The Testament of Yves Gundron (42 page)

Ruth giggled. “What, will you sleep while I make breakfast three feet from your head?”

He sighed through his nose, like she did. “No.”

“Then go to sleep.”

“I like it here,” he said.

“I like it here, too.”

Their breath became more solemn and childlike as they sank further from this world. All around me were the gentle sounds of sleep, its rich fragrance, the lesser heat from the night's fire. Little was visible in the flickering flames—the mounds of bodies, the hulking table, the occasional glint of implements. Yet my eyes would not close, nor my mind quit racing. I was restless with anticipation, though I knew not of what. When it came, of course, I knew why I had been so caught up in the waiting. For at first it was barely audible, perhaps the highest, softest note of the screaming wind. As it drew my mind farther toward it, however, I began to make out the modulations of a tune fading in and out of hearing upon a high-pitched flute. As the melody rose and fell, counterpoint to the wind, the intoxicating rhythm of the drums made itself manifest behind. My heart danced in anticipation, and I looked eagerly about to see if the music had wakened any other soul. But sleep had cast her shadow over the household. I shut my eyes for the briefest moment, only to blink, and when I opened them again, saw my brothers and sister hovering over the pallet on the floor.

“Look,” said Eglantine, passing her shining hand over their faces.

“How good to have a full house again,” Marvin said, light cascading from the waves of his hair.

None of them was playing an instrument; I knew not where the music came from. “Eglantine,” I whispered. “My brothers, I missed you.”

All three turned to me and smiled, then continued examining the strangers.

“Such a blessing,” Clive said.

“I've missed you so terribly. I thought you were never coming back.”

Eglantine closed her sparkling eyes and leaned her head back to sing:

The strains of her music were sad, and frightened me. The drums fell into rhythm behind her; the soft flutes vanished.

“Where have you been? Where are Father and Mother and Elynour? Do they fare well?”

Marvin held a shining finger to his lips.

Clive was blessing them with his hands. “Tell Mandrik we were here,” he whispered “Tell him everything's right.”

“We love you,” Marvin said.

“Why don't Father and Mother come with you? Where are they?” I stood—and though I was barefoot, my nightclothes loose around me, there was no chill upon my skin, so warm was their radiance. “Do not leave me,” I begged, stepping nearer to their fantastic heat. But Eglantine continued to sing.

“Tell Mandrik all's right,” Clive repeated.

Eglantine finished her song on a single drawn-out note so graceful it split my heart in twain. When her eyes opened, they were brighter and broader than the sky. In her smile was a peace so effortless, so full of love, that her own form could not contain it, and it shone forth, filling the house with its amber glow, and warming the far corners of my heart. My eyes closed briefly, the better to witness this fire within, and when they opened, my siblings, the gods and darlings of my infant heart, stood in a semicircle about me, their luminous feet hovering above the floor, their six pearly hands raised in benediction. The light they shone upon me grew so bright that their forms became like veils, and soon I could see nothing but radiance, before, in, and around me. Nothing but the fire of God. To close my eyes made no difference. The vision was exactly the same.

At once my body knew itself to be in pain, and the sharp sounds of a household awakened to trouble jarred open my ears. I was swaddled. My eyes cast about for a place to rest, and at last found Nurit, remarkably near, her peppermint breath and the shine of her eyeglasses hovering above my nose, her arms tight around the blanket around me.

“Yves,” Adelaïda gasped.

“What's this?”

“Yves, you—”

“Are you okay?” Nurit asked. Her thin face was tight with fear, and a deep furrow ran up the center of her brow. “What were you doing?”

The blanket, the sharp tingling in my skin, and the terrible smell all leapt to meaning: I had stepped in the embers. “They were hovering over your bed.”

Eli had run out for water from the rain barrel, and now stood with it sloshing gently across the floor. “Is it out? Is everything okay?” he asked.

“That's what they said. That everything's fine.”

Eli said, “But I didn't see Ruth.”

I looked around; she was absent.

“If you're going to get up in the middle of the night,” Adelaïda said, “then wake up before you do it.”

“What I saw—” I began, but Nurit was pulling away, pulling back the singed blanket. “Let me see,” she said, and leaned close over my legs, inspecting the skin and my toenails. I flinched under her gaze. “It's not so bad, really. A couple of blisters.” She coughed as if she might soon spit blood.

Adelaïda dipped a rag in the bucket and wrapped it carefully around my feet. There were heavy black circles around her eyes. “We'll get Mandrik to make you a poultice in the morning. I don't think there's need to fetch him now.”

“No, let him rest,” I said, though my feet were smarting.

“Eli,” Nurit said, “do we have anything in the kit?”

Eli dug through his bag to produce a gleaming white parcel. “Here.”

Nurit squeezed something onto her finger, unwrapped my feet, and smoothed the unguent over them. At once the feet began to cool. “Thank you,” I said.

Elizaveta peered over the side of her hammock with eyes vast and black as midnight. Nurit stood up next to her and rocked her in her ropes. “Go back to sleep,” she said, but Elizaveta continued to stare. “You might really want to move the fireplace, Yves, off to the side of the room, and enclose it, so things—”

Eli said, “Leave him be. You'll ruin Ruth's work.”

When my legs were sufficiently tended they all helped me back to bed, and after Adelaïda had fixed up the fire I'd destroyed, she wrapped her sweet body around me to ease the pain. Her flesh was hot. I imagined I could feel the baby pressing against my back, though it was yet surely no more than a wish newly quickened by the breath of God. Eli went out to water the fields, and came back with the cold breath of the night upon him. The mattress responded loudly as he snuggled back under the covers with his warm sister. “They were hovering over you,” I told him, despite that I risked sounding mad before two strangers and my wife. “They gave you a blessing.”

“I'm glad,” he said, as if he, too, could feel the last wisps of their presence clinging to the rafters. “Good night.”
¹

Ruth reappeared soon after dawn without a word of explanation, Mandrik a few minutes behind her, having had a premonition that I needed him. He suffered no questions, but inspected my wounds and pronounced
them healing well. He applied his own ointment, which smelled more pungent than Nurit's, by way of precaution. Ruth stoked the fire. Whether from its light or from within, she glowed. Elizaveta placed one of Eli's gold earrings on Pudge's head like a halo, but it kept slipping to the floor.

Adelaïda had gotten out of bed and eaten some breakfast with us. She now wound a new ball of red wool onto her shuttle, her back to the room. “We'll have to gather your belongings, Ruth, if you're to be ready to take leave when the time comes.”

Ruth lay back across the mattress, a gourdful of peppermint tea on her stomach and her head against the wall. “I haven't come to any decision yet, Adelaïda.”

What had looked an ordinary gray sky now breathed forth a drizzle so fine one could only see it in how it veiled the familiar yard beyond the door. Mandrik said, “I need to take a walk.”

I looked out upon the dismal weather. “I'll drive you home.”

He shook his head. “I don't want to go home, I want to go walking.”

“You'll catch your death,” Adelaïda said, her back still to us.

“For three years I sailed the world in a paper boat, woman, and now the November mist will kill me?”

“Everyone dies sometime.”

Ruth said, “Leave him be.”

“Everyone, aye. Yves, leave the cart for your visitors, that they might explore.”

“In the rain?”

“Will you walk with me?”

I gestured to my feet.

“The last mud before winter frost is a most beneficial remedy for burns.”

Nurit wrinkled her narrow brow, which exactly summed up my feelings on the subject.

Adelaïda said, “I will not have another invalid driving me mad with worry.”

My brother's eyes were feverish with urgency. We looked at one another, still as stone, until at last, and despite myself, I said, “I have never yet had reason to doubt your physic,” and rose to my tender feet.

“Bundle up about the top, man,” he directed, “that the cold on your feet not infect the marrow.”

“Madmen,” Adelaïda muttered. “Injuring themselves ever, and leaving us to pine.”

The household watched me in disbelief as I hobbled about for a knitted vest and my worn hooded cloak. “He fixed her leg, by God—I'm certain he can fix my feet.” Even my daughter's eyes looked somewhat less worshipful. My brother's face was still lined with thought. “We'll be back, then.”

“Don't be out too long. It sounds like a rotten cure.”

“I'll be judge of that,” I said, but took my walking stick as a precaution as I hobbled out the door.

Mandrik walked beside me with his gentle hand resting between my shoulder blades, as if I had suddenly gone feeble. I was glad, however, for the gesture of familiar care amid my worries. The mountains all about were shrouded in mist, and even my own barn had lost its sharp outline. The mist had a faint, savory taste when I licked it from my lips, and I lifted my nose to the heavens to divine its origin.

“The sea, of course,” Mandrik said. “It's coming in off the sea.” I recognized it, that faint, unpleasant odor of salt. As we crossed the road into my loamy northern fields, he said, “The truth is, Yves, it's not a remedy for burns.”

“I didn't really believe it was. It doesn't hurt, though, this walking, except for the occasional sharp stone.”

His warm hand behind me steered me through the newly seeded rows toward the cairn. “Will the feet hold up until we get there?”

He didn't have to say where we were going. “I imagine so.”

Sometimes my land seemed a wilderness—traveling for help in the dead of winter, chasing after a lost sheep one boggy March—but never had it looked more somber and strange. Such weather as this was a warning—to finish sowing, to grind the last of the grain, to stack enough wood for the winter—and demanded that the farmer look past it to what needed to be accomplished. That day, for what felt the first time in my life, I had the luxury of observing the weather simply, not as an impediment to whatever wanted doing, but as itself, as weather. Its somberness astonished me, and wakened fear in my breast, for, in such weather, one could not even see the smoke of one's own chimney a few
moments' walk behind. This deadly pallor, I felt certain, was what it would look like at the end of the world.

“To the cairn and back again?” I asked. “Because I don't, in truth, think the feet'll hold longer than that.”

“That'll do.”

His sandals were so deep in the muck, he, too, might as well have been barefoot. “You wouldn't want exercise if you'd taken the farm.”

“Do you chastise me, householder?” His voice broke with a quiet laugh.

“No, no.” Each time we fell silent, the mist moved closer in.

“Because I'm glad that you have all this.”

“As am I.” The landscape before my eyes and the landscape of memory were entirely different from one another, but it did not bother me; it was just, and beautiful, and fine. I raised my face to the salt mist, and closed my eyes, enjoying it on my skin. Strange how, if I were working, such mist would be a hindrance, but with nothing to do but walk and feel it—what beauty, what joy. “Mandrik, when I burned my feet last night, our brothers and sister were there.”

“Saying what?”

My throat grew tight to remember. “Beyond the Beyond, she sang, to the Beyond beyond. Over and over.”

He nodded. The mist concentrated on the tip of his nose and dripped down into the mud. “And what else?”

“They said to tell you that all was right.”

“Why do they send me messages through you?”

“I don't know why. Perhaps you were busy last night in contemplation?”

He closed his eyes briefly. “The dead have their reasons.”

“And when I wakened, they and Ruth were both gone.” I wished I could feel them hovering about us in that somber air, but there was nothing, nothing.

“I wish I had seen them.”

“I wish they had visited you, because I didn't understand what they said. Were you working on your treatise at the time?”

He walked silent, except that his sandals made a sucking sound in the mud. “When I traveled, brother, I know that everyone spoke of my ‘wanderings.' But I wasn't wandering. I had my aims.”

“I never doubted that,” I said, though the Lord knows how bitterly I had doubted his return.

“I don't care for wandering. It implies a want of purpose.”

“It is good,” I agreed, “to move for a reason.”

“Then you know that I have brought you forth today neither for your feet nor for a breath of air.”