Once there was a boy known by one and all to be quite astonishingly stupid.
“Great heavens, but you’re a stupid boy!” cried the schoolteacher, when, in the schoolroom, the boy one day produced a large and rather mouldy Stilton cheese in place of his lessons.
“That boy’s ignorance is a disgrace to my manhood,” wailed his father, who left the family when the boy took his first faltering steps at the age of seven, and they led him straight over the edge of a large and unmistakably overfull sewage ditch.
“Oh what oh what did I ever do to deserve such a fool for a son?” wept his mother, when the boy, in an attempt to solve a particularly difficult math problem, accidentally burnt down the cowshed.
The boy was never troubled by these pronouncements, either because he was so spectacularly stupid that he didn’t understand their meaning, or because he didn’t realize they were directed at him (possibly both), but in any event he was completely oblivious to them, as he was to virtually everything else. And so the years passed quickly and effortlessly for him.
When the stupid boy was nearly grown to stupid manhood, it was decided that he should leave the village and seek his fortune in the wider world. His mother took some bread and cheese, and a few small coins, tied them in a kerchief, and pointed her son in the direction of the road leading out of town. She wiped away a tear as her son ambled off with no particular sense of urgency or purpose, and watched until he disappeared behind a dip in the rough old road.
The stupid boy walked for three days and three nights, stopping only to eat and sleep and try to work out where he was, and how he had got there.
At the end of the third day, though it was only the first of October, a terrible winter storm blew up, covering the road in a thick blanket of snow. The stupid boy stumbled blindly, gathering his thin cloak about his shoulders in an effort to keep warm, but the wind gusted hard and mighty and it was a terrible thing to see. At last, frightened and confused, and with nowhere else to go, the boy presented himself at the door of his mother’s cottage just a little way down the road, which he had been walking back and forth on the whole time, simply turning when he reached one edge of the village and heading back in the direction of the other.
“Well,” sighed his mother. “I suppose I really I ought to have seen that coming, oughtn’t I?”
She made up a bed for her stupid son, and he passed the night there, warm and snug.
In the morning, his mother made once again to send her son out into the world to earn his keep, but such a great fall of snow covered the house and the road and the whole of the town, that no one with any heart could have turned him out in it.
Instead, the next days were spent in digging out the town, and the days after that in taking stock of supplies. The snow had come early and caught the villagers unaware, and their provisions were in perilously short supply. Each night the people of the village prayed that tomorrow, the sun would break through and melt the snow, so that they could travel to the next town and seek help there. But each day the clouds remained overhead, and new snow fell. Livestock froze in its tracks and died, and was soon eaten. The crops had been only half gathered when the weather turned, and the rest lay frozen and buried. Many had no firewood, even to melt ice for drinking water. And in a few weeks time, it became clear that barring a miracle, the villagers would not last through the winter.
The desperate people gathered in the schoolhouse to discuss what they must do. Everyone was frightened and hungry, and words quickly grew angry and threatening, when all at once, the stupid boy spoke up. “I know what we shall do!” he cried, and so desperate and hungry were his neighbors that they ceased their quarrelling to hear his suggestion, despite knowing what a cotton-headed idiot he was.
“We shall make rock soup!”
The villagers exchanged looks of confusion and anger. Rock soup! What sort of nonsense was this?!
“Listen here,” said the stupid boy. “We have no food, and the firewood is nearly gone, but there is enough to light under a big cooking pot, and we could put ice in the pot and melt it, and then add rocks to the water and cook them, and eat them. Rocks are plentiful! The big men could carry the big rocks, and the women and children can find little rocks, for seasoning.”
The villagers began murmuring agitatedly amongst themselves. Rocks? Eat rocks? They had never heard of such a thing. “Here,” cried one man. “Never mind the rocks. Why don’t we eat this stupid youth?”
“Eat the stupid boy?” asked another, incredulously.
And then the cry was taken up by others. “Yes! The stupid boy! We should eat the stupid boy.”
“Yes!” shouted the stupid boy (who really was monumentally stupid), “Eat me!”
And all the villagers sang out together: “We shall eat the stupid boy! Fire up the cooking pot, and we shall eat the stupid boy!”
And so they did, and he was surprisingly tasty, especially when mixed with the potatoes that one farmer had been hoarding, and the leeks of another, and salt from yet a third, not to mention a few small rocks that the women and children gathered, for seasoning. In fact, he made a fine soup which lasted for five days. And on the morning of the sixth, the weather warmed, and the snow began to melt, and several of the younger men, their strength restored by the nourishing broth, traveled to the next village . There they were able to obtain desperately needed supplies, and returned home with onions and potatoes and kindling and several of the less cooperative neighboring villagers, who were cooked and eaten in much the same way as the stupid boy.
So the people of the village survived the winter, and the name of the stupid boy, and of the others they subsequently cannibalized, was never spoken again, for fear of social embarrassment and possible prosecution.
And they all lived happily ever after, proving that even the least among us can contribute, in our own way, to the greater good of all, if only we accept our lot cheerfully.
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