this porch for an hour, and he went home.
There was a long quiet. A hawk crossed the sun. I asked Wilma what she wanted to do. She said she had lived on this place all her life and meant to die on it. She said she did not want the money, not for herself. She said she had never in fifty nine years met anyone who knew Odell like I did, and she would like to hear about him. “All of him,” she said. “The part that was not a liar.” So I told her. I told her about the Buick, the coupons, the way he sang off key in church.
We talked until after dark. Wilma laughed at the Buick. I cried at the pies. At last she went in and came back with an old cigar box and showed me wedding photographs, a thin Odell with a crew cut, standing beside a girl in a borrowed dress. I looked at his young, unknowing face, and I found I could not hate it. He had been a coward, a man who could not choose between two kind women, so he took both and lied to each. I told Wilma it was the weakest thing I had ever seen a man do, and that it was also very human.
We went to the lawyer in Woodward together, a week later, in my Buick. The account of six hundred and eleven thousand dollars was split down the middle, with a simple agreement that the royalties from here on would be shared equally. Wilma signed with a hand that shook. I signed beneath her. The lawyer, a young man with a fresh haircut, asked if he should arrange for separate representation. We both said no, in the same voice, and laughed so hard he left the room.
I drive out to Woodward every first Tuesday now. I bring fried pies from the gas station on the highway. We sit on the porch and watch the pumpjack, two old women named Haskell who share the name of a dead man and a living friendship. Last month, Wilma said she was leaving me the farm in her will. I said I would not hear of it. She said, “You will plant tomatoes.” I do not know whether I will. But I put a rocker on the porch, for me, beside hers, and nobody has taken it away.
