Shivaree

By Margery A. Neely

The families living in the Missouri Ozarks in 1946 had a lot to be proud about: Their local boy, Harry S. Truman, had recently been elected president, and there were opportunities to be seized.

Having grown up during the Roaring Twenties, the parents of this time had already survived much, including the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, and war-time rationing. Their childrenif they didnt workrode their bikes to school or simply walked.

Its against this backdrop that soldiers begin to return home, careers open up, and families set their sights on property, prestige, and prosperity. However, as families anticipate a great post-war era, the growing threat of communism rears its head.

The people have something else to worry about when confronted with mysterious phone calls, the deaths of three unconnected people, and an intrusion into a local armament factory.

Take a journey back into time and enter a world of mystery with Shivaree.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496945815

Margery A. Neely

Margery A. Neely grew up in Missouri and still attends reunions for high school and university classmates. Her ancestors, relatives and some descendants were or are there. She enjoys reading, board games, laughing with friends and family, and music.

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Shivaree

Margery A. Neely

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© 2014 Margery A. Neely. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, buildings, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, locations, conversations, and incidents are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/28/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4582-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4581-5 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

PART ONE

Penny Prospect

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

PART TWO

Cents Sorry Deprivation

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

PART THREE

Moolah Mooching

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PART FOUR

Gem Dangle

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

PART FIVE

Missouri Mettle

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

AUTHOR’S NOTES

In 1899, Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver in Philadelphia said, … frothy eloquence neither convinces me nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri. You have got to show me. 2010 World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia: Version 14.0.0 (r) World Book, Inc. (www.mackiev.com)

PART ONE

Penny Prospect

PROLOGUE

When all the noise started at 10:30 p.m., Marta (as she was called back then) came out of bed with teeth bared, ready to fight whatever it was to save her home, be it intruders or the elements. Frank, she yelled, someone is attacking our house!

It’s a––, I hooted, dancing about, immensely pleased, shivaree.

People were pounding on pans and buckets outside and carrying torches. Reflecting my combined embarrassment, glee, and honor at being so singularly recognized by friends and neighbors, Marta simply bubbled. I treated the revelers to the home-made beer her dad had sent home with us. This was an event we would never forget. We were obviously thought capable of handling being ribbed and thus accepted, included as worthy of recognition. They became our friends in that one evening.

We joined the group as it started to move on to cheer other newlyweds. Marta and I quickly turned down the wicks on our living room lamps and trotted out the front door. She brought with us two old, tin wash pans and big wooden ladles.

About a third of the crowd that night were strangers, people who had joined the party for the free refreshments, and who, incidentally, pocketed spare bottles of bootleg brew when the party left our Wrenslow farmhouse. I ignored that. Wouldn’t have known how to call them out, anyway.

Back then a shivaree progressed relatively rapidly from house to house. We and, before us, the Lowes had already been honored.

Any other brides close by? asked an old roughneck, Bertie Berry. I knew him from over near Bramton. He and his wife were old hands at shivarees and had probably put together this one. The group had halted on the road outside our house.

A voice called, There’s the Harvers and––

––the Clarmonts! Everyone had whooped and yelled and pounded friends on the back with delight. I pinched Marta and blew foam off my beer onto my shirt-front. Marta hastily swabbed at the mess with an embroidered hanky as we scampered after the crowd that had started off quickly.

We Wrenslows were hot with shame after we came to the Clarmonts. It had been hard enough taking all the typical ribbing we heard regarding ourselves––Hot springs tonight––and all that. Here, two grubby little kids came to the Clarmonts’ door at that unpainted shack before the parents appeared.

Really, Frank, whispered Marta, don’t you think they’d rather not have been picked to be shivareed? Having those kids before being married!

We’ll do the Sam Harvers next, and it’ll be fun, I promised. We’ll soon be through here. I squeezed her hand as I reached out for the jug that the Clarmont fellow had handed to the nearest man. Obviously, his moonshine was known to someone in the crowd, someone who adroitly urged the crowd toward its source.

Be careful of those Roman hands, she had teased quietly so that no one could overhear.

’Member when Ted Williams had to tote his wife in a wheelbarrow ’round the Square? guffawed rookie policeman Lefty Little as he swung his wife around. That was shore a sight for sore eyes. I bet we can get the Harvers to liven up this party the same way. The party flowed up into town to the Harvers’ house.

But Sam Harver was too dignified to be trundled in a wheelbarrow. He and his wife had served apples and coffee and played records on their wedding gift phonograph. The recording of Marta, by Caruso, had played again, as it had at our wedding. We Wrenslows had twined together over the rough wood floor in the Harvers’ living room and danced out the door. It had been a most satisfactory introduction of the community to Marta: ‘Martha’ she must be called now.

Marta did not like being teased about being with our first (and only) child––Jerry was born in June, ’26––but teasing never bothered Mrs. Harver. The Harvers had had so many children so quickly that the missus was bogged down with hands of five children clutching at her apron.

After that shivaree, the Harvers and we ran around together for a long time. In 1924, they had a girl, Merrilee, nine months and fifteen minutes after the wedding, as Sam’s raucous mother, totally lacking in manners, laughed vulgarly at them. They had another daughter and two sons in the next four years and, finally, another son just before Sam died. Five kids to feed. Sam started running for offices and winning right up until the day he unfortunately died of the flu on his 35th birthday, eleven years after the shivaree. He left his family adequately provided for. I’ve done well by mine, too.

The Lowes had a baby girl, Margaret, also in ’24, and a few years afterwards had twin boys, before they moved somewhere northeast of here. He became a deputy sheriff and, later, added a farm to his duties, I heard.

Meanwhile, Tommy Little has moved up to become Raumville Police Chief. He and his wife are tall and robust, as are their three boys.

I knew Bertie Berry, from the farm near Bramton, had been injured in the war, and his wife was supporting their family.

There we all were, couples married in the Roaring Twenties: Wrenslows, Lowes, and Harvers being singled out––honored––by friends with that shivaree. And the Clarmonts, too, of course. We’ve waved greetings to each other over the years. And now our children are grown up, ready to achieve and prosper in this great, potentially booming, post-war era. Prosperity for posterity.

CHAPTER ONE

Frank, Martha’s soft querulous voice hissed, Frank, there’s a collect long distance call, probably from the Arkansas plant confirming the pine order. Please try to free up the phone quickly.

I had been lazing away in the porch swing. It has been a wonderful growing season these past weeks since the first day of spring: flowers, grass, trees drinking in the rainwater and sunshine alternately. Our apple farm had been a winner from the git-go. Because of our husbandry, we lost no land to a bank during the Depression because we weren’t dumb enough to mortgage land as people around us did. We even picked up some more acreage. If we couldn’t afford something during those years, we didn’t have it. I pictured the wooded hills, a path to a creek, always a creek at the bottom of a hill, water running over smooth rocks, crawdads skittering about the gravel. Red bud trees, white dogwood, so lacy in spring.

The kapok-filled pillow I had placed against the arm met my back at an uncomfortable angle and kept my head too upright to permit sleep; yet these dreamlike images had assailed my mind’s eye until Martha interrupted me.

The screen door slapped lightly shut behind me as I reached for the phone.

A tinny lady’s voice said, Long distance operator. Sergeant Wrenslow is calling collect. Will you accept the charges?

What? Oh, certainly. There were some odd beeps, and then my son Jerry’s voice said, Hi. How’s Ma?

Fine, fine. I thought it was the Arkansas Mill calling. Your mom must have misunderstood the operator.

Don’t know why she’d say that. Listen, Pa, I need $113 cash sent to ‘Resident, Post Office Box 430, City’. Did you write that down or do you need me to repeat it? He spoke in a mocking tone.

No, I can jot it here on a notepad. Okay, I got it. But why should I?

I ran up a bill there when I took some pals from my senior class out to eat at a restaurant, back when I was home a coupla months ago, and I’d forgot about it until now. If you don’t send it, or you tell anyone, the owner threatened to create an explosion outside your furniture plant like the one somebody did outside the munitions plant two years ago.

What did you say? Are you kidding? What did you mean by that? I remember you were out all night, but I didn’t know where. Where did you go? Who said something like that?

The operator’s tinny voice came on: The service has disconnected, and the phone line shut down.

I sat stunned for a couple of minutes, reached for the telephone to call back, realized that I had no number to call, pulled back my hand. Thought hard, scrambled to my feet; grabbed my checkbook, a fountain pen, and an envelope for my factory’s stationery from the drawer; and hurried off in the car to get the cash.

Noticing Sammy Sue and a baby in a playpen on a lawn down by the Square, I honked the horn and waved. She returned the wave and smiled. She’s married now. Once was Jerry’s girlfriend. A darling little blond, she had helped Jerry by her staunch friendship throughout the years he had been so fat. I always liked her and tried to stay friendly, even after Jerry inexplicably turned mean on her that summer night two years ago when he was home from basic training.

They had driven over to Neosho with his cousin, Cunningham Ham Maynard, a captain who was also home on leave, and Ham’s young girlfriend, Carole Harver. They’d decided to dine at Ham’s favorite inn––the one that had the spring-fed pond in the courtyard. I had expected that the foursome would come back to play pool in our basement afterwards.

Jerry arrived home alone that night about ten, his uniform wrinkled, not speaking to me or to Martha but going straight up to his room. Ham told me later that, when they exited the restaurant, Jerry had looked at Sammy Sue bending to open the car door and said, grinning, All that meat and no potatoes. Sammy Sue burst into tears and cried all the way to her house. Ham, riding in the back seat with Carole, had tried to explain that the expression was simply military-speak, describing a girl with a nice figure.

Myself, well, I didn’t care what kind of speak it was, it was a ghastly thing to say to a nice girl, and, perhaps even worse, to have to hear about the incident from our own smug Dr. Cunningham Maynard. Jerry, in my considered opinion, was merely careless as usual––as well as clueless––in not anticipating Sammy Sue’s reaction. Typical teenager, trying to show off, bungling the attempt.

Continuing to describe the evening, Ham revealed that Jerry had mocked a vaudeville performer at the restaurant who performed when the singer took her break. He was implying that Jerry had no manners. Detestable fellows, both of them.

Sealing the money inside an envelope, I addressed it to the post office box as Jerry had requested and dropped it in a mailbox on the corner. I hoped that was the end of it.

Returning home, I took my coffee outside and, relaxing on the porch swing once more, lit a Lucky Strike. Using my right foot to keep the slatted porch swing moving slightly, a light rain splashing onto the porch roof creating a lullaby, I closed my eyes and tried to rest, but I couldn’t keep my mind off Jerry. Although he started off a bit soft, I now thought of him as a strong grown-up son. Since he was jump-started and propelled out of town by that glorious day, D-Day, June 6, 1944, may we never forget it, he has benefited from the Air Corps regimen. He looks nice and holds himself well, as a Wrenslow should. On the other hand, I still wonder sometimes if I know him all that well.

What else? I had asked young Carole Harver the day before Jerry left on the train two years ago to start basic training. She had been present when he and Sammy Sue broke up two nights before, and I had already elicited her reaction to the incident: a shrug. What can I talk to him about before he leaves that will help him have fond memories of his hometown?

We were sitting on wire-backed chairs at a table in the Braithewaite drugstore eating tin-roof sundaes. The soda jerk’s tall white cap bobbed up and down as he dug deep into an ice cream container while making cones for a little boy and his mother.

Mr. Wrenslow, I don’t know exactly what you want me to remember. There were a lot of things. He did some strange things I heard about, I say ‘strange’ because I don’t know the stories behind them and don’t understand what and why certain rumors went around school about his attitude toward girls. Sorry, I don’t really run around with him anymore.

She stopped, took a breath, and continued, Let me back up and try to explain my puzzlement regarding his actions, because he can work events both to his advantage and to others’ advantage at the same time. Once, he was protecting some little, scrubby farm kids. A farmer had caught the little kids in his orchard and threatened to shoot them if they ever came back. Jerry went to the farm to threaten him right back. Later I heard he made the kids wash your cars and gave them a nickel, then charged them a nickel for some bruised apples from your farm. What do you make of that?

I wonder if the thing with the apples was the time I jumped Martha for lying to the school principal, swearing up and down that Jerry was sick at home when we hadn’t seen him all day. I didn’t think her prevarication set a good example for the boy.

Carole’s clear brown eyes studied me as she spooned up the last scoop and nodded. I didn’t know what you wanted me to tell, maybe things like that story that I don’t think you knew about.

Yes, you’re correct. I didn’t know about that. I scooted the chair back and stood. Thank you, child. I wanted a few things to laugh about with him tonight before he left. My best to your mother.

She stopped me with her hand on my elbow. He is very good at school work and has a lovely tenor in music class. I want you to tell him I said that, if you say we talked.

But, as I stopped to pay the drugstore clerk at the cash register, I wondered why she chose that story, instead of things about his being crude, bullying, or sarcastic if those were the attitudes that she labeled strange. Probably she was just being nice. But the story told me what I already knew about a characteristic of his: Jerry was opportunistic, a trait likely inherited from Grandpop Ben.

So Jerry and Martha and I did laugh over his escapades when we dined at the Country Club his last night home two years ago. About the time he was little and playing with the grape shot from Wilson Creek Battlefield and dropped it on his toe, howling.

About his belief that electricity came from water rushing through Bagnell Dam after his fourth grade class toured the interior, not understanding the water was turning the turbines to generate electricity. About how he loved to pretend being in a shivaree––we had described and demonstrated ours to him––marching around the house, banging on a pan, warbling, The music goes round and round and it comes out here, oo-oo-oo-oo.

And the one where he was playing baseball when he was eight. The telephone pole down the street was second base and, as he ran toward it, he looked back to see if the first baseman was chasing him. Ran smack-dab into the pole and knocked himself backwards. He ran home, pulled off his ball cap and blood ran down his cheek. Martha cleaned it up, applied Mercurochrome, and put a bandage on it. I came in the door a few minutes later and, when Martha saw me, she fainted.

But, now he is gone into the service. When he came home a coupla months ago, we barely saw him. He’s soon off overseas while Ham is coming home in a couple of months mustered out of military service. He will add to the family prestige admirably: Dr. Ham! Wish he were a Wrenslow instead of a Maynard. I wonder how I would look in a bushy mustache such as Grandpop Ben wore.

Towering, hollering Grandpop Ben.

I had eight sisters and then came me, a son, he said. Grandma and I had your dad, a son. He and your mother had you. I was so little and thin: he towered and hollered at me. This lovely southern Missouri land is yours and your children’s. Ancestors for children to hallow, the land to hallow, because the Wrenslows chose America for their homeland. Love it, revere it, protect it to earn it. Don’t forget God’s grace, American’s bounties, and family love are yours, are yours only if you work to deserve them. Towering, hollering, hallowing. "Now you have a son … and he’s bound to be puny like you. How could you marry that tiny woman?" Yes, I do have Jerry. Yes.

Grandpop Ben should have seen how Jerry grew taller than we are, bumping his head against the thick beams in the cellar when he turned 14. So different than little me, with my body shrunken and small, my shoulders wide but thin like a slat. Had I neglected my son? I couldn’t be like Grandpop Ben, yelling, towering, and ordering him. And Grandpop Ben was gone. Daddy was gone, and Mamma gone even longer, dying in the Spanish flu plague of 1918 when I was 12. And Jerry, mushroom cloud Jerry, who didn’t bother to listen to the greats and grands before us, had only me, and I failed to impress him. He preferred his mother.

When he came home this last March, he proudly announced, Look, Dad, I’m an officer, an NCO.

Didn’t he think I knew that NCO meant noncommissioned officer? He’s a sergeant in the Air Corps. Grandpop Ben would be mortified that he is an enlisted man, not a general or colonel, but I think he is doing fine: trim, proud, straight-shouldered, paid a salary. I should have asked him on the phone why I should send money to that restaurant for his night’s adventure back in March––he’s on a payroll, after all. Yet––there was always something off about him, something wild, something that maybe Grandpop Ben, with all his war scars and hollering, could control, but that I could not.

I twitched and shifted my position, trying to draw my right leg up, but the porch swing seat was too narrow for even my lithe frame. I opened my eyes and sat up stiffly, pushing the pillow more into a corner position and sat back against it, looking out through the fern like, dark green leaves of the mimosa tree toward the dark gray sky. That would be a pretty color combination for the new living room suites at my furniture factory.

Grandpop Ben would have been proud of the way we increased the family fortune after he died. Turning out chairs for the Army with all that female labor during the war, and now selling furniture to all the nouveau riche as fast as we can turn it out. Too many people have too much money, all of them on Easy Street and trying to move into power over the good families, sticking their noses in the air at us.

I know he never liked me: I was too small. I always had to remind myself that other people did like me, that no one complained when the ammunition plant bought my nestled hills, near by my stream, or when my furniture factory slap, slap grew up fast. And then more stores were founded in our lovely town, new signs, new siding, and new courthouse. Still his voice rang out in my consciousness, as clear and loud––always, always loud––as it did before the old courthouse burned and he died the same night.

Yes, much as I feared the old man’s deprecating comments, I deeply desired his approbation. I am glad the old patriarch didn’t live to hear that Martha refused to have any more children. She wanted to keep her figure so that I would keep my interest, she said. I did not mind then, not when she followed the announcement with a quick pass to flick off the lights and press into me warmly, indicating this part of our marriage wasn’t to fall by the roadside as she steered clear of pregnancy. I liked her taking the role of the leader: such black eyes, black hair in a bob, white teeth, white body in a grey flapper dress with her hose rolled above the knees.

It was great coming home from the honeymoon to our own house, eight whole rooms in the old farmhouse south of town for just the two of us and, of course, Grandpop Ben. Marta was flabbergasted: her extensive clan in St. Louis were crowded into a ten-room house. Too bad she was scared of Grandpop Ben: he didn’t help matters by saying little to her but expecting his meals on time, his shoes shined, and his laundry taken care of. Old patriarch acting as if he were an aristocrat in this little town. Thought because he had a big house for these parts and ran a farm on the Ozark plateau that he was a present-day Thomas Jefferson. I never mentioned that I had learned in school how much land Jefferson’s estate covered. Maybe I was afraid to.

Marta and I had some good times nevertheless. Marta decided we should be seen with people with more money, a better class, as it were. I wish we had kept up with her St. Louis relatives: their house was aswarming with exuberant people. In contrast, the Maynards were standoffish kinfolk––not that their farmhouse was any better than ours: we ran into them only at holiday gatherings. Maybe I wouldn’t be so uneasy about Jerry joining the Air Corps and going off across the Pacific if there were more family, and if only we had had more children, to be frank (which I am, ha ha).

And now Martha’s figure is bloated; her shape has hardly any definition. Jerry has become trim, and she has quit being trim. She always declared that whatever he did was the correct thing to do, until he upped and joined the Air Corps when he was about to be drafted. That threw her down so far that she cannot climb out of mourning. Her state of mind is unlike the times a few years ago when she would proudly declare that Jerry had apologized quite sufficiently for his latest misbehavior. Always had been a real little gentleman in her eyes.

Going inside for another cup of coffee, remembering how soft, fat Jerry had waved from the KATY train as it gathered steam that long ago June, my eyes settled on the framed poem hanging on the wall just inside the front door, in crayon colors matching the flocked entry way wallpaper. Was the kid a manipulator? Funny boy, Jerry. I closed my eyes.

MY LESSON

I went to the garden alone;

And pulled up my mother’s roses,

Some people like me can’t see

The love that under there nose’s.

So he walked with me and he talked with me

And he told me I was his son,

And I tarried there where he married there

and I’m so glad I’am his own.

Jerry D. Wrenslow, 1937

I could see the crayon scrawl on the backs of my eyelids when I closed them. What a scene that had been: Martha’s roses that were scheduled for the fall County Fair had been pruned, thoroughly pruned, one morning without her approval. Martha wept real tears and screamed at eleven-year-old Jerry and told me to do something, as if there were anything to be done. How could I glue the petals back? The scene ended with a family hug when son Jerry gave Martha and me the poem, the paper sopping wet with his tears (from his spanking) and proclaimed, I love you, Mom and Dad.

I’ve studied it often. I used to see something heartfelt, something to make a father proud, but lately I’ve been wondering if, even at eleven years old, the kid was a manipulator. Even though I gave him a spanking for pulling apart the roses, I was quite soft on him for a while after he gave us the poem, and maybe that’s all he was going for. Maybe he’d been working me over all these years, training my mind to always do what he wanted––like paying his restaurant bill. And making up stories like saying the fellow threatened my factory with an explosion. Weird.

I shook my head, took a swallow of coffee, and stepped back out onto the porch. Manipulation or not, the restaurant bill he phoned about was paid, and thinking about Jerry this way would only put me in a sour mood.

The Rocket Ryan Corporation’s public relations department worked hard to ameliorate fear of explosions after that one scary blast two years ago. I’d read in the paper about the ammunitions plant’s legal and monetary help to the local planning board, utility board, builders’ groups, hospital, and other such efforts. Money certainly did not hurt. Bit of smart maneuvering, also, to donate money to the clinic and to promise to bring back the hometown hero Dr. Ham to run it. The mental health facility should attract people from a wide area, as well as keep the RRC-donated Medical Unit forever in front of the public.

I heard Martha’s footsteps coming down the hall. My gaze traveled to the house three doors down where Ham would be bringing young Carole Harver as his bride in a few weeks. Because the Medical Corps had him on call, poor Ham could guarantee to be available for only two days during that week in June when he and Carole would marry.

Martha came to the side of the screen door, staying hidden while she whispered, Are you talking to yourself again? Honestly, Frank, that’s really scary. Are the bushes hiding someone?

"I’m sorry, Martha, but I’m not talking out loud. You’re hearing things again. Go lie down," I whispered back. Ever since our doctor gave her that amphetamine to help her lose weight last winter, a drug that threw her into a nervous breakdown, she’s been afraid of everything. And that adds to the problem of her mourning Jerry’s absence every waking moment when she’s coherent. I hope the electric shock treatments I take her to in Kansas City will work to kill her jangled brain cells.

Pure clear buoyant thoughts slid into the background of my mind, carrying ancestors, hills and terrain, brides and shivarees, friends and relatives, flowers and strong grandfathers with them. I’ve done all right with my inheritance for a short man, and Jerry, the big guy, will do all right with his. I hope.

CHAPTER TWO

Staff Sergeant Ted Clarmont, Sr., had the concealed economic movement of the hunter––or the hunted. With a swift bend of knee, he crouched over the quarry he had sighted, trapped there in a bush. Now that the enemy was more than two years in his past, he was armed only with fingers. He gently extracted the remains of a Sunday newspaper, found its three-day old date––April 22, 1946––and folded it to fit in his pocket. The hems of his camouflage pants were splattered with red mud.

Like Nimrod, with keen eye and sure foot, he took an old shortcut from the road up over the hill, and then he veered off into the underbrush. Over the hill, out of sight of the thin black ribbon of road, he stripped off his shirt, exposing his skin to the hot breeze.