On a visit home, I heard from my uncle how one of my younger brothers had called the sheriff on the other and he went on in great detail about how thoughtless they were and they needed to be taught “a lesson.” I don’t know if he blamed it on the death of our father a few years before, or the incompetence of our mentally ill mother to “keep them in line.” As he told about it, he became angrier and angrier. Why couldn’t they just talk out their differences, not “involve the law.”
I was astonished.
This didn’t sound quite like my younger brothers. They had constantly bickered amongst themselves when they were little, because our mother thought she was “solving” a problem by settling their little disputes by declaring one or the other a winner. All she was doing, in actuality, was setting them up for the next spat. No one wanted to be the loser. She seldom gave much attention to any of us, and never any affection, so these spats were their way of being noticed by her. And, when one was a “winner,”
that was taken as a sign of favor.
But as they had aged into their teenage years, with their own spaces, now that I and our sister had left home, they each had control of their own space, which they didn’t when they were little and had to share the same room.
This new episode just didn’t sound right.
Of course, I didn’t vocalize this to our uncle. He was always right and I had no facts to go on. This was the first I’d heard of it. Without any direct knowledge, I didn’t want to stick my foot in my mouth and regret it later.
Our uncle described the sheriff pulling up to the house, one brother accusing the other of stealing something, of what I couldn’t remember, the other denying it loudly but not quite violently. They merely traded insults with each other. No one was arrested, there was no evidence for it, but both were given a stern warning that there had better not be a “next” time.
He described all this from the account a neighbor boy, in between the age of my brothers, had told him. I couldn’t figure out, though, where the neighbor boy was in this altercation. He didn’t seem to be on the side of one brother or the other, nor was his point of view clear about where he was standing as he watched all this happen. And, why was he at our house anyway? He lived several miles away and didn’t visit often, as far as I could tell. Things might have changed after I’d left home, but I didn’t know.
I kept silent, but wondered.
A few days later, I was with my younger brother and I asked him about this incident and who had exactly done what to whom.
“I’ve heard about it too,” my brother said. “I wish I’d been there.”
I was confounded. Of course, you were there, I thought.
“I wish I was there,” my brother repeated. “I’d have given that neighbor a piece of my mind. Actually, I will, next time I see him. He doesn’t need to be spreading that kind of shit.”
Then I realized, the neighbor boy had made the whole thing up to get attention for himself and cause dissension in the family.
Both brothers ended their relationship with that neighbor. Neither one wanted a “friend” like him in either of their lives. They concluded that he had had to have been the one to call the sheriff – and lied to the sheriff about a situation that didn’t exist.
When our uncle learned that the entire episode had been fabricated by this neighbor, he also ceased connections with that family.
That neighbor boy had his moment of fame, but when it ended – he had nothing.