Praise the Harvest
The two men stood staring at the broken soil. Nothing had grown this year. Cracked and broken. Only a scant few stalks were bold enough to break through the ground. Dust swirled around their boots, waiting for the wind to take it high. The rain had failed. The sun hadn’t.
Together, the two men stared at the earth, their faces hard and cracked as the soil. One of the men, the younger, bent down and picked a handful of the soil. He rubbed it between his fingers, watching as it coated his skin. He watched as it blew away. Slowly, he brought his hand to his mouth and tasted it.
Flat. There were no nutrients in the soil. It was just dust.
Standing he looked to his companion. The older man didn’t need to taste what he knew in his bones. They shared a look. From his pocket the older man pulled out a long knife, sheathed in leather. The two men stared at it.
It was a modern age. An age when every man knew everything, of felt he knew at least. It was an age when there were answers for everything, but none of them meant anything. Truth, once a solid monolith, was now fractured and small.
But some things were still true. True as they had always been. The older man pulled the knife free from the leather. Honed, the blade gleamed in the noon sun. A farmer belonged to his land, and the land to him. He tended it. It sustained him.
When he couldn’t tend it any more, it fell to him to sustain it, and it to tend to him.
The older man thrust the blade forward, stopping just shy of the younger man. The blade gleamed with the sunlight. The old hand shook, and only the young eyes watched the blade. Old eyes looked over the field.
There, and the boundry, stood the corpse of a copse of trees. Gallows they seemed to him then. Beneath bleached boughs stood people. Quietly watching them. The glint of the blade reached them. They shivered as they saw it, but they did not back away. They were waiting, hungry for salvation.
Timidly, tepidly, the younger man reached for the blade. First with a thumb and forefinger, then with his hand taking the blade. There are ancient truths. When water does not reach a land, blood must. The blade cut into his hand and he winced.
He looked to the older man. Trembling, the knife remained clasped in the old hand, but then let go. Delicately, the young man took the knife by its handle. His blood felt to the earth. Not enough. Not enough.
In the age of all answers, one remained true. Perhaps the first truth that man had discovered. The farmer was his land.
The older man looked away. He as shaking. His hand clasped not to the necklace he carried. A memento of something much younger, gentler, than the truth. He was crying.
The young man thrust, and pulled away, and collapsed on the dirt in anguish. He wept as he watched from the dirt as the older man coughed his lifeblood into the soil. Blood sacrifice to the land. From the empty eaves, the people cheered.
Michael Frutig 