on the front and flax on the back—it would no longer matter, because stability would inhere in the structure of the thing itself.
I signed my name to the drawing with a flourish, and took off down the road with the ink still shiny and wet. Ydlbert was outside smoking in his underdrawers, recovering from the evening’s debauchery, his balding pate bare to the morning sun as I ran past. “Hail, lad. What ails you?” he cried out to my back.
I could not stop running, but called back, “Brothers and sister came to visit.”
“What, again? Hope the wife doesn’t catch wind.”
“I’m building a new cart.”
“Godspeed,” he said, his voice disappearing into the distance. He was the only one besides my brother I could tell about visits from the dead; the only one who didn’t think such an admission stranger than icicles in May.
The sun was up, but the villagers, after a hard day’s celebration, were still asleep. My footsteps stormed along the road. Five minutes short of my destination, before a stand of oak all bursting into leaf, my brother appeared, streaking along with his cassock fluttering behind him and a sheaf of papers in his right hand. We both stopped, perplexed but smiling, before the trees. “What happened to you?” he asked.
“A new cart. You?”
“A visitation. What manner of cart?”
“Double axle.” I held the drawing out to him. “One front, one rear.”
“Ingenious. Though I wish you’d save the paper for writing.”
“The stranger’s idea. Who visited?”
“Our brothers and sister.”
My throat began to close with terror and joy. “No.”
“Verily, they came with instruments and singing to help me in my work.”
“They came also to me, singing.”
“Then let us give praise.” He bowed his head, and I bowed mine, and offered my heart’s thanks to the world that brought my siblings back to me.
“Did they tell you beware?” I asked.
“Not exactly. They wrote me some verses. I brought them to show you.” We sat down in the fragrant soil beneath the trees. “I think it’s good.”
The first sheet read:
“In the beginning there was the Light, and the Fire, and from the Light and the Fire came forth the Great Mind. In the First Ages it brought forth Darkness, and from the Darkness did it bring forth Man. From Man did it bring forth that which pertains to Man—Greed, Penury, War-Making, Ugliness, Pestilence, Sorrow, and Death. From Death did it bring forth all the other sundry Creatures, for in Death are they all the same Stuff. From Death came this great, mysterious World, and to Death does it ever and anon return. And when the World itself—yea, every Mite hereon—has returned to its final slumber, then Death, too, will die, and be subsumed into the Great Mind, and then also will the Great Mind become part once more of the Light and the Fire. And in that Age will all Creation begin anew.”
How did my brother, with whom I had sucked on chunks of sugar, have such thoughts? He was as mortal as I, raised by the same parents, three years my elder. But his mind fixed on the infinite while mine fixed on carts, crops, and weather. I suppose that a family with more than one dreamer would be cursed beyond measure; still did I envy the breadth of his mind.
“I wouldn’t,” I said, “let Father Stanislaus see it.”
“No, no.”
“Because he’s not big enough to understand it.”
“Absolutely not.”
Despite that he was in every way my superior, his eyes searched mine for deeper praise.
“It is magnificent work.”
The light in his smile would have repaid any earthly debt. “But do you think it true, brother? Does it make sense?”
“How could I know?”
He nudged my leg with a stockinged toe in his sandal. “Oh, come, Yves. What does your gut say?”
“My gut says it’s hungry, and anxious to build this new cart. And that I wish I had been you, that I had been thus blessed.”
“Nay, Yves. You’re the one with the harness.”
“A harness is worlds different from a knowledge of first things. Will you help me with the cart, anyway?”
“A knowledge of first things is not all in this world.”
“No.”
“You could speak to our brothers and sister, and see if they had anything for you to write.”
Holy man or no, I gave him a fine shove upon the shoulder. “Like what?”
“Any number of things. A ballad? Or a history?”
“Don’t be daft, monkey. Somebody’s got to till the fields.”
He stood and wiped the dirt from his cassock. “And how did you get on with your stranger last night?”
“Somewhat difficult to understand. Adelaïda seems shy of her.”
He nodded. “But she’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“A bit tart.”
“But lovely.”
“Not everything is pen and ink, Mandrik.”
“I’m aware.”
I, too, stood, and we walked at a gentlemanly pace toward my abode, our family home, where he, too, had passed the bumbling days of childhood. We walked in silence a few minutes before he began to mutter, then finally burst into song:
Alms! Alms for your Chouchou
Awakened by Visions,
Now helping his brother
Improve the life of the whole town!6
The housewives were used to his sweet tenor, and began appearing at their doorways with baked apples, cheeses, and hunks of dark bread. They bowed their heads to him as he accepted their offerings into his capacious sleeve. The Widow Tinker, who still cooked as if she had a great family, though her daughters were long since married off, wrapped him a whole leg of lamb in a cloth and bade him Godspeed. When he was sufficiently laden, he held open the cache to me, saying, “Here, have a nosh before we get there.” I accepted a hunk of ripe cheese and a heel of black bread from the alms sleeve—grateful for my brother’s skills, however odd—and dreamed of my new cart as we walked.
Mandrik dumped his booty on the floor of the barn. When Hammadi blew him a welcome, he gave her an apple and a pat on the nose, but turned immediately
