The Testament of Yves Gundron (10 page)

“A new cart. You?”

“A visitation. What manner of cart?”

“Double axle.” I held the drawing out to him. “One front, one rear.”

“Ingenious. Though I wish you'd save the paper for writing.”

“The stranger's idea. Who visited?”

“Our brothers and sister.”

My throat began to close with terror and joy. “No.”

“Verily, they came with instruments and singing to help me in my work.”

“They came also to me, singing.”

“Then let us give praise.” He bowed his head, and I bowed mine, and offered my heart's thanks to the world that brought my siblings back to me.

“Did they tell you beware?” I asked.

“Not exactly. They wrote me some verses. I brought them to show you.” We sat down in the fragrant soil beneath the trees. “I think it's good.”

The first sheet read:

“In the beginning there was the Light, and the Fire, and from the Light and the Fire came forth the Great Mind. In the First Ages it brought forth Darkness, and from the Darkness did it bring forth Man. From Man did it bring forth that which pertains to Man—Greed, Penury, War-Making, Ugliness, Pestilence, Sorrow, and Death. From Death did it bring forth all the other sundry Creatures, for in Death are they all the same Stuff. From Death came this great, mysterious World, and to Death does it ever and anon return. And when the World itself—yea, every Mite hereon—has returned to its final slumber, then Death, too, will die, and be subsumed into the Great Mind, and then also will the Great Mind become part once more of the Light and the Fire. And in that Age will all Creation begin anew.”

How did my brother, with whom I had sucked on chunks of sugar, have such thoughts? He was as mortal as I, raised by the same parents, three years my elder. But his mind fixed on the infinite while mine fixed on carts, crops, and weather. I suppose that a family with more than one dreamer would be cursed beyond measure; still did I envy the breadth of his mind.

“I wouldn't,” I said, “let Father Stanislaus see it.”

“No, no.”

“Because he's not big enough to understand it.”

“Absolutely not.”

Despite that he was in every way my superior, his eyes searched mine for deeper praise.

“It is magnificent work.”

The light in his smile would have repaid any earthly debt. “But do you think it true, brother? Does it make sense?”

“How could I know?”

He nudged my leg with a stockinged toe in his sandal. “Oh, come, Yves. What does your gut say?”

“My gut says it's hungry, and anxious to build this new cart. And that I wish I had been you, that I had been thus blessed.”

“Nay, Yves. You're the one with the harness.”

“A harness is worlds different from a knowledge of first things. Will you help me with the cart, anyway?”

“A knowledge of first things is not all in this world.”

“No.”

“You could speak to our brothers and sister, and see if they had anything for you to write.”

Holy man or no, I gave him a fine shove upon the shoulder. “Like what?”

“Any number of things. A ballad? Or a history?”

“Don't be daft, monkey. Somebody's got to till the fields.”

He stood and wiped the dirt from his cassock. “And how did you get on with your stranger last night?”

“Somewhat difficult to understand. Adelaïda seems shy of her.”

He nodded. “But she's lovely, isn't she?”

“A bit tart.”

“But lovely.”

“Not everything is pen and ink, Mandrik.”

“I'm aware.”

I, too, stood, and we walked at a gentlemanly pace toward my abode, our family home, where he, too, had passed the bumbling days of childhood. We walked in silence a few minutes before he began to mutter, then finally burst into song:

The housewives were used to his sweet tenor, and began appearing at their doorways with baked apples, cheeses, and hunks of dark bread. They bowed their heads to him as he accepted their offerings into his capacious sleeve. The Widow Tinker, who still cooked as if she had a great family, though her daughters were long since married off, wrapped him a whole leg of lamb in a cloth and bade him Godspeed. When he was sufficiently laden, he held open the cache to me, saying, “Here, have a nosh before we get there.” I accepted a hunk of ripe cheese and a heel of black bread from the alms sleeve—grateful for my brother's skills, however odd—and dreamed of my new cart as we walked.

Mandrik dumped his booty on the floor of the barn. When Hammadi blew him a welcome, he gave her an apple and a pat on the nose, but turned immediately to help me in my work. With great effort we turned the cart to rest on its bed, the two great wheels creaking with the force of their own revolution. We pried off the axle with an iron bar, and set to work salvaging the nails.

“Mandrik,” I said, “the stranger's account of her homeland doesn't tally with your own.”

My brother raised his eyebrows. “And does she hail from Indo-China?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

I worked on in silence a moment, but I was not done. “And when twice I said to her, ‘Indo-China,' she said back, ‘Vietnam.'”

“There's no accounting for the ways of strangers.”

“Mandrik, when yesterday she told you where she was from—”

“From Boston.”

“Yes. Had you really heard of such a place, or did you dissemble?”

He put down his hammer and separated the good nails from those yet to be tried. “Of course I had heard of it, brother. I see no reason to tell her lies.”

“And yet Boston is no place I've ever heard you speak of.”

“I heard tell, in my travels, of a thousand thousand places. I will be glad, if it please you, to name you all their names, but it would take a fortnight—”

“Nay—”

“—and a great expenditure of breath. Still, whatever your pleasure.”

“Nay, Mandrik, nay. I see that you're right.”

Soon our banging and grunting brought both women and my daughter to the barn door, where they stood silhouetted against the bright morning. Ruth was attired in a looser, more modest pair of trousers—a thing that but the day before I could never have imagined remarking about a woman—of a soft, faded blue, and a shirt that covered her with due propriety to the wrists and hips. Dimples of light still shone through her slender legs.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We're rebuilding the cart the way you said.”

“With four wheels? I never should have mentioned it.”

Mandrik hammered delicately at a nail. “I can hardly believe we didn't think of it sooner.”

Ruth said, “I'm eating myself with guilt about this cart.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shook her head in a brooding fashion. “I suppose you would eventually have figured it out yourselves.”

“Aye,” said Adelaïda, “Yves is always at his inventing.”

“And,” I added, “I am glad for your inspiration.”

My brother continued with the nails, three light, expert strokes to each head. “Indeed, in every culture there are stories of foreigners and other fanciful beings with strange knowledge. Surely not all the tales of our grandmother can be true; it was her status as an outsider that made her so fruitful a topic. Every culture does this; you are simply our first opportunity, this generation. And we appreciate your fine idea.”

“Are there more cultures,” Adelaïda asked, “than hers, ours, and Indo-China?”

Mandrik smiled. “More than you can dream of. But you cannot see them from here.”

Elizaveta bolted into the yard, and Adelaïda turned to follow her.

“Where can you see them from, then?” Ruth came to sit near us on the ground.

“From the seas, of course, and the imagination.”

“But none of you goes to the sea.”

“I have.”

She waved her hand. “None of the rest of you.”

“Imagination will have to suffice, then, won't it?”

“Besides,” I said, searching through wood scraps for possible
wheel spokes, “the sea is too far. No one wants to go all the way to the sea.”

Ruth said, quietly, “Indo-China.”

Mandrik said, “Indeed.”

“I'd like very much to talk to you about your journey.”

“Perhaps in due time.”

Ruth watched his work, and only on occasion glanced upward at his face. “Whenever you think it's right.”

“The tale of my travels is longer than Midwinter's Night, and I wouldn't want to bore a stranger.”

“Perhaps when I'm no longer a stranger, then.”

“Yes. Ruth,” my brother said, barely looking up at her, “have you any skills? Can you turn a spoke on the lathe, or work with metal?”

“I could learn—I could be useful. I don't want to be in your way.”

“I was only wondering about your line of work, back home.”

I tossed a stick at him. “She's my age if she's a day, Mandrik, sure. What would she be besides a wife?”

“Any number of things.”

“I'm not married,” she said. “I'm not sure I ever will be.”

“Is it because you're so tall?”

She grinned. “I think of myself as being medium-sized.”

“You must come from a land of giants. Why are you not married?”

“I've had boyfriends.”

I'm sure I raised my eyebrows. “More than one?”

“Not at the same time.”

“What was wrong with them?” I asked. “Had they no land?”

“To answer your question, Mandrik—I'm still in school. I'm a grad student.”

“A student of what?”

“Anthropology. Peoples and civilizations.”

He nodded as if she made good sense, his lips pressed tight in concentration. “Well, then. We must be quite a boon.”

She said, “Yes,” then paused. “I am so anxious to learn everything you're willing to teach me.”

“We will do our best to oblige.”

She stood and brushed nonexistent particles from her clothes. “If it's no bother, then, I'd like to make notes on your work on the cart. Would you mind?”

I graciously shook my head no.

“Great. Let me get my notebook.”

I felt magnanimous as I watched her return to the house for whatever object she required. “It must be because she's so tall,” I mused aloud. “Otherwise, what could be wrong with her? She's quick of mind, pretty enough. Neither markedly pleasant nor unpleasant. Speaks peculiarly, but perhaps they all do.”

“Don't fret her with questions.” Mandrik hammered away. “I think she has work to do. I don't think she wants to be married.”

“Who doesn't want to be married?”

“I don't, for one.”

“She doesn't seem like what you are.”

“You can say ‘mystic,'” he said, the corners of his blue eyes wrinkling with amusement. “It doesn't hurt.”

“I don't like the sound.”

“I think it's the sense you object to.”

“I can't believe she's come from the Beyond, and she sits here, talking to us.”

“From beyond the Beyond. You're lucky to have her, Yves; lucky that my calling precluded her staying with me, and lucky that none else in the village would accept her.”

“Were they asked?”

“No, but I can imagine their response. Have you taken her yet to the cairn?”

“I ran to get you practically as soon as I woke.”

“Take her.”

Adelaïda sneaked into the barn on silent feet, and squatted down beside us, her eyes bright with worry. “That stranger has done some odd things in your absence,” she whispered. “I thought I should tell you.”

“Witchery?” I asked.

She gave a wide-eyed shrug. “First thing, when she woke, she went into the yard with the most magnificent, pearliest cake of soap I ever saw, and spent ages at her ablutions—scrubbing that face like it was laundry, then rubbing herself with unguents about. Then she did something to her mouth with a bright green stick that made her foam like a mad horse and reek of peppermint leaves. Then, when she came back
in and I offered her a slice of bread, she held it over the fire until its edges were quite black, and ate it as if it were the world's finest delicacy.”

Her report seemed cause for alarm, yet my brother kept at his hammering and said, simply, “Toast.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Toast. Burnt bread. There are some peoples, Ruth's among them, I suppose, who like to eat it. For breakfast.”

Adelaïda looked disappointed. “What about the other things?”

“None dangerous, I think. You should get back to the house before she finds you here whispering about her.”

She stood, sorry, it seemed, to have no cause for alarm, and went out to feed the chickens in the yard.

“You're sure you're right about this?” I asked him. “I have a child to protect.”

Mandrik kept unhurriedly at the nails. “She is no danger to Elizaveta.”

When Ruth returned, she sat quietly with a block of the finest, fairest paper I had ever beheld on her lap before her, and asked to know about measurements, the lathe, and the slight bow in the shape of the finished wheel, an improvement we had stumbled upon quite by accident, producing perhaps our third two-wheeled cart, and whose efficacy she did not at first understand. She admired our craftsmanship, which made me proud, and addressed my brother with the shy attitude of respect such a holy man deserved. She fingered the engraved box and pronounced it beautiful, but did not ask to look inside—which I took as a sign of good judgment.

We wrighted two new wheels that day, and the next built and attached the second axle. The next Market Day, we drove the new cart into town, to the never-sated astonishment of our brethren and the natives of Nnms. Cheers erupted as we drove, laden with the first fruits of spring, through Mandragora that fine morning; Desvres, Ydlbert, and our neighbors lauded us as if we had personally sprinkled the ground with the morning's dew. But as I watched, from aloft, my brother walking alongside the new invention, beaming with pride and answering the many questions with grace, I began to wonder anxiously what I could invent next. And who knew but that all our neighbors' attention
was focused not on our work but on the tall, square-shouldered stranger who rode with her arms stretched along the rear gate and her smiling face pointed toward Heaven.