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    Crime has seldom been a problem in my hometown, except once during my teenage years when several houses were burglarized. The robbers would back their truck up to a house, load up, and drive away. During that same time, Norwood Roberts claimed to have been mugged outside the Elks Lodge, though it later turned out he had lost his money in a poker game, didn’t want to tell his wife, so concocted a wild story about a hoodlum stealing his money. Still, all of this was enough to make us watch one another a little closer.

From Home Town Tales Buy it online!

    It was during this period of paranoia that my father noticed a strange truck backed up to Mrs. Draper’s house. Mrs. Draper was our widow neighbor and was visiting out of town. Dad called Charlie, our town’s police officer. Charlie had been hoping for a lucky break in the case and hurried over to my dad’s house to look the situation over. He parked his cruiser three doors down, slipped up to my parents’ home, consulted with Dad, then inched over to Mrs. Draper’s house, his holster unsnapped and his gun at the ready.

    Past the hedge, around the house, through the back door. Paused to listen. Heard a sound in the basement. Stealthed down the stairs, close to the wall so the steps wouldn’t creak. Pitch dark. He saw a flashlight beam right past the furnace, over by the laundry sink.

    Stealing a widow ‘s washer and dryer what is this world coming to? Charlie wondered.

    He saw a flash of metal, possibly a gun. He raised his pistol and fingered the trigger. “Drop it,” he ordered. “I have a gun.” So Frank, the town plumber, dropped his wrench. He would have yelled, but Frank is a steady man, not prone to outbursts. Though lately Frank had been edgy, having heard about Norwood getting mugged and suspecting in a fatalistic kind of way that he was next on the list. Now here he was, down in a dark basement fixing pipes, Mrs. Draper two states away. They wouldn’t find his body for days. What a way to go.

    Frank turned to face his attacker. Confront your danger like a man, his father had taught him. Go down fighting. “Frank, is that you?” “Charlie, what are you doing here?”

    So Charlie told him, and they talked a little bit about Norwood and the crime wave and wasn’t it a shame and did Charlie have any clues. Talked for nearly half an hour, with my dad over on his front porch wondering what in the world those robbers were doing to poor Charlie. He was just about to round up a posse when Frank and Charlie came out and stood by Frank’s new truck, which Frank hadn’t gotten around to painting his name on yet.

It is when we acknowledge our capacity for evil that we’re better able to bring shadow into light.

    Charlie never did find those robbers. The story going around was that someone from the city was picking us clean. When you live in a small town, it’s tempting to blame every evil on ne’er-do-wells from the city. The alternative is believing one of your own did it, which is probably the case, but too painful to consider. Denial does a thriving business in the average small town. Like when Norwood’s wife found his wallet in the mop bucket, which is where he had hidden it after the poker game. She never said a word, preferring ignorance over enlightenment. Easier to think he was mugged than face the truth that her gentle Norwood had a shadow side.

    This denial of our shadow side is understandable, though most unhelpful. It is when we acknowledge our capacity for evil that we’re better able to bring shadow into light. Truth is, we’re a mixed-bag people. Consider this:

...the King David who struck up the band in praise to God is the same David who killed a man after sleeping with his wife;

... the Saint Peter who wore martyr chains with joy is the same Peter who swore Jesus was a stranger;

...the kid who sacked your groceries and called you “ma’am” is the same kid who took your television.