“He is a murderer.”
People in the market whispered to each other as an old man shuffled slowly past them. He appeared to be a crippled, skinny man who could barely breathe on his own, someone who could never be related to murder without evidence. He gazed at the ground while he walked, as if he were trying to look for money through his tiny, blurry eyes. His back was humped, and his skin was covered with freckles.
There was a rumor about him suffocating his wife with a rope belt in his house thirty years ago. Then, after staying in jails for twenty or so years, he had secretly bribed the prison head and gotten released. Having no chance to survive in his hometown due to his bad reputation, he had moved to this remote town in the middle of mountains.
Yet for some reason his criminal record was discovered by the local people as soon as he reached the edge of the town. When he came to the market to look for a job, the sellers beat him out with fishing rods. “I have changed…” the old man murmured as he was pushed onto the ground, but their loud cursing swallowed his weak self-defense. Even the most dangerous coal mine didn’t want to hire him, and even the poorest inn did not want to offer him a place to sleep. So he found himself a shelter inside the hole of a dead old tree. During the daytime, he sat still in the hole like a Buddhist, with his back lying straight back on the trunk and his eyes staring at children playing on the hill, totally immersed in his own mental world. At night, he would curl himself into a little ball and sleep like a street dog.
The old man became part of the shadow of the town. Sometimes people thought, “when is the last time the old man speak for himself?” It seemed like ages ago; now he was obsessively living in his own universe. They saw him scavenging from the garbage piles in the marketplace and daydreaming in his tree hole, but no one ever came up to talk to him, as if talking to a man like him is a total waste of time.
One day in spring, the old man’s body was found on a river bank. No one knew how he had died; no one really cared. Someone said the police speculated that he fell and knocked his head on a rock when he tried to drink water from the river.
“Who is this person?” someone asked after hearing the news.
“He was a murderer...” The story passed on.