Entry nº 18: Small town gossip

Every weekend I travel to my home town to visit my family and every weekend I hear a different gossip from different sources with different distortions of the same fact.
When I came last Friday, just during the trip a lad was telling another lad that a man had been killed by his own father.
When I arrived home my step-father had more details about it, the dead man´s adress, the accomplice of the murderer and a supposed reason for have commited the crime.
But once I went to my mother-in-law´s house she had more reliable and trustful information. She affirmed that a legal source have told her that the brother of a neighbour had been killed by his father and with the help of a young boy in strange circumstances because they were disputing a piece of land.
All this information came to me in the course of two hours.
At the other day at lunch time, an informant that was closer to the dead man´s home, came to my house my grandmother, who is told almost every single rumor around. She collects information when she goes to do the shopping and carries and spreads it in her way back and searchs for another informants to have more details and to check it.
So after one o two days of having heard the first gossip she knew everything about it, I dear to say that she knew even more that the police.
Well, as I said we were having lunch while she told us the story. The dead man had a brother with whom had had a strong quarrel a year before, not because land but because a pig that had been stolen from his land, in that moment his brother had cut him with an axe making him lose a piece of his liver.
But in this opportunity the who was with the killer had thrown a stone to the man´s neck and had let him laying unconscious on the floor, then his brother with great anger started stabbing him until killing him.
It is surprising how in the way to the shop in a small town you can be informed of every new rumor. So when I want to know about the news on my home town, I always ask my grandma.
But do not mistake the gender of the informant because men always use to get better informed than women and they tend to exagerate the gossip and are more critical than women.