Paradise Reclaimed (14 page)

“The poor man, to come all this long way on his own,” said the old woman, feeling Steinar Steinsson with her twisted fingers both on the face and the body. “It’s quite sure that God has something in mind for us all. I am pretty certain I still have some grains of coffee in the tin since our Lutheran was here the weekend before last.”

“Only if Pastor Runólfur has not appropriated it as usual,” said the middle sister.

This was the sort of house which used to be found in Iceland in occasional places, but was rare in other countries: its doors stood open to visitors and passers-by night and day, with refreshment always on hand however long they might wish to stay. Such houses never seemed over-crowded. No one ever objected to disagreeable visitors, although there were many who were not particularly congenial. The host never expected any payment of any kind for the hospitality; it was taken for granted that all travellers were destitute, and that rich people did not move from their homes. At Bishop Þjóðrekur’s house in God’s City of Zion the only demand made on visitors was that they should walk straight in without knocking. Lutherans would be forgiven for two knocks; a third knock was an affront to the Holy Spirit.

Most of those who were put up in Bishop Þjóðrekur’s house were homeless Icelanders, some of them newly arrived, while others had managed to find the truth in the Promised Land with their unreliable heads and even more undiscriminating hearts, but rather less with the more dependable organs. Many of Þjóðrekur’s guests made their own homes eventually. Among those who had been there a long time was the Reverend Runólfur, former pastor for Hvalsnes. On account of a divine vocation he had abandoned his living in Iceland to serve the smallest and sorriest Lutheran church in the world, which three eccentric families had founded right in the heart of God’s city of Zion. After he came to America he gradually became a Mormon, and was baptised by immersion. Shortly thereafter the windows of the Lutheran church were boarded up. No one really knew what it was that impeded Pastor Runólfur’s advancement in Zion, for there were few who pursued correct thinking with greater zeal than he after his conversion, and even fewer who had a better knowledge of what they believed; for he, as a man of learning, had closely studied the Golden Book as well as the Prophet’s revelations and books of the original saints. Other men, some of them ignorant and indolent, swarmed up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment straight from the floor of the byre, as it were, and became counsellors in their Wards, as they called their parishes, or even Ward Bishops, if they were not hoisted straight up into the Stake (which supervises the bishoprics) and made Elders, Seventies, Melchizedek High Priests or even Apostles before the cow had time to low thrice. But Pastor Runólfur willy-nilly had to stick to these fifteen ewes that Bishop Þjóðrekur had put in his charge six years ago, on the day he was immersed. He had still advanced no farther than the post of Ward Assistant. Yet no one was better suited to rally the waverers, and especially to wrangle with Lutherans; he wrangled some of them out of the house and others off their land and some even out of the country. It could well be that this talent for disputation was considered a two-edged weapon, and give the Mormons cause for alarm. But the fifteen ewes in his care, whose numbers he had to keep steady however many of them were slaughtered, even if they were all put to the knife at the same time—they took to the pastor and throve, particularly their tails, which were not at all like the tails one sees in Iceland, but long and full. Bishop Þjóðrekur was so tolerant in religious matters that he instructed the three sisters always to run up a new Lutheran frock-coat for Pastor Runólfur when the old one was worn out, in accordance with the custom that an army general who has been taken prisoner by the enemy is allowed to wear his uniform as long as he so desires, and his sword too if it is not lost or broken. This short, nimble-footed slender man with the watery eyes and the face pulled crosswise, always frock-coated in the desert—this was the man who undertook to train Steinar Steinsson in correct thinking.

And since Pastor Runólfur was a most knowledgeable man, and somewhat free of tongue, he was quick to give strangers an insight into people’s affairs in the district, including the family relationships in the bishop’s residence. Runólfur said that Bishop Þjóðrekur owned three wives, but that people believed that he had only ever loved the woman he had brought from Iceland into the wilderness, where she had perished of thirst. He had buried her in the sand. After her death he carried their baby in his arms farther into the wilderness for a while, but the child’s life ebbed away until all movement was stilled. Bishop Þjóðrekur buried it in a sand-dune and planted over it a cross made of two straws. This child was said to have been a little girl. Bishop Þjóðrekur was one of the pioneers from Iceland who had bought the Promised Land for the price it was worth.

Crossing the wilderness in the same party in which Bishop Þjóðrekur had brought his beloved and lost her was a middle-aged woman, travelling alone; she was called Anna, and wore iron spectacles. She was fifteen years older than Bishop Þjóðrekur. She had shared her water-supply with the mother and daughter to the very last drop. She relieved him by lulling the baby to sleep at night after Þjóðrekur’s beloved had died; and for this, Þjóðrekur was grateful to her. When the survivors reached the Kingdom of Saints, he proposed to her and married her at the same time as he sealed a union to all eternity with the one who now lay in the sand. Anna had since then been in charge of his household, and was known as Járnanna (Iron-Anna). They gave the church one half of everything they earned, and fasted four times as often as the laws prescribed; they baked bricks and built houses for people and raised Welshmen and Danes, as well as Icelanders, out of the holes in the ground in which the pioneers lived, and which were called dugouts. For this and many other social deeds Þjóðrekur was made Ward-leader, Elder, High Priest, Bishop, Stake-president, and one of the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb, according to the Saviour’s choosing in the Prophecy of Nephi in the Time of Grace and the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times. This was the man whom the Icelanders had bound to a tethering-block, gagged, and beaten during divine service.

Wandering about in Salt Lake Valley and its environs at that time was a destitute woman who said she had been born into this world in Colornay. Some learned Englishman in the Stake thought that this was a town in France; but later it turned out to be a place in Iceland called Kjalarnes. She was a tall and stately woman; she had been held up by a troop of soldiers (when people in America say that someone is held up, they mean that he or she was threatened at gun-point). At this time the Federal Government of the United States had begun to send to God’s City of Zion armed troops to persuade the saints to abandon the Moral Law which had been manifested to them by God and proclaimed by the Church, including holy polygamy. These troops had put the girl in the family way. Next year she was held up by Redskins; these men use bows and arrows and kill people with great artistry, like Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi, as was written before. On account of these hold-ups the innocent girl was ostracised by various nationalities, particularly by the Welsh and Danish, who at that time vied with one another in living the pure life in Spanish Fork. There were not many people who wanted to have such an outcast in their homes, and she often had to spend the night in the tamarisk thickets on the banks of the salt-springs where frogs croaked and grasshoppers and crickets chirred. Her young children also slept with her there. One Christmas, Bishop Þjóðrekur rescued this wretched woman and her two children from the hollow in the ground where they were living, and said that it was contrary to Joseph’s Book and the doctrines preached by Brigham Young, the Prophet’s dedicated disciple, that women should be bedded out in the open by soldiers and Redskins to no good purpose. The Lord had purposely instituted polygamy by direct revelation in order that no woman should have to lie outside in ditches with her family at Christmas. It was the express duty and law of the Church of Latter-Day Saints that Mormons should protect as many women as possible with the seal of eternal matrimony instead of making them outcasts and jeering at them. On the basis of this conviction, Bishop Þjóðrekur invited Madame Colornay into his house and took her to wife along with Járnanna, whose spectacles were then becoming badly rusted. He also sealed to himself the children she had conceived during the hold-ups, and begat a couple more with her himself. With this, Bishop Þjóðrekur earned himself still more respect in Spanish Fork; it showed how much he excelled other men, in that his benevolence and wisdom matched his fearlessness towards the prejudices of the Welsh and the Danes. And no one supported him so steadfastly in this act of piety as his first wife, Járnanna.

Nor did Bishop Þjóðrekur’s standing in the district lessen, particularly in the eyes of the wives he had already, when he decided to marry for a third time and seal to himself in heavenly matrimony poor old María from Ampahjallur, who was fully seventy years old, crippled with arthritis and blind. She too had trekked across the wilderness.

This María hailed from the Vestmannaeyjar and had never been associated with a man in her life. She had come to America as a servant to a family from the islands. It was her task to carry the children across the wilderness and support their sick mother. Then the mother perished, as was the custom in the wilderness at that time. María did not abandon the children when the journey was over; she reared them herself and sewed every stitch of clothing they wore, taught them Hallgrímur Péturrson’s Passion Hymns, and told them parables about saintly people in the Vestmannaeyjar. She never let an angry word to man nor beast pass her lips; she was also one of those Icelanders who never speak ill of the weather. When her orphan brood had flown away and scattered to the four corners of the earth (some had gone to the war), she took upon herself another family of children who had lost their bread-winners. This brood too she reared to adulthood with wisdom from the Vestmannaeyjar and long night-vigils of knitting and washing even though she was now nearly blind; but most particularly with the kind of affection that fears nothing and grudges nothing. Time passed, and soon these children too were gone into the wide world to acquire all the things that María Jónsdóttir had never enjoyed. But word got around that there was an Icelandic woman who could bring herself to love other people’s children, and so María was asked to look after some orphaned Danish children in the holy city that the wicked called Salt Lake Puddle. She set off towards this good city, bent with age, half-blind, and destitute. The Danish children did not understand the Passion Hymns and so she had to make do with telling them parables about good folk in the Vestmannaeyjar and about young birds called puffins which were pulled out of their burrows in the cliffs there and made into puffin soup, until these children too were ready to say goodbye. The old bent woman was left behind on the broad streets of the holy city, alone, friendless, and homeless. And when she went out for a stroll she was knocked down on the road and injured. The police took her to a hospital there in Salt Lake Puddle. She said her name was María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur in the Vestmannaeyjar. It was then advertised in Spanish Fork that a lone and blind old woman from the Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, had been found lying injured on the road. No sooner did Bishop Þjóðrekur hear this than he harnessed his horses and drove his carriage to Salt Lake Puddle. He went to see the woman in hospital and greeted her respectfully and asked her to marry him with due seals of eternal matrimony in the temple before God. Then he gave her a dollar to buy herself coffee. He told the hospital superintendent to send him word when her broken bones had healed, and he would return to fetch her in his carriage. When the time came, he married her with all proper ceremony and took her home to the Bishop’s House, 214 Main Street, Spanish Fork. María took it upon herself to rear the children that Madame Colornay had brought into the world, and taught them Pastor Hallgrímur’s beautiful prayers as well as pious tales from the Vestmannaeyjar. María said she hoped that the Lord of Hosts would be pleased to send her other people’s children to have around her for as long as she was granted grace to be able to knit a sock.

19

God’s City of Zion

The hoofbeats of cantering horses, large and small, sounded on the road, and the creak of axles and wheels. The foals that trotted behind looked confident but a little pensive. Men and women went riding past on important business, the women on saddles but the young boys riding bareback in pairs on old hacks, as they do in Iceland when they are herding cows. The neighbours stepped up on to the veranda to greet the visitor from Iceland. They asked for news of home. But no sooner had he started to talk than a distant look came into the eyes of the questioners. Iceland vanished as soon as its name was spoken. Their speech was as perfect, certainly, as the chirping of birds, and so polished on the outside and scrubbed on the inside that it took particular dexterity to introduce a foreign phrase; but if one used an old proverb or some well-known quotation from the sagas, people smiled amiably and absently, and had already forgotten it. The weather in Iceland last year and the year before last concerned them no more than the hydrocarbon halo around Sirius. News of men and affairs in Iceland only prompted them to expatiate on the great events of the present Kingdom of Saints and cite Joseph Smith’s Golden Book, or praise his successor Brigham Young, that chosen leader who towered over not only the mountains of the Territory of Utah but the whole of the western hemisphere as well. Iceland, with its little parish officials and low mountains, its ever-hungry soil-grubbers who composed ballads, and its one (at most) well-to-do person per district—was it any wonder that such a country, in the minds of these Zion-dwellers, had faded away to the far side of the moon? Seldom had a country been so utterly lost to a people as Iceland was to those Mormons.

Pastor Runólfur always took newcomers from Iceland into the enclosure to show them the sheep he looked after for Bishop Þjóðrekur, to let them admire how beautiful and thick their tails were compared with the stumps on Icelandic sheep.

This is the place,
Brigham Young had said when the Mormons finally came down off the plateau on to the shoulders of the mountain and looked out over the great basin with its unbroken soil, spring streams and cool groves. The Mormons never tired of recalling how only half an hour after their arrival in the Promised Land they unloaded an apology of a plough from a ramshackle cart which some emaciated oxen had dragged step by step in the name of Jesus across the endless wastes of America; now these bullocks stood there with the placidly sullen expression of beasts in the Bible, with blood on their hooves, shaking their heads so that their slaver glistened in the blazing sun and drinking from a stream; and the men had started to plough.

After the stories about the trek across the wilderness came the episodes from the life of the early settlers, when everyone lived in dugouts—trenches which they raftered with ropes or roofed over with hides. Very few of the people had any clothes other than the hides of game-animals; some managed to get skins of mountain-goats or antelopes, others of deer or bison from which they made skin-hose or moccasins. Gradually the age of wool began, the days of the spindle and distaff. Brigham Young himself testified in all sincerity about the saints who were in his company, that some had blankets but many had none: “Some had shirts, but I think there were also some who had none, neither for themselves nor their families,” said the pioneer who led people to a greater bliss in this world and the next than most other leaders have ever done.

When they had sown their grain that first year, a host of grasshoppers swooped on the crops like a cloud-burst. The people tried every means to beat them off, but the grasshoppers showed no signs of moving once they had settled. People could see their precious grain, which they had gone to such pains to transport, being utterly destroyed before their very eyes, and starvation and death looming. But God, who never failed his prophet Joseph, sent the bird which the Mormons have ever since held dear; it was the seagull, and Mormons call it their bird. The gulls flew a thousand miles from the sea to their help, and ate up all the grasshoppers. And the saints of the wilderness had their first bread.

Spanish Fork was now full of homely farmhouses built of sun-baked bricks; the log-cabins were disappearing fast, and in the dugouts lived only the occasional Lutheran. Practically everyone had a best-room with a picture of the Prophet and his brother Hyrum and also of Brigham Young. On the table lay the Book of Mormon and The Pearl of Great Price. Those cultural institutions that transform a village into a town were already in existence: a community centre, Post Office and a shop. God (in the person of Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution) owned the shop. His eye was painted over the shop-doors, surrounded by rays like the spines of a sea-urchin, and the slogan “Holy is the Lord.” The Church owned the community centre, and the Territory owned the Post Office. The Church owned the right to allot land; in addition to the wilderness, it owned mountains and hill-pastures where sheep could fend for themselves. The Church had also started to compete with the pagans at mining ore; and it owned the water which was led from the hidden arteries of the mountains to irrigate the fields. All the arrangements prescribed by the Church authorities, even if alterations were made in the original arrangements, bore witness, altered or unaltered, to God’s personal guidance and what was called correct thinking. Everything people earned or acquired proved that the doctrine had its origin in cosmic law. New shoes and a new hat were matter for eulogising the Church of the Latter-day Saints and the prophecies of the great leaders. Mules, these rather solemn beasts which combine the best qualities of the horse and the ass except the ability to breed—were they not remarkable proof of the Golden Book’s special guidance in all things, large or small? Who, more than the saints, had made of this unique and model creature such a useful servant? Steinar Steinsson was shown a primary school where a specially-trained English-speaking teacher was employed to instruct the common children in the learning that would enhance a man’s status in the world. These men and their wives who had lived there in dugouts two decades earlier and wrapped themselves in skins for their faith in the Prophet— could there be more tangible proof of the truth of these prophecies than such a fount of wisdom for the populace? Even the most progressive nations in the world, which had for long enough lived in the shelter of one special grace—where were their schools for the common people? Only the children of the wealthy and the unrighteous received any schooling in the Old World. Come and see for yourself one day how happy the children are to be able to listen to a man of learning! Was it not as if the children who once had been laid to rest in the sand were here being re-born into a life of happiness? Or take this pram, for example! A pram, just fancy that! Yes, all hand-made by a skilled Mormon, copied from a pram in a catalogue from New England. On four wheels, upon my life and soul. See how the superstructure is made from artistically twisted metal rods: they first go in a circle and then into another circle, sometimes like the figure 8, sometimes like the letter S. Who but counts and barons could have dreamed up such a treasure in that part of the world where correct thinking does not prevail?

“But there is one thing perhaps which proves better than anything else how far this nation has advanced, and that is the sewing machine. I could only just pronounce the word,” said Pastor Runólfur, “because I had heard it in the capital. Was there any sewing machine where you lived, in Steinahlíðar?”

“I must admit there was not,” said Steinar Steinsson.

“There you are!” said the Reverend Runólfur. “Only counts and barons abroad have sewing machines; yet here in Spanish Fork there is a sewing machine. You run a piece of cloth through it and in a trice it has become a garment that fits you like a glove. The cosmic wisdom that lives in the words of the Prophet and the deeds of Brigham Young does not manifest itself exclusively in enormous truths which can only be encompassed in the brains of fearfully large-headed University professors; no, it lives also in the sewing machines of people who yesterday had correct thoughts, certainly, but no shirt. It is the bliss of mortal man to have been led to this land.”

“It cannot be denied,” said Steinar Steinsson, “that it needs a lot of philosophy to match a sewing machine.”

Unfortunately they never got round to showing Steinar this sewing machine at the time, and whenever he asked about it later some hitch always cropped up. But nevertheless the little fellow from Hlíðar was convinced that everything there testified to the cosmic wisdom, even the cross on the Lutheran Church, because it had been broken off.

Small things and large things alike contributed to convince him. The time now came when Pastor Runólfur felt that Steinar was sufficiently convinced and began to think in terms of having him immersed, but said that he could not bring himself to have him baptized in the customary village pond which was full of poisonous trout, serpents, and insects that bit people in the leg. He said that he wanted to round off Steinar’s instruction by taking him to the capital city of the faith, which was called Salt Lake City, whatever some wits were pleased to call this holy shrine amongst cities. He wanted to show Steinar the glory of the city and then take him to one of the Elders and have him consecrated in a temple service.

“When you yourself have been immersed according to ritual,” said Pastor Runólfur, “you have the right to have any of your departed kinsmen baptized whom you think worthy of it; you have yourself immersed once for each of them, so that they have the opportunity to build a holy sanctuary in that world of light they now inhabit. Perhaps I could scribble down their names now so that we can apply for a recommendation for them from the Elder.”

Steinar tittered, as was his custom when faced with a problem, and replied after a little thought that neither his father nor his mother was among those he thought needed baptizing in the world of light they inhabited now, because he knew of no couple more patient than they in adversity nor more constant in giving to everyone his or her due; he reckoned they had been a particularly unpretentious couple. He said he had a long way to go before he would be competent to improve such excellent people’s circumstances with God.

“But,” he added, “there are others of my kinsmen I am more concerned about than mother and father and for whose sake I would gladly let myself be immersed again once or twice. First of all there is my progenitor Egill Skallagrímsson and my ancestors the Norse kings, and last but not least King Harald hilditönn of Denmark, who was the first of my line.”

Salt Lake City is a place, of course, where the highest truth is a little complicated in parts, as is only to be expected; but the more simple facts are more obvious than in other cities. It is quite impossible to get lost in it. One can see the whole city lying in its basin under the Wasatch Mountains. It is laid out according to the fundamental principles of logic and the first diagrams in the geometry book. One always knows where one is in that city; and one also knows at once in what direction and how far away other places in the city are. It is a city where the cardinal points have been revealed to people through God’s inscrutable power and grace. For a man newly-arrived from a country where the nation had grown bent at the knees from riding too much along narrow bridle-paths—was it any wonder that he was impressed by the fact that God had prescribed in public writ that the streets there should be as wide as the homefields in Steinahlíðar?

Was it likely that the streets of Zion in Heaven were any wider than these streets in Zion on earth? Steinar thought it better to pace the streets out for himself rather than have to rely on guesswork or hearsay about it. When he and Pastor Runólfur had measured the streets at a few points and found that they were nowhere less than two hundred Icelandic feet in width, they sat down on a kerb-stone, wiped the sweat from their brows, and brought out paper and pencil and began to multiply the width of the streets by their length.

Pastor Runólfur asked whether Steinar did not want to see the house where Brigham Young kept his twenty-seven wives, this man who had laid out the city according to God’s wishes. Steinar agreed willingly and said that, all things considered, he thought it no less a feat to have so many wives than to stake out God’s City of Zion upon earth. They came to a long wooden house, in which there were certainly plenty of doors; these doors were in a row along the whole length of the house. To match them, jutting from the roof directly above each door was a little garret where each wife had a boudoir with a window. The whole house was exceptionally well-built; the outer planking was fitted together with painstaking care and painted grey with a tinge of blue. All the doors had the same fittings and the same doorstep, twenty-seven copper door-handles and as many locks. From every door there breathed coolness without any whiff of human habitation; there were no finger-marks visible on the doors or bolts. The house was imbued with some incorporeal cleanliness akin to frost-work or even mirages. At the garret-windows were the same white clean curtains, twenty-seven times over. And as Pastor Runólfur and Steinar stood out in the street holding their breaths and gazing at this smooth and silent shrine of cleanliness, they had the feeling that twenty-seven women were laughing at them behind the curtains; they even felt a little self-conscious.

Pastor Runólfur whispered, “I am ashamed to say so, but every time I look at that house I am reminded of the monster which came ashore at the Vestmannaeyjar when my late grandfather was the pastor there. It was an enormous, slimy, lump-sucker of a thing. People went for it and stabbed it with twenty-seven big knives, but all that the stabbing did was to open twenty-seven greedy maws. Sometimes I can’t help thinking about Buddha’s belly, which is inhabited by ten thousand women.”

“Although it is as peaceful here as a graveyard,” said Steinar, “and no one seems to want to bite us, it was never considered good manners in Steinahlíðar to stare up at people’s windows without making oneself known.”