Paradise Reclaimed (17 page)

Finally he reached what was meant to be the main point of this letter. He said he had to admit that he sometimes noticed a certain coldness towards him from others; indeed, he himself felt misgivings about his own failure to fulfil the divine Moral Law, and most particularly to live up to the divine revelation concerning holy polygamy. Certainly he never for a day forgot God’s command that righteous men and true Latter-Day Saints should take unto themselves several wives under the seal of everlasting matrimony, and thus deliver them from physical loneliness, spiritual distress and lack of glory in the eyes of God. He was appalled at the tragedy, he wrote, of strikingly capable women, in every way deserving of heavenly matrimony, running around with Josephites, while their daughters fell into the misfortune in their youth of taking up with Lutherans, so that the names of the poor creatures became almost unmentionable in human society. He could also well appreciate the golden example that Brigham Young set the world when he had a house built with twenty-seven doors. But his, Stanford’s, weakness was no less great; in particular, he felt himself to lack the courage to undertake the responsibility of managing several wives while he had still not fulfilled his obligations towards a certain house and home with which he was not entirely unacquainted at a certain place in the world.

His children, who had slept more beautifully than any others—what had they not deserved? Everything except what he himself was man enough to provide for them. “When they were reaching the stage of waking up into a world that was no longer a fairy-tale book I found their presence becoming more and more unbearable because of my utter failure to be worthy of them,” he wrote. And the woman who was so loving and compliant to her husband—her he left, and went on his way. He took with him a horse and a casket, which he called the horse of his soul and the casket of his soul; no doubt he hoped to buy happiness with them in the marketplace; or at least an earldom. But got a packet of needles.

Thus ended the letter from Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer, of Spanish Fork, God’s City of Zion, Territory of Utah, to Bishop Þjóðrekur, Mormon, presumably touring somewhere in the Danish Kingdom P.S. “I enclose in bank-notes fares for my family and ask you to bring them over with you when you come; I shall try to have finished building them a brick house. St. P. Stanford.”

22

Good and bad doctrines

Mine is a bad doctrine,” said the Lutheran. “And, what’s more, I cannot substantiate my doctrine. The man who has the best doctrine is the one who can prove that he has the most to eat; and good shoes. I have neither, and live in a dugout.”

“I’ve heard that one before many a time,” said Pastor Runólfur. “Those who never have anything to eat or to wear are never tired of declaring their aversion to people who have plenty of food. And yet one of the Prophets said that a man needs to have food and clothes in order to perform virtuous deeds. You forget that every single thing contains a higher concept—good broth no less than a pair of topboots; the Greeks called this the Idea. It is this spiritual and eternal quality in all existence and in every thing by which we Mormons live. If anyone is so incompetent that he has neither broth nor topboots, nor the manliness to raise himself from a dugout, he is not likely to have a spirit, or eternity, either.”

“I don’t care,” said the Lutheran. “No one will ever make me believe anything other than that Adam was a dirty shit. And Eve was no improvement.”

At that time there was a great furor over the published dogma that Adam was of divine nature no less than the Saviour, on the grounds that God Himself had gone to the trouble of specially creating them both. With this, the Lutheran had touched upon a topic that really roused the defender-of-the-faith in Pastor Runólfur.

“I might have known you would bring that up,” said Pastor Runólfur. “It has always been the sure sign of a drunkard and philanderer when he starts to abuse poor old Adam. Anyone who has anything on his conscience immediately slaps the blame on him. But I can assure you that Adam was a perfectly sound chap. Those who run down Adam are children of the Great Apostasy and the Great Heresy. Do you think that the Lord of Hosts would have debased Himself by creating a rotten shit? Or even a Lutheran? Do you think that when God made Adam He used material inferior to what He used when He made the Saviour? I deny absolutely that there is any fundamental difference between Adam and the Saviour.”

“May I ask, what did this Adam ever accomplish?” said the Lutheran. “Did he ever make any money? I’ve never heard it said that he got himself a house, far less a carriage; not even a pair of shoes. He probably just lived in a dugout like me. And what did he have to eat? Do you think he had broth every weekday and turkey with cranberries on Sundays? I wouldn’t be surprised if he never had a square meal except for that apple his old hag offered him.”

Thus they went at it hammer and tongs in the brickyard night and day, but never more fiercely than just before daybreak. Pastor Runólfur made a habit of waylaying the Lutheran at dawn on his way home from his mistresses to his Welsh wife in the dugout. It has never been worked out just how much of a theologian this intemperate dugout-dweller really was, and perhaps he was no more of a drunkard and philanderer than the unpleasantness of his homelife warranted. But for all that, Pastor Runólfur held him directly answerable for Luther’s heresy in particular and the Great Apostasy in general. And no matter how worn out the Lutheran might be, he was always just as eager as ever to stand up for Luther there in the middle of the road. He only asked his antagonist, Pastor Runólfur, leave to pop into the brickyard where he always had a drop or two left in the bottle carefully hidden in the pile of bricks for bracing himself before his wife woke up to read him the morning’s lecture. Stone P. Stanford never revealed where the Lutheran kept this mercy-font except for that one occasion which has already been related. But just as soon as the Lutheran had got hold of his bottle in the brickyard, no power in the world could hold him back any longer from his endless disputation with Pastor Runólfur—which seemed, indeed, to have an independent life of its own. Stanford, busy preparing the sun for its useful daily task, often heard the din of their disputation blended with the dawn chorus of the birds; on the one side schnapps, on the other side the Holy Spirit.

But one day the page was turned, as it were: at dawn there was nothing to be heard but the song of the birds and the chirring of insects instead of theological disputation, and Stanford heard it rumoured that the destitute Lutheran had moved from the district.

Time passed. And then it so happened late one evening, when Stanford was in the bishop’s brickyard stacking new-baked bricks, that all of a sudden an unknown visitor appeared before him as abruptly as when one sees a vision. It was an extremely young woman. She was one of those youngsters who suffer so overwhelmingly sudden a growing-up that physical maturity is upon them the moment they wear out their childhood shoes. She had a rather hard-boiled look on account of some gratuitous experience of the world, and did not know how to return a civil greeting.

“Mother sent me,” said the girl, and bit her lip instead of smiling. “I was to bring you coffee.”

“It is not the first time in the history of Mormonism that people have been sent something good,” said the bricklayer.

She handed him a bottle inside a sock. Stone P. Stanford recognised both the sock and the bottle.

“This is the next best thing to meeting your mother herself,” said the bricklayer. “A very good day to you, my dear, and my warmest thanks to you both. To get coffee this year, too, from Madame Þorbjörg, the seamstress—I can hardly believe my luck. It would have been quite enough to give me coffee while I was a complete stranger here, without overwhelming me with kindness after I have become an everyday sight and when all reasonable folk have long ago discovered what an ordinary sort of fellow I am. And now, little girl, be so good as to have a seat on these new-baked bricks over here while you tell me the news.”

The girl sat down on the bricks, bit her lip and was silent.

“It is a long time since there has been coffee in my mug, if only I have not lost it,” said the bricklayer, searching around for it. When he had found his tin mug he reached forward with it and asked the girl to pour. He went on chatting with her so that

“Somehow I had an idea that my friend, Madame Þorbjörg Jónsdóttir, had a daughter, even though I saw little sign of it that time I paid a visit to your house. You will have been born by then, I fancy, and not all that recently, either.”

“I should jolly well think so,” said the girl, and snorted contemptuously. “I was practically in labour already!”

“All the doors were shut, if I remember,” he said.

“Of course they were all shut,” she snapped back at him.

“It is a good custom and a fine rule to close the door, I was taught back in Iceland, even though there was no great surfeit of doors in people’s houses there,” said the bricklayer.

At that the girl sat up straight and said accusingly, “Just so long as nobody is locked in.”

“Oh, perhaps not every pleasure is to be found out of doors, my dear,” said the bricklayer.

“They call us Josephites,” said the girl. “Every time I went out, the children jeered at me that we drank coffee.”

“People are sometimes pretty empty-headed,” said the bricklayer. “And the greatest empty-headedness of all, I think, is to jeer at people who are different from oneself. It was endemic in Eyrarbakki, once upon a time. From there it must have spread all the way east to the Rangárvellir (Rangriver Plains) and then to America. Some people say it is wicked and ungodly and sinful to drink coffee. These people are undoubtedly right as far as they themselves are concerned, and accordingly they should never drink coffee. Then there are other people who can quote medical books to prove that coffee damages the heart, not to mention the liver, stomach and kidneys in this temple of God which is the human body. These people should not drink coffee either. But speaking for myself, I always drink coffee when I feel that it is

“It wasn’t only that we drank coffee, come to that,” said the girl.

“I can understand that,” said the bricklayer. “You lived by yourselves. But all the same it will have been a consolation to know that one had a father who was a thinking person. No one but a thinking person would go away from such a splendid woman as your mother, and such a promising daughter, in order to receive the Saviour in Independence, Missouri.”

“My father may well have been doing some deep thinking when he left mother,” said the girl. “But he didn’t have to think very deeply to run away from me, because I wasn’t born until the year after he turned up missing.”

“How very ashamed I am of myself for being so bad-mannered towards you and your mother, never getting round to doing a few repairs to your house as I had more or less promised. But one has little enough time for doing friends a favour when one is pottering about for oneself. Bricks are difficult things to understand, no less so than the Golden Book itself. And then there is all the church work to be done for the Ward late into the night every evening; and in addition we sometimes have tasks given to us by the Stake, which unlettered people like myself find difficult and slow work. What leisure have we left? Somehow I have never been able to get the knack of not sleeping at night, at least until the birds start chirping. And it is not much better now that I am beginning to build myself a house. But I know of one good man who is a real friend of yours.”

“Old Ronki?” said the girl. “He could well be a fine fellow for all I know; he can at least chase away other people who are perhaps not worth so much in his eyes. But what do you get from him instead? Whatever is left of the soup at the Bishop’s House at night after bedtime! I don’t call that being a man. And I don’t care even if there are occasionally some dry shreds of turkey on Sunday evenings.”

“You have a lot to say, my dear girl,” said the bricklayer. “Perhaps I might venture to ask you a question or two more?”

“I didn’t think you were such a fool as to need to ask what happened,” said the girl.

“My word! Has something happened?” said the bricklayer. “Here? In God’s City of Zion?”

“Everyone knows perfectly well that I had a baby,” said the girl.

“Well now, since you tell me you have a baby, my dear, then I wish you still more luck and blessings than before,” said the bricklayer. “I should think so, indeed. Anyway, to change the subject, what great pleasure I take in these dear little quails which visit me here sometimes in the brickyard; see how agile they are at running obliquely, just like knights on a chess-board, heeheehee. It is a solemn moment first thing in the morning when the birds wake up. Sometimes at dawn a man would call here who said he was a Lutheran, and was always quoting the verse about the evil-doers in the Passion Hymns: ‘early their sleep is shattered.’ In the end one is no longer sure which is the greatest evil-doer, the man who gets up early or the man who goes to bed late. I have a vague recollection that he used to have a bottle in the brick-pile there.”

“That’s him,” said the girl. “That was mother’s paramour. But it was a straight lie to say he gave me schnapps, just like all the other things of which she accused us. Even if I’d been tied hand and foot, and someone had held my nose, I would never have allowed a drop past my lips. But it’s another matter altogether when you’ve been locked in a room with a man who’s been drinking schnapps, as mother sometimes did to me when she was angry with him; it’s like being locked in with a baby: one tries to make sure it doesn’t come to any harm; and one tries to keep it amused. So one gives it the first toy that comes to hand to make it stop whimpering. Whether he was a Lutheran or something else, as if I should be asking him that! I haven’t even asked what it is to be a Josephite.”

“Where do you and your mother hail from, if I may ask?”

“What a question to be asking!” said the girl. “It would be better to ask my mother! Or else Ronki—he was grandmother’s pastor in Iceland when the old woman was converted and ran off with the Mormons. Get mother to tell you how she came here in her youth, long before the trains started going. All of a sudden one fine day Ronki arrived in his frock-coat, all the way over here to God’s kingdom to try to convert them. He held services up on the hill here in an ugly little church which can only hold one mule at a time, and put a cross up on it. But he was too late: mother was engaged to a Josephite. Then he himself embraced the Gospel and started looking after the bishop’s ewes. He could well be a fine fellow for all I know, and he certainly helped us to get hold of a sewing machine so that we could earn a living. And now that we’ve sold it because no one wanted us to do any sewing after I had a child by a Gentile and we don’t dare to be seen out of doors, scarcely even to go to the store, and anyway we’ve no money to buy anything, he collects the day’s scraps from the Bishop’s House and brings them to us at night. But he’s no man. And it’s no lie when mother says we would rather drown ourselves in a salt-pool than have to take Ronki in.”