Sweeter Than All the World (6 page)

The executioner said, “Hold fast to God, Mother, don’t be deceived.”

So she stepped up onto the bench. He was preparing the irons to chain her to the stake, and the priest cried out, so that all the people crowded into the square must hear him, women and men and small children held up high in the arms of their parents to see:

“Mother Weynken, do you gladly die as a Christian?”

She answered clearly, “Yes, I do!”

“Are you sorry you have erred?”

“I once did err and for that I am sorry. But this is no error. I hold fast to God.”

When she said this, the executioner laid a rope around her neck and in his kindness began to strangle her. When he had finished that at last, and she moved no more, he set the wood on fire.

After Auntie Lijsbeth and I finished milking, we fed our animals in their stalls and pens. The steel soldiers with the confiscation papers had not come yet. My aunt was in the pantry pouring the milk out carefully to cool and set for the night. I sat on my stool in our hearth. I watched our peat fire burn under the cooking grate, so quick and changing, so beautiful. Frisian peasants cannot afford wood. Of course, we are not state executioners.

Many times my mother had told me the Bible story of Moses. He heard the voice of God Himself speak to him from out of the fire.

I began to listen to this fire. From the wide, high darkness of the barn opening behind me I could hear the animals, the sounds of their large, uncomprehending bodies sinking gently into sleep. Otherwise there was nothing; I could hear nothing.

Listen, my mother whispers, her finger in my ear.

So I lean down. At the edge of the grate I point my finger into the low blue flame. Still nothing. I push more of my hand forward into the larger, leaping flames, my finger pointing; I am listening as hard as I can. At last I see that my whole hand is buried in the blazing coals. And then, finally, I hear something, yes, I can hear it more and more clearly. And I recognize it too. It sounds like a scream.

A
DAM’S HEAD RINGS IN ENORMOUS SILENCE
. His two rifle shots exploding at his ear have vanished over the land like air; the caribou jerked and twisted a little, staggered, but did not fall. Back sagging lower, but it would not. The immense bow of its sixtined upper rack, the double blades of its lower shovels start to draw its superb head down to the rocky tundra, its breath snores, but its legs are splayed, erect and solid. Adam takes a step, and sees a distant lake between them.

Why won’t it—quick, another bullet, exactly behind the front shoulder. He pulls the trigger.

A crack, a thud, and nothing. The caribou bull stands immovable, white neck braced down between its thin framework of dark legs. Nose snoring blood.

Adam mutters, “Good god, why—” staring, and for an instant the caribou’s snow-white ruff lurches at him like a childhood memory of a woman’s high winter collar and her round
face turning—his head spins in vertigo; he crunches sideways in the lichen.

Eric hisses beside him. “Goddamn it, hit the legs!”

But Adam’s left arm muscles bunch, cramp, the .306 sinks to point at his own foot.

“Shit!” and Eric’s rifle fires. The bull’s front leg disintegrates, and it starts to crumple,
again!
and its rear hoists sideways; topples over. On the lip of the ridge where it rose up over them there remains against the far lake only the long curved stem of one antler, the flare of its tined bone flower.

“I told you they’re tough.” Eric is walking up the ridge, fast. “Rack growing, summer fat, they’re full of juice.”

Adam clicks his rifle on safety. A wave like nausea soaks through him. He sinks onto his heels, balancing with the rifle clutched erect in front of him, the way Napoleon Delorme showed him the Dene rest when there’s no rock handy, rest, but always alert on the open barrenlands. You think you can see everything, Napoleon said, it looks flat and the slopes to the ridges like there seem close and easy, but it fools you, there’s wrinkles all over land like any old face—laughing—and gullies and water and niggerheads, a caribou will surprise you, just come up outta nowhere, huh! she sees you and you move and she’s gone again.

But this one came up and saw him and stopped. Who can know the way of the wind or the caribou? So the Dene said.

Or a woman. Susannah Lyons. Who had stopped and studied him and said she wanted to marry him. She had.

Their mutual friend Eric Gunnarson is up on the ridge hauling at the antlers of this caribou bull dead at last, twisting him over on his back to butcher. Adam is more than a thousand
miles away from her; north, ever north, another thousand and more to the limit of Ellesmere Island and everlasting ice until north bends south into Siberia, the Mennonite name for suffering and the Bolshevik beast Stalin—sweetest shit! as Eric would say. Adam feels himself vertical in flat landscape, an engaged man standing in a museum diorama of Canada with tundra, September shining on the circle of horizon, two clusters of Dene far away skinning caribou; all painted.

But John L in his bright red jacket is moving, coming towards him and Eric and hoisting his rifle over his head in recognition of their kill.

Carefully Adam straightens up. He feels good, the air in his nostrils blue as Edmonton spring, with a lace of Arctic cold. He walks a hoof trail between stones up the ridge. Eric has cut off the dark head with its open eyes and is laying it aside, propped over on the incredible curve of its antlers. Such immense bows of bone sprouting on a slender head, they seem longer than the mound of body; there is still the ragged velvet of growing on the tips of their tines.

“Nice one, you hit him dead right,” Eric says. “So dead he couldn’t fall over.”

Adam can, thankfully, focus on the detached body, the splintered bones. He says, “You really smashed him.”

Eric is concentrating on anatomy, not catching his tone. “Lucky shots.” He searches in the white hair between the splayed hind legs, finds a hold. “Here’s where you start.”

And his knife unzips the tight hide, one quick line running open from the back vent and curving close, not touching scrotum or ridge of penis, and through the bullet-smashed blood of the ribs; lays it open to white fat streaked with red, deep blood-cratered
muscle. Not slowly, centimetre by centimetre, the way they worked together for months on the endlessly enduring, formaldehyded cadaver in their human anatomy lab in medical school: here Eric is strictly a butcher unparcelling meat, Adam reminds himself, good fresh meat to eat with gratitude.

John L in his blazing red jacket stands in front of Adam, his face dark with happiness. Annual fall hunt on the tundra: you get off the plane onto shore and within an hour you have first kills. “Good. Lots of rump fat, that’s where they store it.” And he laughs aloud. “Power right there for jumping them sweet little cows!”

Eric says, “Adam shot it.”

“I hit him, twice, spine and heart I thought, but he wouldn’t fall, he just stood.…”

John L says, suddenly quiet, “Sometimes they’re dead on their feet but won’t go down, like, Hey, this is my land, I live here, who are you?”

Adam’s mind goes blank; the sky settles over him like a pale, thin bowl. After a time he sees that John L is offering him his hunting knife.

“If you want.” His voice in the gentle Dene tone of suggestion. At first Adam thought it was merely their inflectionless way
of speaking English, until he realized they did not speak in orders. “You can offer thank you, to the caribou spirit, this gift. You can lay a bit of liver on the ground for him, and eat some.”

Eric’s knife has stopped unlayering skin from fatty ribs in a hollow of bullet blood. Adam accepts John L’s knife, already slippery with other fat, and kneels down on the lichen; he opens the given body and does that.

He carries the caribou he killed but could not make fall. Every bit of its red meat and fat and heart and brain and the rest of the liver he had not offered or eaten, bundled in its own brownish-grey-and-white hide. One hundred and twenty, perhaps thirty pounds, John L said as he and Eric hoisted it carefully onto his lower back and he smoothed the carrying band of the tumpline across his forehead. He could stand easily enough, the bundle such a warm, settled weight squarely on his hips with his back and neck tilted taut in a straight line holding it. You know the direction to camp? John L asked. That ridge with the boulder, from there you’ll see, you can rest backed against it so you won’t break your back lifting. Eric laughed and said, Next time shoot a smaller one. John L said, balancing him, It’s not you, as Adam took his first steps, staggering a little. It’s the caribou, caribou test you.

Kathy leans at right angles over a fire between three stones on the open tundra, frying bannock. She slides in another piece of the split spruce they brought on the plane, exactly so the flames touch only the pan, wasting nothing. Sleeves pushed up, black hair tied back, glasses.

“Nice big meat you carried,” she says, “and tomorrow your back will feel it!”

“It already does,” Adam says. “Not bad, it just knows.”

She laughs. He thinks, She could certainly carry a hundred and fifty pounds on a tumpline across the tundra, as many miles as necessary to bring it to home camp, stocky, legs solid and planted like that on the hard ground. Then she straightens up, and her woman’s shape moves under her bulky clothing, the neckerchief and thick jacket with white polar bears down the black sleeves and blue pants inside rubber boots doubled over: her brown skin would contain her so perfectly, her arms, shoulders, her breasts, they would be heavy, the push of her knee, the loose pants cannot hide the long, narrow space between her thighs.

“Here,” Kathy says. She has cut the golden bannock in the frying pan and is offering him half on her knifepoint. “You work, you get food.”

Deep-fried and hot, unfathomably good in the colder air. Napoleon Delorme materializes at the tent opening: Adam has not known he was in there, but where else would he be? As he said, he is long past being a hunter, even now when a plane flew in an hour what was once three weeks of heavy paddling and portaging. Napoleon, resting his ancient bones for the evening.

“I can still smell that bannock,” he says. Kathy snorts with a grin, offers him the other half. He takes it in his bare hand and folds himself down cross-legged beside Adam on his stone. “I gotta eat lots now, for all the starving I did when I was a kid.”

“No caribou then?”

“Oh, lots, more than now, but you never know where they come, you can’t sit and look out of a window and fly around and find them caribou travelling along below there.”

Kathy says, “But the Old Ones have power, didn’t they, to find them?”

“Yeah, sometimes, sometimes they had power, they could know where they were coming south with their little calves. My grandfather Pierre had power. One fall he told us it would be Winter Lake and we paddled there straight up the Yellowknife River, that’s an easy way north, only two weeks and there they came, thousands, we snared them among the last trees around the lake all winter, we didn’t even need expensive bullets. But sometimes …” He shakes his head sadly inside the hood of his huge parka. His face tight and dark like polished stone.

Abruptly he laughs. “That’s why I got my name!”

“Oh, Grandpa!” Kathy exclaims, bent at the fire.

But Napoleon has a new listener. “My grandfather Pierre was never happy with his power, the people always needed help and power is always responsibility, it’s so much work, and there were the whites, traders and priests and government eating better than he and it looked like they never worked at all, so he sent my uncle Joseph and my mother to school to learn what white people know so they wouldn’t have to work either.”

Napoleon chuckles. Surprised, Adam asks, “He sent his children to residential school?”

“It was day school then. In winter they’d move to Providence before Christmas and my grandfather Pierre hunted and trapped and the Oblate Fathers taught the kids to read. My mom was very little but she knew her grandfather’s name had been Napoleon, and the priests taught her about the first one, a very Big Man they said, emperor of France. She loved that big map they had, they told her it was the real picture of the world, and she drew it exactly on one sheet of paper. I was born a lot later, but she still had her school picture of the world and sometimes when it was so cold in winter I’d sit in her lap and she’d
say, ‘That’s your name, Napoleon, that’s a big name, big enough for an emperor.’ And she’d laugh and fold open her map. It was grey and pretty worn out, but she’d coloured France and Russia red. ‘When you’re big you’ll march into Russia too, just like the emperor, but you’ll come from here, see, from the back, up the long tail of Russia from Alaska, not from the front where they’re watching, and so you’ll surprise them and take over that big city Moscow easy. Its roofs are all gold,’ she said, ‘and you’ll live there rich all your life and never be hungry!’ ”