A hundred wagons and not one ox among them. I have seen them, sat upon the high road at the edge of the market, packed nose to tail like penned swine, going nowhere. Each wagon holds but one man, sometimes a woman, sitting alone inside a little painted box, staring forward as though waiting to be shriven. No driver walks beside them. No beast strains in the traces. The wagons growl low, all of them, a sound like a great animal too sick to rise, and they breathe out a hot foul air that stings worse than the tannery.
And here is the wonder: they do not get down. A man could walk this road twice over in the time they sit. My legs have carried me farther in a morning behind the plough. But they stay, hands upon a wheel that turns nothing, faces gone slack and grey, suffering in a stillness they have chosen and cannot leave.
I thought at first they were being punished. Some penance, some pillory on wheels for the whole village at once. But no one weeps and no one prays. They only wait, and press upon little horns that shriek like frightened geese, as if noise might shame the road into moving.
God gave a man legs and a man's own patience is his to keep. These poor souls have traded both away to sit inside a beast that will not walk, on an errand they could reach afoot. I do not know what sin earns a man such a purgatory. But I have known hunger, and I have known the plague-cart, and I will tell you true: I have never in my life seen so many people so weary from doing nothing at all.