PASSE-PARTOUT: Book Two, Chapter 7
The house lay empty in the crag of the mountain and the sun and the rain fell through the windows. Time dried the remainders of Amos and the starved Isla, and the glade began its slow invasion of the dirt floor of the house. The passage of years went by, and the house stayed undiscovered, its stone walls doing their best to resist the world. The parchment, kept in its wooden box with all the implements of its making, remained stored behind a loose stone in the wall.
Twenty years went by with not a single human footprint placed within the house. In middle of winter on the tenth year, a stranger, a man, pushed through the weeds and grasses to make his way into the house. His rough boots scraped along the floor brushing past the dry yellow vines and stopped at the two corpses. One of them was wearing scorched clothes and the other, a woman, had hands gnarled up and a jaw that was opened as if in a scream. The gape unsettled the man and he stepped back. His heel caught on a stray root and fell back, his head missing the corner of the table by a half-inch, and he landed flat on his back. The landing crushed a cough from his lungs, and it was a little while before he chose to stand up again. He got to his feet and walked over to the burned one. The man knelt down and touched the corpse’s face. A sigh escaped his lips, and he began to weep.
Oh Amos…I’m sorry I’m so late. What happened to you?
The man found Amos’s shovel in a bin at the back of the room and set to clearing a square of pasture for the graves. The ground had turned to almost stone in the winter, so the man had to settle for two shallow graves. He buried them, placed stones over the mounds, and found two large rocks to serve as markers. He stood up, looked at the graves, and shivered as the winter wind flew in from the open glade. It was time to start a fire.
The floor’s dried weeds and roots made kindling for the fire and the man began to clean up the rest of the structure. He righted what he could in the evening by the fire’s light. (There were no candles, no lamps.) And, as the night continued on, he grew tired and fell asleep sitting against the wall nearest the fire.
Morning arrived. The man arose and looked about the room. In what few pieces of furniture there were, there was only a couple of bins for storage. He went through each one, looking in knotholes and cracks.
Did he burn them? He wouldn’t have burnt them. Either they were taken, or he hid them somewhere.
The villagers had told him that the Amos’s barn had burned to the ground, and what remains there were of the artifice were scraps of charred or melted metal from tools he had waiting to be repaired. The man had looked over the site of the barn, but there was nothing left except for a few places of stacked stone where the foundations were built.
Amos had left a coded message on a large tree near the ruins—a marker to find Amos’s house, and the man had followed the creek bed to the glade and from then on to the crevice in the side of the mountain. He almost skipped over the place, having at first seen nothing but vegetation: vines and tall grasses disguised the house from passers-by.
He looked at every inch of the furniture, looking to find perhaps a secret notch where secret things could be hidden. Having found none, the man began to look at every stone that made up the walls of the house. Near the uppermost row, a stone was looser, more ill-fitted than the rest, and it fell into the man’s hands when he jostled it. Inside the space was a box. Inside the box was a roll of parchment, a metal nib, and a wooden stylus. The man sat the box on the table, its lid open. He sat on the bench and looked at it for a long time, thinking what should be done. Amos had told the man to follow him, to help him with finishing the old man’s task, that there would be things to do that Amos felt he could not do alone.
The man unrolled the parchment and took a deep breath at their contents. Each building, each avenue, every detail was constructed with the tiny script, each letter burned into the parchment, each word not the man’s own. Amos had told him that the parchment was very important, that it was most important. The man knew Amos to be a good man, and a sane man at that. He also knew that Amos knew things that any person should not, that Amos dealt with strange people—people who looked, acted, spoke in strange tongues. Amos was a father to him, as he was to almost any person who would come across his path, but he was also a priest, also a doctor, also a teacher. He seemed to know more, but he was not a braggart. One only realized the extent of Amos’s knowledge by accident. When the man was only ten years old, he got very sick. His parents later told him that they were preparing for his death, but one particular evening, Amos arrived at their door, saying that he thought he could help the child if they would like for him to try. Having done everything they knew to do, and everything the other healers had known to do, they let him in. The old man prepared a paste from a bag of dried leaves he was carrying. That he had the boy eat on bread, but then the old man stayed by the boy’s side, having the child drink as much water at the sick boy could drink. Amos sat in the boy’s room, kneeling on the floor, praying to God for the health of the boy. The parents sat on the other side of the room, awaiting the child’s passing.
In the morning, the boy’s fever broke in a tremendous flop-sweat and, though weak and tired, felt better. The parents tried to pay the old man whatever they could, but he refused, saying, “I did nothing. All I am, all that happened in there is God’s work. You may curse me someday though for saving the boy to live in this world.” With that, Amos turned and exited the door. But, through the years, the boy’s family became friends with the old man, and the boy grew to be a man and still he considered himself a child when talking to Amos. He loved him as he did his own kin. The man knew of at least half a dozen other people who could tell similar stories about Amos, and they were all saddened when Amos told them he was going to leave.
“I have to go. I cannot stay in one place for all my life, and I want to see more before I die. I love you all.”
Some asked to go with him, including the man, but he denied them all. “Do not follow me. Where I go you should not follow. You are happy. Here you will stay happy.”
But the night before he left, Amos caught up with the man walking home from his work in town. They both walked slowly through the fog, down a path occasionally lit by windows of houses where supper was being prepared and families sat around their fires.
“I am so happy to find you before I left,” Amos said. “I thought about walking to your house, but I wanted to speak to only you—without distraction and without other listeners.”
“I’m glad,” the man replied, “I wanted to ask you why you are leaving, but I’ve thought you would have told us if you wanted us to know. And, I did not believe you when you announced your leaving to us.”
“I told you that then so that I would not be questioned further. I need your help. Where I go, I go to complete a work given to me by God, but I cannot finish it by myself. I think you would go with me many places, to see many things in this world,” Amos paused, “How far will you follow?”
The man looked at Amos, breathed, and said “I will go where you tell me. You saved me once and have looked after me since then. I will go where you tell me.”
Amos told of a village he had once been through but did not know if it still existed. And he told the man of a creek that flowed through the village and through the forest and into a valley. He told of a glade and a crevice in a mountain where he would like to build a house suitable for his work.
“Follow me in three years. I will be finished with the work that I can do when you get there. Follow me there and you can help me finish.”
At that the old man and young man parted ways and the younger went home and could not sleep that night for thinking of Amos’s request and what the young man agreed to. He wanted to go now and walk with the old man to that village and into the glade and help him with his work. He loved him so and to have him leave now was akin to his own father dying before the years had sown gray though the temples of his head. When his father died, the young man looked to Amos to be his father. He did not wish it to happen again.
In the morning, there was a pouch hanging on a nail in the lentil of the door. The man’s name, “Cyprus,” was burned in an elegant script upon the leather. The man took the pouch, opened it, and inside was a piece of parchment written in the same elegant hand:
“I taught you to read. Now please read this. God has told me to write newness into the world. I don’t know what God wants, but I shall try to do what he asks. All I have is parchment and pen, fire and smoke. In three years, come seek me out and I will know what God wants of me, and you will help me complete it, because I am old and cannot do many things anymore. I will know what I need of you by then, but be assured, no matter what, your assistance will be needed.
Cyprus folded the parchment and placed it back into the pouch. The next year, he met a woman and fell in love. They married soon thereafter. Their lives were as the whirlwind and soon there were children, and Cyprus remembered the old man’s request and ignored it. His wife and his family were here and no matter what his promise to Amos, they needed him more. But, at times of quiet, Cyprus’s mind turned to the old man and his request, and Cyprus’s own denial.
The children grew and were old enough to work as apprentices and helpers in their village. His wife grew lovelier as age worked its way through their lives, but, fifteen years in, a hard winter fell on the village and Cyprus’s children fell of sickness, and his wife fell of sadness. And on the edge of the winter’s breaking, Cyprus took his pouch, his things, and left for the old man’s home.
Cyprus unrolled the pages upon the table in the house at the foot of the mountain and placed the writing implements on the corners to keep the parchment from recurling. He leaned over the parchment and studied the words that made up each individual line of the drawing. He recognized that the shapes were letters of some sort, but the language was unfamiliar to him. He moved his finger along the words and realized that what he had first thought was ink was actually lines charred into the parchment. He looked at the nib and the stylus on the corners of the drawing.
Is this what he wanted me to help him finish?
The thought that Amos had been a little touched first occurred to Cyprus when the old man requested his help. But he put that thought away because even though Amos’s request was odd, he had never acted in any way that seemed unmindful. Also, no one ever wants to believe that their father was getting older or was losing his mind. But, now, the prospect seemed very real to Cype.
What have I done? I’ve left my home to follow a man who went insane because I am insane, too?
He picked up the nib and fitted the blunt end into the scorched port of the stylus and scratched a circle into one of the clean sheets. It carved an almost infinitely thin line of parchment which curled like a loose spring above the table’s plane. Cype lifted the fragment and twirled it between his fingers. A momentary break in the clouds allowed a single rafter of light to catch the moving helix and throw its shadow onto the drawing on the table. It was so light, Cype thought that this was what holding a thumbprint must be like. He tossed it on the table and sat, looking over what must have been years of work and trying to figure out what to do next.
“Why am I here, Amos?” he asked to the room. Nothing answered. The long edge of the parchment creaked as a bit of breeze caught it and it started to roll back up again.
“I can’t go home for another four months; winter will catch me and keep me. Can you at least tell me what to do?”
Again…nothing. Cype breathed and rolled the parchment up and placed back into its place. He held the constructed pen, looked at its blue-black streaks carbonized into the pits along its longitude.
It is a long winter and I’ve got to eat. Cype looked at the stylus, maybe you can find me food, eh? The pen rested in his fingers, dumb. He dissembled the pen and placed it alongside the parchment in its box.
“I will figure out what to do with you. Yours is not a life of luxury,” he spoke to the air. “We need fire.”
There was enough food in his pack for two or three days of traveling and he made it into that night’s dinner. Fire curved back and forth in the air, casting patterns into the stone walls. Cype sat by the fire, staring into the flames, into its sunset core. The windows and door were blanketed, but every so often the wind defeated them and flew through the house as an invisible river. Cype pulled his own blanket about his shoulders and huddled closer to the fire. He felt the winter would freeze his spirits, if not him, and he went to the loose stone, retrieved the box, and assembled the stylus and nib.
“How do I do this, Amos?”
He placed the nib on one of the rocks that made up the retaining wall of the fire. After staring upon it a good while, Cype picked it up with the tongs and placed it in the stylus, then took to writing on the clean parchment. A fine spiral of material rose like again from the surface. He looked at the nib and then at the fire, then tossed the nib into the sun at its center. The metal remained turned black, then, in a moment, started to glow orange. Cype seized the nib with the tongs and attached it to the stylus. He began to draw another circle on the parchment. As he pulled the nib across the surface, a wisp of smoke rose and was claimed by the night wind. A faint line the color of wet sand illuminated the path left by the stylus. Cype moved the parchment close the fire and smiled. He removed the nib and pitched it into the core again and began feeding the fire, letting it burn as hot as he could without catching the room itself aflame. The metal grew white-hot and warmed the fingers of the tongs to a dark red. The stylus gave off another wisp as the nib was attached. This time, the line burned dark and black, a permanent ink into the scroll.
“I know how you did it, now,” he whispered to the stylus.
“Now tell me why.”
All the night, Cype kept feeding wood from the pile into the fire, kept the recharging the stylus, kept drawing lines and shapes and words into the parchment, hoping, perhaps, that Amos would be there to guide his hand.