The Testament of Yves Gundron (34 page)

I drove Enyadatta in a broad circle about the yard, careful not to excite her, but pleased that the women would witness firsthand the results of my genius. When the horse had gathered sufficient speed, I yanked upon the brake rope, which broke from the pressure as the caliper pinched shut. Enyadatta jerked forward as the cart rumbled off to the side, and I pitched sideways along the seat. When I recovered enough to look round at my audience, my daughter was laughing, praise God, with abundant glee, and Adelaïda was driving her stick into a vat with all her might.

“That's pretty good. But next time,” Ruth called, “you don't want it to grip so tight.”

I hopped down from the cart to inspect the damage, which was but slight. “Well noted,” I said, my dander up. “And you, wife, have you any observations to help your old man in his work?”

“I think you'd get more of it done if you'd quit fooling around.”

I was used to this tart tongue Adelaïda had developed of late—and grateful it was not so bitter as her friend Anya's. Yet on this occasion she wounded me. “There's nothing so pressing,” I ventured in reply to her charge, “that I can't fiddle with the cart a day or two before we bring the last of the shocks into the barn and gather the hay.”

“Nothing but that one day's foul weather might ruin. And nothing wrong with the cart that it wants so much fiddling.”

“When it was the harness, you were as happy as all get-out to watch me make it.”

She gave her vat a last stir and stood with her hands on her hips, regarding me. “That was two years ago, when I had no idea how hard it would be to have an inventor for a husband.”

Ruth looked between us, her eyes guilty.

“When I've brought fame and honor to this household—when even the Archduke comes to see us and no other farmer in the parish?”

“The Archduke came to see Ruth, not you—because she's a curiosity. Wasn't the man I married proud to work his father's land, proud to bear his honorable name, destined to become a pillar of this community?”

I walked closer to her half-circle of boiling vats. I felt I could not bear the sadness and rage my wife's accusations raised in my breast, yet there was Ruth, kneeling on the ground with her head bowed, and before her I could not lose my temper outright. “Am I not,” I asked, “a pillar of this community? If not I, then who?”

“Desvres. Ydlbert. Even Heinrik Martin with his startled eyes and his half-dozen rocky acres. They don't make spectacles of themselves and their families. They don't have mad brothers who—”

“Mandrik is not mad!”

“—moon about defying the church and lolling in the orchards; and if they do, they don't follow their brother's lead. Look how respectable Jude Dithyramb has made himself, all because he's had to strive so for respectability. Other men don't leave their wives with the work of the house and run off to dream.”

“Adelaïda,” I said. Her beautiful face was so flushed that I feared an attack of apoplexy. “Everyone knows—I am certain every one of our neighbors believes—that I do what I do for the betterment of us all.”

“And so does your brother, and I still say he's mad.”

I felt myself, body and soul, near to breaking apart. What would it matter, this great work of mine, if my own family would not understand it? I unhitched Enyadatta, led her back into the barn, and let the cart lie where it was, untended, in the middle of the yard. The horse burred gently when I offered her oats, and allowed me to pat the regal side of her face. As I stood there, looking at the previous failed sets of calipers, my eyes began to water. For it was not worth this. I would not lose the love of my wife over an object; and yet I could not chase the object from my mind. The next day I began taking in the hay with all my strength and vigor, and allowed myself only a few hours of what my heart most desired, time in the barn with my cart.

Before a fortnight had passed, the brakes were perfect. Though they resembled the tool that had dragged my first child lifeless from his lifeless mother, when pulled they sang against the right front wheel and brought the cart to a halt. Enyadatta turned her golden ears backward each time they shrieked, and shot me cross looks when the weight of her burden behind her forced her to stop. But I had built a cart with brakes.

The women were not sufficiently impressed with my work. “It's great,” Ruth said with the same overeager smile my mother had given to Eglantine's first attempt at baking, which had produced nought but a flat, burnt patty of a loaf. Adelaïda said, “Praise be. Now you can get back to work.” And Elizaveta merely covered her ears with her hands at the sound.

I drove straight to Ydlbert's to show him my success. I hurtled down his path, pulling hard on the brakes just before Enyadatta charged into the sty where my neighbor was slopping his pigs. The pigs broke out running and squeaking, and Ydlbert dropped the whole slop bucket into the trough. “Goddamn!” he screamed. When he realized I was laughing as I jumped down from my cart, he tried to rearrange his face for merriment, but still looked somewhat mistrustful. He climbed over his low split-rail fence. “What news have you brought me now?”

“Brakes—that as fast as a horse can gallop, we can still stop the cart.”

He stood by the front wheel and tugged at the rope. “I'll be damned.”

“Adelaïda's ready to kill me.”

“No, you'll be done your inventing now.”

I said yes; what else could I do?

“It's a good thing, Yves. Will you help me do it for my cart? Think what a ruckus we'll cause on Market Day.”

Then I remembered the paving. “But they're at work upon the roads this week.”

“Road or no road, a fine cart's a fine cart.” Ydlbert pulled and pulled at the rope. “I'll be damned. What more could a man want than a cart that stops itself?”

“Tires, for one thing.”

He kicked at the wheel's thin iron shoe. “We've got tires.”

“Soft tires, like on the ruined airplane.”

“A great lot of good they did.”

The pigs returned to their food and resumed snorting happily.

“I suppose you're right.”

“Now you're chasing after fancies, Yves.”

“Nay.”

“Anya gets rancid as week-old milk when I so much as take wildflowers to market.”

“Adelaïda's no malcontent.”

“Easy, man, whom you call names.” He kicked at the wheel again, as if to see what it would feel like, soft. “Don't get carried away with all this. Help me move the cows, and let's get started building.”

I was not the only one who wandered forth every second day to see how the roadwork progressed; and Manfred, Jowl, and sundry other neighborhood boys were conscripted into searching for paving stones. Every day till sundown we heard roving bands of them whooping in the fields and forests. When they found one good enough, there was a solemn procession to bring the great thing in. Widening the road meant, of course, a narrowing of all our fields, but after a brief dissent from Martin the Elder, we all kept quiet. It would be worth losing some land to have such grand access to the city.

The road could, however, hold only so much of our interest, so busy were we bringing in hay, threshing the grain, and driving around the roadwork to get to market with the fruits of our gardens. Though the
weather had been fair, none of us had had a spectacular yield; the arrival of our strangers had affected me more than most, but it had kept the whole village more or less from its labor. The slight possibility of want danced like a wanton spirit before our minds, and we were anxious to bring our goods to market as soon as we could, that if the winter proved harsh, we could afford to buy back what we needed.

The next Market Day, when most of my hay was in and I loaded some of it along with sundry vegetables, Ydlbert and I drove in style in our braking carts; the road crew was a trouble to drive around, but it did not dampen our pride in our new machines. Thea and Enyadatta also seemed proud of what they dragged about, and pranced with their feet held high. Near town, once we had reached the place where the road was already paved, we could drive abreast of one another. With our vain beasts giving one another the eye, Ydlbert and I could now talk as we drove, sitting tall and proud above our carts. Heinrik Martin soon pulled up alongside me on the grass, his whiskers in a tizzy, and did not even bid me good day before he began his talk.

“Strange news, Yves,” he shouted over the ruckus of the wheels.

“What, my brakes?”

“What?”

“No one's poorly in your family, I hope?”

“Not in mine. But it's to do with your brother.”

I pulled off the road and applied my new brakes. Ydlbert slowed, but I waved him on as Heinrik came to a clumsy stop a few lengths down the road. Enyadatta ambled up to him and exchanged scents with his horse.

“Mighty fine stopping thing you've got there, Yves. And what's that you're sitting on?”

“I'll help you fix your cart up the same. My brother, is he ill? I've not seen him these three days.”

“He's not ill, no.”

“What, then?”

Heinrik scratched at his beard. “He's taking up with a woman, looks to me.”

I did not like this confirmation of my fears. Nevertheless, I leaned over to pat his strong shoulder. “Heinrik, in all our lives, you've never told me a joke.”

He scratched the more fiercely. “I wouldn't have stopped you if I didn't think it true, and perhaps a had omen.”

I held my breath for a moment and let it out in a puff like a gust of wind. I could not yet read his expression; he might yet have been jesting. “I appreciate your concern, but that simply can't be.”

“I've seen your brother sporting about with that stranger. I thought I should tell you what I saw.”

“He's telling her about Indo-China, for what she writes about us.”

“Day in and day out?”

“It's a long story, his travels. And I think he's writing a chapter on her for his treatise.” Convincing Heinrik was a lesser part of my work than convincing myself, but I spoke the argument with authority.

He stroked at his beard and watched our neighbors clamber past. “I'm sure you know your brother best.”

“What did you see?”

He worked his lips together before answering. “I've seen them up a tree together, and out walking the fields. And they've gone in his hut together at midday and not been out again till dusk.”

“But they're writing—she's getting stories from him, and he from her.”

“As I said, Yves—you know best.” He lifted his reins with a worried look on his wrinkled brow. “I'll see you at market, then.”

“Thank you, Heinrik.”

“Aye.”

As I drove alone the rest of the way to the gate, I tried to dispel Heinrik's tale from my thoughts. Though my mind had, of late, turned somewhat against Ruth, she did not seem corrupt; and my brother I knew to be better than myself. The world's pleasures had ever been nought to him. With my own hands I had helped him build his hut, and at each juncture he had asked to have it smaller and plainer than I would have built. I had offered him warm clothes, heavy boots, livestock, and thatch for his roof, and he had ever declined all but food, which he ate as sparely as a grown man could. We had plentiful women of beauty and wit right here in our village, if women were any temptation; but they never had been. Heinrik was neither gossip nor liar, and what he said confirmed my deepest fears, but his report had to be stuff and nonsense, the idle speculation of an ill-informed mind. By the time I drove, at the rear of the line, into Nnms, I had convinced myself once
again of my brother's purity. The townspeople were about—picking rags, hanging laundry, trudging to and from market with various bundles—and paid me no mind as I brought up the rear of the provisionary caravan. They were ordinary burghers and tradesmen, householders and servants, and sure they had little enough to dandle about in their minds. Presented with such a spectacle as a mystic traipsing about, followed by a long-legged stranger, they, too, would bound to conclusions. At market I found that Ydlbert had kept me my usual space, and I lost no time in arranging my fruits to their best advantage.

As I drove home, clear into the grass to avoid the workmen, I spied my brother and my charge walking toward his hut through the abundant orchard. They were unencumbered by ought but something Ruth held aloft in her apron, and turned smiling my way when I called out to them.

“Good market?” Mandrik asked as I brought my cart to a stop alongside him. They both blushed fiercely, but it might have been the heat.

“A fine market.” I patted my bulging pocket. “Good day?”

Ruth held her outstretched apron toward me. “Look at these blueberries.”

“No telling of tales today?”
⁶

“Not,” Mandrik said, “when the berries have come ripe all at once.”

“At the bounds of the North Meadow?”

“And a bumper crop,” he said. “We didn't even pick one bush clean.”

They looked flustered, but not specifically as if they'd been to mischief. Indeed, my chief concern was that the berries would ruin the apron.

“She's never put up preserves, so I'm going to teach her this afternoon.”

“Adelaïda tried to show her about pickles, to no avail.”

“Ah”—Mandrik laughed—“but as our father would have told you, pickles is pickles, and jam is jam.”

How I missed our father's clearheadedness. How dearly we could have used it then.

“And since she knows nought about pastry, I thought we might bring a berry tart to your house for dinner.”

I said, “That would be lovely,” as my wife with her work had no time for sweets.

They continued to smile at me, and I continued to smile back, sick with the feeling that I was looking forward to their fruit tart, touched by their innocence, and mistrusting them entirely, all in the same breath.