PASSE-PARTOUT: Book Two, Chapter 8
Cype hunted for food and water during the day and practiced with the stylus at night. He didn’t want to use the parchment, for he felt that Amos had some purpose to the stuff, so instead he wrote on pieces of aspen bark and on pieces of leather he had around, but those things were hard to use, and he did not think they were good substitutes.
I have to go into the village, he thought.
The last time he went through was on his journey to the house, he tried to avoid the villagers except to ask about the barn. The less people know about me, he thought, the better off Amos and I will be. Of course, this was before he had discovered Amos’s and the woman’s bodies. But this time he would have to talk to others to get the supplies he needed. He was not a great hunter and the garden had been overgrown. He would have to trade.
The creek bed was almost overgrown with dead grasses. It had been a long time since water had flowed here. Even the greedy roots of cypresses had gnarled into dormancy. Cype walked along the creek bed, passed the site of the barn, and finally arrived at the village. The winter wind was throwing itself through its hollow street, but people still walked down the sides, trying to walk as near the buildings as possible without getting splinters. Cype walked to the trade house, nodded at a trader walking out and entered the clapboard hut.
The smell of dried herbs met him. He inhaled deep and closed his eyes for a moment. It was the smell of living activity. The keeper of the store, a man with gray temples, stood at a table counting small pelts into piles, paying attention to the color of each one and marking down what Cype assumed to be numbers onto a piece of paper, or, as Cype hoped, parchment.
Cype approached the man and waited for him to look up from his work. The man paused, made another notation on the paper, and looked up.
“I need a few things. What do you take for trade?” Cype asked.
The keeper coughed and picked up a rough-bound book, consulted its pages. “I need furs, seeing that its winter; and I need food, something that will keep. Other than that, you have nothing to offer.”
Cype looked around the room and took in the inventory. He returned his gaze to the keeper and asked “Do you remember the old man in the barn? What did he trade you?”
The keeper raised his head, kept silent for a breath, and looked Cype in the eyes. “He gave our son back to my wife and me. He gave my boy back his breath; he gave us our life. I would not take his work, but he offered it anyway. I would have given him the night and day if he would have but asked. Do not pretend you can offer the same. You cannot offer in all your lives what he gave freely to us in one.”
The keeper’s passionate honesty caught Cype unprepared. He looked at the keeper and wept, “I knew the old man. His name was Amos. I found him dead in his home and he lies buried next a woman in the glade near that house. I do not claim to be his equal. He should have been my father, and I neglected him. He asked me to come here to help him and I waited. I could have taken my family to this place years ago and all would be alive, but I am a coward and took his truths as the babbling of an old man. You love him. I loved him. And he is gone.”
The keeper looked him over, wiped Cyprus’s tears with his hand and held both shoulders in his hands. “I loved him, and he is gone. And any person that loved him is worth loving. I can help you.”
Cype smiled and rubbed his eyes and the keeper brought him to the table and placed before him a cup of water to drink.