[SPOILER: Odysseus finds his father in the orchard, alone, working a row in stained clothes that no king of Ithaca should be wearing. To test him — habit, cruelty, fear, all of it at once — he tells one more lying tale, says he met a man named Odysseus once, long ago, and the man is dead. The spade falls from Laertes’s hands. He goes down in the dirt and pulls grey dust onto his head. The son who was taking one last cunning angle realizes he has just killed his father with a sentence and drops the disguise, drops everything, gets to his knees beside him. The spade lies in the row where it landed. The cunning lands wrong this time and Teilo lets it sit there.]
Laertes's Spade
An old man's gardening tool. It falls from his hands when his son tells him a lie about being dead.