Paradise Reclaimed (23 page)

“Pull the blanket over yourself so that you don’t catch cold, little girl,” said the bishop. “I’m going to see to your mother, who looks as if she is lying in some discomfort. She surely wasn’t left unattended all night?”

The woman from Hlíðar had been thrown this way and that by the motion of the ship, no longer strong enough to brace herself against it in the way that people do instinctively in heavy seas, even when asleep, to protect themselves. She was now lying on her stomach with her face jammed up against the bars at the head of the bed. Bishop Þjóðrekur eased her down and laid her on her back. She was cold and heavy, and showed not the slightest reaction to anything that was done to her. One eye was open and the other was half shut. The bishop put on his glasses and laid his ear to her heart. But when he had listened intently for a while he took his glasses off solemnly and put them neatly away in his spectacle-case.

“Your mother has gone on ahead of us to the land, little girl,” said the bishop. “Your father and I will baptize her in due course and give her the opportunity to enter the Holy City for all eternity.”

At this unexpected new blow the girl ceased all unnecessary sighing over her own manifest fall in the swell, and her face sagged into an expression of vacant relaxation, as if the clockwork of her consciousness had come to an abrupt stop. Then she hunched herself into a ball and turned towards the wall with her knees up to her chin, her plump young body all at once became as soulless and sexless as that of an overgrown child, and the bishop covered her up with the blanket for the sake of modesty before he went away to see the ship’s officers.

All that day, and the next, the girl never raised her head from the pillow, took no food and spoke to no one, but merely cowered against the wall. At midnight on the following night the girl’s brother arrived with the message that their mother was now about to be buried. She made no reply except to draw the blanket up over her head, and grovelled even further down into the bed.

The storm had blown itself out, and the sea was now comparatively calm. The stars looked down.

On the stroke of midnight the ship hove to for three minutes, and into the sea was consigned the body of this woman who had left home to travel to heaven to meet there the best man she had ever known, who had been dead to her for a long while now. Present at this funeral were the captain and first officer and six able seamen in their Sunday best. There was also the dead woman’s son looking a little embarrassed in the too short trousers and mountaineering boots Bishop Þjóðrekur had bought for him in Scotland. The doctor was standing a little apart smoking a cigarette, as was then becoming fashionable. Bishop Þjóðrekur was there with the woman’s grandson in his arms in the night cold. Also in the company was the old Mormon who knew how to sing one of the finest hymns that has ever been composed about a lonely wayfarer; this hymn, however, he was not allowed to chant except in silence on this occasion, for it is by law the task of the captain to read the burial service at sea if there is no clergyman present of the sects that Mormons call Gentiles. But Bishop Þjóðrekur nevertheless managed to say a few prayers over the woman’s mortal remains in a language that no one understood except God, but not for more than about thirty or forty seconds, for this was no time for dawdling.

The body had not been placed in a coffin, but lay on its bier wrapped in thick sailcloth and wearing a white nightshirt from The Company; and finally the red and white flag of the Danish king had been wrapped around it as a token of respect; for in the ship’s register of the world’s nationalities, Icelanders were not reckoned as Finnish, unbelievable as it may seem, but Danish.

“Inside that colourful cloth sleeps your grandmother, my lad,” said Bishop Þjóðrekur.

The captain, a short powerful man, grey-haired and ruddy in the face, turned the leaves of his book, stepped forward into the lamplight at the head of the bier, and recited in English the prescribed words for burial at sea. Then he beckoned to the Mormon. Bishop Þjóðrekur stepped forward and handed the boy over to the old man, crossed his hands on his breast over his carefully wrapped hat, and said:

“This sister of whom we are now taking leave shrouded in red and white attire which is not however her attire, but the Danish king’s, is now being welcomed home by God in other attire, the only attire she had left when she left Iceland. And this attire bears an emblem which is above Icelanders and Danish kings; it has on it the image of the Bee-hive, the Sego-lily, and the Seagull; it is the emblem of the land that the Prophet gave us with the Golden Book and which will rise in heaven on the day the earth is laid waste.”

After that Þjóðrekur took the child in his arms again. The sailors now unwound the Danish king’s flag and attached ropes to the bier. Then they lifted the bier over the rail and lowered it carefully down the side of the ship. Bishop Þjóðrekur carried the boy over to the rail and showed him his grandmother going down. The boy stared with big intelligent eyes in the night cold, and was silent; but when the bier slid into the sea and the bonds began to loosen, all he said, with tears in his voice, for they had been the happiest people in the world when they lived together as paupers on the croft, was: “Little Steinar wants to go with Granny.”

At dawn next morning Bishop Þjóðrekur opened the door of the sick-bay and went over to the girl on the bench and greeted her. She looked up at him like an animal from inside its lair, without acknowledging his greeting.

“Were you awake, my lamb?” he said.

The girl was silent for a long time, until she replied, “I don’t recognize myself. I don’t know what I am. Am I a person?”

“I should think it very likely,” said the bishop.

“To wake up and have lost everything, and know that one has nothing any more, is that being a person?” said the girl. “Oh, where is our beautiful horse which we once all owned together?”

“There is no gainsaying it: the spirits around you are not at all attractive. I have been standing guard here all night. I had my hands full driving these devils off. First came one, then came another, and then came the third. In their eyes you are the basest of all harlots.”

“Was it this then that my father promised me?” said the girl, now overcome by grief. “I beseech you in the name of I don’t know whom, save me from it, never again let me be blinded by it. Shut me in. Turn the key.”

“I have another idea, my lamb,” he said. “And it is in actual fact the same expedient I resorted to on the river last autumn, when Satan stood on the other bank waiting to seize the child: I covenanted him to myself before God. I can think of no alternative than to do the same with you.”

“You can do with me what you like, Þjóðrekur,” said the girl, “if only you will keep me safe and never let me loose.”

“I shall just have to seal you to me by covenant, my lamb, and make you my heavenly wife. Otherwise the shadow of your degradation would rightly fall upon me, not only in the eyes of the Lord, but also in the eyes of your father who deserves better of me than that I should deliver to him a wretch from the rubbish-dump instead of the little girl whom he set out into the world to redeem.”

“Dear Þjóðrekur,” said the girl and raised herself up with tears in her eyes and reached out her arms towards him. “If you want to make any use of this miserable life of mine, then redeem me, so that I may once again feel the breath of the days when I was little at home.”

28

Good broth

The federal government had for a long time shown a disposition to incorporate into its jurisdiction the Territory, as the Utah settlement was called by its inhabitants when they were not speaking Golden Book language. The Latter-Day Saints were not very enthusiastic about any such association. The Government found itself time and time again being forced to send police troops, which were called Feds, to intervene when conflict arose between divine revelation and the U.S. President’s views. The biggest stumbling-block of all for outsiders was the doctrine that a woman should be esteemed in heaven and on earth according to who her husband was, and that therefore it was the duty of honest and upright men to give as many women as possible a share in their reputation and thereby to enhance their status. It is always a heavy step for a church to renounce a doctrine which has been confided to it by the Godhead; and this holds good not least for moral tenets which are founded upon self-denial by the individual and social enthusiasm by the congregation, such as had been the case with holy polygamy among the Mormons.

At about this time the main road to Utah had been improved and immigrants began to pour in from the eastern States. This wave of emigration was justified by the phrase “Good Times” which was then coming into existence in America and had never been heard in the world before; such “times” were said to be had in Utah. The majority of these incomers, however, were certainly no Latter-Day Saints, but Gentiles, as the Mormons, copying the Jews, called people who do not recognize the true God. They say that such people belong to the Great Heresy, otherwise known as the Great Apostasy, in which Christians had been ensnared from the third century until the Prophet found The Book on Hill Cumorah. The Gentiles had no sooner installed themselves than they rose up against the Prophet’s pioneers, called his revelation balderdash and preached holy monogamy against holy polygamy.

The Government had spies out everywhere in Utah to see if there were not some wretch somewhere sleeping with two or three wives. If any such were found they were dragged into court and ordered to pay compensation to the Government, or despatched farther east and put behind lock and key. Particular efforts were made to punish the most prominent men in every community in order to intimidate the minnows. And now the time came to examine more closely the situation in Spanish Fork, to see who had obeyed God’s command in this instance rather than the Federal laws and, if so, was important enough to justify the expense of punishing him.

It was now the turn of Bishop Þjóðrekur, who had committed the crime of raising Madame Colornay, the former ditch-dwelling child-bearer, as high in the eyes of God as the sainted but barren Járnanna, and then made things even worse by sealing a marriage before God for all eternity with poor old María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur. The Spanish Forkers told the Feds that the chap they were looking for was either at the North Pole or in Finland, teaching people to embrace the Gospel.

It is unavoidable that the narrative should digress for a while from Stone P. Stanford, master-bricklayer in Spanish Fork, and the house he built, while events were taking place in other parts of the world. To ensure that such an excellent bricklayer is not entirely forgotten in this book or other books, we shall now take up the thread again at the description of his house. Stanford built almost the whole house in one summer, baking the necessary bricks himself in Þjóðrekur’s yard. First he built a main house, but then he began to get big ideas and added an extra building which he placed at right angles to the other one, as if they wanted to break apart and go their separate ways.

Such houses were not infrequently built in Spanish Fork in the search for a more varied and wealthier-looking style than a pioneer’s circumstances had allowed. Several worthy compatriots said it was a bad move from Iceland to the Land of All-Wisdom if they and their families had to make do with smaller houses than the average sheriff’s residence in Iceland. No one knew where the little house that came marching out of the big house was making for. But in the instructive little anecdotes about England which appear at the foot of the page in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic it was always said that people in fine houses came “down to breakfast,” and this was not the least of the reasons why good people in Spanish Fork had their bedrooms upstairs. Stone P. Stanford did not want to aim lower than other inhabitants of God’s Kingdom on earth. He constructed three rooms downstairs, and in the kitchen he made a recess for himself, the old fellow from Hlíðar, where he hoped to be allowed to sit in peace and quiet when he grew older, picking meat off a leg of salted mutton with his clasp-knife while the young people, visitors and residents, were singing in the sitting-room.

He made the bedroom for himself and his wife as large as the main bedroom in the home of a Welsh sheep-farmer who was living in Spanish Fork at the time and owned twenty-four thousand sheep on the mountain—about as many sheep as all the farmers put together in any ten parishes in Iceland. But he himself never slept there. In the loft of the extra-house, whose gable-wall faced east towards Sierra Benida, there suddenly took shape a room which he had some difficulty explaining when he was asked what it was for.

“When my daughter wakes up on her first morning in God’s City of Zion,” he said, “the sun will rise over Sierra Benida and shine upon saints: the sun of the All-Wisdom; the sun of the Bee-hive, the Sego-lily, and Sea-gull; and then she will understand her father even though she did not understand him when he was making a casket once. My son, who will be staying at the other end, will also understand on that morning that Egill Skallagrímsson and the Norse kings live here in Spanish Fork, but that they now have the gleam of righteousness in their eyes and have become leaders in the Stake, Seventies and High Priests.”

But there was one problem he had not managed to solve, and that was what kind of curtains her windows were to have. Over and over again Stanford had inquired after suitable curtains in the Lord Thy God’s Store, which was uncontaminated by merchants, and where an awful eye stared out with rays like a sea-urchin. He had made them unwind bolt after bolt but never found anything approaching the colour and floral design which were to adorn the cloth that was to be between his daughter and this holy mountain. He laid the problem (white or coloured?) before an aged and honourable Elder in the capital city when he had to go in to the Stake on Ward business. People in Salt Lake City were only too willing to provide him with household goods, but curtains for the girl’s window were quite beyond them. This slow-spoken Elder, who embodied all the ordeals of the wilderness, reminded the bricklayer that there were two things of greater urgency for him now than curtains for his daughter if he wanted to continue along the path he was following: the first was to consider the worthy women who were drifting around helplessly like flotsam on the salt lake of the wilderness without being able to sink, and to consider whether the time had not come to covenant a marriage of a divine nature with a sister or two and thereby do his stint to strengthen this saintly community against the Gentiles.

“When Brigham Young was lying at home on his deathbed the Federal flag was flying over his house with the twenty-seven gables, and the Feds were all standing outside, fully armed,” said the sage Elder, as if to render any further argument unnecessary. “And the other thing, dear brother, is this: is it not soon becoming time to submit yourself to the duty of all good Mormons, and journey to the lands of the Gentiles to teach people to embrace the Gospel?”

Stone P. Stanford came home doubly fortified by the confidence in him that had been shown by these necessary admonitions. The circumspection and solicitude in these admonitions had been on such a high plane that the more he thought about the matter, the more clearly he understood that he had in actual fact been taken to task: the only correction that is true and precise is the one a man is not aware of when it is administered, but realises tomorrow that he had been flogged yesterday. Towards evening he stood at the window which looked out on the prospect of Sierra Benida, the Blessed Mountain, the mountain whose nakedness is like that of a man who has not merely had his clothes removed, but also his skin and flesh, nerves and blood. Perhaps it was the will of God and the Prophet that between this little girl, when she came, and this mountain, the Blessed Mountain, the Naked Mountain, this Skeleton of a Mountain, there should not be any curtain.

Never had it been so far from the bricklayer’s mind as now, when he had pondered the words of the Elder, to think for a moment of living in the house he had built. He put the newly-bought dining-table in the middle of the room with its chairs round it, as if he were going to hold a banquet—and then hung the guests up on the wall: pictures of Joseph the Prophet, his brother Hyram and Brigham Young. He went on pottering about in the dusk, polishing up the woodwork in the house by the light of a lamp he lit. But when he became sleepy he did not stretch out on the big marital bed, but went out to the workshed behind the house as usual. The floor in this shed was the sand of the wilderness. His bed was a frame that he himself had put together, with two props, or rather stools, one for the head and one for the feet. This was where he usually slept, with a blanket to cover him. The death-watch beetle woke up and started to rub its neck when he lit a candle, and there was a rustling from a spider the size of a meadow pipit, which had taken up winter quarters in one of the corners. A wholesome breeze blew in through the open window, and from heaven there shone a star. He emptied the sand carefully from his shoes before turning in.

One evening—it was one of those evenings which are almost exactly the same as other evenings, without even a meeting at the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association, and the bricklayer was getting ready to eat his bread and go to sleep— one evening he was sent a message asking if he would not like to drop over to the Bishop’s House and have some broth. He washed his face carefully as was the custom in Steinahlíðar when people go visiting, and brushed his hands over his bald scalp because he felt that his hair was standing on end as it used to do when it was in full growth.

When he reached the Bishop’s House all the windows were lit up. Bishop Þjóðrekur had come home. From the house came an enticing cooking-smell of cabbage and all kinds of other vegetables, all the hospitable pleasures which are contained in American broth. Þjóðrekur had taken off his jacket and was sitting in his chair under the lamp. A seven-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl were kneeling on the ground in front of him, eyeing their father with awe and admiration; the boy had put on his father’s hat, that marvellous hat wrapped in grease-proof paper which had never suffered a stain or a wrinkle. The bishop’s little daughter fingered the buttons on his shirt and said, “Oh, what lovely buttons you have on your shirt, Daddy.” But Madame Colornay’s youngest son, who had not seen the light of day until six months after Þjóðrekur went away, had clambered all over his father until he had pulled off his spectacles.

Stanford had barely had time to greet the bishop before Madame Colornay came sweeping out of the kitchen towards him, a beaming sunshine smile all over, hugging a fresh-coloured young girl from another world who stared straight ahead with huge questioning eyes.

“Praise be to the Lord of Hosts for giving you such a jewel for a daughter, our Þjóðrekur’s fourth wife! And now kiss both me and her and all of us and congratulate us,” said Madame Colornay. “Don’t you think it a blessing to get a fragrant rose into this bone-jelly and old-women’s smell, so bright and clean and undefiled in heart and, what’s more, just at the time when I can’t have any more children? Now life is starting again with sunshine days here in the Bishop’s House, like the year after our Þjóðrekur raised me out of a ditch with my small sons who are now grown up and gone to the war. Nothing could ever again cast a shadow on this house if it weren’t for the damned Feds (God save the children) skulking around the house here till all hours; one of them very nearly had me trapped in a corner against the water-butt yesterday evening, a fat old thing like me with varicose veins up to the thighs and now gone sexless, thank God.”

He kissed his daughter, as was the custom in Steinahlíðar, but rather hesitantly. Then he kissed his son who sprang out of a shadowy corner, but neither the boy nor the girl could utter a word when they met him here in eternity, until he asked his daughter how their mother was.

“Mother is dead—too,” said the girl.

Then they told their father how his wife had died at sea, and been buried.

“May the Lord be praised for her,” said Stone P. Stanford.

He tittered slightly and added, “My word! It would not matter so much not knowing what to say, if I only knew where I should look.”

“Look over here, Steinar dear, and greet your own image,” said María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur.

She was sitting with the little frock-clad gentleman from Steinahlíðar on her lap. In the single hour that had elapsed since he came into the house, she had practically become his grandmother, the same grandmother for whom he had been pining since she vanished and whom he had half-expected to see again when he came “home,” for somehow or other the boy had got the idea that when she was lowered into the Atlantic she had just been taking a short cut to the place for which they were all heading.

“Bend down, Stanford dear, and give him a kiss here on my lap,” the old woman went on. “This is the son of your darling daughter, our and Þjóðrekur’s fourth sister. I always knew that so long as I lived, God would grant me the joy of having a little boy to hold in these buckled hands, as a saintly woman once prophesied for me in the Vestmannaeyjar when I was young.”

Stone P. Stanford now went round and kissed everyone again, and wished each and all of them happiness as sincerely and fittingly as he knew how. Then he asked his daughter for news of Steinahlíðar.

“Oh, everything’s all right, I suppose,” said the girl, sniffing. “Except that it was a terribly cold spring this year, nothing but rain, rain, rain right until pasturage, and lambs always being drowned in the pools. . . .”