Short Story: The Inheritance - Part two

It wasn’t unusual for a dog to be found dead. Dogs are scavengers and eat all kinds of unsavory things, especially hunting dogs. I only heard the story second hand but in a way, I felt it must have served him right – not the dog, his owner. A blustering, swaggering braggart of a man. I know how he would have been, because his grandson is just like him.
It didn’t end with the dog. At first it was a collection of small incidents that crept up on our small community like snakes out of the long grasses by the river - things going missing, milk souring in the pans and crops rotting in the ground before they ever got pulled. Then the swaggering braggart’s hair started to fall out; not a gentle thinning like the other men, but in large clumps so his scalp was left looking like some kind of a vegetable patch which had been raided by the deer out the woods. He lost it all before he died, along with his swagger.
My mother told me later that the braggart had tried to corner Gran behind the chicken coops when she first came to the village. She was kind of delicate about it at the time, but I think she meant that he tried to rape her.
It has all gotten kind of blurred over the years but a whole heap of folks got sick after that. Maybe it was a smoke screen, to hide the real thing or may be it was the result of a lot of over active imaginations. I guess only Gran would be able to tell us that and of course she’s no longer with us. I go and visit her grave sometimes in the grounds of the state penitentiary but no matter how hard I try to communicate, she doesn’t answer me.