Frankly Speaking by Frank Crocitto

The Start of the Journey: A Fable for Now

Upon a pinched and forgotten part of a low, monotonous plain lived an ordinary man. He lived by himself, sweated for himself and, day by day, ate the dry bread which was the reward of his solitary labors. He plowed and sowed and harvested as his forefathers had.

Neighbors there were on every side of his farm but converse with them had shriveled to barely a glance in passing. Occasionally there were gatherings of one kind or another, but the man never went, though he often listened for strains of melody upon the wind. He neither helped, nor was helped. Other people might as well have been inhabitants of some faraway star, or the substance of a dream, without real existence.
His land, hard-worked to a slack, brown dust, yielded its meager crop reluctantly. The sun and its turning seasons came and went, keeping a piteous aloofness. While the wind, the ever-prevalent wind, used the man and his huddle of gray shacks as a pennywhistle.

Having handled the same pails and the same fence gates for years on end the man found his days held no surprises. He moved, head bent, from chore to chore, like the dullest of his livestock. He wore his ruts deep. Rarely did a fresh event cut across his ways—the tracks of a cat, a thunderhead—and when one did he would gape and ponder and turn the event over in his mind till he wore its fresh-cut edges to the comforting roundness of a stone in a stream.

He trudged doggedly through his days, seemingly oblivious to the possibility that existence—his existence—might have some purpose. Yet, within him, vaguely felt, a long and distant hunger rolled. It had increased with the years; he sensed that. But whence its origin, or by what means it could be satisfied were questions without answers, like birds without wings. When the hunger asserted itself he fought it down and threw his energies into something else, distracting himself. Thus he went on. Thus he survived.

Still, the relentless struggle wore him down utterly, as utterly as the wind had the land. His was a grinding, joyless wrestling with time. His bones creaked even as he sat. He had aged. He cursed life. The gray, half-light, characteristic of the hour before the dawn was a mirror of his existence. He slipped from one gray state to another, unwittingly. When the sun lifted its face he knew it was time to open his lids; when the stars unraveled and swung across the blackened sky he knew the time had come to close them. Sleep brought no rest and waking no zest.

Then one summer day came a horseman.

The horseman, spent after a long journey, accepted the man’s offer of hospitality. Over the empty supper plates the man found himself telling the story of his life. The traveler listened attentively, and moved by compassion, told his host of another place, a far-off place where life, he averred, had another quality. There they worked, just as here, but life there was rich and abundant and joyful. And the land, as well as the faces of its people, glowed with peace and contentment.

Long after the traveler’s hoof beats had been swallowed by the silence, the picture he had painted of that fertile place haunted the man. And as his days droned on, under the pitiless sky and appalling monotony of the land, the traveler’s picture became the focus of his soul. The improbability of its existence flung him into doubt; the possibility of it drove him into hope.

He longed to journey there, but the thought of his farm and its future, like a boulder, weighed too heavily upon him. So he went on as before, dully, but dreaming.

As the season bent down to harvest time, a longing for the traveler’s land stirred once more within the man’s heart and before the wheat was in, a desire came to fullness. It pounded in his chest. It thrashed within him like a bird caught in a house throws itself against the window panes.

His new and wild desire warred against the inertia and habits of a lifetime. He stood for long hours gazing out the window of his weather-battered house. Animals, grown bold by the lack of activity on the land, roamed over his fields — groundhogs, rabbits, skunks and muskrats. He watched them. One day, as a family of deer bounded gracefully through the stubbled field, his heart lifted and tears filled his eyes.

At sunset, after the accomplishment of his final chore, he threw his body down upon the dust and offal of the barnyard. He wept and laughed himself to sleep and when he awoke the stars were slipping over the horizon.

He opened the doors of the barn and the doors of the stalls and the gates of the fences. As the animals drifted out he left the barnyard. He threw open the door to his house and taking nothing for his journey but a new hat he had purchased years before but never worn, he turned his back on all that had been and took to the road.

Each pulse beat renewed his vow, each step confirmed it. Yes, the birds sang, there is such a land and it is your rightful place. His decision was made. And he was on the path to that fabled country from which the horseman had come.