FATHER SOLOMON’S BUSH

Father Solomon was happy and even contented until he had a vision...

Father Solomon gazed out of the broad entrance to his simple cave and out past the straggly bush that bore its few shrivelled leaves the whole year through, and out across the endless sea of sand which was all there was in his part of the world.

He had lived here for almost as long as he could remember. I say almost, because once upon a time he had been a boy in short pants and with a smile on his chubby face and wind-tossed tousled hair. But once upon a time wasn’t now because now he was an old man who had seen very little more than this cave for a huge number of years.

His simple life, though, wasn’t spartan. He had his followers, loads of them, who came by from a variety of far places and offered him treasures and essentials so that he had, over the years, become corpulent without really trying, so plentiful were the sweetmeats offered freely to him. And his cave was decorated with the gemstones and golden treasures that were placed at his feet and in return for which he merely had to tell one of his tales.

“In the beginning,” he would say, “there was no world, no desert and no far off oceans filled with fishes. Instead there was a void, and that void was empty until the great Power of the wars uttered a word of command and created everything. He created the sands of the desert and, far off, the lands of men and women, many lands for many people.”

“Where we live,” they sighed, and in unison chanted “bless Father Solomon for his great wisdom.”

And that kind of thing happened year after year until now he was old and his eyes were growing dim.

But it was with those dim eyes he noted that one of his favourite tales was coming true. He had just told it and the group of worshippers he had entertained with details of how once there was a bush that burned, and in its flames could be read and somehow heard lessons for a good future, had left him. Now, as he gazed after them, they were specks in the desert sands far off as they struggled back to the lands of men.

And now the bush, the straggly one just outside his cave entrance, was burning. Or if not exactly burning, it was smoking. His eyes might be dim but he knew smoke when he saw it, and this smoke, never actual flames but definitely smoke, was most assuredly there.

And within its misty heart he could read a dire message, for it foretold that he must leave his pleasant cave and its comforts and riches, must take up his bed if he wanted a better future, and leave the desert lands altogether.

Once he had known other lands, of course he had, for he had been a boy living in them with parents and dreams and a brother or sister to play with, but to him they were now little more than a faded memory. And memories deceived him, for they blighted out shadows and enhanced the sunlight. Like one day he had hopped and skipped down a hard stone road and tripped and bruised his knees. One of them had even been grazed to the point of dribbles of blood oozing out, but the years had dried the blood, taken away the pain and softened the bruises until it had been more a landing on a feathered pavement, one that tickled him and made him laugh, rather than one that gave him pain.

And the bush explained in signals wrought from smoke that where he was, with foreigners coming endlessly to listen to his stories and imposing their own rules upon him, he was truly miserable, whilst out there beyond the sands of the desert there was light and harmony and nobody telling him what he must do and what was forbidden. There he would find the freedom to be himself. There he would find his own sovereignty.

“I must go,” he told himself when the smoke of the bush had cleared and any sign that it had been burning was gone, “I must take up my bed and leave the comforts and luxuries of my cave, and go in search of a better, a brighter, future.”

And so he rolled up his bed, filled the pockets in his best robe with foodstuff for his journey, and set off.

Had he been the boy who galloped around in his memory he would have run and hopped and skipped, but he was no longer that boy. He was an old man, in search of a better place to live where there would be no foreigners, though he was quite uncertain what a foreigner was. And there would be no committees of hard face men to make inflexible laws by which he must live, and no greedy urchins demanding taxes from him, pennies for this, pennies for that, pennies for every darned thing, like there might be.

What’s a penny? That was the question he might have asked himself, but didn’t.

The first night he slept on his bed roll on the desert sand. The stars looked down and winked at him, the dry air grew cold and blasted from the east, and there was no cave for him to shelter in as the desert dust was stirred into cruel clouds that filled his mouth and his nostrils until breathing was well nigh impossible. But Father Solomon was, if nothing else, stout hearted, and next day he rolled up his sand-impregnated bed and continued on his search for a better life.

As he plodded along, his hip painful, what with the unfamiliar exercise of putting one foot in front of another all day long, he chewed on the last remnants of the food he had slipped into his pockets, and hoped that he’d arrive at his destination pretty soon, or there was danger of him growing hungry. He wasn’t accustomed to hunger. His worshippers had seen to that in what he was beginning to look back on as the good old days, though they weren’t particularly old, not yet, though they had been good.

On the sixth day out and with a stomach aching and a mouth dry as dust, he arrived at the very edge of the desert, at a place where green grass was beginning to flourish in scattered clumps poking up through the sand, and he sat down, truly weary, truly confused.

“Hey you! Get up!” roared a harsh voice, and a blue-helmeted scoundrel with the fiercest face he had ever seen scowled down at him.

“I am Father Solomon, and I need rest,” re replied, trying to sound friendly and probably failing.

“You are a tramp and a vagabond! We have cells for the likes of you, and maybe a rope for your neck if you get mouthy!” replied the other, “now do as you’re told and get off your backside and we’ll see what the judge has to say!”

“But this is my promised land...” whispered Father Solomon, and a small boy from a crowd that had already gathered round him threw a stone right at his head, bringing forth a trickle of blood.

“I have come,” he muttered as he forced himself onto his feet, “I have come from across the desert to seek my fortune.”

“You have come,” growled the blue helmeted officer, “to a place where we hang refugees from the old desert before the radioactive filth in their bones corrupts us!”

And Father Solomon was taken from that place and before a bewigged judge who place a black cloth on his head and scowled at him.

“You might like to call yourself Father Solomon, but no matter, you will be taken,” he growled, “to a place of execution where you will be hanged from the neck until you are dead...”

“But its Father Solomon, the good man from the cave,” whispered a child from the back of the courtroom, but nobody heard because, quite frankly, nobody cared.

© Peter Rogerson 23.10.19