The Boy Who Drew In The Mud and other parables

by Zachary Harper

  Part One

  In a small village, there lived two men who, the previous season, had each bought nearly identical fields directly across the road from each other. Both swaths of land were the same size, touching the same river, and got the same rain and sun. The farmers both spent days and weeks tilling and planting and waiting for their crops to finally pierce the ground and reach out for the sky. And when they finally did, and they could wade through their seas of wheat, the first farmer noticed a strange dissonance in the farms – the second farmer had managed to grow twice the wheat he had.

  ‘Now’, the first farmer thought, ‘I have the same land as he, the same acreage, on the same river, catching the same rain. And I was never lazy; I got up in the morning to do the same work at the same time, we both equally sweat and bled under the bright, bright sun. Yet his field has grown double of mine.’

  This farmer, so unjustfully treated, went before a judge and asked for their wheat to be added together and split, so that both received the same amount of grain for the same amount of sweat. ‘Your Honor,’ the first farmer began, ‘I am no sloth, and I have done my best, but no matter the work I have put into the ground, nature has thwarted my way. It is my right to be given a fair years wage for a fair years work, and since I, no stranger to toil, did spend as much time as my neighbor in the dirt and mud, we should end up with same reward. Punish me not for the mysteries of nature, all I ask for is the justice of fairness.’

  The judge, who could find no fault in such an argument, took their wheat and combined them, and split it in half to distribute to the both of them.

  But the next year, when the work began, the second farmer remembered this lesson, and when it came time to plant, he planted half as much. And when, at the end of the year, the neighbor noticed that half the field lay fallow, he went before the judge.

  ‘Your Honor,’ the first farmer fumed, ‘my neighbor has left half his land empty, for nature has made his path easy. He has done half the work that I have done, he has sweat half the sweat, and he has bled half the blood, yet he has reaped the same crops as me. It is my right to be given a fair years wage for a fair years work, and since I, no stranger to toil, did spend twice as much time as my neighbor in the dirt and mud, why should we end up with the same reward? Punish me not for the mysteries of nature, all I ask for is the justice of fairness.’

  The judge, who could find no fault in such an argument, took the fallow lands and gave them to the first farmer, so that all would be fair.