Paradise Reclaimed (24 page)

Her brother interrupted, “Steina and I were saying that there probably hasn’t been another spring like it in Steinahlíðar since the year the mare threw Krapi. . . .”

“And more stones down off the mountain than ever before, I think one could say,” added the girl.

“I assume you mean that the last few winters have been hard on the hay?” said the bricklayer. “It could also sometimes snow in Steinahlíðar in spring; the sheep then blundered through the thin ice-crusts over the hazards, that is perfectly true. What I was going to say: stones coming down off the mountain on to the hayfields, one knows all about that, all right! But there was some consolation in those days in the fact that we had a good horse at Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar, the one you mentioned. Quite so.”

They listened in amazement to themselves talking to one another again: three people who all were originally one and the same heart. So this is how reunions were in Heaven! They hastened to fall silent.

“I trust that everything went well on your travels, old friend?” said Stone P. Stanford.

“They didn’t beat me very much in Iceland during my last year and a half there. But is that a step forward or a step back?” said the bishop. “It can drive you mad, to wrestle with wool when it isn’t even in sacks.”

“Oh, it can surely be called a good sign that some people, somewhere, have stopped beating those who think differently from themselves,” said Stanford. “You remember where and when we became acquaintances, Þjóðrekur? If I say to you that I live on the other side of the moon, which I have sometimes half suspected anyway, this does not seem to me an entirely valid reason to start beating me up, before you have considered on which side you yourself live. Anyway, we all live a hundred thousand million miles out in the cosmos.”

Then the bricklayer lowered his voice, and almost in a whisper asked the great bishop and traveller: “Could I just ask you to tell me one small thing: were the stars present when she was buried?”

“The storm had abated and it was beginning to clear up, and there was bright starlight,” said the bishop.

“That was good,” said Stone P. Stanford. “That is all I wanted to ask you.”

Járnanna brought in the broth in a large pot and laid it on the middle of the table. She asked them all to come and eat, and this remarkably expanded family sat down at table. Járnanna herself did not take her seat immediately, but started to serve the soup into the bowls. It is not the custom among Mormons that it should always be the head of the house who says grace; sometimes it is one of the sisters; and this is due to the fact that the head of the family is often away for long periods doing useful work in distant parts. Járnanna did not sit down this time until she had said grace. She was rather sparing of words, as lean people always are:

“We thank thee, God,” she said, “for that our brother has once again performed a prodigy of faith which will long be remembered among saints, and planted a new flower in lovely bloom which will live and multiply for generations here in the wilderness. Amen.”

29

Polygamy or death

It is related that two hundred Gentile women got together at about this time and called a meeting in Salt Lake City, calling themselves The Union of Christian Women. The saints considered these women to be offspring of the Great Apostasy. The women, who in fact had never had any revelations themselves, now sent energetic demands to the Congress of the United States of America to take decisive action against the church which claimed to be God’s proxy; and they called upon the Federal Government to brook no delay in disfranchising the polygamists and annulling the law and order which the saints had established among themselves. They further declared in this document that the doctrine that many women should share the same man was ungodly, as God had created for Adam only one Eve and not several. At this meeting, which was held in one of the churches of the Great Apostasy, many fanatical and tearful speeches were made by women with one husband apiece demanding liberation for women who had to share theirs. In a flood of eloquence they demanded that their husbands and other monogamists should put the polygamists behind lock and key. Some suggested making use of a peculiar Anglo-Saxon form of torture, called tarring and feathering, for those husbands who loved more than one woman, and also for their wives.

This is not the place for a full account of all the measures and devices to which the Government authorities resorted in order to constrain the Mormons in Utah. But to demonstrate that the gloves were now off in the battle with the saints it has to be told that, when Stone P. Stanford went to see Bishop Þjóðrekur the day after his return in order to seek more information about the important events that a higher Providence had imposed on both their lives, the bishop was not available. The Feds had arrived at the crack of dawn and arrested the bishop and driven him away in a large military wagon. The blossoming household which last night had gathered round a pot of good wholesome broth to celebrate reunion and soul-salving tidings, and where happiness was guest of honour, had been crushed by injustice in the name of justice and by ungodliness under the pretext of godliness.

Although Mormons are always described as inoffensive people, they were not accustomed to lying down under a beating for very long. It was not long after the two hundred daughters of the Great Apostasy had delivered their manifesto that the saints sounded the trumpets of war. They first summoned local women’s meetings in every single district in Utah to make vows and pass resolutions publicly. Then the local meetings were to be summoned to a general meeting in Salt Lake City to promote unity and solidarity there, and to explain the place and validity of polygamy in the business of salvation. The womenfolk of Spanish Fork also met in conference and made preparations to go to Salt Lake City and make their voices heard in the national chorus. First they sang some beautiful Latter-Day Saints hymns and then attempted to describe their bliss, each in her own way. They thanked the Lord of Hosts for the revelation of being able to see and understand that woman’s salvation consists in having a righteous husband, whose virtuous deeds spoke for themselves; and there can never be too many women sharing in such a man. They said that harmony of spirit, coupled with a tangible share in the divine presence, gave Mormon households a grace which was rarely to be found elsewhere in married life. For every day that God gives us, they said, we thank the Lord of Hosts and His friend the Prophet, the latter of whom instituted here on earth a life of loveliness without envy or jealousy. Who has ever heard that decent women here are thrown on the rubbish-dump, as is the custom among Josephites and Lutherans, whose men go to any lengths to avoid honourable matrimony, or else are unfaithful to their wives when they do eventually marry, and then run away from them? We shall not give up this our life of loveliness as long as we live, however much we are oppressed by the Government and its troops and policemen, its Congress and Senate, orators, newspaper scribes and authors, professors and paltry bishops and even the anti-Christ himself, the Pope. No power on earth will succeed in preventing us from accomplishing God’s sacred ordinances, as regards polygamy no less than all the other aspects that God has revealed to us. Polygamy as long as we live, say we women Latter-Day Saints; polygamy or death!

After the district meeting was over the women all took their seats in wagons that were waiting in the road ready to take them to the general meeting in Salt Lake City. Large farm-wagons, normally used for hay and corn, some with teams of four horses, had been furnished with seats and canvas to transport this cargo of blooms. These worthy women glowed with idealism and correct opinions, and wore the cheerfully innocent expressions that are seen at their best on nuns. Some laughed and giggled from the childlike excess of good conscience that borders on being consciencelessness, others went on singing hymns of praise with quavering voices in order to give this great innocence an outlet; a band of young men played a horn accompaniment. Husbands stood on the road with the children to say bye-bye. There was a great deal of indiscriminate kissing. An elderly man came up to one of the wagons, brushed his hair down on his forehead, and addressed himself to a young girl who had taken her place on a seat between two elderly women and was staring wide-eyed into the blue, not even singing, to be sure, because she did not know the words; but one could tell from her bright expression that she was happier than words could say.

“I hope, my dear,” he said with a titter, “that you are not disappointed in the country and kingdom I bought for you children. I want to tell you that if I had known of a truer City of God elsewhere I would have bought that for you and your brother.”

The bishop’s fourth wife looked at her father from the distance which one day must come between two hearts. She answered from the wagon, “What more could I have wished for myself than to be allowed to join these women? I hope the day will never come when I let Þjóðrekur down, for he saved me from that terrible beast whose name I shall never utter.”

“Don’t say any more about that creature; happy the one who is free of it,” said Madame Colornay, who was sitting on the other side of the fourth wife.

“In the Vestmannaeyjar there was only one terrible beast, the beast that has as many greedy maws as it was slashed with knives,” said old María from Ampahjallur, who was sitting on this side of the fourth wife with Steinar junior on her knees. And the blind woman added, “But the people with whom I grew up in the Vestmannaeyjar, on the other hand, carried heaven within themselves; even if it was sixty fathoms at the end of a rope down a cliff, fowling, they were at home in God’s City of Zion.”

Giddup! and the first crack of the whip. The leading wagon had set off, and soon the whole caravan was on the move with its load of women and music. The menfolk took the children by the hand and ran alongside for a good while, waving their hats in farewell, some with jokes and others with prayers of intercession, but they soon had to fall behind; the women waved their kerchiefs from the wagons, laughing and singing to the music of the brass band, and the dust swirled on the road. Gradually the men gave up running behind and waving, and when the outskirts of the town were reached they had all turned for home except one. He suddenly found himself standing alone in the dust, with his hat held aloft; the wagonloads of women had vanished into the distance, halfway to Springville, and the sounds of singing and brass had almost died. He wiped the dust from his eyes after his vain pursuit. But it was not until he had put on his hat again that he noticed he was standing in front of the farthest house at that end of the street, the dilapidated house where the sewing-machine had once lived.

The house had deteriorated badly since he had first gone there a long time ago; and it had not been in very good condition even then. Now there were such large cracks in the walls that lizards had made their homes in them, and elsewhere pockets of soil had formed in the fissures and couch-grass was growing in them. There was not much life left on the clothes-line either, compared with what it used to be—just a few torn and tattered children’s rags.

He discovered that he was not the only one who was staring foolishly after the musical wagons: outside the door stood a young dark-haired girl who had inherited everything from her mother except the laughter, and was endowed with most of the feminine virtues except knowing how to say good morning. She was looking towards the road, weeping, with her year-old child in her arms. The little scamp was trying to comfort his mother by twisting her tear-filled nose upwards and poking at her eyes with his soft little fingers. Stone P. Stanford had luckily put his hat on, so that he was able to take it off again to the girl.

“What a rumbling of wagons today, did you not think?” he said, walking over towards her. “May God give you and your son a good day.”

There had been no tidying-up done around the house that year, and probably not for twenty years at that. It was amazing how zealously the sagebrush and tamarisk flourished in this patch round the house, and on the whole all the weeds that can flourish in a wilderness. In some places the crumbled adobe had fallen from the house-walls like a landslip. The windows that faced the road had been boarded up. A long time ago the bricklayer had half-promised the woman to see to her house for her; seldom had a half-promise been more thoroughly broken. The bricks he had brought her in a pram when he paid her his visit (blessed memory) still lay on the paving as he had stacked them, except that they were now almost engulfed by weeds and brush. He proffered his hand to the girl, and the girl first wiped her face with her palm and then offered the visitor a hand wet with grief. Then he patted the little boy on the forehead and tittered.

“There is someone, at least, who is not jubilating in God’s City of Zion today, despite what one might have thought,” he said. “What is there to be done about that?”

“We are Josephites and aren’t allowed to go,” said the girl, and went on crying.

“Oh dear, if you had only come to me I would quickly have got you a seat beside my daughter, in gratitude for all the blessed coffee,” he said. “And even though I am perhaps undependable and promise more than I fulfil, it would have been simple for you to mention it to the man who is an older and truer friend to you than this old fellow from Steinahlíðar.”

“You mean old Ronki,” said this rather raw-looking girl. “You surely don’t think he can command as much room as would do for a woman’s bottom? The only thing he can do is to nail boards over our windows when the boys have thrown stones through them. You see, he got used to this sort of carpentry in the Lutheran Church.”

“There is no denying that,” said the bricklayer. “Too many panes are gone. When I look at this wanton destruction it makes me suffer as much as if I had done it myself.”

As has been alluded to already, the sewing-machine no longer stood in the middle of the room; instead Borgi the seamstress, her face swollen with tears, sat at a window at the back of the house doing some darning with needle and thread. The doors that had once been kept so carefully closed in this house were now not only off their hinges but had vanished altogether. And what had become of the cupboards full of the gay ultra-fashionable New England gowns, which were so low-necked that one thought one was being suckled again?

The woman looked at the visitor with her expressive eyes from out of that deep darkness, swollen with tears.

“It has been a long time,” he said.

He brushed his invisible hair down over his forehead as always and found a place for his hat on the floor, in a corner, before he offered the woman his hand.

“A very good day to you, my dear Madame Þorbjörg. It is little wonder you cannot remember this old chap, who himself does not even know his own name any more, much less where he comes from. But there was a time when you used to bring me excellent coffee, and lots of it. A thousand thanks for that.”

“Coffee!” she repeated in astonishment, as if she had never heard of anything so absurd.

“But He who did not let a refreshing drink go unrewarded remembers it even better,” he said.

“Yes, that’s true,” said the woman. “And I, too, thank you for the bricks you brought here in a pram.”

Although she had just been weeping and her tear-glands had scarcely stopped functioning, her sense of humour was so great that the memory of this gift threw her into a frenzy of laughter. She laughed so hard that one could see right down her throat.

“It is truly a Godsend to be able to smile, dear lady,” he said.

She stopped laughing and dried what was left of the tears.

“Do please have a seat on my chair,” said the woman and stood up. “I’ll sit on this stool. No, there is truly no laughter in my heart. But the bloodiest part of it all was seeing women sitting there so superciliously who, to the best of my knowledge, have never once even heard the Prophet’s name mentioned, any more than I have. That was the last straw.”

“It has always been so,” he said, “that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. It is not very long since my daughter heard the Prophet’s name mentioned, if she had heard it mentioned at all. Perhaps there is a reason for everything, even for the fact that you and your daughter were not specially invited to a seat in the wagons. If I remember correctly, you once told me that when someone tried to teach you to embrace the Gospel you laughed until you fainted.”

“As if one isn’t just as dependent on the Prophet whether one believes in him or not,” said the woman. “Why do we sit here abandoned like this? The Prophet has pulled everyone away from me. The house is falling to pieces, and why? The Prophet has stoned it. The only thing the Prophet has left me is old Ronki, and therefore I got the leavings of your ox-soup in the Bishop’s House the other day.”

“It was a great pity about the sewing-machine,” he said. “It gave me a shock to hear of it.”

“Obviously, it had to go towards my debts,” said the woman. “And anyway I hadn’t much use left for it because, since my daughter had a child by a Lutheran, not a single saint has wanted me to sew underwear for his wives (not that it can get around very far who sews people’s underwear), much less any visible garments that could possibly be talked about in the Mutual Improvement Association, with someone saying: ‘That surely isn’t from Borgi?’ ”