I grew up in farm country. Our house was down a ~1 mile, one lane road, with small farms on each side of the road. Most folks were quiet and pretty much kept to themselves, except for one family, the Smiths.
The Smiths consisted of old man Smith and his son and their spouses; the son was an adult and lived on a house on the same farm as dad. The old man lived on one side of the road, the son on the other. They had a habit of parking all manner of trucks, tractors, and miscellaneous farm equipment in front of their barn, which was against the road. Therefore half the lane of the one lane road was often blocked, requiring drivers to move over onto the shoulder to get around whatever they had decided to leave on the road .
Both father and son had a habit of stopping cars and yelling at the drivers for perceived violations, usually speeding but they were known to stop teenagers and scream at them for riding in the back of an open pickup or having an adult sit in the middle seat. The old man stepped in front of my car a couple of times over the years to scream at me for my supposedly speeding. Of course, they happily sped down the road themselves and crammed more kids in their truck than they had seat belts for and all the rest that they would give others hell for. They also liked to ride quads and dirt bikes down the road at all hours of the night. My father in law, who drove a dump truck for the county road department, told me the Smiths were like that to everyone. They would stop and scream at county maintenance crews, water and power meter readers, and the tree trimmers that kept the roadsides clear. Apparently the old man’s wife is part of a local family of rich bigwigs, so the local cops just let him be an asshole lest they piss the wife off.
The son was much worse than the old man by several orders of magnitude. Once when our first son was about 14 months old we went to my folks for dinner. We pulled into their driveway, got out, went in and greeted my folks… and not 5 minutes later there was a banging on the door. It was Smith the younger, screaming at me that we had hit one of their cats in our jeep as we were driving by their shithole. Of course we clearly hadn’t done so, and I told him so. He continued to scream at me so I closed the door in his face. He started pounding on the door hard enough to rattle the windows in the living room, so I opened it up again and told him that he was trespassing and he needed to leave. He then told me that he just ought to wait in his driveway in his big flatbed truck and when we left the house he should ram us into a little pancake.
I looked at him and told him that he had just threatened to kill my son. I told him that I was then informing him for the second time that he was trespassing on my property and making threats. I told him I was closing the door and going to call the cops. I then told him that I was going to the back of the house and getting my dad’s Winchester Defender from the gun closet and if he continued to try to break down the door if needed I would lethal force to protect my son. I then slammed the door in his face. He screamed some obscenity and stormed off.
Interestingly, in the years since that incident and all the times I’ve gone back to my parents’ house, I’ve never seen the son again. Someone told me once they saw his name in the newspaper several years back, he had been convicted of attempted kidnapping and some firearm charges. Apparently he had been going through a divorce and had decided to take his kids from his wife—at gunpoint. I have no clue what happened to him after that.
Now, I still live in the same county. A couple months ago I got a letter informing me I’d been selected for grand jury service. On the day that I showed up for selection, I realized with a start one of the men in the jury pool was old man Smith. He gave absolutely no indication that he recognized me. So, for the next two months I had to serve on a grand jury with this asshole once a week. I was actually quite surprised when I realized how completely stupid this man was. In the decade and a half we were neighbors naturally we never had a single conversation with him—just listened to him yelling at people driving down the road. To sit there and actually listen to the man have a normal conversation… I was absolutely astonished that he seemed to have a hard time following basic instructions, had absolutely no short-term memory, and couldn’t keep up with the flow of a basic conversation. For some reason the judge made him foreman, a decision that turned out to be a huge mistake. Every day he forgot to get the docket’s from the DA’s office, each and every witness he had to be reminded to swear in… after a while I actually felt a bit sorry for him. Then I would remember how he treated all his neighbors and any sympathy I had vanished. Bitter old prick.
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