Truth

Once upon a time there lived a farmer in the County of Wentworth named Gedsudski who was deliriously happy with everything Fate had bestowed upon him. He had an uncanny knack for growing the most useful crop in the world: hemp. He was pleased that others used his crop to make their lives better. Some used it to make clothing, some used it for food, some for rope, some to build their houses, and some even used it for oil. Farmer Gedsudski had even heard tell of a man who had built and fueled an automobile almost entirely of Gedsudski hemp. Everything but the tires was what he’d been told.
Why, his hemp had directly or indirectly made almost every life in Wentworth County that much better for the growing of it. This was a source of happiness for Farmer Gedsudski.
And, Farmer Gedsudski had a wife of legendary beauty! Mrs. Gedsudski was the best wife a man could want in the eyes of Farmer Gedsudski. She was as good as any of the hired help at harvest time and much easier on the eyes in the long days of winter when the fields were resting under blankets of snow. There were those who remarked that her culinary skills were almost as great as her beauty. She seemed to win the Wentworth County Fair baking contest every year with muffins or cookies that contained her secret ingredient. Hemp, of course.
Farmer Gedsudski couldn’t put his finger on it but, between her cooking and her radiant beauty, he saw an almost other-worldy quality about Mrs. Gedsudski. She kept him happier than he thought any woman could. For longer than he thought any woman could.
Yet, with all his job satisfaction and marital bliss, Farmer Gedsudski felt he was missing something. On many a night, in his relaxing armchair, with a very relaxing bowl of hemp in his pipe, Farmer Gedsudski got to thinking. There were days when hemp farming was difficult, and some seasons the weather cooperated and some seasons it didn’t. There were trials and troubles in the hemp farming racket, he knew, but wasn’t it in overcoming these that he took greatest satisfaction? The Missus wasn’t as young as she used to be either but wasn’t she still thrilling him just as much after a hard day planting and a succulent meal of hemp lasagna? So what on earth was it that had him itching to try something new? What was this desire to up and leave what anyone with the sense God gave a termite would consider a life of near perfection? Was it just that little word? “Near?”
Some of the Gedsudskis’ neighbours noticed an overcast shadow about him and felt it incumbent upon them to give Farmer Gedsudski advice. Mrs. Hansen, who brought eggs and milk every week said that the love of money was the root of all evil. Farmer Gedsudski hadn’t found that to be the case, really. He did have certain customers who were only interested in certain strains, who paid quite handsomely for them. They were, indeed, his least desirable customers, but he didn’t think having more money than he and the Missus needed was a bad thing. In fact last winter, when only the greenhouses were in operation and Mrs. Gedsudski wasn’t as necessary, wasn’t it one of those customers who offered her a vacation at his tropical condominium at a reasonable price? Farmer Gedsudski thought, “Those guys ain’t so bad.”
The more advice he received and the more he mulled it over, the more Farmer Gedsudski realized that what he was missing in his life was Truth. He told Mrs. Gedsudski one morning that he was striking out on his own in search for Truth. Well she took it harder than he’d expected. But she actually helped his quest in a backhanded sort of way when she said, “You go find her then. See if I care! But I will sue you for everything!”
“Her.” Farmer Gedsudski had no idea Truth was a woman. He reckoned that’d eliminate about half of his search. For that, he signed everything over to Mrs. Gedsudski and granted her the divorce she immediately asked for. He had found that his skills in herbology would suffice to keep him clothed and sheltered during his search. And leaving the challenges and the schedule of the farm behind him turned out to be an unexpected blessing. His new ex-wife had made his search easier right from the get-go.
He searched high and low, near and far, east and west until finally after several years of wandering the globe, at the top of a high mountain, inside an almost imperceptible cave, he found her. Truth was a woman after all. She was an aged, silver-haired, bone rack of a woman. Cave living had not done wonders for her complexion. She had the tanned saddle-skin wrinkles of a brown elephant. Her one remaining tooth did little to block the breath that was rank evidence of a life spent in neglect of dental hygiene. Fires in the cave were her means of cooking and staying warm so her arthritic, bedpost fingers were all permanently soot black. Upon meeting Farmer Gedsudski, she gave him a gummy, halitosis smile and beckoned him inside by waving one hand that looked like a black catcher’s mitt.
Farmer Gedsudski dwelt in the cave with Truth for a year and a day. Though the times of intimacy were a far cry from his cinnamon sweet, firm, buxom former Missus, the curdled, dangling dog-like dugs and sour, sweaty smelliness of Truth was something Farmer Gedsudski learned to appreciate. Truth was everything he’d been looking for otherwise. Every day she told him of the world and every day he was awed by Truth. The knowledge and wisdom she imparted made him feel whole again. He had found what had been missing from his near perfect life.
On the day he left, Truth embraced him and gave him one last rotting flesh kiss, something he had almost become used to, and whispered one final message into Farmer Gedsudski’s ear: “When you speak of me, my darling, tell everybody I’m a hot, young blonde with a body that just won’t quit.”