The Testament of Yves Gundron (47 page)

“Many a time, listening to Father Icthyus, Father Stanislaus, and the countless Clerics I have witnessed on my journeys, I have wondered at this insistence upon the sanctity of flesh. What matters this dust and water, any more than matters the dust in which we seed our crops? We could not grow food without it, so we must praise God for his Providence in giving it to us; yet we give it hardly another thought. Just so
must we learn to view these bodies. Just so must we look past the illusion of their solidity to those truths they actually contain.”

He looked up to see how we fared. “Do you think it good, Yves?”

I shook my head. “Beautiful as always, but, you know, man—blasphemous.”

“But you think it beautiful?”

“As lovely as the first crocus in spring. But hardly the same treatise. You keep changing the treatise.”

“On the contrary. The sixty-first chapter.”

“I think it's good work,” Ruth said.

Because, I thought, you're the instigator, but I said nothing.

“What's the trouble?” he asked.

My heart was once again thumping. “One of these days, Stanislaus will call down the wrath of Heaven upon you.”

My brother said, “Perhaps he already has. What little we know, after all, of the infinite. I'm asking you what you think of this.”

“It isn't gloomy, like the other parts. I don't like it.”

He read to us throughout the evening, until the late night when the valley lay cloaked in silence. When we went out together to tuck away the animals for the night, a fine snow was falling, easing the transition between yard and field, giving bulk to the nude and shivering trees. “What do you suppose our neighbors are thinking?” I asked him, pitchfork in the fragrant hay. I hated that he helped me in this labor; it gave me less excuse to harbor anger against him.

“Of the new life to come. Of the life of splendor and ease.”

“I wish I could turn their minds against it.”

“Aye. But it's too late now.”

I stopped shoveling and leaned against the tool. The bleating sheep arrived at a respectful silence. “We could be wrong. You and I, from stubbornness, could be missing the most miraculous events to befall our people in generations.”

“But I don't think we are.”

“Nor do I.”

The later snows are always the terrible snows, both in their intensity and in the havoc they wreak upon the roads when they melt—though paving stones, I felt certain, would mark this winter out from those
before. This first snow of the year was gentle, hesitant as a newborn foal, which must first find its footing before it can gambol about the barnyard. It fell, the first snow, in wet, thick flakes, and slowly worked its soft ministration to the landscape.

When morning dawned, the air was fine and crisp, and the sky bluer than robins' eggs against the general blinding whiteness. My house smelled heavy with sleep, heavy with the warm, mingling breaths of my wife and daughter, my brother and Ruth wrapped in their blankets a seemly distance from one another on the floor. All the world was silent, for even the fire had burnt to its embers. I placed two logs upon it and blew gently into its heat, anxious for it to warm me, yet anxious not to wake the slumberers around me. Elizavetas sleep, especially, seemed precious beyond words—so pink were her cheeks, so slow her delicate breath, that it seemed a miracle she lived day after day, month after month.

Leave it to the sons of dreamers, the grandsons of a child of the sea, I thought, looking out upon the white ground, to think that the world could end in a day—and such a fine day as this. I knew that I should spend the winter writing all these happenings down, making sure they remained intact for Elizaveta's children, but I also realized that it would serve me to return to work. Neither would work be bad for the progress of Mandrik's soul.

Ruth sat up when I opened the door to fetch water, Mandrik when I heaved the kettle over the fire. “Is it morning?” she whispered.

“Aye.” I regarded my brother. “Do you now eat burnt bread at breakfast, like your future wife?”

Adelaïda turned in the bed. “Good morning, wife,” I bade her.

She rustled in the blankets, but did not reply.

“No, I still eat my bread like an ordinary man.”

“And you, wife? Will you have newfangled burnt bread? Your neighbors have seen the wonders without you, but you needn't be left behind.”

She did not even sigh a response.

Mandrik rose from the floor, his knees creaking like a new harness, and pulled the covers back from Adelaïda's face. He touched the side of her neck with the back of his hand, and she started and rolled away. “She's still got this fever,” he said, not specifically to anyone.

“No better than yesterday?” Ruth asked.

He stroked Adelaïda's forehead. “A bit worse.”

Ruth looked through the things her brother and sister had left her, and retrieved a white object that rattled like a measure of dried beans. “Give her an aspirin,” she said, dispensing two white seeds into his hand.

He said, “Okay,” and dipped a cup in water to offer it to my wife.

Ruth stood to tuck Elizaveta farther into her hammock, and lingered there a moment, her cheek to the child's face. “Whatever it is, Elizaveta's got it, too.”

“Got what?” I asked.

“Whatever. A head cold.”

“No, I don't,” my daughter said. “I want to get up.”

“You're not sick?”

“No.”

“Then get out of bed.” Ruth hoisted her down. The child's cheeks were fiery, though, and her eyes as bright as glass.

I said, “I don't like this.”

Mandrik said, “It's something every winter, isn't it? This year it's early, that's all.”

“I feel fine,” Elizaveta said. “I want tose.”

Ruth smoothed down the child's sleep-ruffled braids. “What ever happened to the toast you were going to make, Yves?”

I looked about at them. “I don't know.”

“I'll make it.”

“I'm going home for more herbs, and be back by midday,” Mandrik said, drawing his stockings on under his cassock.

“And plum jam,” Ruth added. “Bring more jam.”

“You don't want to go across the hills?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

A cart came quietly up the road and into my yard. I had opened the door before Ydlbert dismounted. “Hail,” I said. “I did not expect to see you again so soon.”

“Is your brother about? The fire's gone out in his hearth.”

“He's here. Can we offer you tea and burnt bread?”

He stamped his boots on the threshold and they shed a thick layer of snow. He looked bashfully from Mandrik to Ruth, then at the floor. “No, thank you. Perhaps a moment by your fire?”

I stepped aside to let him, dripping, pass. “Your family is well, I pray?”

“Not so well as I might hope—Dirk's struck dumb with fever.” I tried to gauge the panic in his voice; it did not seem overweening. “He seemed fine last night, perhaps merely to be confined to the house a day or two; but this morning he's stuck between sleep and waking, and hot as a branding iron. I was hoping, Mandrik, you could bring him some herbs? I don't want my other sons to catch it, and I'm at my wit's end. I've already tried the spell.”
¹

Mandrik drew his fingers through his hair. “Only so much the spell can work for. Come with me, man; I was headed home to fetch herbs for Adelaïda. I can get more.”

“Still with fever?”

“Aye, and the child.” He looked back and forth between us, two fathers, aging with so much care. “No need to look so bleak. Everyone gets a fever.”

Ydlbert nodded.

“Ydlbert, when your family is better,” Ruth said, “I'd like to hear more about your trip over the mountains.”

Ydlbert shifted in his boots. “Aye, but for now let's get done with the herbs.”

She poured two cups of near-boiling water—without even any peppermint-—into cups for them, and bade them drink before they set out upon the road. Mandrik kissed her cheek—turning my stomach, and bringing a flinching smile to Ydlbert's worn face—and they set out into the bright, still morning.

The house's quiet began to seem unnatural. Ruth bundled Elizaveta into bed beside her mother and wiped their two slick foreheads with a cloth. “Would you like me to sing?” she asked.

My eyebrows raised so high I thought they might lift past my hair. “You can sing?”

“Not really,” she said. “Not well. But I would if it would cheer you
up. Would it help you to do some work? It'd take your mind off things.”

She was, I admitted, coming to know me well. “Aye, we're short of firewood still, and I must mend the chinks in Enyadatta's stall before the worst of the weather sets in. Else she's likely to take her death before spring.”

“Then go ahead and work. I can watch them.”

She looked as if she knew her business with the cloth.

“Really, Yves. I'll call you if there's trouble.”

I lit a torch from the fire and carried it to the barn. The fire had gone out, and the sheep huddled against one another, complaining as if an unforgivable sin had been perpetrated against them. “Quiet,” I told them as I cobbled together a fire, but they continued to cry. It set Enyadatta to stomping for emphasis upon the floor of her stall, and Vringle, the billy goat, to chewing at one of the beams. “Stop that,” I said, kicking him as I placed the torch in Enyadatta's post. When I picked up the rake, Yoshu came bounding out, covered in hay, and rolled at my feet like a snake trying to escape its own skin. She irked me, but I rubbed her belly anyway. “Stop that,” I said. “I have work to do.” Still the animals went on with their frolicking commentary while I brought out their dung and gave them fresh hay and clean water. My breath, and their breath, rose in sad, pale clouds. I was consumed with worry for my invalids, but as long as Ruth would tend to them, I would stay here, among my charges, where I also belonged.

I took a chamois from the wall and wiped down the surface of the worktable I had built. It had splinters yet, so I honed it again with a sharp knife, and swept the shavings toward the billy goat's pen that he might eat them.

However dark the winter proved, I resolved to preserve this—all of this—against what I perceive to be the inevitable encroachment of the future. All this time, when we have looked back at how things used to be, we have praised God for showing us how to better ourselves. Now I see that the future—this future we have begun living now—leapt out with its rapacious mouth open to swallow us. What will come up out of the west I cannot say, but I am frightened of its hum and its terrible energy. I knew, as I stood that day in my barn, that I had a winter to spare to keep this story, the story of who we were before the approaching
change, alive, in the dim hope that someone, among Ruth's people or my own, would read and understand. I was lucky in my home, my prosperity, my ability to make meaningful marks with pen and ink; and this much would have to suffice. I opened my box, which had not come from Indo-China, and inside were my supplies, as I had placed them: a measure of Mandrik's black ink, two pens I had whittled with my back to the fire. When I touched them, they were full of the barn's autumn chill. But there they had waited for me, and there would they remain.

The desk offered succor, and relief from my cares. I could work until my brother returned with his poultices and tea. I could begin this tale. This work would not wait until the dark days of the New Year, nor even until tomorrow. There is no waiting on such a project, so quickly do things change.

My brother did not return till nightfall. During that time I had gone to the house but once to see that my wife and daughter still made their way among the living. Ruth regarded me then with worried eyes, but we did not speak. My brother had been far longer afield than he'd expected, and there were deep, bruise-like marks beneath his eyes. The cold had chapped the rest of his face like a beet. “What overtook you?” I asked, half angry at having to return to the house, half wild with relief at his return. “Spirits at the crossroads?”

He draped his dripping cloak over the bench and set his sodden shoes by the fire. “Illness throughout the parish. Half the village lies home abed.”

“Who's taken ill?”

“Vashti Nethering, Ion Gansevöort, Prugne Martin; Dirk must have given it to her.”

“Given what? What has he given?”

“Whatever illness it is.”

My heart felt cold. “You have not seen it before?”

“I have seen others like it. It's not a plague, certainly. Some kind of flu.”

“Not—”

“I don't know, Yves.”

“If you have another chicken to spare,” Ruth said, “chicken soup would be good for them.”

“Absolutely,” my brother agreed.

Adelaïda was curled like a mother cat about our daughter.

“More are ill than you mentioned?” I asked.

“It's winter, man. People take ill. Go kill one of your hens.”

“You left them all with remedies?”

“Of course.”

“Are they likely—”

“I wish you wouldn't discuss it.” He spat into the fire, which sizzled. “Put the pot on, Ruth. We'll see what tomorrow brings.”

“I don't want to wait and see.”

“You've no choice.”

Ruth took the water pail out into the cold night.

“Surely, if this illness has come from the people over the hill—”

“Who said it had?”

“—then they have the remedy? Surely, if their carts drive without horses—”

“There's no cure for the flu,” Ruth said, spilling some of the frigid water onto my feet as she poured it into the cauldron. “Though if you're worried, we could take them to the hospital.”

“The what?”

She and my brother watched one another. “Do you think we should?” he asked.