The Testament of Yves Gundron (3 page)

“What in Heaven's name have you done to her?”

“I've made an invention.”

“It doesn't look kindly.”

“Never mind its outward form—will you help me bring the cart?” It was not so heavy that I could not have moved it alone, but I wanted her nigh when the great event took place. She tied the child back up to the bench and rested her spindle against the door frame. Together we maneuvered the awkward cart out of the barn, and pulled it up behind the bewildered horse. I fastened the ends of the contraption to the cart, and tested their hold. The horse hung her head and looked at me askance, but when I clicked my tongue and urged her to follow me by tugging gently upon her lead, she knew the moment of reckoning had arrived, and began, hesitantly, to walk. For what seemed an eternity the traces pulled taut, and then the cart began to roll at a stately pace behind her. The horse, who still believed disaster was imminent, continued to regard me. But nothing went amiss. The cart's solid iron-clad wheel whined, bumped, and turned as it always had, but nothing pulled at the horse's throat. I put my hand upon the horse's neck to stop her.

“Adelaïda,” I said. “Climb up on the cart.”

She pursed her lips. “This much seems miracle enough.”

“But another is about to unfold,” I said, uncertain though I was. “Climb on.” I prayed silently as Adelaïda hitched her skirt up, revealing her pale underskirt, and climbed up to the bed. I saw her lips moving, if not in prayer, then in a song of private devotion. Once more I clicked my tongue at the horse, and though she strained to set the cart in motion, she soon lifted her white feet high, and carried Adelaïda without apparent effort toward the southern fields. Adelaïda whooped with glee, for she had never before moved so quickly. No one had ever moved with such speed, and had I not known the cause of her rapid motion, I would surely have thought her an Arab upon a magic carpet or a witch in the Devil's thrall.

Adelaïda is by no means as heavy as a load of turnips, but she has weight enough, if not to strangle a horse, then to make her struggle in her labors. The horse, however, pulled my fair wife with ease. When at last she tired of her sport, I returned to the barn and brought forth a bale of last year's hay, Yoshu nipping at my heels. As I hoisted the hay and the dog onto the cart, both the horse and Adelaïda winced, but the added weight, nearly equal to my wife's, did not cause the horse more than a moment's pause. Finally I stopped the cart again and climbed aboard.

“Yves!” my wife cried. “You'll surely kill her.” Yoshu, ready for adventure, voiced her approval of my scheme.

But I persevered. The horse looked round, wondering where her master had gone. I stood at the forward end of the cart and yelled at her to go, but she did not understand, as I was behind her. I had left her lead dangling before her, as it always had before, so I had no way to signal her to start. I reached over the edge of the cart and slapped her croup, shouting. She turned her head to recognize me, and showed by the gleam in her eye that she understood. She pulled all of us—myself, Adelaïda, the dog, and a dry bale of hay—until the sun went down. That evening I rewarded her with oats from my own provender, and with the previous year's dried apples, and scrubbed her down until she gleamed from crest to tail. Elizaveta, when we returned to the house, was completely bound up in her string, and lay with her arms pinned to her sides, blinking.

That was the night the device's Heaven-given name appeared to my
inward ear. Harness would be its name henceforth until the generations expired. I was still speaking the name to myself when I rose before dawn to bring wood for Adelaïda's fire, and as I spoke it, I realized that this one simple word meant that our horse, with God's grace, would survive into her dotage. She would become a member of the family. She, too, would require a name. Again the voice spoke in my inward ear: Call the horse Hammadi. Its beautiful sound rang throughout my body and mind. Although the wood was heavy in my wood sling, I stopped at the barn. All the animals stood wide awake and expectant, and the horse looked at me skeptically, her white star shining, as she hoped for a breakfast as fine as last night's meal.

I said, “Hello, Hammadi.”

She flared her nostrils and flattened her fine brown ears against her head. Perhaps this form of greeting had, in the intervening night, attained an almost human eloquence. I could practically hear her whisper, “Hello.”

That day was a Saturday, one among the many. On Sundays God decreed a day of rest, but after we went dutifully to worship, and ate a solemn meal, we would return to our everyday work. We dared not tell our priest, Stanislaus, that we worked on the Sabbath—he was too young to have real experience of the world and its ways, and such an admission might have shaken his confidence. Our old priest, Father Icthyus, had fed us full up on the fear of God; but Stanislaus, thin as a reed in his dun-colored cassock, looked down his hooked nose at whatever he studied, his Adam's apple bobbing ever in confusion, and could not inspire us to the same frenzy of worship and dread. Though he was a young enough fellow, he held to his doctrines with an old man's fervor; and his unwillingness to grant pardon for our workaday follies made us hesitate to admit to him our real sins. The truth was that, whatever God had decreed, survival required a great deal of labor, and to take more than half a day of rest would have meant our demise. And as for spending one day in contemplation, for the multitudes there is nothing to contemplate beyond work; we think about it while we do it. Clerics or no, it is better to bring in the hay on a sunny Sunday than to meditate upon God's goodness and allow the hay to be ruined by an evening rain.

Sunday morning Adelaïda and I put on our good clothes, tied Elizaveta to a clean string to keep her from running wild in our lovely sanctuary of St. Perpetua, and walked to the village for services. The air was crisp and the sun bright, and I was humbled by the beauty of the mountains that lifted their heads to Heaven all around us. That day our church, with its jewel-hued murals, its clear morning light, and its great congregation of farmers, seemed truly the house of the Lord. Stanislaus's sermon was a dreary injunction against drunkenness and profanity, but all the same was I ardent in my devotions. Adelaïda looked especially beautiful that day, and when we joined together in silent prayer, I thanked God for her as well as for my new invention and my horse. My friend Ydlbert must have noticed the happiness on my face, for as we left the sanctuary he regarded me with a look of some curiosity. I held my silence as we began the walk home—Ydlbert and I together, followed by our strong wives carrying our infants, followed by four of Ydlbert's sons, who walked in a row, each holding the previous child's string. The front-most son, whose name I could not recall, held to the back of their mother's apron, which she kept tied in a scrupulous knot. The eldest, Dirk and Bartholomew, scuffed at the dust behind them all, their dark hair hanging forward over their eyes as if they were brigands.

Ydlbert said, “Has something happened, Yves? You look different.” His gray eyes were bright with expectation.

I believe I blushed from pride. I told him, “I think I invented something.”

“I hope it's better than that damned thing you made with iron filings.”
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“Indeed,” Dirk said. “That was a foolish invention.”

“Ydlbert,” his pinch-faced Anya said, as her sons guffawed. “Not on the Sabbath.”

“I call it the harness. It allows me to attach my cart to my horse without strangling her.”

Ydlbert laughed, as he does, with all his soul, and with his great, firm belly heaving. “Oh, well, if that's it, congratulations.”

“Ydlbert,” I said, “I'm serious. When I used it to tether them together, the horse dragged me, Adelaïda, a bale of hay, and the dog without the slightest strain.”

“Yves,” he said, poking me in my gut—which was only half so ample as his own—“save your fairy tales for bedtime.”

“I'll bet you three guilders it works.”

Ydlbert raised and drew together his brows. Three guilders was somewhat more money then than it is now—enough to buy a pound of fine sugar or all the cinnamon one's wife could bake with in a year. “In that case, my friend, I'll come sec.”

Bartholomew said, “Father, he's baiting you, sure,” but without enough fire to offend.

Ydlbert lived half a mile closer to town than I did, and parted from his family at the rise that marked off his property from my own; Anya trudged down the gentle slope in the brilliant sunlight, her noisy children following behind like a family of rumple-headed ducks. Ydlbert accompanied us to our farm, and thought, no doubt, that I had prepared him an elaborate joke. Adelaïda took Elizaveta into the house, and as Ydlbert stood with his arms folded across his chest, I brought my horse, whom I could hardly grow accustomed to calling by her God-given name, Hammadi, outside. Since yesterday evening's exploits, she had begun to stand taller, and her eyes shone with knowledge of her accomplishment. The animals, out grazing in the near field, gathered round to bah and grunt with expectation. Ydlbert helped me drag the cart from the barn, and we pulled it in a wide circle to Hammadi's rear. I hitched her into her harness, which she accepted this time with joy, attached her to the cart, and repeated the previous day's successful experiment, this time with Ydlbert the skeptic in tow. When first he felt the forward motion of the cart, he crowed with joy at my invention. “You've done better than invent the wheel!” he yelled, tossing his cap into the air and revealing his comical bald spot. “What good was the wheel before we had your blessed harness to make it worthwhile!” Chornaya and Flick, the two black sheep, bahed in unison; God be praised.

My heart glowed with pride; I had brought a new, good thing into the world. I stopped Hammadi's circuit, and walked to where Ydlbert had hunkered down in the cart. With my hand on his broad shoulder I told him the dearest secret of all. “I named my horse.”

He smiled, uncomprehending; his teeth were worn down from more than thirty years of good use. “What do you mean, you named her?”

I said, “She's not going to die now. I gave her a name, as we'd name any other thing.”

“What name?”

“Hammadi.” The name still rippled like the faint echo of bells over my ears.

Ydlbert nodded and looked at Hammadi, for the first time thinking of her by her own name. Knowing this gave me joy. “Yves,” he said. “We've been friends since childhood.”

“Yes.”

“Please make me a harness, for my horse, also.”

“With pleasure,” I said.

Ydlbert continued to nod, and looked off toward his ancestors' land. “Then I name my horse Thea,” he said.

“And my three guilders?”

He smiled broadly. “I'll pay you anon.”

“I don't want it. Come,” I said, steering him toward the barn to begin on the second harness.

By Monday morning, then, two horses in our village had names. I cannot overstate the importance of this development. In Mandragora, we do not even name our children when they first emerge from the womb; we call them “daughter” or “son” until they have lived a full year. On the first anniversary of a child's birth, we name it, for by then it has weathered the most difficult season of its life, and we can pray for the child once it has shown us the light of its soul. But in reality children, like horses, die all the time, for the strangest of reasons. Each morning as I wake, I wonder when Elizaveta will be taken from me.

What a mark of our faith, to name our horses as we would name a year-old child. Our neighbors thought we'd gone mad—except for my brother Mandrik, the one man in our village who understands more than the ordinary workings of machines and of God, the one man I defer to in judgment, however odd my countrymen think him. The villagers had not yet witnessed what the harness could do; how could we expect them to believe without any visible sign?

We grow what we need to survive—a crop of wheat, smaller crops of oats, rye, or barley in rotation, and a row of flax in the vegetable garden. My brother keeps an orchard of trees that produce many fruits of
his own invention—strange, succulent things of rare colors, which require his constant gentle care and provide one of our chief pleasures. We preserve what we can for the dark days of the year. We give some to the Archduke's
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household and bring the rest to market, where the townspeople buy the goods to feed their families.

When the horse could bear little weight, we loaded some of the fruits of the land onto our one-wheeled carts, carried the rest in our wood slings, and prayed each minute of the five-mile journey to town. Thankfully, we went to market only once a week, each of us bearing the choicest of his produce, peas, parsnips, or pears. If such a one as Gerald Desvres, who owned a great tract of meadow, had surplus hay, he would bring that to feed the town horses. Ydlbert, who is, after all, a sap, sometimes loaded his cart with wildflowers—then he could load it high, because they weigh almost nothing. His brother Yorik, who bordered the forest, sometimes brought a load of firewood. As the sun rose we began to lead our horses up the road. Mandrik has the best voice among us, clearer than the first birdsong of spring, and so he often accompanied us singing ballads of events in the times of our miraculous grandmother
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sprung from the sea; and when we were lucky, he sang to us from the repertory of his many adventures in Indo-China.
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Those tales, weird and fantastical, filled us with wonder and delight.

The journey to market was grueling, despite that the terrain was smooth and gently sloped. Many a man could be heard saying spells for safe drayage under his breath, especially at the crossroads. Horses always managed to slip free of their burdens—not my Hammadi, mind you, even before she had her name—or lose their shoes. And when finally we arrived at the city, we had to pass single-file through the gate and the fetid streets, which were closed to the sunlight, full of the odors of refuse and garlic. If a townswoman had hung her laundry in the street, the passing horses would knock it down, but it hardly mattered—even on the line, the linens were far from clean, and their descent to the gutter seemed, sadly, a return to their natural state. The younger sons, Ydlbert's and Desvres's especially, covered their noses in disgust. We wove between crumbling buildings until we arrived, quite
abruptly, at the church steps, where we spread our wares. The horses and carts blocked off most access to the tight, oddly shaped apron of stone, even crammed as they were nearly atop one another, and the residents of the town always cursed us, spilling their slop buckets on us, kicking our horses in the shins as they struggled past.