The Testament of Yves Gundron (26 page)

In this time were the days so long as to seem infinite, and the crops coming to full flower. The fruits of the earth were not so plentiful nor so plump as they had been in years past, but they grew strong and without blight. Along the road the air was full of the scent of wheat, luxurious and green. I began to prepare my mind for the hard labor of the weeks ahead, and meanwhile, in the few weeks left to me of relative freedom, began to potter with my newest and, I was certain, best inventions.

¹
“Thank you, Lord, for Sister Airplane,/Though her flight be erratic and her Ways be strange,/For she brings us our Brethren from the skies.”

²
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”

INTERMEZZO

REFLECTION

t is no small thing for a man of my station to be lettered. My grandfather, Andras Gundron, was among the more prosperous farmers in the village, but was by no means specially marked out for his wealth, and had no pretensions of attaining status in this world beyond that of a land-owning farmer and lover of God. Nevertheless, with the Holy Scripture as his guide, my grandfather taught himself to read, and with a stick in the dirt he learned to form the letters we use to mark out the Word of the Lord. He brought his knowledge to Father Icthyus, who immediately set at him with fire, oil, incense, and chants to exorcise whatever had possessed him. Since, however, the possessor had been nought but the Love of Knowledge, it could not be got out, and Father Icthyus proclaimed his learning a miracle. Andras taught what he had learned to all his children—daughters as well as sons, though only my father, Uncle Frith, and a sister, Una, grew to the full flower of adulthood, their other siblings, Childrik and Dane, having passed beforetimes into the Beyond. Una, despite her high color and thick brown hair, proved impossible to marry because of this mark he had placed upon her; Frith renounced learning and cultivated the habit of dozing in church; and my father, Zoren, needed marry among the Gansevöorts, who had generations since been marked by song-singing, high spirits, and other slight peculiarities of
mind. (None of which seems to have affected my Adelaïda for the worse.)

Mandrik, Marvin, Clive, and I learned the ruggedness of the soil and the vagaries of the weather by following our father out in springtime and in snow, by listening to him with half our minds as we lazily assisted in the work and invented games of our own. At midday did our mother send Eglantine forth with a yoke across her sweet, plump shoulders, cow's milk warm in one pail, and porridge, soup, or bread and cheese in the other. Oft, too, did she tie a chalk and slate up in her apron or carry forth our precious Bible, that we might have a lesson while we rested. Thus it was in my own fields, amid the wheat and the flax, that I learned to make sense of the shapes that make up our mother tongue. Evenings, as our mother scrubbed the pots and Eglantine knitted furiously—as many stockings, hats, mittens, and mufflers as four growing boys could ruin—my father read to us from the Bible or spun tales of the fabled Indies and the sea, from which Mandrik learned his yearning to wander. From his earliest childhood Mandrik made up songs (though, until he was nigh manhood, most of them were of no consequence), with which he beguiled the evenings while the rest of us laughed and listened, grinding spices, churning butter, or swatting flies at the request of our mother.

So naturally did our reading and contemplation occur, so seamlessly did they mesh into the fabric of our day, I had no understanding that they were not part of all our neighbors' lives. Ydlbert's parents, God rest their souls, were as kind and quick-witted as any, but they could not read, and did not wish their sons to, lest they fritter away in idleness time that might better be spent on the land. Each Sunday in church, Father Icthyus read from the great Scripture atop the lectern as the assembled spat and admired the frescoes on the walls. There in colors bright as midday, applied ages ago by the gifted hand of Cedric von Broleau, were the scenes that were the one book of which my countrymen read copiously and with skill. Our souls learned equally to cringe and to rejoice at the stories our Father relayed, but only I and my brothers and sister learned to check up on his sources.

Such scholar work might have been supposed to infuse us with doubt, uncovering, as it sometimes did, vast chasms between the words our Lord spoke and the meanings Icthyus gave out on Sundays. But rather did the eerie availability of those words, their sonorous nearness,
open our eyes to the mysteries of Earth and of Heaven. Mornings did my young heart tremble at each day's appearance of the dew, and evenings did I rejoice to see the hearth fire burning, the stars in the vast sky beyond. From some of his early readings did Mandrik claim to have learned all he knew about trees, which subject infected him with wonder.

This, then, was our childhood; in addition to which I must here recount what should have been told long before: of how I won Adelaïda after a long spate of tragedies, and of my brother's journey abroad, and of his eventual return therefrom.

My first wife, Elynour, was Franz Nethering's daughter, and all my life I had loved her. When we were three, barely out of swaddling clothes and tethered to our mothers, I looked at her nut-brown curls as she sat before me in church, and wanted to eat them. Elynour was the eldest of four, and the only to live long enough to marry. Her brothers did not die in nameless infancy, but after they had grown characters and second teeth. Elynour, all the time we were growing up together, had always around her a bevy of youngerlings, whom she ordered about and doted upon with a grin upon her thin lips. She was, I have been told, no great beauty, being short of stature with enough curly hair for two, but I adored her dark coloring and the seriousness it lent her most frivolous gestures. Elynour did not sing or play the timbrels, and the cloth that she wove and her needlework were only passable, yet did I love her.

I was fourteen when the Great Scourge swept through Mandragora, carrying off half of what everyone loved, and more besides. In two days I watched Clive and Marvin, who had been out with me picking peas, sicken and weaken to the brink of death. Their lips grew dry and their eyes bright as the stars, and they trembled and gasped for breath. I nursed them, and wept over them, and exhorted them to stay among the living, and Eglantine, with her braids caught up beneath a scarf, mopped their brows and brought mint tea they would not allow past their lips. My parents—both parents—stood away from the big bed where they'd lain the boys down, and sobbed and prayed. Their work and their house fell to a shambles about them, and when they could cease weeping ten minutes at a time, they leaned over Clive and Marvin, pleading with them, or sat at the end of the bed holding the patients' burning feet. The influenza was fierce, and once my strapping
brothers had succumbed, they could fight no more; they rattled with chills and grew hollow in the cheeks, and without opening their eyes or saying another word (except the innocent ravings of the fever, to which none of us could listen) they passed into the grave. Clive died early one June night, and Marvin hung on till near morning. When the sun came up, those two we had loved most dearly lay still, blue, and cold, looking exactly like themselves except that their hands had closed like claws, and that they would nevermore speak, and no more be where once they had made their home.

In the middle of the night we heard Friedl roaming the parish, wailing over her and our and everyone's dead, but we were all too afraid to put out an offering for her.

My stomach gripped with fear as my mother and sister bathed the bodies. I had hardly ever seen my father without his hat, and now he wept the day long. Mandrik prostrated himself, his nose to the ground, and cajoled and prayed, but it was too late for intercession. In the morning I ran for Father Icthyus, and it took me half the day to find him, so busy was he saying offices over the dead and those soon to follow. I had never seen the rims of his great blue eyes so fiery, yet he did not weep over his duties. By the time he wearily approached my house, my father was red in the cheeks and curled up on a pallet on the floor. Mandrik, now heir to it all, still had his nose to the ground, and my mother and sister shrieked with worry and care. The bodies were blessed, and my mother gave Icthyus money to send for coffins, but so many were dying that they were in short supply. Two days later, my father succumbed in a rage to his malady. There was no subduing my mother and sister, so mad were they with grief. Mandrik quit his prayer—“Because you can see,” he said bitterly, “how much good it's doing”—and we went out to this very barn to saw boards for coffins. The house by now reeked of decay, but my mother and sister would not leave to attend to any business. When we finished the three coffins—plainer than my love for my family would have dictated, but the best we could do—they helped us carry the bodies outside, seal them away, and hoist them into the cart, which Mandrik and I dragged to the cemetery, as was the custom. No gravediggers could be had because they, too, were dying, so with my father's own shovels and spades did we lay them to rest.

Eglantine opened the great door to the air and took the linen out for
washing, but the odor of death held tight to our home. My mother, her usually sleek brown hair spread wild around her, walked about nights, weeping. Mandrik huddled into a corner with paper and pen, writing the first chapters of his Apocalypse. And before we could venture to church on Sunday to seek revenge on the terrible God who would take our father and brothers, Eglantine developed the spots on her cheeks. She tried to be cheerful and banish the truth with the same click of her tongue she used to call her chickens. By the Lord's Day, her breath came rasping in her throat, and it became clear that my mother's grief was not something from which she would soon recover. Within a fortnight we buried them both, and Mandrik and I stared dazedly at one another, to see who would be the abandoner, and who, if either, left behind to tend the farm.

Though at fourteen I felt I had the strength and demeanor of a man, I was not ready for the burden Fate had yoked across my shoulders. Mandrik, now the elder of our clan, was angrier than I had ever seen him; sometimes if I interrupted his work he would literally snarl. How could I live in this house that smelled like death and see to my father's crops? How could I, a boy alone, bring in all that he had sowed? Father Icthyus was no help, heartbroken as he was from burying more than half his parishioners, including some of his lifelong friends. Ydlbert and Anya were married then, and Dirk was a four years' lad; and though my friend brought over loaves of bread and bowls of new cheese, he always stopped with them outside our door, as if our very lintel were cursed.