A great flat field, cleared of every stone and stump, level as a lord's table, and they grow nothing in it. Nothing. God gives them ground a man would kill his brother for, ground that wants only seed and sweat, and they have laid it hard as a church floor and left it barren.
I walked it a long while. No wheat. No turnips against the winter. Not so much as a goat to crop the weeds, for there are no weeds, for there is no soil, only this strange black crust that holds the sun's heat like a bake-stone and gives back no bread.
The metal beasts sleep here in rows. They are penned neat as sheep, each in its painted fold, and no one guards them, and none stray, and none are fed. I saw a man leave his beast and walk off whistling, careless, as though he did not fear it wandering or dying in the night. A rich man, then. A man with beasts to spare.
There are white lines painted on the ground, straight as a scribe draws them. Someone knelt in the heat and marked every fold with care. That was labor. That I understand. A man sweated to paint lines on a field that will never bear.
I do not know what sin buys a field so fine and leaves it hungry. But come the famine, and it always comes, they will pray over this black and empty ground, and it will answer them the way barren ground always does.
The good Lord gave them Eden and they paved it for their carts.