Not many new people came to Harlow, and when they did, well, the tongues got to wagging. Teg’s mother’s name was Loreen McCall, and that started things off right away, considering Teg’s last name was different. The only thing worse than being black in Harlow was being different. I was a couple of years older than Teg when he arrived, but I was old enough to know trouble when I saw it. My mother and father didn’t outwardly tolerate gossip, but there was nothing they could do to stop my sister, Pearl, and her wildfire tongue when they were out of earshot. Pearl knew everything that went on in town. Some girls collected dolls; Pearl collected stories about people and then added twists and turns of her own. I know now she was just bored. Being in Harlow was like living on a desert island to her. When she grew up, Pearl went on to be a newspaper editor in Chicago. No small feat in her day and age, let me tell you, but after all that happened in Harlow, she had a mission to tell everyone the truth. It was that way with her until the day she died, except for one thing: She never told anybody our secret about Teg Saidlow.
Teg and his momma set up house in the trailer behind Miss Molly Chad’s restaurant, The Blue Moon, and it wasn’t long before Loreen McCall was waiting tables and flipping her eyelashes at the marshal. Loreen had a way of winning people over with her soft voice and the way she’d look at you out of the corner of her eye. Like I said, the questions did arise, and the women folk weren’t as taken with her as the men were. I heard my own mother whispering to Dad one night that Maggie the Cat had come to town in the form of Loreen McCall, and he’d better keep his distance. Which would have been difficult, in any case, being as he was the only doctor in the county. He said he knew how to handle stray cats and began to tickle Mother.
No one quite knew where Loreen and Teg came from, she was kind of wishy-washy on that issue, but somehow, she bewitched most people into forgetting she hadn’t been born and raised in Harlow.
Teg kept a low profile right from the start. I only saw him twice before school started that year, and both times he was taking out the trash from The Blue Moon. I really didn’t think too much about him that summer other than the occasional story Pearl reported to anybody who’d listen on the front porch. Most of her stories had to do with Big Mike tracking down the new boy, breaking his glasses, and setting fire to his books.
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.