As kids growing up in a town outside a city we moved like packs of wild dogs sniffing around for something to do, some trouble to get ourselves into. All towns have real live horror stories and this one involved a little girl who’d died a tragic death with some farming equipment. The bit about it that was most upsetting was the parent’s reaction, and the local lore that spun up around it. So naturally we had to go investigate one afternoon as fall was coming on and school was back in session and we had nothing else to do, pre-internet.

Trying to recall the details from a distance, sometimes you see the core of a story more clearly, the underlying motives. The story breaks down to a skeletal outline. And it made me wonder if this little vignette spoke to something bigger, a human truth about why we poke around in other people’s tragedies. Sure there was a rubber necking quality to it both voyeuristic and perverse, to pluck the truth from an awful moment and make it our own—but there was another thing about it too, more primal, maybe even evolutionary.

Living in a town outside a city you had to go a decent ways to find a cornfield. But with our bikes and open-ended days we’d travel to the outskirts of town where the houses got further apart and the strip malls subsided and soon we were in the middle of nowhere, the hem of the horizon stretched end to end. Then the spooky allure of entering a cornfield as thieves, trespassers, defying the shotgun-wielding farmer who would not take kindly to kids. We went there with our empty pillowcases and backpacks to fill them with corn ears we used to tic tac people’s houses around Halloween. Tic tacking, if you’re unfamiliar, is the act of throwing handfuls of dried corn at people’s homes at night. You throw dashes of corn at the windows and it sounds like you’re being sprayed with machine gun fire from inside. The dried corn are like pebbles just hard enough to make a terrible sound but not break the glass. It’s also a way to exact some mischief upon your enemies, to single someone out as marked, and Halloween seemed just the right time to do that.

The story about the girl who died was she fell inside a grain silo, and the parents were farmers, and to grieve her loss they tied one of her dolls to a porch column by the front door. You could see it with your own eyes if you wanted, so naturally we did, drawn like dogs to the scent of a fallen bird with a broken neck, sniffing around in someone else’s yard, stealing the farmer’s corn. We’d heard the story and seen the image in our little kid brains but to see it in person was to experience real life on another level: the sad doll tied to an empty porch with no one around. What kind of pain the family must have been in.

Maybe it was just being bored we’d do something like that. Or it appealed to our sense of the macabre, around Halloween. Kids layered on bits of untruth to the story too.

But it could be a window into a dark part of humanity, a tribal thing, maybe not the way you’d normally think of tribes, but one of sniffing out the weakest link and shooing it to the edges in hopes it would go. Naming the wounded, favoring the strong. Maybe your inherent shortcomings could be ignored by exploiting another’s. Or you might come of age by gaining an easy defeat, Lord of the Flies style. From witness to judge.

In this way I gossiped about kids at school who smelled bad or walked funny, and all our elaborate theories as to why. Would-be bullies had some deep tribal thing that was learned and primal and hadn’t been corrected by evolution. Later it got rewarded even, in social circles and corporate politics. (Maybe it was its own bad strain of evolution, classist: the elite.)

Men were best suited at these games being men, but women developed their own maneuvers too. It was a human feature, the singling-out of the weak and damaged, and we learned it early on.

Today’s packs move through digital circles; ours did in the streets and cornfields. One of the least-noble impulses that comes with being in a tribe is deciding who shouldn’t be. The easiest targets are the ones who struggle the most to defend themselves, the weak and wounded. The strongest tribes take a different tack and lean in to help. That’s evolution.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction

Tags: essay, Fascism, humanity, tribes