The Testament of Yves Gundron (14 page)

“Among the family, I suppose it's fine.” I looked at her.

“I'll go change.”

It was impossible to look at her closely, and equally impossible to look away. “You'll have to learn the spells for the crossroads, and what to do when you pass my grandmother's cairn.”

She looked surprised. “Okay.”

“Else, the spirits will get you, sure. I'll at least have to teach you to spit to ward off danger.” She regarded me what seemed a long time, and in her sober gaze I thought I detected mistrust. “What?” I asked, perhaps somewhat snappishly.

“Nothing. It's only I've never done anything like that before.”

“Aye, and look at you—mother dead, you farther from home than any among us could imagine. You might learn to take a precaution or two. If you'd spat to the four directions, your life might not be so bleak.”

Her eyes widened, but she did not respond.

“Besides which, Ruth, you can't follow people about all day, bothering them with questions.”

“Am I bothering you?”

“No,” I said, somewhat surprised to realize it. But my family was different—marked out among the village as the one that could read and tell tales; one of the few that could support so idle an extra mouth. “Perhaps at church we can ask about for people who don't mind questioning.”

“I'd like that,” she said. “I'd really appreciate it if you'd ask for me, if that would be the right thing to do.”

Elizaveta said, “No more church,” but was mainly objecting, I thought, to being tied to her mother.

I said, “I could do that.”

“I'm so interested in all those people,” Ruth said. “I can't wait to find out about their lives.” The assertion raised a flicker of jealousy; were Adelaïda and I not interesting enough? No such thought had ever
before occurred to me, for no one had time for “interesting” when we scraped for sustenance with our fingernails. I was surprised even to care what she thought of me, but I did.

“I'll ask tomorrow at Mass, then. But you'll put on a more modest shirt.”

Now she laughed. “Okay, Dad.”

I knew not what she meant, so I smiled.

Ruth said, “‘Dad' is short for ‘father.'”

I nodded.

“That's a joke, Yves. I'm kidding.”

“Yes, very well.” The appellation felt strangely pleasant.

Services were, as always, harder labor than dragging the plow had ever been; to stay awake required an effort of will so mighty that none but a saint could expect to achieve it. Father Icthyus, in his day, had at least understood that our farmers' minds were concerned mostly with farms, and spoke to us about our animals; during times of trouble, he hunted down the right Biblical passages to allay our doubts and fears. Ever were his sermons about fields and flocks, flocks and fields, and our minds easily grasped his meaning. He talked about casting pearls before swine, and often as not a sick piglet was in church to be blessed. Stanislaus was the son of Titus Marnt, who had farmed at such a distance from Mandragora that when he died, his house and land were left to rot, so close did they skirt the edges of the known world. Titus's son still knew surprisingly little of what ordinary people did. His talk was of brotherhood, duty, sacrifice—noble and lofty things all, but of little consequence when one had a load of potatoes to haul to market.

Stanislaus also suffered, in my eyes, from a subtler ailment—his inability to match my brother's skill in rhetoric. Mandrik was no priest, but he could spin a tale to raise the hair on a man's arms. When Stanislaus began that morning with, “Brethren, you have the lot of you been lax in your devotions to the Deity,” we immediately took to dreaming of our fields. At last, after he'd berated us roundly for attending church but once a week, he was done, and offered, as ever, to let us speak our minds on issues of interest to the community—something Icthyus would never have done, despite which there was no comparison.

Jepho Martin shot up to his full bean-pole height, and announced that the Great North Meadow was well enough grown again for public pasture.

“Aye,” his nervous elder brother added, “but be sure this year to keep the sheep from out the graveyard. I can't tell you what a time I had last spring, trying to visit our parents.”

“I should think the sheep's, you know, droppings should be good for the grass growing over the dead.”

“Aye, but not strewn about where the sheep drop them.”

Stanislaus squeaked, “Gentlemen,” cleared his throat, and added, “that will do.”

Waldo Smith, his shirt black from yesterday's work, arose, nodded, and wiped his nose on his dirty sleeve. “If any man's horse wants shoeing, I'd gladly trade labor for help cutting and fitting a new harness.”

A chorus of assent filled the hot sanctuary, for every man's horse needs shoes.

I stood and faced the assembly. I had known most of these people all my life—had known all their families, always—and had never felt so shy of them. It was no ordinary thing to stand before them on a stranger's behalf. “Our guest, Ruth Blum, would like to talk with the various members of our community, that she might learn to know us all and understand us better. To which end she proposes to sit today outside the church awhile after services have ended, that any who would not mind her questioning might tell her so, and she might go visit them at home.”

Such a request had never been put forth in our church—or indeed, I suspected, anywhere—and my neighbors regarded me dumbfounded.

“Question us about what?” asked the Widow Tinker.

I shook my head, for I did not want to embarrass Ruth by revealing the simplicity of most of what she asked. “About our lives and opinions.”

The brothers Martin nodded, with a look of satisfaction in their eyes, and some around them slowly followed suit. I suppose many of my neighbors had been curious about her all along, but had kept their distance for fear of a hex. In the quiet sounds of assent I also heard, which I had not expected, that some of my brethren were willing to talk about themselves; something I never would have known from our clipped conversations. It suddenly occurred to me that Ruth had a good idea, coming to listen to us.

Stanislaus
benedictus
ed us and
pax vobiscum
ed, and allowed us to sally forth into the warm, fragrant air. On so bright a day, with the
fields all agreening, a man might pass the afternoon in any way he saw fit, and yet would his activity be at heart a hymn of praise. Adelaïda and the rest of the young mothers whisked their small ones off to water the trees, and the middle-sized children set off in pursuit of a leather ball stuffed with hay. Ruth sat down cross-legged in the grass a few yards from the church door. Since I could neither leave her alone there nor fold my legs into so ungainly a position, I stood behind her, close enough that her slatternly hair brushed my leg each time she turned her head. My neighbors hesitated to come near, but in time they gathered like a litter of kittens to a bowl of milk. Half the people of my acquaintance shyly invited her over for nettle tea and biscuits. Even my Uncle Frith, bent nearly double with age and always so dubious of my endeavors, offered to open his door to her. The youngsters were clearly more interested in her garb than in her company, but the adults seemed almost pleased at the prospect of questioning. I saw Mandrik leaning against the church gate, waiting for us to exit, and when I raised my hand to him in greeting, realized that his eyes were looking toward Ruth.

What villager had been honored by a visit from the Archduke, in any man's memory? Just as my brother and I were specially marked out among the living to have traffic with the dead, so did it seem that Ruth was marked out for glory. It lifted the weight of worry and grief from my heart to think of the event. So too, from the look in her eyes, did I think it lifted the weight from Ruth's. The cares that had driven her here clearly paled somewhat in comparison to a nobleman's visit.
²
Adelaïda mended holes in our clothes, embroidered flowers on her and Elizaveta's pale blue dresses, and began to experiment with new ways of pinning up her braids.

In the midst of these preparations, Ruth set off on forays to, as she said,
interview
my neighbors. “Why not plain talk to them?” Adelaïda asked, kneading forcefully at the week's dough.

“That's what I'm doing.” I had given her my carrying sling to truck loads smaller than that with which she'd arrived, and she sat on the
swept dirt filling it with papers, odd pens that contained their own ink, and hunks of our bread and cheese. “I talk to them, and they talk to me.”

Adelaïda licked a bead of sweat from her upper lip. “You should call it talking, then.”

She would return each day only a brief span after she'd set out, for she eagerly awaited the Archduke. She was not accustomed to being out in the sun, or she would not have returned so red-cheeked from each day's wandering; but despite the skin peeling from her nose, the stranger returned happy. “Ion Gansevöort introduced me to each of his cows by name, and gave me cheeses from three different years to taste, one of them covered in dark green mold,” she reported after one expedition.

“Aye, that's the best one, isn't it?” My wife nodded, her eyes gone wistful.

Another day, “Aelfred Laight is scheming for a way to buy that farm. You should see the ledgers he's drawing up with chalk marks on slates. I never saw such a complicated accounting system.”

“And was he drunk?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He didn't smell so great.”

One afternoon Mandrik took her to visit the cairn, and she came back subdued in aspect, her color high. “What a remarkable story,” she said. Mandrik, in the corner spreading plum jam on bread, beamed. I had no doubt he had told Iulia's story well.
³

What a pleasure to find that we were interesting! That she desired to know our neighbors' stories, that our lives did not seem small to someone from the outside. So it was no wonder my brother had returned from his wanderings; we were more interesting than whatever
lay beyond. I felt a great relief that our lives to her seemed worth listening to; and in the glow of such recognition, I neglected my work from time to time.

Once I realized I had been too long away from the land which sustained me, however, I made haste to visit my crops. Though the season had been niggardly with rain, my wheat and rye were coming up hale and green, and the great patch of vegetables sent forth shoots that bore the promise of a comfortable winter. I offered a moment's praise for the bounty of the garden, wishing I had my brother's facility for offering up thanksgiving in verse. How much sweeter it must thus be in the ear of the Creator. I knelt in the dirt to pluck weeds from the burgeoning plants, for they encroached upon them and sought to choke them out. My hands were, as ever, sure in their pruning—I need hardly look to know what is essential and what stands in its way. My father and his father before him pruned thus, and their knowledge lives on in my fingers. Kneeling upon the ground that day, I missed them terribly, and regretted that they would not be with me to witness the reception of an Archduke. While up in my northern fields I flung a pebble upon my grandmother's cairn and said, “Do you know yet, the Archduke's coming to visit?” She did not reply, but in the whistle of the breeze in the wheat I thought I could hear her, or whatever was left of her as she rotted beneath the ground, pricking up her ears, all strung with sea-vegetables, at such good news.

Each day we swept the hearth and the yard, and tied Elizaveta to the table leg to prevent her getting underfoot. Ruth, her hair in one silly short braid, wrote things down with her remarkable pens, stopping occasionally to peel a potato or get water; Adelaïda mended clothes and dusted the tabletop, but her excitement kept drawing her from the work of the house, and soon enough she'd be telling tales to our visitor, her face still wary, but her tongue by degrees more loose. I, imagine! I did not have the concentration to spend long days tending my fields. Tasks that required less time sat easier on my restless mind, so I made spotless the animals' stalls, then brought my sharpening stone into the yard and worked at the blades of the ax, scythes, and Adelaïda's household knives. I smoothed down the handles of splinters, and waited, my stomach awhirl, for the great event to transpire. When after a few such days I had not a tool left to mend, I brought out the churn and began to
make butter, though it had always been a woman's chore; if my ancestors looked down on me from Heaven, they laughed. The next Sabbath morning I awoke before dawn to a dream of four ghostly men, dressed in the black garb of death, come to take our stranger away, but when I woke in our great bed, I saw her sleeping peacefully on her pallet on the floor, and tried to calm the unfounded frenzy of my heart. As the sun strained groggily to appear through a thick cover of clouds, the fear gripped me that if we left for church, the Archduke would appear in our absence and be stuck with the terrorized pigs and sheep. I soon recalled, however, that even the greatest of men owes his weekly homage to his Maker, and that if we hurried home from services, we could not fail to meet our visitor.

And so our souls prevailed. We went to pay our worship, Ruth marching up the hay-strewn aisle beside us, though it wasn't, she said, her God. Father Stanislaus, though he had never been much of a speaker, gave an admirable sermon about our tolerance in accepting this stranger into our homes; he had not heard even one report of demonic behavior, and therefore urged the congregation to quit putting so much sugar in her nettle tea, lest all her pretty teeth fall from out her head. What little we knew of the ways of God, he admonished us, who might after all have even greater miracles in store. My neighbors had been somewhat skeptical of Ruth's visits, but had minded them less when she brought them gifts of gooseberries or eggs. We had never been tried before, not since the days of my grandfather, but this, our first trial, wasn't turning out so badly.