Om förlåtelse (på engelska)

A faint fog was slowly rising from the wet leaves on the ground and the crisp air felt fresh in my nostrils. Dewy cobwebs glistened as the first beams of sunlight found their way through the vegetation. It was quiet, save for the chirping of the early songbirds that saw the sunrise as a signal to start a new day.

The cottage was smaller than I remembered it, and it was not as well kept as it had been during my childhood years. I could still see the remains of the burnt down barn, and the little garden was overrun with tall grass and weeds. I checked the cellar and found the scythe. It hadn’t been my intention, but I wanted to tidy the place up a bit so I started on the lawn. After a few attempts with the scythe, I started to get the hang of it and before long, the tall grass lay in neat piles on the ground.

As I was scything, a man came walking by.

“Hi there”, he said.

“Hello mister.” I put down the scythe. “What can I do for you?”

He scratched his head under the cap and scrutinized me furtively before he suddenly recognized me.

“Aren’t you the Williams boy?” he blurted out.

“Yes sir, John.”

He smiled and shook my hand.

  “Well, isn’t this a surprise. You used to come here all the time. I’m sorry about the old man. Are you here for the funeral?”

“Yes, I am. I just wanted to see this place once more.”

“Strange fella he was.” He shook his head and spat tobacco into the ditch.

“Well, I must be going; the missus doesn’t take kindly to me being late for breakfast.”

Yes, he was indeed a strange fellow. The newspapers called him Big Bear. He was part Indian as his paternal grandmother was Cherokee but to me he was just John and to everyone else around here he was referred to as the old man. I found it quite amusing that we both had the same name. John created quite a stir during the mid sixties when he helped the police catch some criminals by using his exceptional intuition. He was one of the first modern mediums and when he first approached the police with information about a crime, he immediately became a suspect because of the many details he told them - details that no one except the criminals themselves would know.

The newspapers got hold of the story and for a couple of years he was the celebrity of the county. He never sought any fame himself and he was soon forgotten until a couple of days ago when a local paper printed his obituary and ran a story about him. Had it not been for that newspaper, I wouldn’t have known that my old friend was dead.

I must have been about ten or eleven when I first met him and I immediately liked him. He took me under his wing at a time when my own family was breaking apart. He used to tell me stories sitting on the front porch and I was fascinated by this man’s wisdom. My father’s drunken outlook on life didn’t impress me a whole lot and my mother was busy taking care both of him and four children. John lived alone and was regarded as odd by the locals. That he talked to the dead didn’t exactly improve his status in the neighborhood and my parents forbade me to visit him. I had, however, a will of my own so I took every chance I had to sneak up to the cottage in the woods to listen to my friend’s stories.

I remember when some local juvenile delinquents burnt down his barn. I asked him what he planned to do about it.

“I can either rebuild the barn or I can do without it,” he said.

“I mean, are you going to get the guys?”

John was a big, strong man and I’d heard that he was quite a fighter when he was young.

“No,” he said. “Why would I want to do that?”

He sat himself down on a chair that creaked alarmingly under the weight of the old man.

“Don’t you want revenge?”

“No, I don’t want revenge. I don’t know what that is,” he said.

“It’s when you beat them up”.

“I see. And what would I gain from that?”

“Justice,” I continued. “If you want justice, you have to go after them.”

“I leave justice to the Great Spirit,” he explained calmly.

“Will the Spirit punish them?”

“No, the Great Spirit has devised it such that they will punish themselves.”

“I’ve never seen anyone punish himself.”

“Look John, I will let you in on a secret.” He lowered his voice and looked around to see if anyone was listening, which of course there wasn’t. That gesture was designed to make me curious, and it worked.

“You know I talk to people that you call dead,” he said, “but do you know what they say when the come to talk to me?”

“No, what do they say?”

“They say ‘Forgive me’.”

“Do they ask for forgiveness?”

“Yes, they sure do. Not everyone but far too many. And do you know who are the saddest of all people that come to me from Spirit?”

“No, who are they?”

“The saddest are the perpetrators. Not the victims. You see, one day we will all see what we have done while we walked on earth, and we will see it with our spirit eyes, and then we will realize that what we have done, we have done to ourselves. In heaven there are no divisions between us. We are all part of one great soul.”

He looked at me to make sure I was paying attention.

“We will have to forgive others which is easy,” he said, “but we will also have to forgive ourselves and that is much, much harder.”

That was the last time we spoke. The next day my family was split apart and myself and my younger brother Robert were sent to our aunt Betty to live with her. Even though I never saw Big Bear again, the memories of the wise old man never left me.

I skipped the church service. I worked in his garden instead, because I realized that John was not in a church or in the ground. He was in heaven, and I think he was smiling down at me.