The Testament of Yves Gundron (25 page)

Iona, however mad you might one day have gone, how glad would I have been for your guidance then. How glad would I be for it now.

The men shed their jackets and resumed their labor, and at long last, when the sun had traveled a goodly distance in the sky, came the thud of a spade against the first coffin, which flipped my stomach end over end. The soil continued to come up, broken with pebbles, worms, and black ants that scuttled about, intent on their own work. At last the pine coffins, damp and dark from the loam without and the putrefaction that no doubt had already begun within, lay uncovered. Bradley and Fiske bent down in the stinking pits to feed ropes beneath the boxes. Bradley, his face mottled with anger and sweat, glanced about, but none would offer to help him in his labor. One at a time, straining against the terrible weight, they hoisted the ungainly loads back up,
and grabbed onto the handles to drag them to firmer ground. Fiske wiped his brow on his filthy sleeve. Bradley, who had clamped his lips so tight shut they'd gone white, said, “Open them.”

The crowd moved forward and put out a great shout. Someone made a hushing sound, to which another countered, “Sacrilege!”

“Is it not enough that we allow you to move them,” Stanislaus said, still bent, winded, over Vox and dirty with her grime, “from what ought to have been their last resting place? Can you not leave them this much in peace?”

Bradley picked up a crowbar and handed it to Fiske. To Stanislaus he replied, “We have to identify the bodies.”

Fiske was sweating visibly, wetting his hair and the crooks of his arms. He pried with all his weight against the good, strong nails. The lid popped open all at once, and sent forth a clinging odor like a bouquet of dying violets, but a hundred times darker and more sweet. I had no desire to see the contents, and yet was drawn forward to the offending stink. There within lay Boogaerts's body, wrapped neatly in my wife's fine linen. Bradley said, “Unwind the shroud.” Fiske regarded him, his eyes full of the unfairness of what he had to do, but he took his knife to the neck of the shroud, and gently tore it open. Inside, Boogaerts's skin was thick and waxy like a relic's, his chest sunk in like an empty bladder. Bradley checked him against an image he cradled in his palm, found the resemblance sufficient (though no man I had ever seen looked less like a man), and, his mouth grim, gestured Fiske to shut the lid. They repeated the dread procedure for Ulyanov, who was turned nearly sideways in his hard bed, his eyes, when revealed to the daylight, sunken and black. Already the dirt and her denizens had begun to creep in, and an ant traced a wavering path across his face. Immediately did my imagination fly forth to all the other bodies all around, and imagined them in their neat rows, lying still below ground as their flesh melted into their winding sheets. I saw the shrouds growing threadbare, becoming dirt. I saw my sister's golden hair, dulled by the dank darkness, and my first wife and child, what had been her lithe arms now twisted around the infant in what came more and more to be an embrace of the bones. All around me lay the dead in the slow, purposeful business of casting off the bodies they had sojourned in. They were not here. And when these bodies came up at the end of time,
surely they would return in all their softness and splendor, their hair rippling behind them as they flew, the first bloom of youth in their fingers, toes, and cheeks. They would drop their rotting grave clothes behind them like veils. This slow tragedy around me, this squalor I had not meant to witness, would not be the end of us all.

“Very good, then,” Bradley said.

Fiske stepped to the side, knelt down, and vomited.

“If you'll at least help us move them to the helicopter,” said Bradley, “we'll be on our way.”

We looked about at one another, none willing to step forward, until at last Jepho Martin said, “You may load them into my cart, if you must. But I'll not help you else.”

Jepho held his gray Gar close by the bridle as he brought him round, but the horse skittered, for he knew ought was amiss. The two lieutenants struggled painfully under the burden of lifting the coffins, but no man among us would help. Jepho held Gar by the headstall and whispered encouragement to the beast as he led him away. My eyes were drawn to the empty holes, already crumbling and seeming somewhat startled to have been opened so unceremoniously to the day. Stanislaus's lips, and my brother's, moved in prayer, while we villagers remained rooted to this earth, to which all of us still, by God's grace, belonged. Then Desvres, slowly rubbing his head, bowed to the empty graves and said, “We should see them off.”

We drove our carts around the churchyard, through its unmown grass, to the Great North Meadow, where the living and dead machines had communed this week with each other and the vast blue sky. Though each beast had flattened the grass and flowers as it settled down, the bounty of nature was now once more in full force, and the poppies again faced sunward on their crooked stems. Our horses kept their distance from the scene, perhaps still sensing Hammadi's demise, though the stains of her blood were no longer visible to human eyes. With some difficulty Fiske and Bradley pressed the coffins through the open door of the squat, healthy airplane. After Bradley closed the door with a tinny thump, Fiske once more took up his machine and pointed it into each of our faces, its red eye blinking to remind us that it could see. At last he took the box from his shoulder and stowed it in the airplane. It had branded his right eye with a frightful pink circle.
His white shirt dripped with sweat and was dark with the dirt of graves.

Bradley began to speak, but hard though my ears strained to listen, I could hear nothing of his words—instead, my eyes were taken with the structures of the airplanes, one whole and one desecrated by the unforgiving earth. How they moved, on the ground or in the air, was a mystery, for their bulk was great. What seized my attention, however, were the wheels on the ruined plane, small as a man's hand, black, puffed like a full cheesecloth. How so small an object could bear so heavy a load, when our own wheels creaked under the weight upon them—

“Mr. Gundron?” Bradley said, and my neighbors regarded me as if I had been in a trance. Ydlbert gave me a slight push forward, and with my hands dangling beside me like two cured hams, I stood facing the tall, disheveled man. “Mr. Gundron, may I ask you to convey our thanks to Ms. Blum?”

I bowed my head. “Indeed.”

He wiped his hand, then held it out, and I took it. It was cold as All Saints' Eve.

“You'll all stand away from the field so we'll be clear for takeoff?”

“Yes,” I said, and we started back, though I wasn't certain what he meant.

In they climbed, and shut their miniature doors behind them. The machine rumbled, then began to purr like an infernal cat. Even the children pulled back. The noise grew louder and fiercer, and all at once the machine lifted from the ground. Its dim halo rained down an uncanny wind that stung the eyes, frightened the horses, and chilled me to my marrow. The machine bounced and wavered upon the air, but it remained aloft, and as it climbed higher it veered toward the south, where eventually it disappeared from sight and hearing both.

“Lord have mercy,” Stanislaus said. When I turned I saw him kneeling, his head bowed. Our neighbors stood about and looked at the flowers and bugs, all of which were returning to normal in what was now an ordinary summer breeze. My eyes could not resist the wrecked machine, which Nature sought to prettify, but whose ragged edges and ruined lines spoke all too eloquently of death. Behind us, in the churchyard, lay the empty graves, whose loss we could not make up, though
we would bury the shovels cursed by the sacrilege, fill the holes as if they still held their charges. The maws of Hell had not yet opened to swallow us, nor had Heaven yet bid us repent. Stanislaus prayed as if he wished some terrible sign to come. But the June air was thick with the songs of the birds.

Desvres, his eyes baggy and slack, said, “It won't be long till the Day of Judgment comes.”

“And yet this is better,” said Jepho Martin, “than certain death. Is it not?”

“We will try,” my brother quietly interjected, “to have faith, and to hope that God understands why we've done what we've done.”

“To save our skins?” Desvres asked.

Mandrik drew his lips in over his teeth, then released them with a sigh. “Not only. Perhaps for a higher purpose, as well.”

The night passed, and the next day, with no sign of retribution. Though at all moments I listened warily for the trumpet of Justice, none sounded. On the second night a soft, warm shower gave way without warning to a gale whose wind swept thatch from our roofs and hatchlings from their nests. Yet though my mind warned me that this was the calamity—and only the beginning of the calamity—whose appearance we all had feared, my heart knew how we needed rain, even when it came down thus angrily. It became possible, as time passed, to walk, or tend crops, or fix one's ruffled thatch without worrying that the world would end at any moment. If a punishment was coming, God had something subtle in mind.

Indeed, as the summer grew hotter and the long days dry, I began to wonder if the strangers had ever come—if they had not been a mere fancy of the mind. Our life had settled down as quiet as it had been before; the weather was capricious and we had lost some time to idleness and speculation, but that state of affairs we had never known to call Peace settled once more over Mandragora like a sheet set to dry on a hedge. Ruth was among us, recovering quickly, and seemed markedly less odd in the butter-yellow chemise and blue skirt Adelaïda sewed for her. Mandrik returned to tending his orchard and writing his treatise, and my wife, once assured that her house would not be swallowed by
an avenging angel, returned to more ordinary spirits. The sun kept rising. Nothing we could do would change that.

The faith of my youth waned after tragedy upon tragedy—the epidemic which took my parents and siblings, the birthing bed that snatched my first wife in a torrent of blood and stole the breath of the son within her before he could be wrenched from her lifeless body. As I grew to take into my own hands the management of this farm, I relied less upon prayer; and as my brother went out on his wanderings, and came back to preach his own strange gospel, even less did I need of religion, for he had a whole clan's share. Then came the cares of my family to distract me from piety, and as my own inventions, the work of my own two hands, began to change the shape of the very world we live in, only on Sundays and on the rarest of occasions did I give up thanks to God.

Now, with the strangers behind us, and with my crops nearly ready for harvest, I began to reflect upon my position and my life, and realized how much I owed the Lord for my prosperity, and how little thanks I had offered. My land was plagued neither by flooding, drought, nor pests, and gave forth bountifully year after year. My mind was fertile with imaginings, and though my wife had not yet produced a second child, our first was thriving, growing lovelier by the day. Ruth had come to me for succor and guidance, and I was able to give it to her as surely as I reaped the rewards of her presence—her earnest questioning, her strange resemblance to my grandmother, her company. My brother, with whom I would otherwise need have divided the land, making two fair less productive farms, brought blessings down on our family and this town by his devotion. I could not, as he did, work the greater part of my labor in composing songs of praise, but I might learn to express it all the same.

With that in mind, then, did I begin, after the airplane left, to attend services at Prime once or twice between Sabbaths. The sun was new and unsure in the sky as I left home with the chiming of the first bell; no one was out driving, and all the eyes upon me were those of kine left pasturing overnight. When first he saw me early in his dim, candlelit sanctuary, Stanislaus's weak eyes near popped out of his head.

“Yves, your family is well, I trust?”

I removed my hat and made my way hunched over to my bench, as if by making my body smaller I might attract less of his attention. “All hale. I've had the fear of God in me, and I think more church might do me good.”

“Oh, but that's excellent.” He nodded so vigorously that his crucifix and other trinkets tinkled. “I have long wished to see you here more. And your brother? Any—”

“He won't set foot, I'm afraid.”

“Ah, well. Glad to have you, Yves. These services between Sabbath Masses have never been well attended. Most of your brethren pay their Maker no heed until it's too late. Since the”—he cleared his throat—“incident with the graves, I think even fewer of our countrymen have been coming on the Lord's Day.”

“That's a fancy, Stanislaus,” I said, though I, too, had noticed in the intervening weeks some slight thinning in the ranks. “I have seen no such thing.”

“I wish I believed you.” Stanislaus rang his piercing bell one last time, and brought in Martin's wife and the wanton daughter, Prugne, fresh as a blossom despite the hour. Elaine, the Widow Tinker, hobbled in, leading a lamb by a length of twine.

“Yves,” she said, bobbing and smiling when she saw me. “You won't mind my Urs, will you? He gets so lonely if I leave him home.”

“Not at all,” said I.

Young Urs followed her to where she squatted on the bare floor, and stood rubbing his woolly head against her leg. Beneath her breath did I hear her mutter,

and I took pity both upon the sick beast and upon Elaine, for having opened her heart to a creature that would most likely not long make its way among the living.

I had never seen the church so empty. On the Lord's Day one can count on the church to be full of gossip and noteworthy behavior; but that July morning I was alone with the word of God, three women, and an oddly quiet lamb. Stanislaus delivered no sermon, but read in a soft voice from the texts for the day, officiating with water and incense over
the morning. When he read the psalm
“Levavi oculos meos in montes unde veniet auxilium mihi
,”
²
my eyes were lifted up unto the meadows in which St. Perpetua, her deep auburn hair in a mad tangle all about her, calmly met her end. There were two cows, behind the nearer one a dark angel; beyond the split-rail fence were the ill-clad Romans and their fierce soldiers, all looking down upon her and the congregation. It could have been our own town—indeed, as Cedric von Broleau had lived and died among us, it no doubt was—and to look at the terrible scene about to be enacted rankled me to my bones. Still did I hear the words of the great psalm behind me as the fresco began to grow brighter and nearer, the saint's halo all of light and not mere earthly gold. It could as easily have been me, I realized; easier still it could have been our Ruth, and my anxious mind trailed off after the notion. Soon enough I was back with Stanislaus, his voice once again merely human, the morning light shining through the magnificent glass window and falling in shapes on the floor at his feet. But I knew then I had been wrong to worship so infrequently, and with a mind so full of earthly cares, and I resolved that when the disposition of my crops was not dire, I would visit in the mornings the house of the Lord.