The Laundress
In the year with no summer, the native women take to their fields in the nude. The missionaries protest and the Christian women are appalled, but the miners crawl out of their shanties at night and peer between the dried out corn stalks at the women in the moonlight, their skin velvety and dark with sweat. They lift their arms and stomp their feet, so that the ground is worked so fine that the dirt lies light and loose like flour. Sometimes the wind takes it up, and then the women disappear in the dust.
As the Laundress unlaces her boots at the side of the field, she does not...
Reminds of Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop and Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River.