A Parable

They cut off his testicles and penis and threw them to the dogs. The
crowd looked on as the pariahs fought among themselves and devoured the
useless clumps of flesh. Some said they should have killed him. "He'll
bleed to death," some said. "Let him die slowly. A pig like him has no
reason to die swiftly."

By all accounts, he should have died. But providence sometimes sees fit
to let the unfortunate ones suffer, and then suffer some more. It soon
became apparent to the people of the village that they had targeted an
innocent man. He had been accused of rape. The young girl who pointed
her finger at him later said she wasn't sure whether it had in fact
been the man they had mutilated and left to die. She said it had been
dark and she had kept her eyes shut during the assault, so she wasn't
sure.

"Even if he didn't do it, he must have done something to have merited
such a fate," some said. "Things happen for a reason. He is guilty of
something."

For the first few weeks, they weren't sure what had happened to the
unfortunate man. After the attack, they left him on the street and most
people thought he would be dead by morning. The butcher had already
promised to cut up his body and feed the pieces to the stray dogs that
had already consumed his genitals. But the next day the body was gone
and no one could account for its whereabouts.

People became fearful when the body failed to materialize. And then
strange things began to happen in the village. First, the dogs that had
consumed his penis and testicles showed up one morning dead in front of
the church, their heads cut off and nowhere to be found. Then the man
who had actually done the cutting was found hanged outside the village
and both his tongue and his ears had been removed and, again, they were
nowhere to be found. Whispers began to circulate about what all this
might mean. No one spoke of it openly. The villagers began to distance
themselves from the event, claiming they had nothing to do with it.
They had simply witnessed what they felt to be justice and therefore
had no reason to fear retaliation from whomever or whatever it was that
was doing these strange things.

One night three barns were burnt to the ground, all at the same time
and at different distances from each other. One of the barns belonged
to the father of the girl who had made the accusation.

The next day the villagers confronted the girl and they wanted to know
if she had anything to say regarding the gruesome events that had
followed the castration. The girl denied any knowledge of what had
transpired. The villagers wanted to know if the girl had lied about the
rape.

She told them that she had not lied but that she wasn't sure if the man
had been the one who had committed the crime.

It was then decided that the village had come under some diabolical
curse because of the girl's false testimony, and that something should
be done to remedy this wrong or further misfortune would continue to
plague the village.

It was decided that the girl should be stoned to death to right this
wrong. Naturally, her parents refused to let this happen, so it was
decided that the entire family should be stoned to death to atone for
this malady that had befallen their peaceful village.

The man who had been castrated was now being spoken of as a good man
who had never harmed anyone, and that he should be elevated to the
status of sainthood if only to honor his memory and to bring closure to
this most tragic of events. The priest of course was opposed to this.
This must be left to Rome's discretion, he argued. They could not take
this matter into their own hands. It was a sacrilege. The villagers
decided that the priest must be hanged as well. So, after the girl and
her parents were stoned to death, the priest was taken from his
sanctuary and hung from the tallest tree in the village square.

This, reasoned the villagers, would bring back the peace and
tranquility the village had once known. But strange events continued to
beset the village.

The graves of the priest, and the girl and her parents were dug up one
night, and the bodies were found dismembered and scattered throughout
the village streets the next morning. No one knew who might have been
responsible.

The same night that this occurred, all the dogs in the village began to
howl at the exact same time in the early morning hours, waking the
villagers from their dreams. The howling continued unceasing. The
villagers threw water on the dogs to shut them up, and they chased them
through the streets, throwing stones at them, but the dogs howled the
louder.

It was apparent that their attempts to bring tranquility to the village
had not worked and now the villagers decided that they needed to do yet
one more thing to make things right again. They would burn the entire
village down and rebuild it in the valley where the castrated man had
lived in a one-room shanty with his pet rabbits. This, reasoned the
villagers, would bring peace to the man's restless spirit and they
would once again find the peace that they all longed for.

So they proceeded to burn down their village and rebuild it where the
man had lived with his rabbits.

The following year, they had settled into their new locale and went
about their business with a sense of having done the right thing.
Justice had prevailed.

When the rains came that year, a flood washed away the new village and
everyone in it had drowned in the night. For the next two weeks, the
bloated bodies of the villagers drew the attention of the scavengers in
the area. They fed an assortment of creatures that feasted contentedly
on their carrion.

During the hot season, their bleached bones lay like broken cages on
the landscape and the wind at night whistled through the stone
structures they had built, and rabbits came and played among their
ruins.