Read Online Sweeter Than All the World by Rudy Wiebe - Free Book Online
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Ads: Link
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
“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
Similar Books
