Your humble Smallholder lives in the tiny virginia hamlet of Batesville. Population: 100 (actually 99 now that the horse has died). We actually have a town song that we sing during the Christmas carol festivities in which we proudly proclaim ourselves a podunk “one horse town with a lot of heart.”
But crime, my friends, has come to Batesville.
Our good friend and occasional commentator Polymath hired a guy out of Crozet to paint the roof of Polymathschloss. The painter brought his ne’er-do-well son along to help (I found this out much later). And this is where the serpent enters the garden. Years from now, when we look back a bemoan the loss of the innocent Batesville years, we will all blame Polymath. We might even have to arrange for an old-school blanket party to help him atone for his sins.
Ne’er-do-well son, driving home from the paint job evidently saw my pigs who are pastured right next to the road. He tells one of his buddies and they decided to have a pig roast.
They came at night, shot one of the pigs with a crossbow, jumped the fence, manhandled the 300 pound carcass over the fence, hung it up in paint man’s garage, and went to a party. These two 18 year old dropouts then brag to everyone at the party that they shot a pig in Batesville.
Unfortunately for them, some of the kids at the party liked my pigs. People who drive down my road frequently slow down and even stop to enjoy the pigs. Most people have never seen pigs being pigs in the woods. The Batesville pigs are well known and beloved. I keep running into people at the pool or the local store who talk about them. Yep, I say, they’re mine. At any rate, some of those kids did the right thing and came to tell me who killed the pig.
I called the cops. And, not knowing that they had stolen the body, spent an hour walking through the woods trying to find the victim. Not finding anything, I figured that the other pigs,being pigs, had eaten their less fortunate colleague.
When the policeman finally showed up, I gave him the names of the perpetrators. A dead pig is not a high priority in the police department, so he suggested I file a citizen’s warrant (he was familiar with the two boys from previous cases). So I went to the magistrate to swear out a warrant against the two boys. The magistrate looked up livestock killing and found out that it was a class five felony. I swore out a citizen’s felony warrant and the magistrate told me it would take a week or so to serve the warrants.
I was pretty hot, as you can imagine. But I also realized that a conviction would be almost impossible. I thought that the body has disappeared and the only evidence was based on hearsay. So I was not optimistic about justice and definitely not optimistic about recovering the loss. Unlike the Maximum Leader and Minister of Propaganda, your humble Smallholder is not a “man of wealth and taste.” I’m a school teacher and a farmer and the loss of one seventh of my hog crop was a big financial blow to my family.
And then I got to thinking. Many of the criminals I deal with in the after school program have parents who are enablers. I knew that the triggerman lived in a trailer park and had recently beaten his father so badly that he had to go to the hospital, so it was unlikely that he had parents to bail him out. But through the miracle of the internet and property tax records, I discovered that paint boy’s family owned a house in Crozet. So I looked up the Snow family of Crozet in the phone book. There are a lot of Snows in Crozet. But I did find a listing with the boy’s name.
Woman answers the phone: “Hello?”
“Is C____ Snow there?”
“He’s not in right now.”
“Well, you tell your boy that I know he killed my hog and if I don’t have restitution by the end of the day, I’m prosecuting to the full extent of the law!”
“Wait, wait! My husband C_______ is thirty years old. This happens all the time. We are always getting calls for the C________ who is eighteen.”
Oops. Ah well, it was worth a try.
But the woman evidently called the correct group of Snows because the next day paint man comes up my driveway with $1000 in cash. Introduces himself and says he is the father of one of the boys who shot my pig. I invite him inside because I want witnesses and have a friend in the kitchen. Dad comes in, almost in tears, and tells us that he came home from work to find the pig hanging in his garage. The boys told him they bought it somewhere but he thought the story sounded littly hinky and was upset about all the blood on the floor. He told them to move it. He says his boy was a good boy and had never been in trouble except when he was with the triggerman. I refrained from saying that his boy wasn’t good at all if he thought it was morally acceptable to shoot and steal someone’s animal. He says that when the other Snow called him he called the boys in and the triggerman came up with the $1000 to pay me. I asked why the boys hadn’t come over and he said that he didn’t know what kind of people we were and was afraid that I might be violent towards the boys.
Now, if I had come upon them in the act of stealing the pig, I don’t know what I would have done. My wife and I were out for our anniversery dinner. My wondeful inlaws told us they would stay up late to watch the wee ones and that we should see a movie too. If we had come straight home from dinner, we might have pulled up behind their truck. If that had happened, I’m not sure what I would have done. I imagine I would have been enraged. And I also imagine that I would have felt protective of my wife. I probably would have picked up the trailer hitch on the floorboard of the truck and went after them. Either they would have killed me with the crossbow or I would have beaten them pretty badly. I’ve actually had nightmares about this. I kill one and go to jail and can’t see my kids.
But once the act was over, I wouldn’t have been violent. So I tell the man he needs to go get the bys and bring them to the house to apologize and pay restitution themselves - and I’ll have a police officer there to witness the restitution.
He leaves to get the boys and I call the police. They don’t seem to be that interested in coming out until I say that I don’t know what will happen. Then they dispatch a police officer.
The boys drive up, give me the thousand dollars, and confess that they killed the pig. The triggerman starts bawling and says they “only wanted to eat it.” (”Well, in that case, be my guest! Stealing from my family is fine as long as you want to have a pig roast!”) Paint boy mumbles that he was “just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This set me off. I hate when kids try to deny responsibility and place blame on the world at large. I lit into him: “No, you made a choice. You and your buddy chose to come to my house after dark. You chose to climb over my woven wire and electric fences. You chose to help your buddy get the hog over the fence. You chose to load the hog into your truck. You chose to hang it up in your garage. It wasn’t a series of circumstances beyond your control. You chose to commit this crime.”
Our friend, who is witnessing this from the front porch, says it was better than a crime drama on TV. I then lit into both of them for hurting the pig, hurting my family, and hurting the community as a whole because they would have one less pig to watch.
The policeman stood there and listened until I wound down. He then said that it was good that they had paid restitution but there was a felony arrest warrant for them and he would take them downtown. He handcuffed the crying boys and took them in.
CSI Batseville: Making the guilty confess!
I’ll continue the saga in another post.
