At the end of my walk today, I entered the cathedral in Santo Domingo expecting to see what I see in most every cathedral in the world - candles, stations of the cross, and statues.
But in this cathedral, visitors get a surprise - a rooster and a hen in a gilded Gothic cage set high in the stone wall, across from the tomb of saint Domingo.
The story is nearly seven hundred years old.
A German family was walking to Santiago - a father, a mother, and their son named Hugonell. They stopped for the night at an inn here. The innkeeper's daughter took a liking to the boy, and the boy, who had come a long way for reasons that had nothing to do with her, turned her down.
So, she hid a silver cup in his bag and told the authorities he had stolen it.
In those days theft was a hanging offense, and so they hanged him. His parents, who could do nothing for him, walked on to Santiago and prayed at the tomb of the apostle, and on their way home they came back through this town to look at the gallows one more time.
Their son was still hanging there. And he was alive. He told them Santo Domingo had been holding him up the whole time.
They ran to the magistrate's house. He was sitting down to dinner with a roasted rooster and a hen on the plate in front of him. After he listened to the two parents tell him their hanged son was alive, he said the thing that has followed him for seven centuries:
"Your son is as alive as this rooster and this hen I am about to eat."
At which point the birds stood up on the platter, put on their feathers, and crowed.
They have kept a live rooster and hen in this cathedral ever since.
