Sweeter Than All the World

by Rudy Wiebe

  “Yes, Anatomy 201, but also geometry: ‘One curve osculates the other when it has the highest possible order of contact with the other.’ ”

  “I love you when you recite the Oxford English

  Dictionary on Historical Principles.”

  “Just for you,” she said, half a breath from contact. “Pure love.”

  “The OED definition of ‘love,’ please.”

  “ ‘That disposition with regard to a person which, open bracket, arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy, close bracket, manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, delight in his presence and desire for his approval.’ ”

  “Ex-cel-lent.” He was eighth-of-an-inching closer. “Love is disposition, desire, delight.”

  Susannah said into his mouth, “Love is also a decision.”

  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!’ ”

  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 Napole
on; 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 hi
story 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.