Sweeter Than All the World (5 page)

My mother had sent our farm people quickly to their relatives, so they would not try to defend her. But I hid myself deep in the hay of the loft. By the time she found me, it was too late to run to Auntie Lijsbeth’s. My mother kissed me hard and pushed me towards the ladder again. “Deep, deep!” she hissed as I climbed. I was so terrified for her, at their hammering and their smashing the rooms below me, that I was too stupid to look out the roof window. So they dragged her away, and I remember only her face against mine in our terror. And her kiss.

My mother was the widow of Wybe Pieters of Makkum. But she could be arrested in Friesland and taken for trial in The Hague because she was born in Monickendam, Holland. Makkum is eighty kilometres from Monickendam by sail across the Zuiderzee, and during an autumn storm my father’s fishing boat was driven ashore there, and they saw each other. She was locking down the shutters of her family’s shop against the spume flung by the crashing sea, and she glanced at him with the usual Dutch expression when recognizing a “stumma Fries,” no matter how young, long and handsome he might be. The problem was he looked up at exactly that moment.

That’s the way she always told the story. He and his two mates walked past, staggering from their twelve-hour struggle to save themselves and their boat. They had thrown all their gear and fish overboard to lighten it in the storm, and his hard body passed nearest her, bent like a tree against the shuddering wind. Then he saw her bare feet, the edge of her skirt, and from under
his heavy eyebrows he looked up the length of her dress to her face. Expecting, and seeing, her lip curl. They were so close she would have touched him had she raised her finger. Their looks locked, and she saw light shape itself into an immovable decision in his blue Fris eyes.

That’s how our mother Weynken told me the story. What my father Wybe saw he never said. Not that story in her eyes, nor any other. I remember him a little. He would sit with his legs stretched out, long feet naked and toes moving a little as if he remembered a song, staring into our hearth fire where bread baked. He was always mending a fish net, or sewing one. God took him, my mother told me, to Himself in the violent winter water, west beyond the Wadden Islands of the North Sea. I asked her, Does God live in the stormy sea? She said, I’ve told you and told you, God’s home is everywhere.

On November 18 in The Hague, my mother stood alone and chained—there was no place to run, did they think she would attack them?—before the Duke van Hooghstraten and all his Councillors seated high in the Council Chambers. They would not, of course, talk directly to her themselves. As the records show, they had a woman ask her the questions that their learned and compliant theologians had prepared:

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.

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 her 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?”