When the final bell tolled, the plaza was full. As always with the executions in the village, there was a strange mixture of excitement, contempt, sadness, and distraction. Many came for the entertainment, hauling heavy wooden chairs from their homes down the cobblestone pathways that winded through crooked medieval walls. Others, such as the local politicians, merchants, and women of high social standing came to wag their fingers and shake their heads in disgust at the lawless one last time. As for the nuns, they wore their sadness openly and chanted the rosary in somber unisons. And yet for most, these were events of social diversion; hawkers came to sell various foods and trinkets, capitalizing on the large crowds, and adolescents would take advantage of the chaos to sneak away from their parents to experience their first loves in the periphery of death.
So it was that when Jose Antonio stood there fidgeting as his executioner kept re-tying the noose, unsure of his work on account of too much wine earlier in the day, Jose Antonio knew that this spectacle was all so much bigger than him. The executioner sighed in relief after several tries. “Finally!” he exclaimed, then waived to signal the officer of the Inquisition. The Inquisitioner read aloud from the scroll, slipping it out of the leather tube. “Jose Antonio de Nogal, you are hereby sentenced to hanging for crimes of heresy against our Holy and Apostolic church”. The crowd, or at least those that were paying attention, called out with casual, amused interest, “what did this one do?” The Inquisitioner frowned that the irreverence of the riffraff, but answered nonetheless. “He prays with crows.”
Now, this was of course true. Ever since his quiet youth, Jose Antonio had chosen to perch on the steps of the village church on Sundays, rather than go inside for Mass. Ironically, he was decidedly devout. He believed fervently in the Eucharist and was a firm advocate that every living soul take part of the rite each Sunday morning. Jose Antonio’s problem, though, arose from the fact that he saw souls not just within humans, but within crows, too. As far as he could tell, the crows were incredibly intelligent. Moreover, the crows that gathered at the church steps seemed to be particularly faithful.
As a child he noted their consistency and persistence at lining up in front of the door to walk in, each on their own two feet as if to politely emulate the human parishioners. But of course the priests would never allow it. “Out! Out!” they would wave their arms around, and with a grumpy squawk the crows would hop away to regroup on the window sills, peering in where they could from holes they’d pecked in the stained glass. When the choir sung, they sung too, though to human ears it was gratingly screechy and hard to bear.
So, when Jose Antonio was of the age where church attendance began to be of his own volition, he began to act on his years of accumulated sympathy for them. He stopped coming inside the church doors and instead would sit with them outside reciting the liturgy and offering – however improvised it may have been – the Eucharist. Though the crows never cared much for the blood of Christ, the body they gladly accepted before hopping back with a flap of their wings to their spot along the steps for silent, independent prayer.
And for years none of the other villagers cared. Jose Antonio, always so quiet, solitary, and aloof – though never unkind – was hardly missed. No one noticed his peculiar behavior for the better part of a decade and a half, for they were either inside the church walls themselves or farm from them, in the walls of their own houses. If anyone were to happen upon him as a passerby on those Sunday mornings, they would not have cared or thought of him as anything other than a bit odd. Those had been different times then, though. Now the Inquisition combed through Spain lifting up each cobblestone and terracotta shingle they came across to inspect for heretics. Thus, Jose Antonio perched like a bird and preaching the Gospel in a nearly squawk-like accent like some sort of foreigner attempting to communicate in Spanish to a row of crows in front of God’s house was easy enough to find.
His conviction in the Inquisition court went through in under 8 minutes, the fastest trial in the entire region at that time. Naturally, Jose Antonio was shocked by the entire event. “But the crows are entirely devout,” he protested, “they are as sincere in their taking of the Eucharist as anyone else in this town!” The Inquisition judges sighed as their eyes rolled about their sockets. “They want the bread, you idiot.” “But it’s not bread, it is the body of Christ,” he countered, exhausted by this back and forth. The judges smirked with raised eyebrows of dismay. It was clear he was insane at the least, if not a genuine heretic. “Either way…” they shrugged.
So now, as the final echo of the bell toll in the plaza had faded, the sentencing proclaimed, the Inquisitoner shoved the scroll back into the leather tube. Jose Antonio stood there in a mixture of denial and serenity, his fear kept at bay in part because he presently repeated the rosary to himself unceasingly – and the rest because he couldn’t be certain that this wasn’t all just a bad dream. It wasn’t, though.
The Inquisitioner flicked his hand somewhat apathetically to signal the executioner to put the noose over Jose Antonio’s bearded neck. Then, as much from his drunken stumbling as it was from his professional responsibilities, the executioner knocked the stool out from under Jose Antonio’s feet. The rope tightened, his body dropped, the crowd cheered wagged their fingers, shook their heads, wailed in grief, and some snuck their first kisses. Jose Antonio appeared to die instantly.
In that moment, everything froze permanently. The bored Inquisitioner, the clumsy executioner, the amused audience, the frowning elites, the crying nuns, and a few giggling and distracted lovers. Death, he supposed, was just the last moment in time a person saw in utter stillness and silence, forever. But then he saw movement from somewhere up above. Little black dots sat there growing bigger in the sky like ink bleeding onto parchment from a feather quill. Crows. Jose Antonio was puzzled. Why would crows be the only thing not frozen in death? They squawked and flapped and then landed all around him, 11 of them just as there always were with him at church. And thus they spoke “Jose Antonio, brother! My goodness, what a turn of events!” the other crows shook their heads in agreement, bobbing their tails. Jose Antonio was convinced now it was a dream after all. It wasn’t though.
Another crow chimed in, seeing Jose Antonio’s belief that it was all in his mind written on his face. “Not a dream, I’m afraid,” the crow corrected, “but not to worry.” A third crow clarified, “we can send you back, you know – we’re angels”. “Angels?” Jose Antonio asked inquisitively. “Surely not? I mean, angels are white and have…” “Wings?” the crows asked, smiling. Jose Antonio hesitated. “Well, yes”. The crows explained that for thousands of years humans had never understood that crows were really just angels in the only physical form they’d ever be able to viewed as on Earth, and that frankly it had never seemed important enough to correct. Concerning Jose Antonio’s predicament in particular, they relayed the message that God was more than empathetic for him and touched by his unwavering faith throughout this whole debacle. Because of this, God now offered him – so said the crows – a choice: another chance at human life, somewhere far in the Pyrenees Mountains, safely outside the view and earshot of the Inquisition. Or, if he so wished, the rest of his lifetime to be lived out as a crow.
Jose Antonio slowly began to nod in understanding and eventually came to make his decision within 8 minutes – the fastest in the entire region at that time when it came to mortals being given such a choice from the Almighty. And it still remains something of a local folk legend even in modern times that there was once a heretic executed in the village plaza whose body transformed into a crow and flew away to the top of the Church’s bell tower before his human body ever stopped swinging from the gallows.