The Elder Man

  EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ®

  www.evernightpublishing.com

  Copyright© 2020 Katherine Wyvern

  ISBN: 978-0-3695-0158-5

  Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

  Editor: Devin Govaere

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEDICATION

  To Karyn White

  With many thanks for our endless, rambling, moving talks about God, gods, death, resurrection, and the eternal life of the soul.

  THE ELDER MAN

  Katherine Wyvern

  Copyright © 2020

  Prologue

  Or you could read this as an epilogue.

  Every beginning comes to an end. Every ending contains the seed of a new beginning.

  It’s up to you, really.

  Wedding Day

  Allie

  The road was a narrow ribbon of asphalt right at the top of the hills. It followed the ridge, bending and bulging this way and that, like the tail of a wandering dragon, a resemblance heightened by the freshly mown hay, which lay flat on the fields, flashing and gleaming, scaly and lizard green, in the low afternoon sun. Jean-Pierre drove carefully, as he always did, and it was a good thing, because just as he was turning left onto a narrow lane that disappeared downhill into a thickly forested valley, a small white van shot out of it, driving blindly backwards into the road.

  “Oy!” Jean-Pierre hit the brakes hard and leaned out of the window to holler at the van’s driver. “Oy, Schumacher! Putain, ce n’est pas le grand-prix ici, tu sais? Ce n’est pas le Nürburgring, bordel! Tu es un danger sur la route!”

  He was grinning hugely, as was the driver of the van, who showed him the middle finger, laughing, while he steered the van onto the side of the road, one handed. He lowered the volume of the music that blared out of the van’s loudspeakers, and Jean-Pierre asked, “Ça va?” as the two cars sat idle on the road, open window to open window. Given the level of traffic on this road, two cars could be parked there all day without causing any inconvenience to anyone.

  “Ja, super,” said Armin, the van’s driver, grinning and laying on the German accent very thickly for comical effect.

  Tall and limber as he was, he was the best roofer in the company by now, and after a week in the sun at their last building project, he was golden brown all over and spattered with dark freckles like the chest of a thrush. His hair was a blond-streaked reddish-brown mane that he tried, in vain, to keep bound in a ponytail. He puffed a strand of it out of his face and blew a kiss to Allie, who sat smiling in the passenger seat, and one to Michel in the back.

  “Armand!” squealed the child excitedly and showed Armin his own middle finger, laughing. Allie swatted his hand down and frowned, not very convincingly, judging by Michel’s undaunted grin.

  “Where are you off to so fast? You are not trying to escape from your own wedding, are you?” asked Jean-Pierre, ignoring the last exchange.

  “No, no,” said Armin. “I just have to fetch some last-minute stuff from the farm. Christine promised to make ice cream, but I could not fetch it earlier, or it would all melt.”

  Jean-Pierre nodded sagely. There were no refrigerators at Le Sureau Noir. Ice cream was a rare treat and one that could only be fetched last minute.

  “Well then, I’ll see you guys at our wedding,” said Armin, with another dazzling grin that made him look ten years younger, much too young to get married, in fact. “Did you bring a dress, Allie? You are not getting married in that old thing, are you?”

  Allie plucked at her tatty gingham shirt and made a mock-pout, but then she cracked and pointed at the back of the car where her new wedding dress hung on the back seat, wrapped in tissue paper.

  Armin showed her two thumbs-up and then sped away toward Alain’s farm, music coming loud once more from the open windows of the van. Jean-Pierre shook his head.

  “Connard,” he muttered, but he was still smiling.

  Later, after greeting everybody, she gave her future husband a good hug and retired to the bedroom to change into her dress. The house was quiet—everybody was already out in the garden—and lovely, all the windows open on the warm, fragrant evening. The breeze from the valley carried the scent of flowers and sun-baked herbs, the buzz of bees, the song of countless birds and the shrill call of the crickets.

  The girls had found the time during the day to fill every available jam jar with blue, green, and white bouquets of flowers from the garden. Borage, the last periwinkles, the first fennel, and honeywort, and the odd iris, sage, and catnip, and the ever-present elder flowers, which didn’t like to be picked and drooped a little. Even cut, even indoors, the flowers were still attended by crowds of bees and hoverflies and bumblebees and the first hawk moths.

  She pinned a few flowers in her hair, chose one of the bouquets to carry, and walked out of the house and through the garden, down to the outdoor kitchen and tables where the party was waiting for her. The moment she came out of the trees and walked into the clearing, feeling huge and self-conscious, she was greeted by a round of resounding applause. She was immediately surrounded and hugged by all the women, Ella and Edith, Meintje and Rebekka, and after a moment, they were joined by the men. Frederic and Mark kissed her gallantly on the hand. Paul squeezed her in a giant bear hug. Monet just gave a nod, shuffling his feet. Jean-Pierre kissed her almost formally on the cheek, looking awed. He was the only man in a complete city suit, tie, vest and all, and he looked very handsome and extremely smart.

  Armin walked around her—a fairly good stroll—whistling softly.

  “Wow, Allie,” he said. “Just wow!”

  “You don’t look so bad yourself,” she said, rather tremulous with all the emotion. When had Armin become so ridiculously good-looking? Tall and leanly muscular, in his pale linen shirt and trousers and jacket, he was the most beautiful young man she had ever seen, a long cry from the pimply tubular youth she had first met two years before.

  She found herself face to face with Van finally, and they embraced. “No white dress?” he asked, holding her at arm’s length and smiling.

  “Oh, Lord, no,” said Allie, laughing. “If I wore a white dress, Captain Ahab might rise from the deep to hunt me.”

  Van shook his head. “What nonsense. You are absolutely gorgeous.”

  “So are you,” she said, smoothing down his silvery beard and straightening the lapels of his jacket. He was not a man used to wearing a suit, even a casual suit like this. But he wore it well. He had not gone as far as wearing a tie. Allie suspected he would rather be hanged than be seen wearing a tie.

  “You are all gorgeous,” he said, smiling that killer smile of his and gathering both Meintje and Rebekka in a close embrace.

  Rebekka and Meintje had foregone the white dress too. Meintje wore a sort of deep orange sundress and large gold earrings, which complemented the deep glow of her black skin. Her black curls were held back by a sumptuously fringed and beaded scarf. Rebekka was dressed almost formally in a gray silk shirt and loose black pants, with a small rope of pearls around her neck. The severe, short cut of her steel-gray hair sharpened her slightly unfocused look.

  Jean-Pierre wandered off and came back with glasses of wine and one glass of juice. Allie was eight months pregnant, and looked it.

  There were three brides and three grooms and ten guests, plus the budding life in her
belly.

  They all had had their official weddings already, in Amsterdam, at the mairie in Les Eyzies and in the church of Tayac, but they all felt that this unabashedly informal and rather hippy forest party, a reunion of the friends who had seen it all begin—their true family, in a way—was their real wedding.

  They all chattered animatedly, drinking and laughing.

  “’ad a good stag night?” Jean-Pierre asked Armin.

  “Every fucking night, brother,” said Armin, raising his glass and winking, and Allie almost spit juice on her dress.

  “Armin!” she gasped.

  But all children and teens were out and about in the garden. Nothing could have kept them still on such a glorious evening.

  In fact, right then, a shrill screech came from the garden path, “Daddy, daddy, daddy, look! No feet! I’m flying!”

  Van, Jean-Pierre, and Armin all turned to see what the racket was about.

  It was Michel, coming horizontally down the path at waist height, his arms spread wide, carried at a run by Sofia and Josefine, who had him by the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants. Little Maja and Jade the hound were scampering after them. They were all in stitches.

  “Put him down!” Allie yelled, horrified. “Put him down this minute!”

  But they had already disappeared past a bend in the path, laughing and hooting.

  “Oh, let zem ’ave some fun,” said Jean-Pierre, amused, and poured her some more juice. Allie wished she could have a good tot of gin instead.

  “Yeah, what’s the worst that could happen?” said Van, grinning.

  “There’s a pond at the bottom of that path,” said Armin. “He can swim, right?” Allie shot him a reproachful look, but he just winked at her disarmingly.

  Later, at dusk, they all walked out into the garden and farther down, under huge spreading trees and tangles of wild evergreens, to the spot Van had chosen for the event.

  They all stood around the old, spreading elder tree at the bottom and center of the valley.

  Despite the woodland setting, it was not a Wiccan wedding. Allie had grown up in the Anglican church, Rebekka and Jean-Pierre were at least nominally Catholic, Meintje, a Presbyterian. Armin had been christened as a Lutheran. And there was Van, of course. Allie had no idea what exactly Van believed in. He never called himself an atheist, but he had the deep inner calm of a man who doesn’t need a god to believe in. Perhaps he believed only in himself.

  With such a diverse, secular, and rather profane congregation, it had been decided that a pastor of any sort would be out of place. Mark would officiate. As an experienced church organist, it was felt that he had sufficient ceremonial aplomb to pull off the stunt. With his silvery-white hair and moustache and shirt, he had a fine, druidical gravitas to him, which fit the surroundings. Monet’s even more oracular figure added to the ambiance.

  They all laughed a little and cried a little before the end. They were somewhat awed, too, under the great spreading boughs in the heart of the darkening forest, and Mark’s voice had a deep musical ring to it. “… and you will build together and grow together, root to blossom, and blossom to seed, in health and sickness, joy and sorrow—and by any god or goddess that resides within your hearts…”

  “I will,” they all said.

  “You may kiss the bride, then. Or groom. Whichever. Ahem,” he concluded.

  Jean-Pierre kissed Allie with laughter trembling on his lips.

  Meintje and Rebekka smiled and kissed quietly and briefly and held hands in serene silence.

  Van grinned, hugged Armin close with a hand squarely on his ass, and kissed him deep and long, so long that the young girls began to giggle uncontrollably, and Allie ahemed meaningfully.

  And in the dreamlike enchantment of that magical night, Allie thought that even the great tree above them blushed, a flare of luminous blue-green that sizzled on the tip of its arching branches and lit the forest for a moment and then was gone.

  Chapter One

  Two Years Earlier, May 2019

  Allie

  “Then there is a Mr. and Mrs. Graaf, who ask if they can split the workshop. He would do the first four days, and she, the last three.”

  “No, absolutely not,” said Van, turning from his work a moment to send her a disdainful look over his shoulder. “You know how it goes. I’ll spend the whole day bringing her up to scratch on the stuff we did when he was here. It’s an absolute no—no.”

  Allie nodded, typed busily on her tablet, and sent the reply.

  “And a Miss Janssen who wants to know if vegan food can be catered. There’s also a list of food allergies. There doesn’t seem to be a lot she can eat—”

  Van made a gesture encompassing the view outside the window, in a way that Allie—who had known him for a long time—understood to mean, “She can graze in the garden for all I care.”

  Allie hesitated a moment then typed, We regret to inform that, although the workshop’s kitchen will offer a selection of both vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes, a strictly vegan menu cannot be provided at this time.

  “Oh, fuck!” she said as the internet connection disappeared. She looked up guiltily to her four-year-old son, who played on the floor nearby. Luckily he was too absorbed to hear his mom swearing. She shook the tablet irritably and waved it about. Finally the internet connection came back. She watched as the email trickled out, bit by painfully slow bit, and she finally got a “sent” notification.

  “And Lisa and Robert, who were at the workshop in Bruniquel last year, want you to know they finished their cottage and buried their wedding rings in the wall.”

  “Well, tell them that … oh, that is actually sweet,” said Van, turning again with a dazzling smile, the smile that regularly melted knees—both male and female knees—at workshops and made even Allie, even now, after all these years, lose the thread of her thought for a moment.

  He was still the most attractive man she knew, although he was not in any way classically beautiful. When she had first met him, he had had a mane of long, long brown hair, which he tied in a knot when he worked, long before man-buns were a thing. Van being Van, now that man-buns were in, had cut it off and wore it short. He didn’t want to be mistaken for “one of these young new whippersnappers,” he had said. It was still thick, his hair, and lustrously dark, although his beard was going gray along his jawline these days. It made him, if possible, even more handsome. Middle age suited him.

  He went back to his work immediately but added. “Send them my blessings and my real affection.”

  Allie snapped out of her reverie, changed blessings and real affection to a more twenty-first-century-friendly XOXO, and sent the email.

  She sometimes thought of Van as Mr. Weasley. A wizard with an endearing but perfectly clueless fascination with non-magical people. He was a natural-born hands-on educator, although you could never foretell what tangents his thoughts would take—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll didn’t begin to cover it—and he needed a little managing in polite company.

  And outside a workshop, he was wretched at networking and absolutely hopeless at anything digital.

  He had an inexplicable aversion to technology, and even his own private inbox would remain unopened for weeks until Allie swooped in and took things in hand. Her attempt to introduce a smartphone into his life had resulted in Van ceasing to take phone calls at all, because swiping a touch screen left to right just did not compute to him. “Why can’t it have a bloody button?” he had roared.

  In any case, working a touch screen with muddy hands was obviously a messy business. Allie had finally located the smartphone, battery all empty and screen smudged with clay all over, covered in dust and cobwebs and forgotten in a corner of the tool shed. She had quietly brought it home, cleaned it up, found a new charging cord, and given it to her niece as a birthday present.

  It was a mystery how a man who could walk into virgin forest with nothing but a toolbox and a bit of tarp and build a whole astonishing house and garden
from scratch could not cope with as simple a gadget as a smartphone.

  Ever since Vezere Bauge, their natural building company, had been founded, she had taken charge of all their online presence and all the necessary logistic arrangements. It was all right, because, when Van was finally delivered to the workshop location and put in front of real living human beings, the natural materials he mastered so effortlessly, and the tools of his trade, he transformed from a cranky recluse into a dazzling, inspiring teacher. People came away from his workshops changed. Allie’s business was to make sure he got there. Once he was there, magic would happen. Still, sometimes she liked to involve him in the communications, just to make sure they were still on the same page with everything.

  “Oh, and Jörg and Anja, who were in Saint-Cirq two years ago, asked if we can take their nephew at this month’s workshop, here. It’s a bit last minute, I know, but they really begged.”

  Van frowned. “That workshop has been all booked up for months.”

  “I know. But they seemed really… worried.”

  “Worried?”

  Van finally stopped adding blobs of wet clay to the sculptural wall he was working on and turned to look at her, frowning.

  “Ye-es,” said Allie hesitantly. She had stayed in touch with Anja ever since that workshop. Sometimes the workshops were so wonderful that she made real lasting friendships with the clients. Anja and Jörg were one such case. Plus, being the chief editor of Grüner Alltag, one of the best sustainable lifestyle magazines in Germany, Anja was a useful professional contact for the company.

  Van, who was so incredibly personable and involved when teaching, so much so that people of all sexes and ages regularly fell in love with him—as she had—was less adept at keeping in touch once the workshops were over. He gave his whole on his job, unstintingly, pointing a million watts of real soulful warmth at people. And then he moved on. It was not that he didn’t care. He was just a man who lived in the moment, or perhaps in a different timeframe. He saw buildings and forests as living things with a personality, which were sown and grew and were cultivated into wise and dignified maturity. Human beings were perhaps a little transient and insubstantial in this perspective. Or maybe it was something else entirely. Even after fifteen years of the closest friendship, Allie was not sure she really knew Van.