Doug Allyn - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 32, No. 13, Mid-December, 1987

I guess I should begin by saying that it’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to tell a story. I don’t really know much about that sort of business. I never went but to the fourth grade, and even then I didn’t hardly care for reading. I did like arithmetic a lot, though. Arithmetic’s not like other things. You’ve got something solid there. You always know what you have with an arithmetic problem.

It’s a funny thing to me now, it really is, but I didn’t want to do nothing but get out of school and go to work on my daddy’s farm. And I was let out early for need.

In those days, you see, you could leave school to help out at home if you were needed bad enough. That was the law then. Well, I couldn’t wait, and my daddy did need me, so I got to quit school very early in life and go to work for him. It was a happy day for me.

My mother was against it, she wanted me to go on at least to the eighth grade, but I insisted. I figured I knew better. So I finished the fourth grade, as I said, and then I quit.

The only reason I say all of this is because I went to school with John Lehmann. And we been friends for all these years since. That was nearly sixty years ago, so you can see that I knew him for a long time.

What happened to him and to his shouldn’t of happened to anybody.

Well, his daddy’s farm was right below my daddy’s farm, down low in the valley south of Garlock’s Bend, and so in time it turned out that his farm was right below mine, they both come down to us by rights. It was good bottom ground. And so wonderful for water because the Susquehanna cut right through it. It even flooded every dozen years or so, and that made the ground around there even better. There was a lot of water. That’s important to remember.

I never got married. John, he did, to a wonderful girl from over to Skinner’s Eddy, Caroline Jacobs, and they had kids, and time passed like it does for us all. The kids grew up and didn’t want to stay around Garlock’s Bend so they left and went down to Harrisburg for work. Carrie, his wife, she seemed to not quite care so much about things after that.

Now I always liked Carrie, don’t get me wrong about her. I really did. A whole lot more than liked. A whole lot more. In my own way, of course. I guess that in the end that’s important to remember, too.

Miller’s Store, where all this sort of comes to a head, you’ll have to understand about. It’s kind of the place in Garlock’s Bend where everybody goes. You can buy groceries there, and you can buy clothes there. And tools. And even light meals. You get so you don’t have to leave town very often. It’s an honest-to-goodness general store, in the middle of town right down along the river. I knowed it through four owners ever since the building was put up. And my daddy was one of the men who helped to do that. The current owner, Bill Miller, bought the store off his second cousin, Henry, who decided to retire pretty nearly thirty years ago now, and he’s run it ever since.

Generally it’s open by eight, only hardly nobody would ever be in there that early but Bill, fussing around with boxes and cans on the shelves, keeping things all straightened up. Not hardly ever anyone else, though. Not much happens early in Garlock’s Bend. It’s a town used to slow starts. But the people of the town and the hills around, too, consider Miller’s to be something of a meeting hall, so it is almost always open. Later in the morning there’s lots of them comes in. The talk is just plain satisfactory. And the coffee is special. So it’s not at all unusual at ten or eleven in the morning to see a fistful of men stuffed into orange hunting jackets all clustered around the homemade wooden tables, elbows on red-checkered tablecloths, sipping hot coffee rich with cream and sugar. Listening to young Dale Heberlein, the morning disk jockey from over at Towanda. Every one of them men laughing at Dale’s humor. With maybe a bought doughnut or some eggs and home fries, all peppered up. Add the smell of that coffee, maybe even some hand cut bacon, and it’s as good a way to start the day as there is.

Well, that’s Miller’s for you. That’s where things started to go haywire.

Funny thing is, even though I lived so close to John Lehmann, I got to talk to him mostly there at Miller’s. At home, right next to him, it was all farm business until the evenings. And then he had his family to attend to, with very little time at all to jawbone with me. I was alone, and like as not off doing things myself, chasing around, so mostly I saw and talked to him after growing season in the late mornings at Miller’s, and I sometimes think he wouldn’t of come there even then but for my sake, to befriend me and spend even just a little time with me. I always appreciated that.

I now and again think he knew, too, how very much I cared for Carrie down through the years. Maybe better than she did. But I never said a single word of it to either of them or to a person alive. I just never would have done that.

Over the seasons I sure liked the mornings I spent with him at Miller’s, but I especially liked those last few times. We used to sit and talk and drink that coffee. God, how I remember that!

It makes the loss of him all the more painful.

Some things, I guess, you’d end up going mad if you tried to keep inside of you. Just completely mad. And so I guess the best thing is to just tell the story, no matter how painful, to say what happened, get it out in the open finally and maybe get a handle on it. I have to admit, though, that John Lehmann’s story has me licked, and more than that — it’s got me scared, too.

Well, there isn’t a whole lot happening on a small farm in late October, except maybe finishing up your apples, and getting the ground ready for next year, that sort of thing, so for a couple of weeks this particular October I had been going just as regular as anything to Miller’s for breakfast and for talk. Mostly it was just to pass time.

For the first of those weeks John and Carrie occasionally came in too, and we had some good mornings together. All the usual stuff, bragging about farming and hunting, and me teasing Carrie and finagling an invitation for a supper from her soon.

Carrie Lehmann, I’ve got to tell you, was the gentlest, kindest, most friendly woman I ever knew. That’s a certain thing. And it’s not the most important thing in the world, but she had such beautiful light blue eyes. Those last times I saw her over there at Miller’s are dear times to me yet. They seem now to me to be a kind of adding up of all the earlier times I was ever around her. Sort of like they were the real times and all the ones before were dreams. I don’t know. I guess I can’t say it exactly like I mean it.

Then they began not to come to Miller’s so often. Winter wasn’t so very far off and we had a cold snap, and I guessed maybe it just was easier for them to stay home when that cold spell set in. There wasn’t anything too unusual in that.

But then there was that last time I saw Carrie. It had rained hard on and off for about a week. It was cold and damp and all the water had pushed up the Susquehanna until it was as high as it’s ever been. I mean, it was high. And there we were in Miller’s, just like always.

But this particular time there was something really different about Carrie. I could see that right away. She hardly touched her coffee at all, hardly touched it at all, and she wouldn’t talk about any of the usual things no matter how we tried to get her to. And she fussed and fretted.