Two Sides To Every Story

I had a dream that I am going to be your boss one day, the cocky young man said to us as we all stood silently, our jaws falling open at the flagrant hubris the young buck displayed, neglecting the many years of experience before him. The silence only hung in the air for a short time before the angry retorts began to fly back at him, some of the men cursing and chastising him, but the message was clear, over our dead bodies.

He was the new guy, barely on the job for a year now, but the boss had taken a shine to this youngster, a yes man who was willing to do anything to get ahead. Many of us had been working hard for the boss for decades now and were beginning to show our years of hard labor. There was always a hope that when a position came open as a Forman or supervisor, the fruits of our labor might place us in line for it, but this young punk and the boss’ obvious affection for him was making it clear that would not happen.

An alliance against the youth began to form, even though we all wanted to be promoted, we would understand if one of us was promoted above the other, but not him, anyone but him. We began to plot ways to bring his downfall. The boss had begun to not trust us either, and the boy was starting to spy on us too, sneaking around on us while we were out in the field, taking notes on us and reporting back to the boss. We would come in from a hard day’s work, and the boss would be waiting for us, he would then question us on what we had been doing all day. The boss that we looked up to, the man we had honored for so many years was now becoming our enemy and busting our chops, something had to change.

One day, as we were hard at our labor out in the field, we caught sight of the little sneak nosing around and spying on us. The place we were working that day happened to have an empty well, and so we threw the boy in there in our anger to be rid of him. As the reality of our actions set in we began to pace nervously, we hadn’t wanted to kill him really, we just wanted him to leave us alone, stop throwing us under the bus with the boss all the time. We edged over to the rim and looked down, thank God he was alive. We hoisted him out of the hole and dusted him off, but he was really angry with us, and he began to tell us all that the boss was going to do when he got back and reported this little incident. We had no choice; we tied him up and took his jacket from him. We tore it up and dipped it in some blood, then made up a story about how we had found it this way and suspected a wild animal had attacked him. Just then, a band of travelers headed for a faraway land neared, and we offered to sell the boy to them cheaply if they would promise to take him far away and sell him again once they got there. They promptly agreed.

Dread filled our souls as we headed back to our homeland, knowing what we had to tell the boss, that his prized worker would not be returning, and then showing him the jacket that had been torn. We would see his anguish and pain at knowing that not only his favorite worker, but his favorite son was dead and gone forever, never to return. All ten of us were complicit in a horrible secret now too, all of us knew that we were lying to our dad, we would forever have that wedge between our father and us, every time he brought Joseph up and began to talk sadly about his death and how much he missed our brother since his passing, we knew the truth, we had sold him off cheaply to a band of drifters.

When we would all be together out in the fields away from prying ears is the only time we could ever talk about it. “It was the only thing we could have done” said Judah as Rueben countered “don’t drag me into that, I told you not to do it, and you did it anyway while I was gone, I wash my hands of the whole bunch of you”. The brothers who used to be so close began to argue more and more these days, and it seemed that happiness eluded our families as the months turned into years. God would surely deal harshly with us for what we had done to our own flesh and blood, we should have given him time to grow out of his foolishness before we acted, maybe embraced him before pushing him away.

Our lives became haunted ones, hiding a horrible secret from all but each other. Eventually even our crops became cursed and we could no longer support even our own families. Dad called us all together and told us there was food in a faraway land called Egypt for sale, and that we should go and buy some. Surely this was the beginning of the end, God was going to pay us back for the evil we had done so many years ago to our brother. We packed up our camels and set off toward Egypt and an uncertain future.

I have always looked at the story of Joseph from Joseph’s eyes, and thought of his brothers as horrible wretched people for doing what they did to him. In this writing I decided to try to look at it from their eyes and see things from their perspective, being second to a favored son.

God Bless-JFT

This story is fiction based on scripture.

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