Paradise Reclaimed (4 page)

5

The sacred lava violated

In Brennugjá (Burning Rift), the place in Þingvellir where people used to be burned at the stake, a small gathering of farmers had collected at dusk that late-summer evening on the day before the king’s arrival. The scree under the cliff was almost hidden by moss, and on one moss-grown block of lava the height of a man someone had clambered up to make a speech to his fellowcountrymen about a matter of no little importance. A few inquisitive souls had drifted up to hear if anything of interest were going on, and among them was Steinar of Hlíðar; he had his riding-crop in his hand.

As far as he could make out from a distance, it seemed to Steinar that this man was quoting something from the Bible, but he was astonished to note that the pious expressions usually worn by an audience on such occasions were not in evidence now. Indeed, most of the bystanders were looking rather indignant, and there were some who made no secret of their disapproval of what was being said. The speaker was constantly being interrupted, and some of the catcalls were distinctly discourteous; there were other people who just shouted and laughed. But the speaker was never at a loss for an answer and never became confused, although his delivery was by nature a little awkward.

He seemed to be about Steinar’s age, big-boned and high-shouldered but rather thin, with a gaunt face that was pitted with pockmarks or scored by suffering; his whole appearance bore witness to some exceptional experience. At that time, most Icelanders had rounded cheeks under their whiskers, and their adult tribulations were as natural to them as the sorrows of childhood; even the oldest men had the same expression as children. Many people in Iceland in those days had a sort of pink, transparent skin; their colour varied between a cold blue-red pallor and a deep-blue flush, depending on the weather and the nourishment they were getting. But this man was almost greyish-brown in the face, not unlike the colour of glacier-rivers or warmed-up coffee with skimmed milk added. He had a shock of thick, tousled hair, and his clothes were too big for him, but he was no scarecrow for all that.

And what was this man talking about at Þingvellir near the Öxará out with the official programme for the great national celebrations, when every honest breast in the land was swelling with pride and the hope of better times to come?

Steinar of Hlíðar asked who this preacher might be, and received the reply that he was a heretic.

“Oh really?” said Steinar. “I must say I would not mind having a look at such a person. We see many strangers in Steinahlíðar, but most of them seem to have the right ideas about the Almighty. Excuse me, gentlemen, but what is this man’s heresy?”

“He’s over from America to preach some revelations from a new prophet who opposes Luther and the Pope, some fellow called Joseph Smith, apparently,” said the man Steinar had addressed. “They have several wives. But the authorities have burned all his pamphlets with the revelations in them, and now he’s come to Þingvellir to see the king and get permission to print more heresies. They immerse people.”

Steinar moved in closer. By this time there was no longer any question of a formal speech being delivered. The stranger’s preaching had so incensed everyone that he was scarcely given time to finish a sentence before the audience were shouting corrections or demanding further explanations. Some were now so impassioned that they could scarcely find words of sufficient abuse to apply to this heretic.

“What proof does this fellow you mentioned have that people ought to be immersed?” yelled one heckler.

“Was the Saviour himself not immersed, then?” replied the speaker. “Do you think the Saviour would have let himself be immersed if the Lord had acknowledged child-baptism? In the Bible there was always baptism by immersion. There is no child-baptism in God’s Word, no sirree. It never occurred to anyone to sprinkle water on infants before the third century, at the beginning of the great Apostasy, when unenlightened and ungodly people got the idea of cleansing children who were to be sacrificed to a copper god, yes sirree. They called themselves Christians but they worshipped the fiend Satan. Then the Pope adopted this perversion, of course, like all other heresies; and Luther followed him, even though he boasted he knew better than the Pope.”

One person asked, “Can Joseph Smith perform miracles?”

The speaker retorted, “Where are Luther’s miracles? And where are the Pope’s miracles? I’ve never heard anything of them. On the other hand, the whole existence of the Mormons is a miracle, from the moment when Joseph Smith spoke to the Lord for the first time. When did Luther speak to the Lord? When did the Pope speak to the Lord?”

“God spoke to the Apostle Paul,” said one learned man.

“Oh, that was rather a brief interview,” replied the speaker. “And God never bothered to give the fellow more than the one audience. On the other hand, the Lord spoke to Joseph Smith not once and not twice and not thrice but one hundred and thirty-three times, not counting the principal revelations themselves.”

“The Bible is God’s Word here in Iceland,” said the earnest theologian who had spoken previously. But the preacher was quick to reply: “Do you think that God was struck dumb when He had finished dictating the Bible?” he demanded.

A witty heckler shouted, “Not dumb, perhaps, but at least dumbfounded at the thought that Joseph Smith was going to come along and bastardize it.”

“Dumb or dumbfounded, I’m not going to argue the point with you, my friend. But I get the impression that you believe that God is utterly silenced? That He has not opened His mouth for nearly two thousand years?”

“At least I don’t believe that God talks to fools,” said the heckler.

“Quite so,” said the heretic. “I suppose He is far more likely to talk to respectable farmers and sheriffs, and perhaps a pastor or two? But allow me to add one word, if I may, since you were asking about miracles: what miracles do you have to set against the fact that God led Joseph Smith to the golden plates on the Hill Cumorah, and then by direct revelation showed the Mormons the way to the Promised Land which is God’s home and the kingdom of the Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake Valley?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” said the heckler. “Since when has America with all its hordes of gangsters and beggars become God’s Kingdom?”

Now the Mormon had to swallow carefully once or twice.

“I must admit,” he said at last, “that one’s tongue can sometimes get tied in knots here in Iceland, and it takes an effort for unlettered folk like myself to untie it. There’s only one thing I want to say to you, because I know I am speaking the absolute truth: everything the Saviour and the Pope’s saints tried to do but couldn’t, even though all your Lutheran kings tagged along behind them, Joseph Smith and his disciple Brigham Young achieved when they, at God’s express wish and command, led us Mormons to God’s own city of Zion descended upon earth; and over that country there shines a glorious light. There you will find God’s Valley of Bliss and His millennium on earth. And because this valley lies far behind the mountains, moors, deserts and rivers of America, and secondly because America preserved the Lord’s golden plates that Joseph found, the mere name of America is sufficient praise.”

“Yes, and of all the swindlers and vagabonds in America, Joseph with his plates was the worst,” shouted one of the crowd.

“Where is
your
promised land?” retorted the speaker.

“In heaven!”

“Ah yes, just as I thought. Is that not pretty high up in the stratosphere?”

Another said, “It would be fun to have a look at these golden plates. I don’t suppose you have a fragment of them handy? Even just a list of the natural resources in Zion?”

“In Salt Lake Valley it’s quite usual for any one farmer to own ten thousand ewes in addition to other livestock,” said the Mormon. “How are the prospects in
your
millennium?”

This report about sheep-farming in the Promised Land seemed to take everyone aback for a moment.

“Our Saviour is our Saviour, God be praised!” testified one God-fearing man, as if to brace himself against this enormous holding of sheep.

“Yes, and is Joseph perhaps not Joseph?” said the Mormon. “That’s what I would have thought, even though I’m not very learned. Joseph is Joseph. God be praised.”

“The New Testament is our witness!” shouted the man with the clergyman’s vocabulary. “He who believes in Christ does not believe in Joseph.”

“That’s a lie!” cried the Mormon. “He who believes in Christ can certainly believe in Joseph. No one but he who believes in the New Testament can believe in the golden plates. But he who calls the New Testament a hoax made up by vagabonds and asks ‘Where’s the original?’—
he
can’t believe in Joseph either. Such a person would tell you he puts the New Testament and the golden plates of Joseph in the same category. Such a person says, ‘Just as the Saviour’s friends concocted the New Testament, so Joseph’s friends invented the golden plates.’ Such a person will try to prove to you that the Saviour and Joseph were both dishonest men. Dear brethren, we Mormons do not speak to people who talk in the way I have just described. They are beyond the pale.”

“I seem to recall, my friend,” said one well-to-do farmer, “that you were just telling us how many ewes you had. Ten thousand, wasn’t it, eh? How about now telling us how many wives you have?”

“How many wives did people in the Bible have? People like Solomon, for instance, who was at least as big a farmer as you?” said the Mormon. “And didn’t Luther allow the Elector of Hesse to have more than one wife? And why was the papacy abolished in England? Only to allow old Henry to have several wives.”

“We’re Icelanders here,” said a voice from the crowd.

“Yes, and Icelanders have always been polygamists,” said the Mormon.

There was a gasp from various good folk in the audience. Some shouted, “You’re lying!” Others challenged the Mormon to prove his statement.

“Well, they certainly were when I knew them,” said the Mormon. “It was just that any one man was free to turn any number of women into harlots instead of giving them honourable status with the seal of matrimony, as we Mormons do. Mormons don’t let nice young girls waste away before their eyes in shame and humiliation if they refuse to marry the first lout who proposed to them. Many fine girls, on the other hand, are happy to share a good man rather than make do with some boor all their lives. We in Salt Lake Valley don’t want to rear harlots or old maids or disgraced mothers and widows for vulgar people to gossip about. But when I was growing up in Iceland the country was crowded with such women. Children were given fathers and women married off for the most part according to whose reputation needed salvaging. I myself was conceived and reared in this form of polygamy. People said I was a pastor’s son. It was the custom of those in authority who had to travel a lot to sleep with whatever women happened to take their fancy, married or unmarried. My mother was forced to seek refuge in the Vestmannaeyjar, and died there from the contempt with which she was treated; and I was brought back to the mainland and reared in her parish. An orphan, usually an illegitimate one at that, was never a person of much standing in Icelandic society. I was invariably given a change of clothes and a haircut on the first day of summer. The sack on which the dog had lain at the door all winter was dusted against the wall, then a hole was made for my head and that’s what I was given to wear. Polygamy has always been practised in Iceland, but that’s how it actually worked out for the women and children. It wasn’t perhaps quite so bad in my time as before, when the unlawful wives of polygamists were put to death by drowning in a pool here at Þingvellir for giving birth to children. With us in Salt Lake Valley, on the other hand . . .”

When he had reached this point in his argument it was obvious that various upstanding farmers in the audience felt he had gone quite far enough. Some said they had not ridden to Þingvellir from distant parts just to see the sacred lava violated and the place defiled with foul talk about eminent folk and decent farmers. From all around came shouts that the heretic had gone too far. Several good people went up to him and tried to topple him off the stone. The Mormon peered at them over his spectacles and stopped short in mid-sentence, dropped his preacher’s attitude at once, and said quietly in an ordinary tone of voice, “Are you thinking of laying hands on me?”

“If you insult this holy sanctuary with one more word from your shameless and ungodly mouth, you’ll suffer for it,” said one topbooted gentleman, walking briskly up to the stone on which the Mormon stood.

“I shall stop now,” said the Mormon. “I always stop when people are going to beat me up. God will conquer without Mormons having to brawl. Goodbye, gentlemen, I shall take my leave now.”

They cried, “Fie on you!” and “Shame on you for taking the Lord’s name in vain!”

The Mormon clambered rather stiffly down off the rock. Two or three respectable farmers seized hold of him, not to help him down but to take him to task. They gripped him tightly and exposed him to the crowd, so that whoever was so minded could come forward and deal with him. One topbooted gentleman stepped up and kicked him. Another good man came and struck him twice on the face.

There was a bystander with a riding-crop in his hand nearby, rather an undistinguished, clumsy-looking fellow.

“Good, there’s a riding-crop,” said a stout gold-braided man with a goatee beard. “You there, spindle-shanks, lend the lads your riding-crop.”

“It so happens, heeheehee, that so long as I am holding it this riding-crop has human intelligence, as one might say, though not very much, it’s true,” said Steinar of Hlíðar, with a falsetto giggle.

Anyway, whether or not it was because they failed to get a loan of Steinar’s riding-crop, they stopped giving the Mormon a beating. They released him and told him to go to hell. He shuffled away down towards the water, straddle-legged and stooping a little from the waist. In characteristic and ingrained Icelandic fashion he was jeered as he departed. Some shouted “America!,” others “Salt Lake Puddle!,” while others just shouted obscenities; but the Mormon neither turned his head nor quickened his pace. It did not take long for the crowd’s vehemence to simmer down, and the people dispersed. Soon there was no one left in Brennugjá except Steinar of Hlíðar sitting on a stone with his riding-crop.