Solomon Planted Peppers on the Vein That Runs to Cush

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The King Who Knew Which Vein Ran to Cush

Push a seed into the ground and something comes up. Peppers, figs, anything at all. Any farmer in Judea could manage that much. What no farmer could manage was the second question, the one nobody thinks to ask. Not what to plant. Where.

Solomon knew where. He had followed the world down to the place it was fastened. Out of Zion the whole world had been finished, and under Zion lay the stone the sages call the Foundation Stone, so named because the world was founded from it. From that anchor the veins of the earth ran out in every direction, the way sinews run under a man's skin, and Solomon had traced them in his head until he knew which one carried the heat of Cush.

He set his peppers over that vein. They fruited at once.

Judean soil, African heat, and a king on his knees in a garden with dirt under his nails because he had read the planet like a body and found the warm artery in it.

The Land Was Already Full and God Said Plant

The command carries its own argument. When you come into the land and plant. Israel was walking into orchards it had not dug, vines it had not staked, presses still greasy from somebody else's harvest, and the Holy One knew exactly what a full land does to a people.

You will want to sit down. You will say, we have enough, let us settle here and not plant.

Do not say it. You came in and found trees that other men put in the ground for you. Now put trees in the ground for your children.

Then comes the second excuse, the one that sounds almost like modesty. I am old. Tomorrow I die. Why should I break my back for someone else's mouth?

So God hid the day of death. Solomon wrote that God made everything beautiful in its time and set eternity inside the human heart, and the sages caught the word sitting there with a letter missing, so that eternity can be read as hidden. If a man knew his date, he would never build and never plant. He would say tomorrow and put the spade down. The blank space on the calendar is what keeps a shovel moving. If he turns out worthy, he eats his own figs. If not, someone else eats them.

Hadrian Stops to Mock an Old Man

The emperor was on the road with his troops, marching to put down a country that had rebelled against him, when he passed a field where an old man knelt in the dirt setting fig saplings.

Hadrian reined in. Soldiers waited behind him in the dust while their emperor looked at a bent back and a row of sticks that would not be trees for years.

"You are an old man," Hadrian said. "Why are you taking the trouble to toil for others?"

The old man did not stand up. "My lord king, here I am planting. If I am worthy, I shall eat of the fruit of my saplings. And if not, my children will eat."

Hadrian rode on to his war. It took him three years.

The Basket of First Figs

Three years is long enough to bury an old man and long enough to ripen a fig tree. When the emperor came back along that road, the old man was still breathing and the saplings were carrying fruit.

He filled a basket with the first of them, the best ones, and carried it to the emperor himself.

"My lord king, take these figs. I am the same old man you found here on your way out, the one you asked why he was taking the trouble to toil for others. Look. The Holy One has already found me worthy to eat fruit from my own saplings. What is in this basket is your share of them."

Hadrian turned to his servants. "Take it from him and fill it with gold coins."

They did. The old man walked home with a fruit basket heavy in a way fruit is not heavy, and went through his house telling his wife and his children what had happened on the road, and told it again.

The Neighbor Who Wanted the Gold Without the Three Years

A woman next door heard all of it through the wall.

She turned on her husband. "When people go out in the world the Holy One gives to them and lays out bounty for them. You sit in your dark house in the gloom. Our neighbor honored the emperor with a basket of figs and the man filled it with gold for him. Get up. Take a large basket. Fill it with apples and figs and every fine fruit you can find, because he loves them. Go and honor him."

Her husband loaded the basket on his shoulder and cut down a side road to meet the emperor coming through.

"My lord king, I heard that you love fruit. I have come to honor you with figs and apples."

Hadrian looked at him and spoke to his soldiers. "Take the basket, and hit him in the face with it."

They threw fruit at him until his face swelled shut. They stripped him, ruined his eyes, and left him standing there as an example for anyone watching. He walked home crying, and his wife came out expecting gold.

"What is the matter with you?"

"When I listened to you and went to honor him with a gift, they hit me in the face. If I had listened to you all the way and packed the basket with hard fruit, they would have pelted my whole body with it too."

The Garden God Did Not Need

Two men carried fruit up the same road. One had waited three years in the dirt for it and came back with gold. One wanted the gold and came back with a face he could not open.

The old man went out again the next season and kept planting, because that is the whole of it. Do not stop. However full the land looks, however old the hands are, keep putting trees in the ground.

Learn it from Me, the Holy One said. Do I need fruit? And yet the first thing done in the world's first week, before there was any mouth to feed, was this: the Lord God planted a garden in Eden.