Polished Pebbles

  There was a boy who lived by the sea; every day he would walk along the shoreline collecting unique pebbles that enchanted his attention.  It was not long before his mother would scold him for leaving them lying around the house creating clutter. She prompted him to take them outside, out of the way.  He refused to leave them out in the open, so she countered his reluctance by suggesting he keep them in the back shed among the other forgotten tools and outdated items the family had collected to ease their life.  He visited his prized collection often, in fact, every day; he wiped them clean of residue dirt and dust that had settled on them. The cloth he used was a soiled remnant his father used when servicing the mower.  The combination of the oily rag with his constant rubbing brought the stones to a glossy shimmer; over time they looked to have been encased in a cocoon of glass.  Many of his friends and family thought his hobby rather odd; on occasion chastising him for wasting his time on such an empty, useless endeavor.  He would smile at their taunting, but inside he was deeply hurt that they would not see his delight in his practice.  He didn’t care if wasn’t practical, that it didn’t make money, or aid the family in its effort to sustain itself.  All that mattered to him was his recall of time and again his elders advising him to be happy; but when he found something that gave him that happiness they ridiculed his choice.  What he felt was the absence of encouragement and over time it began to squelch his joy in the delight of his hobby.  Eventually he was asked to help clear out the shed of unnecessary junk, and in that he elected to give away his box of prized polished pebbles.  On impulse he took the box to a local store and convinced the owner to put the box of stones on consignment, offering an even split of the profits.  Days later the store owner excitedly reported that all of his pebbles had sold at a handsome price; also if the boy happen to have more stones they could enter into another arrangement where the boy was offered more of the profits.  The young boy raced to the shed and searched for hours to find other forgotten stones; after a full night of searching he had several handfuls just as beautiful as the ones he surrendered to the store owner.  These he brought to the shop keeper and just as quickly as the others these too sold briskly at double the asking price.  Once more the store owner pressed the boy to bring more, as well as amending is offer to share even more of the profits.

  But the boy knew with certainty there were no more stones in the shed. It was not long before he concluded he must go back to the shore and seek out new rocks and shine them so they could sell them to the demanding public.  He spent the rest of that day walking up and down the shores seeking only the most alluring pebbles, for he was dedicated to the notion that his pebbles must meet a standard that only he kept dear in his heart.  That night he discovered techniques to polish the stones to their luster in a fraction of the time it use to take.  In the morning he went to the store and he turned them over to the shop owner who was overjoyed with the bounty of pebbles; he saw quickly they would both get very wealthy with this enterprise. 

  Now the boy’s family was taken totally by surprise by this good fortune.  The young boy brought home fists full of golden coins, enough to meet their wildest dreams. At first they thought the boy had stolen them, and were prepared to beat the truth out of him.  Having delayed that notion until he talked to the store owner is a credit to the boy’s father for keeping his anger in check.  Soon the entire family went scouring the shorelines in search for special pebbles; but they did not possess talent for finding them the way the boy did.  The young boy rejected most of their offered finds.  This created a bit of resentment with his siblings; soon they chose to ignore the enterprise altogether claiming the young boy had become arrogant and a tyrant over the pebble project.  This was ok by the boy since he never felt the need for their help or had rejected any desire for their approval a long time ago.

  One day the local doctor was shopping in the store that carried the stones.  He spotted one that charmed him and amused by its luster.  The more he handled it and considered its beauty, the more an idea struck him that he could use such a stone in his treatment for a chronic stomach problem that plagued this tiny fishing village.  He decided to put his theory to a test and had his patient swallow several of the stones.  Such enough, the stones were of the optimal size to break up the painful tumors in the stomachs of his patients, so remedied their affliction.   The doctor experimented several more times and in each case the results were instant success.  The doctor in turn became renowned throughout the region as being an excellent healer.  Soon he was overwhelmed by patients from the far reaches of the land seeking a cure to this curious, albeit painful, ailment.  The doctor in turn sought out the boy who polished the pebbles to obtain an exclusive access to his stones.  There were of course copies and imitators to his stones process, to be sure, but all of them were of inferior quality being either too small or too large to meet the very demanding specific quality the doctor needed for his procedures to succeed.  In those where the other stones were use either the stones were passed out of the stomachs, or created their own distress and had to be taken out by a very painful operation.  In those days there was no anesthesia so you can just imagine having someone cut into your stomach to fetch out some stones.

  The doctor made a very attractive offer for the exclusive rights to the boys polished stones, but the boy’s family had grown very greedy by the success of their young son’s abilities to polish these seaside pebbles.  They wanted more than the doctor could afford, so the boy had to refuse his request.

  At that very same time the king of the province became afflicted with the very same and strange stomach affliction.  All of the courtly doctors could not cure the king of his constant complaints.  One day the Lord Marshal was told of this particular doctor in a tiny village near the shore of his land who was very successful with curing the local peasants of a very similar malaise.  So the doctor was summoned to the castle and asked to assist his Regent.  The doctor explained that he might be able to cure the king but that he needed a portion of some very specific polished pebbles that only a single young boy could provide. The problem, the doctor when on to say, was this young man’s family priced the stones beyond affordability and that their avarice was so keen they were content to let sick people suffer rather than provide the pebbles to the doctor to use in healing these poor folk. You see the doctor was very angry at the family for persuading the boy to reject his offer, so took this opportunity to punish them.  When the king’s attendants heard of this stingy young boy and his family, they advised the king to send his soldiers to the town and demand the boy surrender the stones to the doctor under command of the King.  Furthermore, after he obeyed the order, to torch the entire town and kill all of its residents as an object lesson to the entire kingdom the consequences of a stingy, greedy disposition.  Because the king was in so much agony he could not reason clearly the harshness and mean spirited nature of such an order; but so acute was his suffering, all he could utter in reply was,

   “Anything to make this pain abate!”

  So the Lord Marshal ordered the kings army to descend on the town and demand the stones from the boy, who readily gave them up without haste.  Then the doctor was ordered to follow the soldiers back to the castle. After the doctor had  left the town with his stones, the soldiers carried out the rest of their orders and swiftly killed all the residents in the tiny hamlet, including the pebble polishing boy, along with his entire family. Then they burned all of the buildings there and stayed until the fell to the ground in ashes.  It was a sad fate for the town that had done nothing wrong, along with the young boy who had turned his hobby into a source of income for his family.  What the doctor did not know was the stones the boy had given to him had not been completely polished; or at least not to the standards the young boy believed as necessary.  Yet, because he was placed into a demand for his stones, and was sorely afraid if he argued or delayed, he hurriedly complied without saying a word.  He did not caution the soldiers that they were not ready; he was unaware of the plot to destroy the town after he surrendered the stones either.  But that didn’t matter to him or his town; they were destroyed nonetheless.  When the doctor administered the pebbles to the king they were still too course and abrasive, so they ripped small fissures in the stomach of the king resulting in him bleeding to death; whereby the doctor was summarily executed for malpractice.