� to say the least � 2003-05-22 � 7:48 p.m. �
Sunday morning we were having morning coffee in the sun at Mum's... an ordinary day... a sad day upon leaving but an ordinary day just the same... we heard dogs bark madly from down the street or across the river... as if they were being fought... we come from the Townships... it's possible afterall. We shrugged it off.
One... then two and three and four provincial police cars raced down the river road.... a mission they couldn't get to fast enough... one, two, three past my parents' house
Instantly my mother worries about my brothers and the neighbours' kids. She knows that our eldest is drunk and asleep in his bed... our Cameron she isn't so sure of... she sends Dad out to make sure he's at home, since no one is picking up her calls.
Dad comes back dreary... sullen... and sunken... Cameron and Heather are both ok... but the cops were laying blankets on the road a few door down and the paramedics were in the ditch, obviously tending to someone. Without words I knew memories were coming back to Dad faster than fallen stars in a sky... He was so dim.
He said cops were parked in a neighbour's yard... incidently the neighbour family of the boy our eldest had struck and killed years ago now... we all sat there sad over our coffee... eyes welling... remembering and thinking that that mother couldn't bear another child hurt or lost.
We're not a religious family but we all silently prayed that whoever was laying hurt, be ok.
We went about our day.
I spoke to Mum last night... and she read in the paper that no one had been struck by a car... that it wasn't a child laying hurt, but a man.
A man who had apparently been accused by his nephew of molestation...
A neighbour told Mum that the boy told his mother, who instead of calling the police called her sister (the accused's ex wife), who called their brothers, who called more neighbours... so on an so forth... and before long a lynching mob was after the man accused.
The article in the paper read that they beat him severely with baseball bats... kicked him, punched him... and finally someone stabbed him repeatedly in another (uninvolved) neighbour's yard.
The accused ran, or stumbled as a stabbed man might do, nearly a kilometre down the street toward town before he collapsed in a ditch to keep safe.
He's in critical condition, I assume at the regional hospital...
I wonder now what parts are truth and what parts are glorified... but I guess it doesn't matter... truth remain down the street from me last week a little boy was being hurt... I trust that's true since kids, for the most part, don't know how to lie about sexual abuse. Half the time they don't know how to describe it, let alone make it up... and down the street, as seven or eight of us chatted in the morning sun, a man was being beat by his family and his friends into a bloody pulp... I am not sure what to think of it.
I am not a violent person... i don't believe that an eye for an eye is fair trade... and I have lived reasons to believe it should be. I don't believe that man should be killed for his mistakes... at least not by his peers. And still, if these accusations stand strong... I don't necessarily hope the man recovers well from his beating...
Broken glass that cuts deep on both sides....
I used to live in a town when I wouldn't think twice about being a kid and walking around alone. I used to live as a kid, fearless... and in the last while I've wondered if you can't raise a child safely on Decelles Street, Brigham... where in the hell can you have a family and live worry-free?
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