The Testament of Yves Gundron (33 page)

Ydlbert, with four of his sons fully capable of labor, finished reaping before I did. As I was scything my last row the next morning, I saw Jungfrau and a few others who farmed small plots go whooping past in their carts, and Ydlbert: brought Dirk and Bartholomew to help me cut the last of my crop. As I had but one row left, Dirk did the work himself, scything like a house afire, and Bartholomew sheaved the grain. Ydlbert and I hung back to admire their work.

“We're not so young anymore,” Ydlbert said, wiping his brow.

“You're not so young,” I said.

Ydlbert toyed with the sunburned, hairless spot at the top of his head, and I felt a pang of guilt for what I had said.

“Thanks to your fine sons, this crop will be in before the sun is high,” I said, perhaps changing the subject without too much grace. Ydlbert nodded. He kept fingering his head, looking out at the neat rows of stubble striping my rich black earth, the leaning shocks of pale brown wheat, the fallow land above the cairn gone to flower. “Thank you, brother,” I told him.

“I wish there was more I could have done.”

It was I, though, who truly so wished—for I wished the harvest could be more than a mere harvest, more than so much sweet-smelling wheat being dried for the threshing floor. “Now I'll have time to work on my new inventions,” I told him, for I could not speak aloud of the sadness I was feeling, nor of my misgivings about my brother.

“What have you got for us now?” he asked, bending down to work a clod of my soil between his forefinger and thumb.

“More to do with the cart.”

Dirk returned with the scythe slung over his shoulder in a precarious fashion, Bartholomew wiping his hands on his trousers behind. “There's a party down in the grove. Will you be heading down there?” Dirk asked.

“In a bit,” Ydlbert said, nodding approval at his son's attempt at politeness. “You go ahead.”

“Thanks, Father.” Dirk set the tool down and they sauntered off.

Ydlbert said, “You've had the cart on your brain for years now. Don't you want to go back to farming?”

“Every time I fix what I set out to, I realize something else is wrong.”

“Any special reason?”

I shrugged my shoulders. They were sore. “So complex a thing always, I suppose, admits of improvements.”

“No, I'm asking why you brood over the cart.”

“I hadn't really looked for a reason.”

“Yves, there's nowhere to go.” He turned to look around him. Mountains to all sides, the cairn to the northeast, and the broad, blue sky. “To market and back, and lately to town however many times a
week. And where else? One can drive about, but there's no need to go any faster or farther. You've done us a great service by inventing all that you have.”

“I am glad you think so.”

“But, Yves, there's nothing more we require. You can stop now. Or move on to something else—try your hand at improving the mill, or turning lead into gold.”

“You mock me.”

“No.”

“I have no interest in the mill. I have work to do on the cart.”

Ydlbert shook his head. “We've got a whole crop to thresh, winnow, and grind, and the fields to glean and plow under. You'll need to rethatch before the frost. I've looked in your woodshed, man—you need to split a good dozen trees before winter, never mind shivering your kindling. Why not make these your tasks and your projects, as ever you did before?”

I picked up the scythe Dirk had left on the ground and stepped on the blade, working it sideways into the dirt. “I'll do everything this farm requires of me, but it no longer draws my heart.”

“You won't be my friend, will you, when you're busy inventing all the time.”

I looked at him, expecting him to crack a smile, but he did not.

“You've tried the life that I lead, and found it dull. It was good enough for your ancestors—”

“Not dull. It's not that I don't want to farm.” Although, at that moment, it was. “But my mind is restless. It seeks after things to fix, things to grapple with. It isn't enough anymore, this looking after my land.”

“It's not good enough for your brother or for you.” He wasn't angry, but an expression of regret lodged around his great gray eyes. “It isn't only your brother, is it?”

“How's that?”

“Who's marked.”

I drove the blade deeper into the ground with my heel. “Don't say such things.”

He pushed my foot away and gruffly extricated the tool. “No use spoiling a good scythe, Yves. I didn't mean to offend you.”

I shook my head. I had nothing to say.

“Come on, then, the whole town'll be drunk before we arrive.”

We walked toward the house. “I am renouncing nothing.”

“But the madness is calling you.”

“It is not madness.”

“Hush, lad. I didn't mean anything by it.”

Work was calling me. Why were brakes so different from a field in want of harrowing or a horse that needed to be shod?

We gathered our women from our homes and, with our jubilation quieted by our disagreement, set out for town. The bonfire was blazing again in the grove, despite the heat of the sun, and from the rise we could see the rest of the stragglers, on High Road and Low, converging. What caught my eye, however, was not the familiar sight of my neighbors gathered to quaff ale, but farther out—practically to Nnms—a cluster of men blocking and crouching over the road. “What'll that be?” I asked.

Ydlbert squinted. “It's been years since they smoothed the ruts out.”

Ruth stood up to stick her head out between us. “You're right, Ydlbert. That's a road crew.” Anything she said would have annoyed me, and the words' strange sound burbled in my ear. “The Archduke said he was planning to pave the High Road and the Low Road, but I didn't think he meant to do it so soon.”

Suddenly the bonfire and its concomitant merriment held nothing for me; my mind was fixed on the Road Crew. As if she were similarly held in its thrall, Enyadatta trotted past the assembled farmers, who whistled after us in what did not quite seem a friendly manner, and continued onward toward the strange sight. We drove down past where the roads joined, past the church and the graveyard and the wreckage of the airplane, and perhaps five minutes' drive from the Great West Gate we were stopped by the shouts of the workmen.

“Halt!” shouted he closest to my horse.

Enyadatta walked onto the grass, and the cart turned and eased to a stop behind her. Now we were turned broadside, we all flocked to the long edge of the cart and peered at the men in wonder. They were dressed identically, in raiment of deepest blue, on which the road dust floated like the clouds in the sky. Their loose trousers were tucked into thick laced boots, and their shirts were rolled up above their elbows, revealing their sun-darkened, muscular arms. One of the fairest wore a
kerchief around his head like a woman. And all of them—six or seven in all—chewed, spat, and worked the ground with shovels, spades, and pikes.

“There'll be no thoroughfare,” said the man with the woman's hair scarf. He was red with exertion and sunlight.

“What are you doing?” Ydlbert asked.

A tall, dark one gave a crooked grin, pointed down at his feet, and said, very clearly, “Roadwork.”

“We're paving under orders from the Archduke,” said the kerchief wearer.

Ruth said, “This is amazing.”

The dark one looked her over and spat. “If it isn't that creature of his Lordship's, all skulking about with the farmer folk.”

Ruth said, “Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me clear.”

“And where, exactly, arc you paving?” I asked.

Said the dark one, “On the road.”

A third one cuffed him across the head, and he grumbled and quieted down.

“Paving,” said the cuffer, who looked like a cousin long since passed on, “from the West Gate, out the High Road, to four miles past Mandragora. We're to double back along the Low Road to the village church. And we're to make the road a cart's width wider as we pass.”

Ydlbert said, “What a lot of road.”

“On whose authority,” I asked, “will you cut a cart's-width swath from the length of my land?”

The affable cuffer shrugged. “The Archduke's, naturally. Most of it's his land anyway.”

“Land, schmand,” said the dark one. “Give me a fortnight's pay and a jigger of ale and I don't ask no questions.”

“Will the work be done by Market Day?” asked Ydlbert, who was clearly already imagining himself driving in style along those paving stones.

The dark one looked behind him at five or six cart's lengths they'd already smoothed. “That's a day's work there, so I'd say no.” Then he laughed.

“Give us perhaps a month to get to the point where the roads join,”
said the cuffer. “After that, we'll go, as I told you, around, so wherever we're not paving, you good folk can drive.”

It was a lovely plan—how the road would glitter, paved!—but we had brought in our grain, and in the next month would have our largest market crops of the year. I could not imagine how we would bring them to Nnms with no road. And how long had Ruth known of this project and said nothing? Her brow looked clear enough. She was digging around in her sling. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for a pen. I'll stay and talk to them.”

“You'll do no such thing.”

Their ears pricked up as they admired her lithe form, bending over and fidgeting.

“Not what you think, lads,” I said, pushing her roughly into the cart.

“Yves, I have work to do, do you mind?”

“Work!” One of them chuckled. “I'll be glad to work her.” Another said, “I hope it's the same kind of work she does for the Archduke.”

Ydlbert said, “Gentlemen, please.”

“Yves,” Ruth said, “what's your problem?”

My throat grew tight. My mouth would not form the words to tell her of my misgivings.

“You think I've never been catcalled by construction workers before? I'm fine. Besides, I'm bigger than they are.”

Ydlbert said, “I'll stay and watch her.”

When our eyes met I thought for certain he could divine my thoughts, but his expression did not change. “Very well, then.”

“Thank you, Ydlbert, but I don't need to be chaperoned.”

Ydlbert said, “You'd be a mite easier to get used to if you spoke English all the time, like the rest of us.” They went clambering over the side of the cart. Ydlbert offered me a lazy salute and said, “We'll see you by and by.”

The roadworkers waved and spat to their sides as we drove away. Me, my brother, the Archduke, these workers—there wasn't a man in the parish Ruth was afraid of, and I began to wonder if it was a quality of which I approved.

“Is this good news or bad,” my wife asked, “that we must now convey to the assembly?”

“Good news, though perhaps a slight difficulty at present. Why?”

“Because I want to know if it's going to make us more reviled, or lift us in the popular estimation.”

“I don't believe we're reviled.”

She neatened her skirt. “That's because you're the one with the mad family.”

“It's our common ancestors have supplied this hamlet its fair share of weirdness.”

“Fine, then. The mad brother. You can't argue that my brother's mad.”

Driving toward the celebration, I kept thinking of the scene we had left behind us on the road. If digging bodies up from the earth had called forth a subtle and insidious punishment, perhaps with such strange events did it begin.

The peas and beans on their poles twisted about wildly, sprouting leaves everywhere, sending forth myriad flowers, and growing so many lovely fruits that we could not pick them all before some, hidden as they were amid the vegetation, grew too large to be of use and festered. Yet harvesting vegetables is as child's play compared to harvesting grain—to do it requires no songs for encouragement, and even Elizaveta could tromp about the garden with a basket in tow, pulling off whatever edibles she could reach. The fruits of the garden do not come ripe all at once—the result, my brother says, of their gentle nature, their desire not to make us too much labor—so gathering them feels more pleasure than work, a daily opportunity to dream as the rich, sweet odors from the vines cling to one's nose and fingers. Bringing in the garden plot of flax was a pass-time compared to the labor of reaping. Mornings, too, we gathered the apples from Mandrik's orchard—perhaps the most pleasant work of the year, climbing trees, breathing in the ripe perfume, and plucking the sweets as they blushed and bloomed. Though I was still full of misgivings, a day in the orchard was like a day in Paradise—and led to long, soft afternoons, peeling and coring the fragrant fruit, that it might be boiled down into applesauce, or pressed into cider soft and then hard, or strung up on sticks to dry over the fire.

These lesser harvests left me some leisure—which in former years I had used to mow hay for the animals' winter fodder, or to begin
threshing. This year, however, the farm's duties did not beckon, and at each spare moment I retired to the shade of the barn, there to pursue my inventions. The seat on the cart came easy, though it took two tries before I figured the exact distance at which my feet could either hang into the bed of the cart or rest upon its front. The execution of brakes required more thought, though their caliper shape, which I had drawn from the blacksmith's dread instrument, had been easy enough to arrive at. They did not desire, on their own, to grip the wheel with just and equal pressure, and each new experiment sent the cart spinning and Enyadatta off in a snit.

I had installed perhaps the fourth set of brakes when Adelaïda took to the yard to dye the first of her wool for winter. On the ground she had built three fires, each with its iron pot, and in each she brewed a decoction of flowers and leaves, into which she mashed her yarn and thread with wooden poles. Her sleeves were rolled up and the sweat beaded on her brow. Elizaveta, beside her, mashed doll clothes around a bowl with a kitchen spoon. Ruth occasionally stabbed at one of the pots, stirring the foul-smelling wool, then retreated to examining the materials—rubbing the petals of the flowers between her fingers, asking my wife where and when she'd gathered this and that. She didn't have her notebook—paper is vulnerable to a stirred pot—but I saw well enough the furrows in her brow, and I knew what she was doing. So did Adelaïda, whose scant patience had perhaps at last reached its limit, and who answered the questions with as few words as possible.