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The Story of Saint Joseph’s Ass
by
In winter, when work was scarcer, and the wood for burning the lime was rarer and farther to fetch, and the frozen little roads hadn’t a leaf on their hedges, or a mouthful of stubble along the frozen ditchside, life was harder for those poor beasts; and the owner knew that the winter would carry off half of them for him; so that he usually had to buy a good stock of them in spring. At night the herd lay in the open, near the kiln, and the beasts did the best for themselves pressing close up to one another. But those stars that shone like swords penetrated them in their vulnerable parts, in spite of their thick hides, and all their sores and galls burned again and trembled in the cold as if they could speak.
However, there are plenty of Christians who are no better off, and even haven’t got that rag of a cloak in which the herd-boy curled himself up to sleep in front of the furnace. A poor widow lived close by—in a hovel even more dilapidated than the lime kiln, so that the stars penetrated through the roof like swords, as if you were in the open, and the wind made the few rags of coverlets flutter. She used to do washing, but it was a lean business, because folk washed their own rags, when they were washed at all, and now that her boy was grown she lived by going down to the village to sell wood. But nobody had known her husband, and nobody knew where she got the wood she sold; though her boy knew, because he went to glean it here and there, at the risk of being shot at by estate keepers.”If you had a donkey,” said the lime man, who wanted to sell the Saint Joseph’s ass because it was no longer any good to him, “you could carry bigger bundles to the village, now that your boy is grown.”
The poor woman had a dime or two tied in a corner of a handkerchief, and she let the lime man get them out of her, because it is as they say: “Old stuff goes to die in the house of the crazy.”
At least the poor Saint Joseph’s ass lived his last days a little better, because the widow cherished him like a treasure, thanks to the dimes he had cost her, and she went out at nights to get him straw and hay, and kept him in the hut beside the bed, so that he helped to keep them all warm, like a little fire, he did, in this world where one hand washes the other. The woman, driving before her the ass laden with wood like a mountain, so that you couldn’t see his ears, went building castles in the air; and the boy foraged around the hedges and ventured into the margins of the wood to get the load together, till both mother and son imagined themselves growing rich at the trade; till at last the baron’s estate keeper caught the boy in the act of stealing boughs and tanned his hide for him thoroughly with a stick. To cure the boy the doctor swallowed up all the cents in the handkerchief, the stock of wood, and all there was to sell, which wasn’t much; so that one night when the boy was raving with fever, his inflamed face turned toward the wall, and there wasn’t a mouthful of bread in the house, the mother went out raving and talking to herself as if she had got the fever as well; and she went and broke down an almond tree close by, though it didn’t seem possible that she could have managed to do it, and at dawn she loaded it on the ass to go and sell it. But under the weight, as he tried to get up the steep path, the donkey kneeled down really like Saint Joseph’s ass before the Infant Jesus, and couldn’t get up again.
“Holy Spirits!” murmured the woman.”Oh carry that load of wood for me, you yourselves.”
And some passers-by pulled the ass by the rope and hit his ears to make him get up.
“Don’t you see he’s dying,” said a carter at last, and so the others left him in peace, since the ass had eyes like a dead fish, and a cold nose, and shivers running over his skin.
The woman thought of her son in his delirium, with his face red with fever, and she stammered: “Now what shall we do? Now what shall we do?”
“If you want to sell him with all the wood I’ll give you forty cents for him,” said the carter, who had his wagon empty. And as the woman looked at him with vacant eyes, he added, “I’m only buying the wood, because that’s all the ass is worth!” And he gave a kick at the carcass, which sounded like a burst drum.