Free Sweeter Than All the World by Rudy Wiebe

his parka, down his pant leg as he lifts the edge of it, wiping his greasy hands the way his mother taught him never to do, unthinkable in the lab too, and talking, words running from his mouth. “It’s just little, one of those silly things you go into a bus depot, mostly greyish, it’s not her alone, in Edmonton and you stick your head behind a curtain, she sat down and I just wanted to too so I stuck my head in beside her and just then the silly flash goes off, Susannah was trying to ask me if I…”
    He is nattering as if he has lost his head.
    Adam wants to tell this tundra woman he will never see again absolutely everything. The story of the life he has lived until this very moment, the longer story of the life he will live, his singular life, which as he has seen in the running of the caribou, is already, and simply, complete.

FIVE
To NGUE S CREW
Antwerp, Flanders
1573
Danzig
1638
    I WAS BORN IN A NTWERP , F LANDERS , in our small stone house on the Oudenaerde Ganck in 1570. They named me Jan Adam Wens. It was the horrid time when the Spanish Fury burned in the Low Countries, driven by the merciless inquisition of Antoine, Cardinal Granvelle of Utrecht, and the Spanish armies led by Fernando Alvaraz, Duke of Alva. King Philip II of Spain and Portugal considered himself the champion of the Counter-Reformation; his armies slaughtered infidel and heretic alike, and he paid his mercenaries with shiploads of gold and silver brought from the Americas. Death by labour in the mines of the New World, death by religious rage in the Old; my brother Adriaen Wens was fifteen years old and I was three when, early in the morning, our mother was led out to be killed.
    In the Grand Square of Antwerp, where the unfinishedspire of Our Lady Cathedral towered over the tall seven-stepped houses facing the new city hall, Adriaen climbed up on a bench, holding me as our mother had written him in her last letter: “Take Hansken on your arm now and then for me.” He was trying to lift me high so that together we could see her burn. But when the executioner chained our mother to the stake piled around with firewood, Adriaen fainted and fell to the cobblestones, and of course no one in the crowd noticed. So neither of us actually saw it happen.
    October 6, 1573. I remember nothing, not even how my head cracked. I was only three.
    On the other hand, my wife, Janneken, says she remembers everything. Both how on September 6 of that year her father Hans van Munstdorp was burned alone in such a huge fire that it drove the watchers into the side streets and they feared for the surrounding buildings, and also the four well-controlled fires—the executioner had a month of burning experience—which much more slowly, and with great torture, destroyed her mother Janneken Munstdorp and my mother Maeyken Wens, together with her sisters, my aunts Mariken and Lijsken Lievens.
    “It’s impossible,” I say to Janneken. “You weren’t born when they killed your father, and only a month old for your mother.”
    “I know, I know,” she answers in her low, soft voice, her small face looking at me as fierce as any bishop. “But I saw.”
    “How?”
    “I saw him because my mother saw, I was in her womb. That’s why they didn’t burn her and my father together. For her they waited till I was born and they found a wet-nurse.”
    “I know that—but how can you say you saw even them? You were barely a month.”
    “The nurse took me to the square.”
    “But I was three years, and I remember nothing!”
    “If you don’t remember, how do you know what happened?”
    “Adriaen told me.”
    “But he told you, many times, he fainted and fell. You have the scars to prove it.”
    “He saw enough, before and after.”
    And usually, I don’t have to say any more. I can’t. We sit opposite each other in our hearth, warm, silent together. She knits, I stir the fire and raise or lower the kettle on the kettle-hook, so it sings. Adriaen told me all he ever