Lisa Atkinson - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 5. Whole No. 801, May 2008

I was a gangly kid with my own problems and I was glad to be out of Big Mike’s headlights. You’d think Big Mike had it out for smart kids because they were weaker and he was dumb. But that was not the case. Big Mike had a pretty good head on his shoulders when it came to schoolwork. He was tall, a center for the junior-high basketball team, but he wasn’t overly muscular. I think now he was just trying to survive. He was the smartest kid to come out of the Bowman bunch in years, and being the smartest kid (along with being a decent ballplayer) meant he got to do pretty much what he wanted when he wanted. His parents had already pegged all their hopes and dreams on a fourteen-year-old boy. Big Mike wanted to make sure no one got in his way, because he was looking for a one-way ticket out of Harlow, even then.

My other problem was Pearl. She had started to court, and she was pinned for the high-school sorority, so there were slumber parties on Saturday nights and boys from the football team sniffing around all the time. Pearl and me didn’t get along too well then because Mother had appointed me as her tag-along. Let me tell you, being a chaperone at any age is no fun. Pearl and her beau of the week did everything they could to ditch me, but I was like a fly on maple syrup. There was no way I was going to disappoint my mother.

About six months after they came to Harlow, Loreen McCall and the marshal, Lehigh Bowman, waltzed into the justice of the peace’s office and got married. Now Lehigh wasn’t the brightest man in the world, but he thought he was the smartest man in Harlow. Lehigh was Big Mike’s uncle, and the gun on Lehigh’s hip made him think he knew everything. All of the Bowmans had been marshal of Harlow at one time or another, and with Lehigh being the youngest, it was pretty much accepted he would have the job for life. The job didn’t require much, and it was a good thing, because if there was one thing Lehigh Bowman didn’t know anything about, it was hard work. My dad always said he envied Lehigh because he was the only man he knew who got paid for taking naps in the middle of the day.

Anyway, Lehigh and Loreen moved onto the Bowman place, a farm where most all the other Bowman brothers lived as well, into a small two-bedroom wood-frame house that hadn’t been painted since the beginning of the big war. Teg was relegated to the basement. It seemed that being a step-daddy didn’t set too well with Lehigh; he wanted Teg as far away as possible so he and Loreen could hump like bunnies on the living-room floor whenever the urge struck them. Teg told me later that he was really happy about living in the basement. He could sneak out the window any time he wanted and disappear into the woods behind the Bowman farm.

For weeks after the marriage, Lehigh walked around town like a big Rhode Island Red rooster, saying he’d married the “purtiest woman ever to come to Harlow.” You’d’ve thought he’d won the Irish Sweepstakes. But it didn’t take long for reality to set in, and Lehigh was back to his normal routine of naps in the afternoon and drinking beer at Store Longwood’s bar on Main Street. Loreen kept working for Miss Chad, and Teg, well, that’s when things started to get real bad for him.

I didn’t set out to be friends with Teg Saidlow, but it happened the summer after he and his momma came to Harlow. Lord knows I had enough trouble in school on my own, fending off Big Mike too much to notice that Teg was too. As I already told you, I wasn’t very athletic. My biggest muscle was on top of my shoulders. Except I didn’t know that then. Oh, I liked to read, and my mother was always reciting poetry and listening to opera records she’d purchased in New York City when she was a girl, but I thought most everybody knew the things I knew.

Every Sunday morning Pearl and I woke up to Maria Callas belting out an aria I couldn’t understand the words to. We knew the music was an ongoing fight between her and my dad. You see, he went to the Pentecostal church on Sundays, and Mother stayed home, refusing to step foot in a building where they kept snakes under the pulpit. She wasn’t against church, really, and she understood that Dad had to fit in to Harlow because he was the only doctor, but she felt worshiping God had more to do with how people acted every day. The “little things,” she used to say, “like a smile to a stranger, or a dime to a hobo, are worshiping too.”

My dad told me after she died that he’d always agreed with her, but he felt it was his duty to go to church on Sundays, just in case one of the snakes forgot they were in a house of God and bit somebody. It happened three times before he retired, and each time, Dad saved the believer from making an early journey to Heaven.

So, it was on a Sunday morning that my friendship with Teg Saidlow really began. Mother forbade Pearl and me from practicing a heathen religion, so we were not allowed to go with Dad. Don’t think we got off scot-free, though, we still had our duties to the Lord. And they came in the way of good deeds. “God didn’t put people on this earth to sit on their butts on Sunday morning and listen to some madman trying to scare the bejesus out of them,” she’d say. “He put them here to do something to make the world a better place.” And that was that.

Because of Dad’s job, Mother knew everything that went on in Harlow. She just didn’t talk about it like Pearl did. Maybe somewhere along the line, she learned a lesson, as Pearl eventually would, about when to keep her mouth shut.

While she listened to Maria Callas, Mother would be in the kitchen cooking up a feast for Pearl and me to disperse to those who couldn’t do for themselves. The baskets on our bikes were loaded with sweet potatoes, jars of chicken soup, leafy salads that she’d picked out of her garden that morning, tubes of salves, headache pills, and a list of names that had to be scratched off before we were allowed to come home and enjoy our own day of rest.

Sorry, I get long-winded in my memories. I miss those old days when Teg Saidlow walked the world, and my mother hummed to Maria Callas as she cut up vegetables. Things were simple, but they weren’t always clean. I get so damned angry sometimes listening to people wish for the past because it was so pure and perfect, I’d like to hit them upside the head. The world was bad then, too. Teg would tell you that if he could. The world has been a mean, ugly place since Cain and Abel, and to think otherwise, well, you might as well be as dead as the past.

Now that morning, my heart sunk, because Loreen Bowman’s name was on my list. The last thing I wanted to do was walk right into enemy territory. Big Mike had laid off Teg since Lehigh came into the picture. And he’d decided to make me an example to every other kid in our class who got better grades than him. After I snitched on him for copying off me in history class and told him that I wasn’t ditching a test so he could be at the head of the curve, things got even more physical. I tried to trade lists with Pearl. I even offered to get lost on one of her outings, but she just laughed and sped away on her bike.

Loreen was on solid bed rest for a week. My dad had seen her the night before. The story was that she had miscarried, but even my father was unsure of whether that was the truth or not, even though he didn’t come right out and say it. He’d seen her in his office the week before and told her that Lehigh’s baby was healthy as a horse, growing in her womb just like it was supposed to. I heard him tell Mother after he came home that things didn’t add up. Of course, he took it personally when some sort of tragedy took place. He should’ve seen it coming, prevented it, saved a life, but he didn’t see this, and it hurt him badly. My dad had a weak stomach when it came to losing babies. Mother had miscarried after I was born, leaving her unable to have any more children, and it broke my dad’s heart. He relived that pain and suffering every time a baby failed to take that first breath of air.