The Testament of Yves Gundron (29 page)

My nearest neighbors, Ydlbert and Nethering, no doubt heard my screams, for they arrived soon after with baked potatoes in their pockets for warmth. The midwife had by then bathed down the bodies,
tucked them like sleepers beneath a clean sheet, and coaxed the expression of pain off Elynour's face. Yet when Nethering saw her, his lone remaining child, lying still on the foul-smelling bed, he broke down, and knelt on the floor weeping. The midwife and the smith left in the morning, promising to send Icthyus when they reached town.

“The world contains nothing more terrible than this,” my brother whispered to me as I knelt beside the gruesome, stinking bed. “We have drunk of darkness to the lees.”

The pale body was but a shadow of my wife. The infant—who could tell whom he would have resembled? Who could know what wonders he might have accomplished?

“I have, Mandrik. I have drunk it down.”

“I, too, brother.”

Again the rage rose in my throat. “What do you know of misery? She was not your wife.”

Mandrik, like a child at his prayers, placed his head on his hands on the mattress. His back heaved silently for what seemed a lifetime. “I have lost a sister, Yves,” he said finally, “and the heir to my father's name. I beseeched our God to save her, and my prayers changed nothing.”

“And my prayers?”

“I have begun to think that there is nought but leads to death and misery. But surely that cannot be so. Surely there is some comfort in this world, and not merely in the world beyond?”

I did not think so. All that had ever comforted me had died in the place we now sat—all but him, and I began to understand the full weight of the truth that he, too, would one day be taken from me. That, or I, like all I had loved, would be snatched from this world in pain.

Mandrik would not accompany me anywhere; he brooded about the house, writing whenever he was not racked with sobs. I sought solace in the church, but in truth it provided hardly any comfort. The sweet faces of the saints and martyrs, even the fair countenance of God, mocked me each time I sat in St. Perpetua. My grandmother looked down in pity. At seventeen to have lost a wife and son as well as my whole family was a hard lot, even in hard times. For weeks, each morning we awoke to find the bounty left by our neighbors—stewed chickens, icy to the touch, piles of root vegetables dusted with the morning's snow. But nothing could assuage my misery, and though I kept abreast
of the firewood, lest we die of cold, I more or less let my crop go to rot in the barn.

And Mandrik was no farmer. He was up late nights, or up early in the mornings, having visions or writing about them, and so was of little use to me. Days, as I worked, or when I stopped for midday repast, he relayed to me what he was learning of the world beyond, until I grew too frightened to sleep. So did we live our lives in the darkest part of that winter.

Yet God is merciful, and sadness, like any other foul weather, eventually passes off. I missed my Elynour each day, and Mandrik wore a stricken face each time he spoke of her, but as the ground began to thaw, so too did our hearts. I was by no means mirthful, but as I prepared the soil that spring, I found a measure of joy in the work. The long-absent glimmer returned to Mandrik's eye; as I sowed my crops, I realized he was harboring a secret. One June day he came skipping home in such triumph that one of his shoes was lost along the way. “I've found you a new wife!” he cried, galloping across the north field, where I was watering, in the shadow of the cairn.

“Mandrik, please.”

“I did, I found her.”

I knew full well the name of every marriageable woman in the parish, and that I cared for none of them, so I kept at my work. “Your left shoe, brother.”

“God will provide another. Don't you want to know whom you're to marry?”

“Let me see.” His excitement itched me like a rash; with the magnitude of his grief, how could he forget our Elynour so quickly? “Ah, yes. The Widow Tinker.”

He slapped my arm. “Be serious. A beautiful girl, and as strong as any in the valley.”

“This is sacrilege.”

At once his aspect grew more sober. “When Elynour lay upon her final bed, I thought I could save her, I thought I could intercede with the Almighty. But I could not, brother. And now I will make you amends. I will stop the gap of your sorrow.”

“I don't want it stopped. My wife is dead. I have good reason.”

“Don't you even want to guess to whom I've betrothed you?”

“I can't think who.”

“Adelaïda Gansevöort.”

I set down my water skin and let it fall into a puddle. “Who?”

“Ion Gansevöort's youngest sister—and our mother's cousin, besides.”

When I pictured Ion, an affable fellow who lived too far from town for socializing, it was surrounded by a cluster of yellow-haired sisters. “But the youngest is a child.”

“Not a babe-in-arms: she's eleven.”

“Eleven!”

Mandrik smiled his one-side-higher-than-the-other, usually infectious grin. “She's a good girl, with a kind heart. And she's young enough we can train her to do what you like.”

“And to make clothes for her dollies. Why didn't you get one more my age, if you had to get one at all?”

“Because the older ones can't sing.”

He was quite serious. I was lucky not to be such a lunatic myself. “Can't sing?”

“Aye, but does she know her way around the back end of a cow?”

“Aye, and can card, spin, and weave cloth finer than women twice her age. And knows how to cook all manner of stews. But, Yves, you're not listening: she can sing.”

“So can you. So could our mother. It doesn't bring meat to the table.”

“Our mother got it from her Gansevöort grandmother, and I from her and from Grandmother Iulia. Only one family in this whole village can express itself in rhyme. And I tell you, she's better at it than I was at her age.”

I laughed, though the remembrance of my mother's sweet songs left
me sick at heart. “Yes, but you used to sing, ‘Toad, toad, why do you lie in the road?'”

He smiled; he never minded a joke at his own expense. “And ‘Cow, cow, next to the sow.' Aye, I recall. She rhymes better than that, and in a low, sweet voice. And think, Yves: When I leave you for a place of my own, to work on my treatise, how else will you keep from getting lonely at night?”

It was true—only during his absence, and during the most tragic evenings of my life, had I been without a song from my mother or brother to cheer me and make sense of the stuff of the day. “But eleven years old—she'll cry at night for her mother.”

“Her mother is four years dead. Ion's crazy to get all those sisters out from under his roof; and you can treat her like a sister, if that'll make you feel better, till she's old enough.”

Though I still could not picture to which of the Gansevöorts my brother had promised me, I began to like the idea. I dreamt of the blond, smiling lot of them that night, and in the morning acquiesced to marry, though Elynour was hardly six months in the soil. We dressed carefully—Mandrik having retrieved his shoe—picked all the cherries and greengages off our trees, and set out with hearts more hopeful than light to greet my new bride.

By the roads it would have been half a day's walk to Gansevöorts, so we cut through the fields, west through Nethering's land, and finally to Ion's sloping dairy farm. His cows were out to pasture, lazily ringing their heavy bells or sleeping under the shade trees. As we wove through them, barely even exciting their notice, the strains of a song in a low voice touched our ears:

A smile broke over my whole being like the sun after a rain shower: they'd be sassier songs than Mandrik's, then.

“Is that Adelaïda?” Mandrik ventured, though we knew who it was.

“Who's afield?” asked the voice, without any tenor of concern to mar it.

“The Gundrons,” said he.

“Mercy, then.” She rose up from the grass: still a child in the softness of her cheek and nose, but nearly as tall and broad as I, with a head of yellow hair streaming out behind her and collecting clover and grass. “Good day.”

“Good day,” I answered. At once I noticed the gap in her teeth. Though my heart still yearned for Elynour, there was no denying the beauty of this child.

“Adelaïda, I am pleased to introduce you to your future lord and master, my brother, Yves.”

“Not lord and master,” I said. “Your friend.”

She curtsied, lifting the soiled hem of her skirt above her solid ankles. “I know you from church. I can't wait till we're married and my sisters quit bossing me around.”

I said, “I would never order you to do anything.”

“No, of course not. Mandrik says you're sweet as a Michaelmas apple, and soft as a duckling's down.”

The back of my neck prickled, and Mandrik clearly saw it. But it hardly mattered what he had said if he'd gotten me this fine, strong girl for a wife.

When we brought Adelaïda home after the harvest, Mandrik did not give up his place beside me in the bed; we strung her up in a hammock like the bairn she was. She took over our cooking and the baking of bread—a delicacy we had lacked since Elynour's passing. She swept, tidied, and washed about the house, and kept herself busy from dawn to dusk in giving us a proper home. And in time, as the seasons passed, I grew to love her as dearly as ever I had loved Elynour; she did not erase the memory of my first wife, but daily she worked her miracles of compassion, which slowly eased my sorrow. When at last she was old enough to perform all the duties of a wife, we built Mandrik a hut of his own close by the church, and began to live like an ordinary family.

God sent me Adelaïda to allay my grief; she and my daughter are the rewards for all I have suffered. If they should be taken from me, after
all that has passed and all that I have already lost, I do not know how I could continue to make my way among the living. I pray fervently, morning and night, for their well-being. I know that God's will is not susceptible to my intercession; but it is my hope that if he knows how dearly I love them, how dearly they are needed on this earth, he will let them sojourn among the living a short while longer yet.

PART II

CHAPTER SIX

THE HARVEST

s the summer grew fierce, Ruth's leg grew sound once more, and before long we removed Mandrik's contraption and she hobbled about the house and yard. She seemed much less strange now she looked more an ordinary woman, and she helped as best she could, picking vegetables and cleaning and preparing them. She could still not be taught to spin or weave, but she carded as ever with my daughter, and wound the wool from my wife's distaff into neat, even balls. All these tasks she performed with quiet pride, as if she had long doubted her ability to be useful; and each day that she walked about, the color returned somewhat more to her face. Mandrik proclaimed her recovery miraculous. The stranger and my brother were always about our house, and though I enjoyed their company, my wife and I rarely spent time alone together anymore. One hot afternoon we found ourselves with no one else around in the barn, taking the last hay down from the loft that we might place the new hay up.