Sweeter Than All the World Read online

  Question: Take care what you say, such answers cost necks. You do declare that you do not believe the body and blood of Christ are present in the sacrament?

  Answer: I verily believe, and hold, that God is not baked.

  How could my mother speak before high lords and priests in this way? A shopkeeper’s daughter, the widow of a peasant fisherman who could write her name well enough but could otherwise write or read not a word?

  She’d say to me, “Listen, my sweet Trijntjen, listen,” and then she’d laugh and pull me tight against her. “Our dear God gave us one good mouth in the middle of our face, see, to talk, but two good ears, one on either side, to listen. So, two and one, you listen twice in all directions, and then you speak straight ahead, but only once.” And she’d lean forward, nudge a forefinger into each of my ears—by now we were both laughing—and she’d wriggle them into rhythm until my head rumbled gently. And she would speak straight into my mouth, her breath like a kiss, “Do you hear?”

  Since before memory I lay on my blankets and watched her sell. She sold the cheese and bread she made in the Makkum market, and also our father’s fish. After he was gone his partners still brought her their catch to sell, and when I was old enough to walk, she carried the fish with her wooden yoke to Witmarsum and Bolsward as well. She talked to everyone easily, friends, acquaintances, the many strangers who paused, but like all market women she listened more. Especially to travellers shouting aloud in the market news from other towns, or reading out pamphlets on theology, or broadsheets about politics. So she heard, and remembered, when a priest named Ulrich Zwingli began teaching in Zurich far away. He taught that, according to the Scriptures, the Pope himself had no more power to forgive sins than any true Christian believer. She heard that Melchior Hoffman was travelling across Europe saying the Holy Spirit was poured out on every living person, you must listen to God’s Word in the Bible and you would feel the Spirit move in your heart, all men and women too, it made no difference! She heard the New Testament read aloud, first in Martin Luther’s German translation, and then the reader translated it on the spot into Dutch.

  Masses of people were crowding the market square, many with their mouths open, listening. The women especially, as they bought and sold and waited, talked among themselves. Was this what the priests had mumbled in Latin all their lives? What no ordinary person was supposed to hear or understand? The women discussed, they argued, they memorized; they could not speak Latin or read, but they certainly could hear this, and remember.

  And, shouted in the market, my mother heard what happened to Felix Manz in Zurich. He was the illegitimate son of a priest who studied theology with the preacher Zwingli. But he went farther than Zwingli, too far. He dared to have himself baptized as an adult by a fellow believer because, Manz testified at his trial, his baptism at birth could mean nothing. No infant could commit itself to a life of discipleship following the teachings of Jesus, as he, a grown person, now publicly did.

  On January 5, 1527, Manz was bound with chains and rowed into the middle of the Limmat River. To below the Grossmünster Cathedral where Zwingli preached every Sunday. There the executioners held Manz under the water of the river until he was dead. An unforgettable lesson for the hundreds who watched, and those who heard it shouted in the towns and cities of Europe: if any adult dares the heretical water of rebaptism, the church and the state will give you enough water for a third baptism.

  My mother heard of Felix Manz’s testimony unto death. She heard of Michael Sattler burned alive in Rottenburg, Germany, on May 20 for the same reason. And of his wife forced to watch his torture. She was given the “third baptism” in the Neckar River, though it was reported she had asked for fire like her husband.

  I never met anyone with a memory like my mother. She knew exactly how much fish she had sold, and for whom, every market day. If she heard something once and thought it important, she remembered it word for word. She told me these stories, she memorized and taught me the Word of God. By heart, she said, listen:

  “Mark 12:30, 31. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and your neighbour as yourself.

  “Acts 2:38. Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

  So, when the woman read her the questions before the Governor and the Council of Holland, and asked, “Who taught you this, Weynken, how did you come by these opinions?” she disdained to implicate anyone. She simply quoted Jesus:

  “John 10:27. My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me.”

  When he heard this, the Duke Anthony Lalaing van Hooghstraten could no longer contain himself. He leaned forward in his throne and roared at my mother:

  “Woman, you would teach us!”

  And she dared answer him directly: “Listen to the words of our Lord, Matthew 5:9. How blessed are the peacemakers, for God shall call them his children.”

  Though she did cry when the guards led her back to the dungeon exhausted after hours of such cross-examination. Those heavy men facing her in their fur and silk gowns, glaring. And especially when Auntie Lijsbeth made the long journey over sea and land to plead with her.

  “How is my darling, my Trijntjen?” My mother was chained to the floor, Auntie Lijsbeth told me.

  “She’s safe. She doesn’t go outside the farmstead wall. But she cries for you, so much—dearest sister, why, why? Can’t you think what you please and keep it to yourself?”

  “How can I be silent, when they ask me what I believe?”

  “They have no moral right to ask.… Lie!”

  “Yes. And then, how could I believe it?”

  “I’m so afraid. They will kill you.”

  My mother wiped her tears, and suddenly she chuckled a little.

  “I am learning Latin,” she said. “Two Dominican priests come to me every day, and twice at night. One is to confess me— he’s very harsh, with heavy Latin—and the other is very cheerful, though full of Latin too. That’s the way they confuse you, one rough and the other pretending to be gentle. But the guards are better teachers. They say in Latin ‘domini’ means ‘lord,’ and ‘cane’ means ‘dog,’ so, they tell me behind the backs of their hands, don’t let these two fat dogs of the Lord scare you!”

  But my aunt said she could not laugh with her. The filthy stone dungeon, my mother clamped by both legs to a huge ring with short irons she could barely lift.…

  We were with our cows, milking, when she told me. I sat rubbing Oldcow’s heavy udder, my face pressed into her flank. The thick warmth of the good animal who gives us God’s best food while we feed her hay and hard grain. I could feel life burble inside her, it seeped through the short hair of her hide, warming me, and the barn, and all our living quarters up into the open rafters. Oldcow turned her long head to me, her single eye and blunt nose with its large, moist nostrils breathing, to watch me stroke her. Together we felt the milk gather down into her teats, ready and warm.

  Stripp, strapp, strull,

  Soon the pail is full.

  My mother and I always sang that little song when we milked together. I could not clench my hands for weeping.

  “What do you hold concerning the holy oil?” the “kind” Dominican asked my mother. He was trying to frighten her about death with his instruction on extreme unction.

  My mother answered, “Oil is good for salad, or to oil your shoes. First Timothy 4:4—”

  “God be damned!” the Dominican burst out. “Does it say that in the Bible?”

  “You should read it, and not curse,” she told him. “It says, ‘Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.’ ”

  She would not recant. After three days of trial, on Wednesday, November 20, the other Dominican led her before the court and held a crucifix in her face. “Fall on your knees,” he whispered in he
r ear, “and ask the Lord for pardon.”

  But she turned her face from the crucifix and answered him loudly, “The just shall live by faith. Hebrews 11:2. For by faith our ancestors were commended.”

  He told her, “You will be condemned to death!”

  She declared even louder, so that all would hear, “If any die by faith, they shall indeed never die but live in the Lord. Hebrews 12:1. With so many witnesses of faith around me like a great cloud, I will run with patience the race set before me.”

  My auntie Lijsbeth told me that, at these words, there was silence; as if, at that moment, they all knew that the great cloud of witnesses filled the trial chamber, watching. Then one of the Council asked her, softly, “You would condemn us all?”

  “My Lord Jesus came to condemn no one,” my mother said. “He came to give us peace.”

  The Governor pounded his gavel. “She has spoken enough! We will hear her sentence!”

  The Dean of Naeldwijck stepped forward and read out her sentence to the Council in Latin, and repeated it for her in Dutch. Then he delivered her to the power of the state, adding that he did not consent to her death. When he and the two Dominicans—hypocrites—had left the Chamber, the Governor looked to his Council. They nodded one by one, and he declared:

  “The heresy of Weynken, daughter of Claes of Monickendam, her immovable obstinacy of error regarding the sacrament, cannot pass without punishment.”

  He ordered, first, that her property be confiscated to the state for expenses. These, even before execution costs and including the daily fees of the Lords for Council sessions, already amounted to over fifty guilders. Second, that she be taken to the city square, that she be chained to the stake, and that she be burned to ashes.

  I see a grotesque logic here. My mother baked bread all her life. If a man’s baptism heresy demanded death by water, then a woman’s heresy concerning the bread of the Sacrament could receive nothing less than the most extreme application of fire.

  That afternoon on the scaffold she turned to the hundreds of people watching in the square and asked forgiveness of any she had offended. Then with one hand she moved her neckerchief so that the executioner could lay the gunpowder on her bosom. A priest held his crucifix in front of her, but she pushed his hand away. Instead she turned to the bench set against the stake and heaped around with very good wood, and asked the executioner, “Is the bench strong enough? Will I not fall?”

  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.

  FOUR

  ON LASTFIRE LAKE

  Northwest Territories, Canada

  1961

  ADAM’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 mo
und 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.

  “Oh, eat your roll!” Susannah exclaimed, exasperated.

  “Your dad,” Adam muttered into his thick china coffee cup. “He doesn’t like me.”

  “It’s not you, silly, it’d be anybody, I’m all he—”

  “Thanks a lot, I’m just ‘anybody.’ ”

  “I told you, it’s my mother.” Her long fingers unravelled a University Tuck Shop roll, its cinnamon tang drifting between them. “He’s still mourning her.”

  “He still has you, he’d just gain me.”

  “He knows that, he does.”

  “Then why doesn’t he like me?”

  “He does! You just don’t recognize how he is, listen,” and she slid out from under her side of the booth and onto the seat against him, “you don’t need cinnamon or coffee, you need a bit of osculation.”

  The mirrors above the Tuck Shop booths multiplied their heads into facing each other endlessly, but at that moment he felt there would never be enough of her. “Os-cu-la-tion,’” he recited to her lips, ‘“the mutual contact of blood vessels.’ ”