The Gardener
There once was a pathless man who sought shade and solitude, so he found an acorn and pilfered a spade and went to an untended field at the edge of town and planted the seed at its center.
As he was backfilling the hole, he saw a glimmer, and he lifted the now more friable soil in pinches and atomized it between the pads of his fingers, studying the particles as they fell, so focused he forgot to breathe.
At last he found what it was. A gold fleck. He pressed his forefinger against it, and it clung there from the sweat, so minute that his eyes crossed just to see it. He cast his attention over his shoulder and mimed indifference, pretending to flick away what he had been studying. But he was cunning and flicked his second finger instead of his first. Then he transferred the gold to the tip of his tongue, where he held it behind his lips.
Of course he wanted to find more, and so he dug another hole and repeated the atomizing and sprinkling procedure. And then another, and another and so on. Each hole adjacent to the prior, so that the circles of backfilled soil formed a spiral from the original.
But as he was doing this, a townsman stopped on the path to watch him. The man felt the townsman's eyes on him but concocted a plan and continued with his search. When the townsman eventually asked him what he was digging for, he answered that he was planting vegetables.
But the townsman argued with him:
You can't plant that way, in a spiral. You have to plant in rows. And also, what is it that you are even planting? I don’t see any seeds.The man slapped his forehead with his soiled palm, and he expressed gratitude to the townsman for pointing out the serious flaws in his procedure.
He said:
I will go straight away to the town and purchase some seeds, and also a bucket, because I don't have way to water the little germs.And he did that, spending all his money on three grams of cucumber seeds and nine of tomato. The seedsman dispensed the cucumber seeds onto the scales and then scooped them into the pouch of tomato seeds and one of cucumber, and then he visited the cooper, whom he convinced to loan him a bucket until he could afford one of his own, and he filled it at the well on the way back to the field.
He knelt and resumed his digging, only this time he filled each cavity with an actual seed. And the applied water to the soil that he made cover it. And he did this until the pouch of tomato seeds was empty, and then he planted the cucumber seeds, and when that pouch was empty, he continued on, once again with imagined seeds.
And he did this for days, precisely replicating the motions, at night resting in the woods at the edge of the field, watching over the rows and dozing.
The townsman asked him again, a few days later, why he was planting phantom seeds, and the man told him that he had exhausted his supply, and he had no choice but to continue his procedure without them until his plants produced fruit. The townsman, convinced of the man's idiocy, left him alone.
The tomatoes and cucumbers grew, and the man ate some of them and decided to sell the rest in the town, so as to maintain the ruse. He set aside the produce that was worm-eaten, and set aside some more to ensure that he had enough seeds, and took the rest to the market, where the townsfolk complained that they were not fully ripe ripe and that the bottoms were yellow from resting on the ground. He sold only a few.
He returned to the woods and snapped branches from the trees and fashioned them into stakes. This was hard work to do without tools, and it took him a full day.
Driving the stakes into the ground without tools was no easier, but he managed it on the second day, and then he went into town and used the little money that he had earned from the produce to purchase a ball of twine.
He spent another day cutting the twine into small lengths, using two stones he found deep in the woods. And then he lifted the young vines and secured them gently to the stakes.
And he pulled the tomatoes and the cucumbers apart and extracted their seeds from them, forming two piles on the cutting stones.
Concerned with being consistent with his story, he re-dug the holes that were barren and dropped the seeds into them, which were still sticky from the fruit, and he backfilled them and sprinkled them with water.
He found that he needed more stakes, and so he obtained them, this time using the cutting stone to form tips to make their planting easier, and he drove them into the newly fertile earth.
After doing all this, he set to digging new holes and depositing the remainder of the seeds, sprinkling the soil and studying it as it fell. One day, as he carried the empty bucket to the well, he passed the townsman who had queried him earlier. The townsman remarked on his new industriousness. The man nodded in agreement and left him.
From time to time, he thought he spotted another glimmer, but as he pinched the soil and studied the grains of it, he found only minerals that he could not name.
He continued in this way, imitating his own actions as accurately as he could, wanting only to reproduce what had occurred, and the tomatoes and the cucumbers grew in orderly rows. They climbed the stakes, and he tended and watered them, and he took them to the market and sold them. The townsfolk were delighted by their quality, remarking that the field must have excellent soil, and even hinting that they might want to make use of some of the land themselves.
The man objected that it was not the soil that was exceptional but the seeds, and even then one had to follow his procedures, which were secret.
The months passed. In the fall the man used the spade to dig a burrow for himself at the edge of the field, and in the winter he dwelt there, buried, clutching the spade against his body with one hand, the other continually motioning as if it were atomizing soil, forefinger and thumb working together in this way.
When the soil thawed, he drug himself from the hole and resumed planting. One day the townsman stopped on the path and watched him for some time before calling out, over the din of the songbirds:
What got into you, causing you to occupy yourself in this way, after having languished for so long?The gardener, studying the soil that fell before his eyes, muttered something, but the townsman was unable to discern it.