They sat me on a hard chair, one man across a table, and told me not to work. Only to speak. I waited for the shovel, the sack, the field to be pointed out. None came. This man does not wish to see my back bend. He wishes to hear my mouth move.
He asks where I see myself in a great span of years. I do not tell him the truth, which is in the ground, same as my father, same as his. I say a thing about hard work. He nods as though hard work were a fine wine and not simply the shape of every day the good Lord ever gave a man.
Then he asks my faults. My faults. As if a lord ever cared whether the ox was proud or humble, so long as it pulled. I told him I work too hard. He liked this. God forgive me, it was a small lie, but he liked it, and I begin to understand that in this place a man is not weighed by what his hands have done but by what his mouth can dress up.
He said he would send word. No coin, no bread, no roof. Only the promise of word, later, by some means he did not name.
I have dug ditches in the frost with less doubt in my heart. A whole morning spent, and not one furrow turned, not one beast fed. The Devil finds work for idle hands, they say. It seems the gentry have found something worse. They have found a way to make idleness itself the labor, and to pay a man in waiting.