The Testament of Yves Gundron (20 page)

“You'd better, then,” I said, clouting him across the head with my open palm.

The child ran shrieking away, his wooden shoes threatening to fall from his feet at every step.

When the afternoon waned and I tossed my last two lettuces into the gutter, I had earned not a quarter of my usual take for a good spring day, which did little to improve my already black mood.

The sun hung low in the gauzy pink cradle of the sky when I returned home. Mandrik had left. Adelaïda greeted me with a heap of mashed turnips. “How was market?” she asked, digging into her own bowl.

“Foul,” I answered. “We'll be in the poorhouse yet.”

Ruth, her work scattered about her on the bed, said, “Where's the poorhouse?”

“It's an expression.”

“Did you find a new horse?” asked Adelaïda.

“I didn't look.”

She pursed her lips around the wooden spoon. “How, then, do you expect your lot to improve?”

“Damn it, woman, I don't.”

“You might fashion a new harness, for when you change your mind.”

“You're not listening. I'm not changing my mind.”

“Yves,” Ruth said, “it's all going to be fine.”

“That's easy for you to say, who might die any moment.”

“Excuse me?”

Adelaïda brought more turnips to her invalid. “Now now. Just because my brother Carmichael died of a broken leg doesn't mean you will.”

“People don't die of broken bones.”

“People don't die,” my wife emended, “of broken hearts. Bones, all the time.”

“That's ridiculous. You set them and they heal.”

Her Cambridge must have been a soft and balmy place, where wounds set cleanly and no one feared infection or the long, slow demise. Until her bone healed, how would she be fed and kept warm? How clean herself or look after the basic tasks necessary to her existence? Her inability to recognize the fragility of her situation raised my dander. “People die of broken bones when they don't have my brother to set them, and neighbors to carry them home in a cart, and people to look after their every need. Left on their own, they die.”

Her finger traced a shadow on the sheet. “I had no idea.”

“We are taking care of you as best we can.”

“Thank you, Yves.”

“In the midst of our own tragedy, we are looking after you.”

“Thank you, Yves. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be ungrateful.”

Adelaïda sighed and continued eating—she had too much work to allow my sourness to spoil her meal. I would not budge, however, from my admittedly difficult stance. Hammadi was different from other horses, and I could not simply replace her like a worn shoe. If it meant more toil and less earnings until I changed my mind, so be it, thought I. This was the price of the great service she did me. It seemed my duty to pay.

We held our monthly gathering on the new moon; the darkest night, it was the one least possible to use for work, even in the tightest of circumstances. When the new moon came that month, despite all that had happened, I swept my barn floor as ever, brought forth liquor, and eagerly awaited the menfolk, who descended in a clump a short while after they finished their dinners.

“Things should not,” Jepho Martin said before he even sat down, “fall thus out of the sky. I'm sorry about your horse, Yves.”

“Thank you.”

His brother raised his bushy eyebrows. “Things fall all the time—birds and hailstones, if nought else.”

“But not great beasts. Only think if it had landed in one of our fields. Someone could have lost his crop in a morning.”

“We all,” Ydlbert assured him, “would have done our best to make up the loss.”

Laight, as it seemed, came mostly for the drink, but though he had settled in against a post with his gourdful, he opened his mouth to speak. “You're right, Jepho, that great things shouldn't rain down like that. I'm worried what might be the cause.”

“A terrible accident,” Ydlbert said. I added, “Ruth says they come and go all the time, with never such bloody results. She says they land and fly off again like birds, a hundred times a day.”

“I think it's the sign of something amiss,” Jungfrau said, his voice deep with sobriety. “A sign of witchery.”

Ydlbert said, “Not all ill luck is the product of a curse.”

“And do me a favor,” said Dithyramb, “and leave my mother out of your accusations this time.”

“My grandmother, too,” I seconded, though Dithyramb's Friedl was, I admitted, easy to suspect.

Jungfrau shook his large head. I think he thought we were all rather stupid. “Nothing fell from the sky before the stranger came.”

We looked among ourselves, and my stomach drew tight. “And?”

Wido shrugged. “Has she brought any curses on your household?”

“My household is a hundred times blessed.”

“Not in horses,” Yorik murmured.

“Cows not giving milk, hens not laying?”

“Nay,” I said, “my beasts are hale and well.”

“And no one thinks it odd we've seen no sign of any family in the parish having a new bairn since Tansy Gansevöort's, at Advent?”

I looked at my countrymen—most with large families, most in adequate health. “Tansy's bairn was among us four months before Ruth arrived, and in all that time there was no news of a child on the way. So yes, I suppose someone might have witched our women, but I know it wasn't anyone resides in my house.”

Ion Gansevöort, the lucky father of the lucky child, said, “I think that stranger's been right kind when she's come around questioning.”

“Brought us a basket of gooseberries,” Heinrik said, “and listened better than I listen to the priest in church.”

“She is soft with my daughter. I have accepted her as my own,” said I. Clearly I had said too much, for my countrymen regarded me strangely.

Said Gerald Desvres, “And you have no fear for your family?”

“I live ever in fear of God's wrath, Gerald. But I am not afraid of Ruth.”

He looked about at the company, and poured another short round. “Of all of us, Yves knows best of what he speaks. We should take him at his word.”

I let my cup sit before me, but around me many were raised. “Hear hear,” said Nethering, and the ale was drunk.

Jungfrau shook his head. “If no one heeds my warning, then so be it. But I'll tell you one thing: Beware.”

That the echo of my sister's words should issue from Wido's mouth both offended my stomach and tickled my spine. I was glad that I did not see the hair rise on any other man's arms. That, at least, might soothe my restless mind.

I was still bothered by Jungfrau's air of prophecy, and still woozy-headed from the ale, when next morning the Archduke's dappled horse and bright cart clattered up, with two attendants and the attaché. The trumpet boy squawked, and the attaché hopped down with something less than the air of sprightly grace I thought he intended. He approached the sty I was halfheartedly cleaning, but would not venture actually near. “Sorry to interrupt, Gundron.”

I leaned on my dung rake. “No trouble. What news?”

“The Archduke sends to know where his immortalizer is. If I may say so, and to put it mildly, he's quite thoroughly steamed.”

Mauritius, lonely for his lately-eaten mate, snuffled listlessly at my feet.

“Ruth was injured in that terrible fall from the sky. Her leg is broken, and she lies abed.”

His delicate face darkened. “Do you expect her to live?”

“We hope, and pray.”

He fingered his mustache. “That won't do.”

I moved the rake slightly, by way of a sign—which indeed worked to rouse him.

“I'll bring him the news,” he said, “but he won't be pleased.”

“Sorry I have none better.”

He remounted his cart and drove away. I was annoyed by his visit until, later that afternoon, the Archduke sent the cart back with two sacks of oranges and a note in a spidery hand: “Look forward to your return to the living, that I may tell you all my tales.”

Ruth heaved a sigh and let the note fall to the floor.

All the while Ruth had spoken of the brake, she spoke as if it would be a great and intricate invention, but in a flash like the storm fires of Heaven, I realized what she meant: a device to raise its hand against the forward motion of the wheel and cry, “Halt!” I realized this thinning out the radishes in the garden, and ran to the barn, where I took out my pen box immediately. Gone were the days when I might go to visit my horse and sketch an idea, but without her I could still draw this new thing. If it would release me from danger, and from the bondage of my guilt over Hammadi's death—if it would allow me to drive where and how I pleased—then it would be worth any amount of effort.

That day I stopped in the house only to eat, so busy was my mind with the invention; and when I went inside, I had hardly a thought to spare for wife, child, and invalid. In the afternoon I tended the wheat in the northern fields, pursuing all the while the new invention with persistence and vigor. The idea gave me renewed strength in my work; I had before me my crops—my hands in the loamy soil, the sun upon my back, the sweet stalks blowing and brushing against me, the sap of life coursing in them like love in a young man's heart; and ever the great promise of the new invention. This was my destiny—the fate for which I had been born, the reason God placed me down on this green earth. I felt the power of His grace and the earth's great abundance rising in me like a fire poised to consume a house—bedsheets, children, and all.

All that week did I tend the crops, and after lunch each day spent a while in the barn working at the problem of the brakes. One afternoon, feeling it a guilty pleasure, I cut the leather for a new harness, for whoever the next horse might be; and found myself, much to my surprise, dreaming of her beauty, of her long, black mane. Even this short time idling away from work softened me; at the end of each day my hands
stung from the cruel hasps of the tools, and the fierce sun burned the back of my neck as surely as if I were Ruth's bread in the kitchen fire. But I persevered in both my invention and the work of the land, for these were the tasks I was made for. Had my father grown soft as I seemed to be doing, we would never have survived the winters. I would not put my family in peril to chase after ideas—only chase after them furtively in my spare time. One dreamer in a family is more than its due, so I would learn to leave my family's dreaming to my brother.

Come Market Day, Ydlbert drove round early with his cart half full, and helped me load up produce for sale. I climbed in with him among my early peas and radishes and his sweet-smelling hay. Along the route we discoursed of weather and pests, wives and weather, as two farmers ought to do, alone on the road together on a fine June morning. It had been a comfortable while since Anya had borne a son, and Ydlbert hoped she would bear no more; I still dreamed of an heir. My chest filled fuller of the good air than it had since the airplane had come. Except that we now shared a cart instead of each to his own, everything seemed as fine as it ever had been. And though I regretted my horse's loss, I remembered my fresh straps of harness leather in the barn, and began to see how the pall of Hammadi's passing would lift.

“You'll buy a new horse, then?” Ydlbert asked, hardly looking at me.

“Someday.”

“Andras Drck has a few good ones.”

“I'm certain,” I said coldly, though secretly pleased at his concern. My eyes absently read the sky for the next day's weather (a wind so fierce who knew what it might blow in from the north), and beheld what at first I took to be a vision. Soon enough it became some other kind of airplane, moss green in color, and with a bulbous head and a dragonfly's tail. It wore a gray halo above it, and its bleating cut the air.

“Look at that,” I told my companion.

Without letting up on Thea's speed, he scanned the sky. When his eyes lit upon it, he shook his head, spat off the side of the cart, and cursed. “I thought we'd had enough trouble for one year.”

“As did I.”

His head kept shaking. “Perhaps that one will leave us alone. I'm not sure you should have taken that stranger in, Yves.”

“She has nothing to do with the airplanes.”

He spat again. “Did you ever see one before she arrived?”

“Never so close. But of course I'd seen one.”

“I think you're misremembering.”

As this new one moved across the sky, she grew louder, and larger, and soon, it became clear, began to descend. Unlike her sister, she did not pitch headlong toward the ground, but came toward it deliberately, like a bee preparing to alight on a flower. The force of her nearness was so strong that it rustled the hairs on my head and the nearby grass. She hovered above us, looming large as a barn, before she disappeared from view into the foothills near the city. I said, “Do you want to go see it?”

“Whatever its business, we'll hear of it soon enough,” he said.

“I'm sure,” I said, though I was also curious.

“And I hope it hasn't done to someone else what the last one did to your Hammadi.”

“No,” I said, my throat growing tight. “I wouldn't want that to happen to anyone.”

“Though, when the last one came, I heard the sound of trouble four miles distant, and this one doesn't have quite that same disastrous ring.”

“I wouldn't know,” I said.

The Martin brothers went hollering past in their laden carts, the first of our neighbors to bear witness to whatever had come.

Despite all of which, my mind was full of the world's abundance. It would have been more than enough had we been sent a single machine from the sky; but because His world is plentiful, in darkness as in light, God sent us two. For a reason I could not describe, my body was suffused with ease; I felt I had begun to understand my brother's raptures. Oh, to have been a farmer like my father, my mind concerned wholly with the land; but since I had been cursed with introspection, how glad was I, in that moment, to see to what stillness inside myself it might lead me. Where there had been the airplane's thrum, there was now only the fluid buzz of early summer, followed soon by the shouts of my countrymen, who had not yet seen enough of a bad thing. It had landed, sure, but I did not care to have any further knowledge of its whereabouts.