The Ghost of Mary Prairie

Prologue

In 1961, southern Oklahoma was a landscape of hard traditions and miles of empty space. Recycled stories and wide prairies were the sustenance from which everyone drew strength and stability. Families lived in the same houses, on the same ranches and farms and on the same streets as their ancestors before them, and no whim of Darwinian evolution was going to break that chain. And woven into the very strands of this social tapestry was a culture of silence and a graveyard folklore that followed every day and every event like a grim, relentless shadow.

It wasn't that more people died here than in other parts of the world. Life was hard, not for some but for all of us who lived its painful cycles and endured all of nature's tricks. Drought, tornadoes, flash floods were the obvious ones, but the real tricks involved watching a man sip his morning coffee and then, after not more than a hiccup, slump over dead in his chair. No logic or analysis could predict these injustices. But we all knew the stories and most of us had first hand knowledge of death, had smelled its damp, rotten breath and watched it perform its slithering, languorous dance through the body of someone we loved. There were 10,000 people in Jefferson County in 1961. So when the news of death arrived, it was likely somebody we had bought milk from or sold eggs to or hitched a ride across the flatlands of Route 32. Death, in this place, was as expected as rain on a cloudy day.

The overgrown baseball diamond in Grady was where my life radically changed for the first time. And that year, 1961, when I was fifteen, it would change twice more so that soon I would hardly recognize who I had once been. Grandma Leeds, we called her "Weaver," said that's what growing up meant - nibbling on the forbidden fruit and realizing that your life was never actually as you had known it.

My mama refused to call Grandpa Leeds "Woody," like the rest of us. She hated him, or maybe she hated how he frightened her, though I had no concrete proof on which to base this theory. There were all kinds of quirky things on that side of the family, like how Weaver never let Woody drive anywhere at night. She hid his cigars from him and only let him smoke on his birthday, but knew he smoked every second he was out of her clutches. Woody told me stories of how the men in his oil cartel used to lie and cheat each other out of thousands of dollars, and then one of them would just stop showing up for work one day. He painted a picture of himself as the conscience shadowing their dirty deals, and the one who reminded them of good will and honesty. And whether or not it was true was beside the point. I never got to know him well enough to establish either intrinsic goodness or evil, or to judge his misdeeds. Woody was just another thread in my family's fraying tapestry.

I thought, back then, that the fate of my older sister Lewella and her premature baby was foremost in my mind and heart. But little did I know that three women - Janet Lange, Nelda McCann, and Mary, would shape my life more than any other influence. It was largely because of them, this femme trilogy, that I would become a man far before nature intended.

My adolescent world was full of trilogies like this. My Daddy, a rancher, believed every story had not two but three sides - the truth, that which covered up the truth, and a whole world in between. And there were only three things to see in southern Oklahoma - the open sky, a dry dotted landscape, and the murder of crows that flew around dead cattle. Our treehouse club was a trilogy of sorts, even though neither me nor Mikey Savage liked Jimmy Wilson as much as each other. Mikey and me were best friends, though this was a fact neither of us ever spoke of out loud. Issues had come between us, like Janet for one, but not enough to dismantle a friendship that had lasted ten years so far. There just weren't enough people in Grady back then to be too selective.

The most important epiphany that came out of that year was that I was not intended to have the simple life I was born for. Mamma and Daddy expected, I guess everybody did, that I would grow up, maybe study agriculture somewhere, marry some local girl and endure the life of toil and hardship endemic to heartland farming and ranching. In my life, I had known a little of either, since we started out as a dairy farm and then later converted it to a ranch. But by the following year, I knew that chasing ghosts and dead bodies and killers was as native to my mind and heart as herding cattle was to Daddy.

And once I knew this, there was no going back.

I had learned that lying and pretending were for the weak of character and the faint of heart. And I knew, the night Mary McCann first called out to me, that I was neither one of those and that I, of all people, had been chosen to be her savior. And so it was that I would change from a gawky, bumbling teenage boy into a superhero nearly overnight.