by Sean Dempsey | 04/06/24
There once were, in a certain indistinct corner of a Canadian kingdom whose borders were always expanding on paper yet never visited in person, two brothers who came into possession of adjoining lands. Yet possession in such a place was a delicate word; for everything, in truth, already belonged to a wise king, yet one who neither tilled nor walked nor seemed burdened by the weight of what he owned, yet who nevertheless governed it with an attentiveness that grew more peculiar with each passing year.
The western brother, a man of careful habits and inward anxieties, believed that the safest way to exist beneath such a king was to anticipate his will, to read each decree not merely as instruction but as revelation, and to comply not only fully but eagerly, as though obedience itself might one day be rewarded or at the very least remembered and thus allow his children to prosper in light of his diligent obedience.
The eastern brother, by contrast, was neither rebellious in any grand sense nor particularly brave, but possessed instead a quiet and almost negligent skepticism, a tendency to assume that what was demanded of all could not possibly be enforced upon each, and that the king, in owning everything, could not meaningfully attend to anything.
This peculiar difference, though at first no more than a private inclination, soon began to shape their lives as well as the very soil beneath their feet…
In an effort to proactively ascertain the king’s mercurial whims, the fastidious western brother took it upon himself to sojourn to the king’s castle and seek out his will for his land. The king’s courtiers were delighted at the brother’s arrival and with great fawning for his attention to the king’s desires, soon announced that from every litter of pigs born upon the king’s lands, the fattest and strongest must be rendered.
Bowing low and with supplicating praise, the brother left and thanked the king and his men for such a wise decree. Arriving home days later, the brother complied immediately and without hesitation, selecting from each new litter the finest of the animals, those most likely to endure the winter and multiply in seasons to come, and delivering them with a care that bordered on reverence, as if the act of surrender required dignity even when it depleted him.
He began, though he did not say so aloud, to eat less well and his four children cried for want that winter when they might otherwise have laughed and ate plenty.
The eastern brother, having learned from his western brother of the king’s decree with a mild curiosity, concluded only that pigs were numerous, litters frequent, and the king singular, and so he kept his animals as they were, slaughtering and breeding as suited him; and when no one came to inquire, which they never did, he ceased even to think of the matter.
Thus, while one brother gave his best and grew thin, the other kept his best and grew accustomed to abundance, though he credited this not to defiance but merely to the absence of interruption.
The following year the king, who had perhaps exhausted his interest in pigs or else discovered some new irritation within himself, issued a decree of greater subtlety, declaring that for every four-leaf clover found upon a subject’s land, an ounce of silver must be paid, the finding of the clover being, as the decree insisted, both a sign of fortune and an obligation to share that fortune with the Crown.
The western brother learned of this solemn edict by vigorously keeping in contact, via courier, with the king’s laudable administrators. He strived as a good-intentioned, responsible denizen of the kingdom to always be aware of the king’s orders, lest ignorance of the law be his unintended undoing. However, upon learning of the new agrarian law, he, who had never before considered the clover beneath his feet as anything other than background to his labor, now saw in every patch of green the possibility of debt. And thus he searched, methodically at first and then with growing desperation, turning over soil, counting leaves, discovering with mounting dread that the more he looked, the more he found, and the more he found, the more he owed!
Silver, which had once been a measure of his security, became instead a measure of his compliance, flowing outward in quantities that demanded explanation yet forbade refusal, until at last he was compelled to mortgage portions of his land in order to satisfy a tally that no one had required him to keep but which he felt moral- and duty-bound to complete.
The eastern brother, upon hearing of this decree by his fastidious brother, paused only long enough to notice that clovers had grown for as long as he could remember without ever having been counted, and so he declined to search for them, reasoning that what is not sought is not found and what is not found cannot be owed; and as no official arrived to dispute this logic, he continued his work, retaining his silver, expanding his fields, and gradually acquiring the appearance of a man favored by fortune rather than merely spared from scrutiny.
Years passed in this fashion, during which the king’s decrees grew less practical and more intimate, as though having exhausted the resources of the land he now turned his attention to the lives conducted upon it…
The final decree, which arrived not with official parchment but rather by proxy via administrator conveyance at the bequest of attorneys and through rumors of official adjudicators that seemed to precede it, declared that upon the marriage of any buxom daughter within the kingdom, the Crown reserved the right to receive her first into the royal bed, an act described in language so ceremonious that it concealed, without disguising, its violation.
The western brother, who had by now come to understand obedience not as a choice but as a condition of existence, quickly informed the king of his daughter’s impending wedding with a voice that did not tremble only because it had already grown accustomed to quiet acquiescence; and on the appointed night she was taken violently by forceful men owing their dutiful allegiance to the Crown, returned before dawn, and presented back to her dour husband in a silence that required no explanation and permitted none.
The celebration that followed proceeded according to custom, though something essential had been removed from it, something that could not be named without also being judged, if not even scorned and despised. The western brother knew in his heart a great wickedness had played out, but his soul refused to even entertain defiance of his king as anything but an aberration of thought and duty.
The eastern brother, faced with the same decree, as explained to him tearfully by his brother, found himself for the first time not merely disinclined but unwilling. And thus he arranged his own ample-bosom’ed daughter’s upcoming marriage in secret, beneath trees and among witnesses who understood that silence could be an act of preservation rather than concealment; and as no announcement was made and no record kept, the king’s men did not arrive, and the marriage bed, unobserved by authority, remained intact.
In time the lands of the two brothers came to reflect not the will of the king, which was identical in both places, but the manner in which that will had been received. The western fields remained orderly yet diminished, burdened by compliance and stripped of their best offerings; the eastern lands prospered, shaped less by decree than by the quiet decision to ignore it. The two families who habituated those lands, though they were of the same blood, could, however, not have looked more different had they been plucked from different worlds. Sallow eyes hid vacant, hallow stares from the western family who celebrated compliance and adoration to the Crown who justly ruled over not just their land, but their very souls. In contrast, the eastern family wore a smile on their lips and their eyes shined as from only those who foolishly believe men and women are born free and that freedom comes from God, not man.
And yet the wise Canadian king, who continued to control and subjugate both lands completely by royal decree, could not distinguish between them in any meaningful way. For ownership, in such cases, requires less knowledge than assumption and the feint of control is oft more illusion than reality; but that reality is made whole and verily enforced by the subject via abdication of self.
It may therefore be said, though it will rarely be admitted, that the difference between ruin and prosperity in such a kingdom lies not in what is demanded but in what is surrendered, and that the man who gives everything simply because it is asked of him does not preserve order but enables its excess, while the man who withholds, not always in rebellion but in quiet refusal, discovers that much of what is called law depends entirely on capitulation to enact it.
For it should be said that perhaps no man is owned in the way a field is owned, and no land belongs to a king in the way it belongs to the one who lives upon it, and to pretend otherwise, especially with enthusiasm, is not responsibility but a kind of willing disappearance, a vanishing of self carried out in perfect compliance.
And thus the brothers lived, one increasingly hollow beneath the weight of his virtue, the other increasingly whole beneath the lightness of his disregard, each convinced, in his own way, that he had done what was required of him, though only one had ever questioned who, in fact, had required it at all.
