Part 2. Still 100% factual.
What Mom had said, as it turned out (in her rather matter of fact way) was, "They're going to see the LEG in the cemetary."
I realized this as I rounded the end of Maple Lane and cut through to where about 15 people were standing, including three of my sisters and my dad. They were quietly staring in at something that was on the grass. A human leg, cut off at high thigh level.
Seems the kid Keith had found a plastic garbage bag in the graveyard and dumped it out, and the leg was what was inside.
We stared at it for a few minutes. I remember my sister Polly saying, "It must be a lady's leg because it's shaved."
A single police car showed up, the cops wrapped the leg in a blanket and took it away in their trunk.
There was no story about it in the news, nothing in the paper.
What my dad heard through the grapevine was that it was a leg amputated from someone who had a plot at the cemetary. But the caretakers obviously didn't go ahead and bury the leg or whatever they were supposed to do.
One odd thing about it is that there was no sense of, "Gee the kids saw a leg. Should they get counseling?" Or anything like that. And none of us kids were particularly freaked out. We went home, ate dinner, talked about it at school the next day.
Then years later, my sisters and I got to talking about it, and it was like, "Did that really happen??? A freakin' leg just sitting out in the sun down the street???"
And then we knew, maybe for the first time, that it had happened.
The leg was real.
