The Testament of Yves Gundron (39 page)

“Brothers, you must protect yourselves from this plague of interest.”

Stanislaus shook his head. “Mandrik, rarely in our lives have we concurred upon a topic so completely as we do in our desire to keep our fellows from going across the hills. But what you describe sounds more a nuisance than a peril to the soul.”

Mandrik passed his hand across his face. “What I have described is but the beginning. Because I have not yet begun to speak of how badly you will, all of you, desire their intervention.”

Ydlbert said, “Nay—”

“Let me finish, Brother von Iggislau. Those people possess wonders you will crave as a child craves sweets. They have mechanical vehicles that drive without horses, five times faster. Lights that turn on by a switch on the wall and produce no smoke nor danger of conflagration. Windows as large as a barn door to let in the light, and covered in sparkling glass to hold out the drafts. Filmy screens in the windows to keep out the summer bugs. Cold chests in their kitchens where their food stays fresh forever. Others make all their clothes and grow all their food for them, that they simply go to market, any day of the week, and buy.”

“That's ridiculous,” said Yorik.

I said, “Ruth has spoken of such things.”

Mandrik said, “Ruth?”

“It's all true,” she said quietly.

The images of the world to come settled over us like a film of fairy dust. Anya said, “To me it sounds like Heaven.”

“Exactly like Heaven,” added Ion.

“That is as I have feared,” said Mandrik.

“My research,” Ruth whispered.

I crouched down beside her and peered into her black eyes. “May it rot, Ruth. May it fester in your sight.”

Her eyes, fixed on mine, wore a pleading expression.

Stanislaus stood up to face my brother. “It is a life of ease, across the hills?”

“They do not scrape their life from the soil as we do.”

The priest's face clouded. “Why, then, it sounds an earthly Paradise.”

“But it is not. Ruth?”

Ruth leaned her face into her lap.

“Stanislaus,” said my brother, “I thought we agreed with one another.”

“I did, I mean, I do think we must be wary. But think you not, Mandrik, that by going across the hills—with all due caution—our brethren might be freed to contemplation of the infinite?”

“If they think not of their Maker now, why should they then?”

Stanislaus's Adam's apple bobbed. “Do you seek to deprive your brothers of the bounty of God?”

“I think we should form a delegation,” said good Franz Nethering, “to go across the hills to greet them. We should not judge them before making their acquaintance. We should see with our own eyes if these wonders Mandrik speaks of be true.”

“Hear, hear,” said several, raising wooden cups.

“They are not wonders,” Ruth said, her words muffled by her skirt.

Mandrik said, “Wait a few days at least. Gentlemen, I beg you. Consider this carefully.”

But what, I realized, did it matter? If what my brother spoke of was true, then two generations hence, there would be nothing left but meadow, and Mandrik's strange trees, unable to propagate more of their invented species, but bearing for the ages their succulent fruit, each the entire of its solitude.

Adelaïda said, “These are fairy favors come from who knows how far off to tempt us, and it all has the savor of iniquity. It must be that Ruth has brought this with her from the Beyond—this, and grave-robbing strangers from who knows where—and we must banish her before she heaps more wickedness upon us. Before she came, did things plummet from the sky, and did we desecrate tombs, and were we beset by strange neighbors?”

Ruth stood up and faced the assembly. “I am not responsible for this. I did not do this to you.” She stalked outside, and I heard the door of the house slam shut behind her.

“Adelaïda,” Ydlbert said.

My wife swallowed twice, then lurched for the door. I followed her into the bitter, starlit yard, where she stood retching by the sty. I heard Ruth bustling angrily within the house.

“Wife,” I said, and held one hand beneath her forehead that she not hit it on the post, “what ails you?”

Her breathing calmed and she stood. “I am but with child, Yves. Go in.”

When we returned, the heat of the fire overwhelmed me, and I remained against the door a moment to right myself. Adelaïda leaned into me.

Ion reached back to touch the hem of her skirt, and said, “Fare you well, sister?”

“Nay,” she said, swaying slightly. “But I will be better ere the child is born, unless some curse take this village bodily away.”

“The bairn within her,” said Anya. “God be praised.”

A few of my countrymen murmured, “Amen.”

“Have you a song for us?” asked Ion. “It is a dark night, and a song would help gladden our hearts.”

“I feel poorly, Ion. I feel no calling to sing. I'm sorry.”

Ion patted her foot within her sturdy shoe. She yet looked pale.

“Chouchou?” Ion asked.

Mandrik shook his head no. “My heart is too heavy to lift up to God.”

“Then something terrible has passed among this company.”

Jude Dithyramb let out a long, deep sigh.

“What ails you, man?” Ydlbert asked.

Jude shook his head. “As often as not, when I think of my father, and the sweat he gave to his land, that I and my brothers and sisters might thrive; and I think of them all now, snug in the churchyard; and I think of my mother, madder than the bulls in spring, and reviled by everyone in the village who did not think her the sum of the world's blessings when he was a bairn; and when I think how much has happened since my father's passing, though we still farm the land, eat, dream, sometimes starve and sometimes prosper; when I think on all of this, I don't know who I am sadder for, my father or me. But I do know that I miss him terribly, and that all this change is for nothing—nothing—if it can't bring him back.”

Adelaïda sat down upon the floor. I crouched down beside her and reached for her hand, and felt the warm jump of her pulse like a hatchling shivering in its mother's nest. As her blood coursed through her, so
also did I feel it race through me, a shock as one receives from touching wool in the winter, a jolt of life. Here, before my countrymen, I could give no sign of emotion, but I felt fully what Jude had said, and we and the barn seemed suddenly very small, while the cold wind blew from who knew what distance.

“Aye,” Ydlbert agreed. “But perhaps Mandrik will yet figure that out.”

“There's no raising the dead,” I answered, though speaking tore the delicate veil of thought I had begun to weave. “Only in tales. They don't come back. Better carts won't make them, nor strangers with ice chests. Even my brother can't raise the dead.”

“It's but,” said Jude, “that I wish my father might accompany us, if such wonders are to make themselves known to me.”

“Is there nothing,” I asked, “that I could say to make you stay?”

“Nothing at all,” said Ydlbert. “I wish there were something I could say to make you come with us.”

“But there is not.”

Ion rose to his feet and held his cap between his hands. “Then we should leave you to your peace, Brother Gundron. A great day dawns tomorrow.”

Desvres said, “We must send a messenger to the Archduke, that he might lead us forth.”

“Aye,” said good Ion, “in all his splendor.”

The assembled company rose.

Again I said, “I wish I could make you stay.”

Yorik opened the door into the howling night.

“It's too late,” Mandrik said. He spoke to me alone. “I, too, would bid them hold—but it would be no use. There is no other way to slake their curiosity. So I send them my blessings, and Godspeed.”

Ydlbert said, “And Godspeed to you, Mandrik. And my great gratitude to you for looking after my son.”

Adelaïda set out across the yard.

One by one everyone of my acquaintance bade farewell, and I followed to watch them climb aboard the seats of their carts or run off down the road. The wind was bitter as February—no Advent wind at all, no promise of redemption. The horses stamped and grunted at being so rudely and cruelly unblanketed. I stood with the warmth of my barn behind me, the promise of the warmth of my home before me, the
neighbors' torches like so many spluttering stars. I could imagine my neighbors this evening, wide-eyed and restless with anticipation. I neither despised nor envied them, but I knew their lives to differ from my own.

At last my yard grew quiet. I felt Mandrik's presence behind me, yet knew that if I turned to regard him, he would not be looking my way. “Imagine that,” I said, leaning against the doorframe our grandfather had built.

He remained silent. When I turned, the light of the fire was full upon him, shining into and through the luminous blue of his eyes. At last he said, “You and Adelaïda should not have chided Ruth so harshly.”

Her name was the last word under Heaven I desired to hear. Though my temper was hot, I managed to keep it down. “Imagine, a whole village,” I said, “so close by.”

“You do not answer my accusation.” He paced to Enyadatta's stall and back before he lifted those strange eyes to mine. “This is a terrible circumstance, Yves, but why are you so glum? It is my duty to fear for our brethren. What do you know about that village, after all?”

My blood began to simmer. “How did you decide if Dirk had seen a vision?”

“By questioning him.”

If only he had not become a holy man, and I could have punched him as I did when we were boys. In the absence of such recourse, my anger rooted deeper inside me. “Mandrik, you knew there was a village there.”

He made no reply, and my rage to choke him began to choke me.

“Did you not know there was a village across the hills?”

“I knew.”

His quiet gave me a moment's pause, but it did nothing to appease me. “And you told me nothing?”

“Yves,” he said.

“You came back after a three-years' absence, during which time I thought you dead, and told me story upon story of what you'd seen, but could not mention a village two days' journey from my home?”

“In those days it was farther—before the harness and the pavement, before the improvements to the cart.”

My mind was by now but a distant outgrowth of my roiling guts. “What has that to do with it?”

“I didn't think you, or anyone else, would ever get there.”

“And what has that to do with it?”

He sighed. “Nothing, I suppose.”

“You're right—nothing. Because you did not tell me the truth, Mandrik.”

“I did not—”

“You did not tell the truth.” The heat in my belly had burned up to the backs of my eyes, which stung bitterly, though not with tears. “You said nothing of what you saw here at home. Nothing. Everything was Indo-China, praying Hindus, and the great wide sea.”

“Because those were the adventures. Those were the best stories to tell.”

“Am I such a child that you tell me what's most interesting instead of what's true?”

“I didn't want you to go off looking for our neighbors.”

“I am not a child, Mandrik!”

“But look what's happening.” He paced again to the horse's stall, and tried to pat her brow, but Enyadatta, as if aware of his perfidy, shied from him. “On the basis of one report—that not even a favorable one—the whole village will go off to investigate. Every last man but you and I—even those who were wise enough to have some fear. Should I have told you, that this could have happened three years ago? You were right, Yves, when you counseled them not to go.”

I did not like him steering the conversation from his untruth. “And why's that?”

“Will you sit down with me, brother?”

“No.”

He closed his eyes and traced their sockets with his fingers. “Our neighbors will come back, every man of them, hungry. Changed. What Dirk found is an isolated village, a few fishermen on an unfriendly shore; but there are other, more populous islands a stone's throw hence, with scores of other villages, Yves, more villages than there are people in this town.”

“That's ridiculous,” I told him, but I knew in my bones it was true.

“And once our neighbors see the wonders they possess—”

“Mandrik, why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I didn't want you to go.”

“I wouldn't—”

“Yes, you would. Your curiosity—look at them. Look how they ran.”

My face burned. “What else have you not told me?”

“Nothing.”

“What else?”

“Nothing, Yves, nothing.” He held up his hands, beseeching. “What would I keep from you? Why would I keep anything from you?”

The rush of answers which flooded my mind shamed me, chided me, bid me ask, how have you come to mistrust him you hold most dear? Why was I so full of doubt? “I don't know.”

He reached out to wrap his arms around me. Though my whole body rebelled, bid me hit him with my fists, I stood still. His sackcloth cassock scratched against my cheek. “With all the wonders of the world about me, brother,” he said, “I chose to come back home.”

I longed to accept comfort from his embrace. In his strong arms I felt the arms of my father; in the scent of his flesh lived the scent of my brothers' flesh. I felt them all buzzing like bright wasps about us, about the rat-infested rafters of the barn. Beyond the walls of this barn were my daughter, spared me thus far by God's grace, and my wife, a new life burgeoning, also a miracle, within. And past them, a great emptiness-—for our family lay beneath their gravestones, our grandmother beneath her cairn, and our neighbors would flee now to the land of plenty, which none of us had known was so nearby. I felt the weight of the mountains, and the broad sky, and the sea, who knew how far away, pressing inward, pressing down upon me. And the arms of a brother who had not offered me all of his truth—who had kept from me half the tales of his wanderings, and was still, I believed, keeping from me the tale of his love—offered now not even the flimsiest barrier, not the least measure of safety. In all the world, there was nothing but me and the cold, dark emptiness around.