Paradise Reclaimed (16 page)

21

Good coffee

From then on the woman brought this bricklayer coffee in a bottle once a week. She put the bottle in a sock and tucked it away under her coat. He thanked her each time most profusely for her generosity and produced the mug which he normally used for a drink of water. But he never drank more than half the bottle, and always made the woman take the rest back home with her.

“My husband always drank a whole bottle,” she said.

“But then he was a Josephite,” said Stone P. Stanford, but apart from that he took care not to remind the woman of how things had gone with this man.

Then the woman laughed.

She was not particularly talkative, and when he made some remark she was often so preoccupied that she did not hear what he was saying and was only roused by her own laughter.

“A thousand thanks for the coffee,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

But when she had given him coffee for a few weeks, she suddenly said, right out of the blue, “How is it that you have been a Mormon all this while and haven’t got yourself any wives yet?”

“I have one, and that is sufficient for me,” he replied, and tittered.

“One wife, what’s that?” she said. “It certainly wasn’t considered much in the Bible, at least. Perhaps you’re not a genuine Mormon?”

“I know some Mormons who are certainly no more imperfect than I and don’t have any wives at all,” said Stanford, naming as an example his comrade, Pastor Runólfur.

“Oh, Ronki?” said the woman and laughed. “You surely don’t think that Ronki is good for anything, do you? No, it’s a poor Lutheran who isn’t better than old Ronki.”

“You are talking about the one subject in which no male can pass judgement on another,” said Stanford, “and so I say nothing.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still a bit of a Lutheran at heart,” said the woman.

Once again, it was just before sunrise when the Lutheran returned. He went over to the brick-pile and could not find his bottle of schnapps.

“I never really liked the look of you much, and now you’ve proved me right,” he said. “Where’s my schnapps?”

“A woman came along,” said the bricklayer, “and took the bottle out of the pile and broke it against a stone.”

“Oh, the bitches!” said the Lutheran. “They’re always themselves, day and night: they even go to the length of ransacking a pile of bricks and stealing one’s last drop of consolation.”

“She is a generous and capable woman,” said the bricklayer.

“Since you allowed them to treat my schnapps like that, it is my dearest wish that you get to know them better. And with that I’m off, insulted and without a drink. Good night.”

“It is really time to get up, so I can hardly bring myself to bid you good night; but may God be with you nonetheless, even though you wish me ill,” said the bricklayer.

He accompanied his visitor out of the yard as a host should.

“To tell you the truth, I think you ought to marry this woman,” said the bricklayer, putting his hand on his visitor’s shoulder when they reached the gate.

“I would perhaps have done so if her daughter had not threatened to palm a child off on to me,” said the Lutheran tearfully.

“All the more reason,” said the bricklayer. “Embrace the Gospel and marry them both, my friend.”

“Women are my ruin,” said the man, wiping his face with his sleeve. “These dragons use me as a plaything and torment me. I try to betray them, but they hound me down and say they love me. If I had no schnapps to take refuge in, I would be dead.”

The bricklayer replied, “That is the difference between the Latter-Day Saints and the Lutherans. The Prophet and Brigham want to give women a share in the honour and dignity which men have achieved in the eyes of God. Women are neither tobacco nor schnapps. They want to be wives, in a house. That is why Bishop Þjóðrekur married not only Anna with the iron-rimmed glasses, but also Madame Colornay and finally old María from Ampahjallur from as well.”

The following week, when the woman arrived with coffee in a sock, Stone P. Stanford had vanished. He had gone off to do some bricklaying and perhaps even some joinery in various places. He was only in his brickyard for an hour at the very most to prepare the sun for its day’s task at a time of day when neither Mormons nor Josephites were awake. But one day towards autumn, when the chirring of the cicadas was at its loudest and the frogs were roaring at the salt-pools, he was back in his brickyard.

“So that’s how unfaithful you are,” said the woman, popping her head over the fence. “You simply run away from me. I would never have believed it of a man like you, to make me wait all summer with the coffee. I was beginning to think you had turned up missing.”

“That is the way we bricklayers are,” he said. “All of a sudden we just turn up missing. Quite so.”

“Before I lose you again I’m going to try to persuade you out to visit me at home at the far end of the street,” said the woman in a high-pitched, distant voice. “I have been wanting you to have a look at something for me. Everything’s falling down about my ears.”

Next evening he borrowed the bishop’s pram and put in it twenty-four bricks to take as a present for this stately seamstress and dream-woman.

She had a little corner house, No. 307. The brickwork was badly in need of repair in places; these were obviously poor adobes. He also thought the garden rather neglected. But to make up for it there were plenty of gaily-coloured drawers hanging on the line. He took the bricks out of the pram and stacked them neatly at the door.

She came out wearing an apron and flushed in the face from baking him a berry pie.

“Where are you going with that pram?” she asked.

“I brought some bricks with me,” said Stone P. Stanford.

Prams were one of those quite unpredictable things that roused this woman to laughter; perhaps also bricks. She stopped dreaming her sorrowful day-dreams; instead she shut her eyes and threw herself headlong into the surf-topped ocean of laughter, where she was tossed from wave-top to wave-top until sorrow washed her ashore again and she opened her eyes.

Stanford was favourably impressed by her home; indeed, she had tidied up the room and closed all the doors. The pictures on the wall of the Prophet and Brigham Young were veritable masterpieces. But the bricklayer was really astounded to find that in this very place, right in the middle of the floor, should stand the proof that Pastor Runólfur had adduced for his thesis that in Utah man had achieved prosperity through having correct thoughts: a sewing machine. The machine stood on a special table in the middle of the room, as if the house had been built round it.

“I would never have believed that this machine would be found at a Josephite’s,” said Stanford.

“But I always thought it was Josephites who invented the sewing machine,” said the woman.

“Is that so?” murmured Stanford, running his hands over this prince of machines cautiously and reverently, as if he had come across a bird or a flower in the middle of the wilderness. “What is the extension of the Golden Book itself if it is not a sewing machine? And that reminds me that when I took leave of Bishop Þjóðrekur in the city of Copenhagen where we had been drinking Kirsten Piil water, my prospects were so gloomy, and the poverty of my soul likewise, that I could only afford a packet of needles to send home to my wife.”

“All I know is that the very best Elders in the Church come to me with their wives and daughters, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in sprung carriages. In that cupboard there I could show you a row of half-finished dresses for people in Provo, all made from pure silk in the latest New England fashion and so low-necked that you haven’t seen the like since you were being suckled.”

Her coffee warmed the cockles as always, as one says in Iceland about a really hospitable pot of coffee. He drank two half-cups with a long interval in between, and on each occasion he ran his palms over his hair (which in fact was all gone by now), either because he felt it standing on end or because his scalp broke out into a sweat owing to the unspeakable power that lay latent in the coffee. The woman contemplated him deeply out of her long, dark subterranean dream. She was one of those women who had been graced in her youth by some muscular restriction at the corners of the mouth; this not only tempered the smile, but quite literally restricted it. And though it had often been stretched by involuntary spasms of laughter, it quickly reasserted itself, but had still not turned altogether into a wrinkle or a grimace, the way in which all the world’s beauty does. The woman stared sleepily straight ahead and right through the man, occasionally drawling some low-voiced, worried remark and sighing.

“How are the women looking after you at the Bishop’s House?” she asked.

“Turkey and cranberries, dear lady,” said the bricklayer. “When I look at the tables of plenty in this land of the All-Wisdom, where parts of more animals than I can name lie side by side on the board, as if in a millennium, and the milk so rich that it would truly be called cream among people who had not yet found the truth—is it any wonder that I am impressed by what people can manage to conjure up out of these salt-flats if they have the right book? If it were not wicked to say so, the only thing this little fellow from Iceland misses is some sour blood-pudding. Heeheehee.”

“Excuse me, but have you anywhere to sleep?” she asked, sunk in thought.

“What’s that?” said the bricklayer. “Where do I sleep? I really cannot remember, dear lady. I don’t believe I have ever noticed. It makes no difference where one sleeps in God’s City of Zion, the air is everywhere just as all-embracingly pleasing. Sometimes one stretches out on a bench out in the garden, with a jacket round one’s head for the flies; sometimes up on the balcony if it rains. This summer I often spent the night in the brickyard on top of my bricks. Now that it is getting cooler at nights, I stretch out on Pastor Runólfur’s floor. But I cannot deny that I am just beginning to wonder whether I should not build myself a little shed; but not for my own sake.”

“I understand,” said the woman.

“I have no doubt told you already that I have a wife,” he said.

“Was that not on the other side of the moon?” asked the woman.

“Does that not rather depend on which side of the moon one happens to be oneself?” said the bricklayer with a smile.

“Whichever side she is on, does she not live in a house where she is?” said the woman.

“Heavens above, one can put a name to anything,” said the bricklayer. “But that is not the whole story: this good woman bore me two children.”

“Aren’t they doing all right?” said the woman.

“Thank you for asking,” said the bricklayer courteously. “When I looked at them sleeping when they were small, their happiness was so beautiful that I almost felt sad to think that they would have to wake up. Once I thought that I could buy them a kingdom for a horse. But little came of that. And yet. Who knows? The night is not over yet, as the ghost said.”

“I shall give you this house,” said the woman. “The house we are in now. If your wife comes, I shall not take from her anything she has a claim to. The only thing I ask in exchange, for my daughter and myself, is a share in a good man’s status.”

He had not recited a verse to himself since the year in which he made the casket; but now he had started to rock back and forward and chant the way he used to:

She gave food for hungry hound,
She gave bed for sleeping sound.

“This one wife was for me the same as Bishop Þjóðrekur’s three wives, Brigham Young’s twenty-seven wives, and the ten thousand wives that the god Buddha is said to have in his stomach.”

All at once the corners of her mouth started straining, until she burst. She laughed long and heartily.

He stopped his chanting and looked at her. She said, “I only hope that this wife of yours wasn’t like the monster that came ashore at the Vestmannaeyjar when Ronki’s grandfather was pastor there.”

She heaved a sigh, and was no longer laughing.

He did not let himself become confused, but said in a rather more deliberate tone of voice, “This woman’s indulgence towards me was not based on how much I could enhance her status in the eyes of man and God, for I have not yet been man enough to give her anything apart from that packet of needles. You will see from that, my good woman how likely I am to make other women more estimable in God’s eyes, when that was all I could do for the one who was all women to me.”

A little later the bricklayer sat down and embarked on a letter to his benefactor, Bishop Þjóðrekur, who was now travelling some distant road. He said in his letter that it was unnecessary to try to express his thanks for the doctrine that the bishop had brought him and which had this advantage over other doctrines, that those who believed in it, prospered. He said that the more he contemplated the book that Joseph found on the hill and which Brigham upheld to the people thereafter, the less value he found in other books. “It is difficult to doubt that a book which can make roses bloom on a barren branch must be right. And in that case, the truth is something different from what we once thought,” said the bricklayer, “if it is as a result of a lie that the wilderness has become green pastures or golden acres of maize and corn.”

Then he described freely how he himself had made good in God’s City of Zion, which he referred to as the Territory of Utah, as it was now called. He had become both a bricklayer and a housebuilder in Spanish Fork and its environs. He had been put in charge of other bricklayers and been paid foreman’s wages, and double pay had also been forced on him for toying with carpentry. He said the only reason he had accepted the money was his certain conviction that he was now in the land of divine revelation. He had been elected Ward Assistant and instructed to prepare himself for ordination which would authorise him to conduct ceremonies within the Ward. Although he was not an eloquent speaker, he had also been requested by the Stake to sit on the committee of the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association, where one discussed such things as the proper attitude towards proposals and how the behaviour of young people during courting should best be harmonised with eternal matrimony sealed with the authority of High Priesthood. An Elder in Salt Lake City had said that he, Stanford, should be prepared to be elevated to the Stake. “The only thing,” wrote the bricklayer, “that grieves me in all this is that my mentor, Pastor Runólfur, the most learned and wisest of men, should not have been nominated to this position first. I cannot bring myself to accept preferment as long as my worthy spiritual father is given no promotion.”