Sweeter Than All the World (7 page)
Read Sweeter Than All the World Online
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
They are laughing around the three-stone fire, their sounds thin as stray hairs adrift in space, taking golden Moscow from the barrens of the Northwest Territories with Dene carriers trudging towards camp packing meat on tumplines as they have for ten thousand years. Flee Canada for Russia—not the story Adam had heard in his Alberta bush, often in icy winter on his mother’s warm lap, though he had never gone hungry either. For his parents Moscow was hungry misery and abrupt, inexplicable release into a strange land for a few, but banishment for most. Banished home. How is that possible? Adam is laughing at the Dene conquest of Moscow, but he is also on the edge of crying. Clearly this tundra space, where a person walking is always less than a mere speck, is nevertheless home to Napoleon; and Kathy too.
Legs straight and body bent down to a fire burning under nothing but sky: a beautiful woman. Adam feels Susannah sing in his head, she has taught him how a woman’s contained and perfect shape can drench his mind and seep through his body; he has to straighten up, stretch out his legs, the stone under him so hard and raw suddenly he has to stand, move, walk away, down to the narrow sand of the lake where the Otter backed them in on its pontoons, where they grabbed their packs and scrambled
through brush up to the level of the tundra and instantly saw the caribou. A line of pencil dots between grey knobs of hills, dots bunching and shifting shapes below the horizon, vanishing as they all stared without even a moment to unstrap binoculars. “Look there,” John L said beside him. To the right, there they were too, so close they became huge individual animals walking a steady single line, their brownish-white bodies seemingly so close, their necks and shoulders hung thick as snow, their high shovelled antlers bowed forward over their precise heads, walking south on the skyline as if above and far beyond them, travelling on air.
Susannah, his long-legged Susannah. “I’m all he’s got.” Bud Lyons, he thinks, you can have every bit of her that’s daughter, she has more than enough life and love as wife with me.
Susannah, the intense joy of his life, which for so long had been hardened into nothing but concentrated, laborious study. Medicine. It was impossible, but nevertheless necessary, to know everything concerning the human body; body models did not change every year like cars, they were always all the same, like a smashed caribou chest—and also always infinitely different like every other smashed caribou chest. Every body was capable of growing things until then undreamed of, to say nothing of the brain that controlled the mind or the infinite corpuscularization of feelings. But when they two discovered each other, gradually over months like an inevitability edging closer, in every concentration of endless medicine he began to realize she permeated him with her undemanding or arguing presence like blood beating, she was there in any split-second slit of his concentration. And when they were together every other body vanished, the University of Alberta Hospital with its six or seven hundred beds
filled with sick, screaming, healing, dying, weeping or overjoyed people dropped away, gone. Talking, enfolded in arms, twisting wits, the lengths of their bodies, a room, a couch, a bedsheet a world enough.
Then why is he apprehensive? Face it: here on a staggering landscape he has never before seen, he’s afraid.
Four weeks from today, on October 7 in Edmonton; Saturday.
“Na oba doch,”
his mother said softly in Lowgerman, which of course Susannah could not understand. “At least, it has to be in a church. Our last boy and we see his bride once and the second time they’re just written together?”
He wanted to yell at her, Because getting written together can be just one more suffering for you, how can this be
God’s will
if you don’t
suffer?
But he saw Susannah had understood his mother’s tone, if not her words, and he controlled himself.
“No, no, Mam, in a chapel, United Church, and you and Dad will come, yes? I’ll drive down and get you.”
“Where will we stay?”
No relative within three hundred miles of Edmonton.
“It’s all arranged,” he assured her. “The guest room at St. Stephen’s residence, the same hall as my room, I’ll be right there and Susannah’s father will bring you back, he says he’d like to look around Lethbridge, he’ll bring you home.”
“What kind of name is that, ‘Lyons’?”
“Bud Lyons … I guess it’s English, they came from the States after the war. And he’ll drive you back in his big car all in one day, he said, he’d be very happy to do it.”
Susannah’s green eyes watching told him again: I want her there, I want them both there, my mother’s gone and she has to be there, so be a good and considerate son to her, try, for once.
“And everything English,” his mother said sadly.
“You want to bring Preacher Puddel Reima up there to—” He caught himself, explained again, steadily, “Susannah and I are getting married,” and standing there with his right arm around her shoulders, looking into his mother’s grey eyes, Adam knew that it would happen. “And Susannah does not understand German.”
She said into his ear, “Tell her, in the ceremony we can have a Mennonite German hymn.”
“What? Who’ll sing it? Nobody’ll know a word of German.”
“She and your father, they sing beautifully.”
“Sing … a duet?”
Adam recognizes his feet walking the curved margin of the tundra lake, along the many shovel-footed tracks left in the sand by caribou. Here and there their trails lead aside, cut up the bank and radiate in worn lines over the tundra; so much like the paths trodden deep into poplar bush where he once brought the cows home for milking that he looks around, almost expecting leaves to flicker above him. But only immense bluish sky streaked with thin, fast clouds; running, like the caribou.
His apprehension wasn’t about his mother—and certainly not his father, who looked at Susannah and laughed aloud; to him she was simply beautiful, a golden girl tall and
strong and English, you’ve found yourself such a bride! Their song, Susannah said, would be the most beautiful part of the ceremony.
“They have the steady, delicate sound,” she told him, “of medieval angels.”
“So where have you heard medieval angels?”
“Goof, you know what I mean.”
“It could be … as long as they don’t sing Dad’s all-time favourite:
“Here on earth now I am a pilgrim,
And my pilgrimage, my pilgrimage, is not long.”
Susannah said, “You told me Mennonites sing that at funerals. This is our wedding.”
“You don’t know my mother. Her life motto is, We have here no abiding city, for we seek the one to come.’”
Eric, plough-straight-ahead roommate, would have none of that. “Mothers are fine, in their place—the past. So,” and he threw his big body on his residence bed set at right angles to Adam’s so they could talk more easily, “you graduate in the top third of the class, you can choose anywhere in Canada to intern, and practise, and get rich, a beautiful girl is in love with you, she’s so smart she’ll have a Ph.D. before you’ve finished interning, but despite everything she loves you and you love her, so what’s the matter?”
“Getting married isn’t all-night cramming and you ace a test.”
“Hey, I never said it, but hell, this one’s made in
heaven, everything right here in St. Steve’s Chapel, walk down the hall, just you two and three parents and twenty friends and a minister, a mountain hotel Thanksgiving weekend lovering and you’re back in classes, both, the world goes on as it should, but together … so?”
Purest Eric logic: one of the reasons they had roomed together comfortably for three years. Unworried and unhurried, he would certainly make a very good, practical doctor. He was born in Yellowknife where his father managed a gold mine, but there was no way he’d go into a goddamn hole a mile in the ground. His big body had the steady, delicate craftsman’s hands of a surgeon; unlike Adam, who certainly didn’t want to spend his life searching for and cutting things out of people’s bodies and sewing them shut again; who sometimes couldn’t remember why he was in medicine at all.
“In grade twelve this teacher, Frank Bargen, got me really interested in history, about the city-state Danzig—” Adam stopped; that was too ridiculously personal even for midnight confidences. “He also got me reading a book, too, called
The Bloody Theatre or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians
, a huge collection of stories of people who were killed during the Reformation, hundreds of them.”
“Good god,” Eric said, “a history of fanatics? And really horrible?”
“Oh yeah, blood and burning and beheading, drowning, lots of it.”
“Sounds great for a growing boy,” Eric laughed. “Pretty kinky teacher.”
“He wasn’t kinky at all, he told me history wasn’t just
kings conquering worlds, it was people living lives, as they had to, as they believed. Sometimes I think if that first-year university course had been any better, I’d be in history.”
“Old fart MacDonald, so mentally constipated he’d just come in and read for an hour from his own lousy book.”
“Anyway,” Adam said glumly, “what can you do with history?”
“Nothing. Maybe teach. Hey, it’s okay,” Eric calmed him, “for you medicine’s easy. It’s a legal profession, very good money, and you can always change and do anything else if you want. In the meantime you get shitloads of respect. ‘Oh, you’re a doctor!’ ”
“Yeah, like the Jewish mama, she could just as well be Mennonite, yelling on the beach, ‘Help! help!
my son the doctor
is drowning!’ ”
The crystal water laps at his boots, at the edge of two pawprints. Perfect in impressionable sand and large as his mittened hand, the oval indentation of the heel, each drop-shaped toe pointed deep in a scimitar claw. Adam’s feet sink slowly in the soft surface, the lake clicking tiny waves beside him: Susannah, marriage—how can that be, how is that about to happen? Life, past and foreseeable, is organized university routine, classes and study, get drunk and talk about sex and go to dances and drink and sleep and classes—but he detests the stupidity drink blunders him into. He has decided his life into what he thinks a transparent cycle: study, study, in summer dirt and good wages on oil rigs and save and study. A deliberate concentration of books and labs and professors and finally cadavers and precise,
clear requirements that can be fulfilled exactly if you concentrate and work hard enough, focus. He can drive three hundred highway miles to Coaldale on a long weekend reviewing definitions and body parts, and leave about the time it is necessary to go to church because his mother understands, yes, of course he has to study. And even Susannah, met when they both were leaving a silly dance and then met deliberately, again and again, until he began to intuit a possible happiness with her far beyond Tuck Shop coffee. Nevertheless, when he is studying she seems a sort of dislocated fantasy. A shadow passing over him, beyond touch and unawares. But then she is actually beside him, with him, and she pushes aside, as it seems then, his ridiculously narrow world so completely that he can for those moments understand, beyond any doubt, his mother’s eternal and unshakable faith in the substance of things hoped for as the evidence of things suddenly seen.
“The Bloody Theatre,”
Susannah said in wonder, “what an amazing title for a book. And
Mirror
too.”
“It was odd, yeah, but no odder than all the bloody stories.”
“All books had those long, complex titles then, in the 1600s.…”
“One of those martyrs,” Adam told her, “was barely a teenager, they tortured her by ‘tearing her tender limbs with cutting hooks,’ I remember that, they cut her open to the ribs and she cried out, ‘Behold, Lord Jesus Christ! Thy name is being written on my body!’ ”
Susannah’s large, brilliant eyes held him unblinkingly. Adam murmured, “I remember that … story.…”
And she responded, strangely, “In a mirror you see the world in reverse.”
“Yes,” Adam said, “there’s that. And also it’s always behind you.”
They were two people profoundly together, and together thinking beyond themselves; his deliberately cobbled world of medicine gone somewhere then, somehow pale and shallow and gone. But. But. Never as completely, he sensed, never quite gone in the flat, factual way she vanished when he lived hands-on in medicine.
Eric said no worry, they were just up to their goddamn necks in endless minutiae. More likely, Adam thought, he was in over his head. And if he could surface, would a life split with Susannah submerge him as well? How many ways does a person need to drown?
“C’mon, clear your head,” Eric pushed him. “A break before term, before the wedding, just relax, hunt caribou on the tundra where there’s nothing but horizon. C’mon, Napoleon says sure, if he wants to, you bring your friend along.”
Adam hunches down on the soft edge of a lake at the Arctic circle. Huge prints with four toes; grizzlies have five. Napoleon would say: This is our brother, our sister wolf who long ago when the world was new showed us how to hunt the running caribou, taught us how to live as good a life as the Creator has already given us, live it until we die. The relentless hospital wards slide over Adam’s thoughts, row on row on corridor of Hippocratic devastation so simple if they could all simply die when their bodies said so, and he simply carry a tumpline of
meat, drag his convoluted life over the moss-and-stony tundra—sweet shit.
He should go back. Gnaw a roasted rib, listen to hunter talk and grunt, stare into a three-stone fire. Shut the shit down.
As the autumn night deepens they lie side by side on or in their sleeping bags inside the perimeter of the tent; it is so compact that unless they curl a little their feet touch down the centre line. Napoleon sits beside the barrel heater and tells stories. Some in English, a few in Dogrib that he has been given to tell only in that language, but which John L has permission to translate. Stories about the People, who have always lived here, who know certain things a little, who have no word for wilderness because everywhere this land is home. No plane or skin canoe or radio or bone needle changes land and People. A journey here to Lastfire Lake for fall caribou once required three or four weeks, paddling and carrying around rapids and between rivers from Rae-Edzo, their dogs running along the banks with them in summer clouds of mosquitoes, fifty-seven portages on tumplines, even the little children carrying. And on the way they would pass the immense dam built by the Giant Beavers where the Lawgiver Yamoria fought them, and also the place where the Dogrib and Yellowknife Dene a hundred and fifty years ago pledged peace to each other forever and danced, the circle they pounded into the earth dancing still rounded deep between the stones. Napoleon’s lips barely move, a mystery of incomprehensible language and John L’s quiet voice speaking his words into the further mystery of English as the spruce snaps in the heater. They are drifting into sleep while the mantle lamp hisses down.
