Free Far Far Away by Tom McNeal

moon, Wilhelm said, “All those marvelous places.” It was a soft, damp evening. The village butcher, passing by with his terrier, touched his hat to us. We had just turned up our lane when Wilhelm said, “We must go to these many places, Jacob, before we rest.”
    But we had our tales to transcribe and then the great dictionary to compile. One works and works, and then one morning the elm tree outside one’s study shatters into the smallest of pieces, and the room in which one sits shatters, and the niece with whom one sits shatters, too, and—
blitzschnell!
—in the quickest instant the life that one has taken as one’s daily due has been converted to this … what? … this place between smelling andtasting, between speaking and being heard, between living and finding peace.
    But Wilhelm’s words
—We must go before we rest
—had given me an excuse for movement. In one of the tales, a princess searching for her twelve brothers says that to find them she would travel as far as the sky is blue. It is a beautiful phrase, one that Wilhelm himself added, and it seemed now to command my own quest. I would travel as far as the sky was blue to find him. I needed no shelter, no food, no fire, no rest. However forlorn a ghost might be, he moves quickly and smoothly, without pause or break, and that was what I did.
    China, Mongolia, the Yukon, on and on, all of those places Wilhelm had wanted to go, everywhere looking for Wilhelm’s genial face, but I did not find him, and as months passed and then years, my hopes grew fainter. He was not here. He had not waited for me. He had passed on, and I had not.
    Decades slipped past. Wars, famines, inventions. A century, finally, and half of another.
    Then one day I found myself drifting with the wind across the grassy American plains, and I spied at a distance a specter working his way into the wind. He moved slowly—with the wind behind me, I covered four lengths to his one—and soon we approached each other.
    I nodded at him and saw in his dull, desperate eyes my own dull desperation.
    Wait
, I said. To my own surprise, I said this.
    I did not expect him to turn, but he turned and hovered, leaning into the wind, waiting for me to speak again.
    I am looking for my Bruder Wilhelm Grimm
.
    The dead man stared at me for a few moments and then—how surprised I was!—his lips curled into the slightest smile, which I beheld as a man in the desert might behold water.
    I know who you were
, he said,
and who your brother was, though I have not seen him. As a boy, I read your tales
.
    This news had a soothing effect on me.
    For a long time
, he said,
I thought the Brothers Grimm wrote those fairy tales. Not until I was a grown man did I learn you had collected them from others
.
    From this I knew he had not been dead as long as I, for when I was alive, few would have made this mistake.
Yes
, I said,
most of the tales came from citizens of Hesse, where we lived for a long time, so, for my brother and me, the associations were tender
.
    We talked for some time, though the man’s smile had now dried up and he kept peering north, into the wind, as if he had some appointment there to keep. I asked him if we might travel together in search of my brother, but he said he could not. He must travel on, against the wind.
    For how long?
    He looked at me with hollow eyes.
Until I no longer must
.
    Why?
I asked.
Why into the wind? What for you is the thing undone?
    He bent his head and said,
On the answer to that question I will float away from this wretched place
.
    So he, too, was enduring his own form of living
Hölle
.
    We parted company, that desperate soul and I, but a short time later I detected his voice carrying downwind to me:
Hallo, hallo
.
    I turned and saw him at a great distance motioning me hisway. He could not come with the wind, so I must go into it. It took some effort, but in time I had overtaken him.
    Yes?
    I have remembered something that may be of interest to you. In a town