Paradise Reclaimed (15 page)

“Ought we to knock and ask for a sip of water? No one could find fault with that,” said Pastor Runólfur, and began with clerical elegance to finger his cravat, which in fact had not existed since he ceased to be the pastor for Hvalsnes.

“Although I am thirsty, I think I shall refrain from having a drink in this house,” said Steinar of Hlíðar. I suggest we go on our way.”

When they had set off he continued, “I always pitied blessed Abraham, whom God forced to have two wives, to say nothing about old Solomon, whom God castigated with three.”

“Three hundred,” interposed Pastor Runólfur.

“It makes no difference to me whether it was three or three hundred,” said Steinar. “I always name the lesser number. Many a man with only the one wife is inclined to think that when God instituted the sacraments he forgot one, the sacrament of divorce. I have been married for nearly twenty years, come to that. And yet, when I stood for the first time on Bishop Þjóðrekur’s threshold and was greeted by three sisters, I realised that God is always right—just as much when he ordained monogamy as when he ordained polygamy; twenty-seven wives, one door; one wife, twenty-seven doors.”

When Steinar Steinsson first heard the Tabernacle mentioned, and was told that it was a casket, he had confused the word with “tobacco’’ and thought it was a snuff-mull. On this particular day he stood at last before the doors of this marvel of architecture, the greatest in the Western hemisphere. It was built to measurements that God intimated to Brigham at a time when nails had not yet been seen in God’s city of Zion, or any other devices for holding a building together. This building is lower in relation to its length than any other structure of comparable size. Icelanders call it God’s Word-Hall, meaning God’s mouth, because its proportions are the same as the inside of the human mouth. The faithful say that with such a mouth did God speak to the Church Fathers. The acoustics are so remarkable that if the name of the Lord is whispered at the altar it can be heard as a shout at the door. Steinar and Pastor Runólfur borrowed a pin from a distinguished-looking lady who was studying God’s miracle with a very patronizing air; and when they dropped the pin at the innermost part of the chancel everyone jumped and thought an iron bar had fallen on the altar. Pastor Runólfur went over to the lady and returned the pin to her with thanks and asked rather smugly whether she were not now convinced that Holy Wisdom, as it was called in Greek, was more present here than in other kingdoms. Steinar had now obtained permission to climb up into the roof of the building and clamber along the cross-beams and rafters to investigate for himself exactly how the All-Wisdom had built it without having to make a seventy-day trek across the wilderness to buy nails; and he was rather impressed to find that the learned architects had been inspired with the idea of using thongs of ox-hide. There was also an organ there with wooden pipes whose timber had been gathered in some far-off magic forest. While the two Icelanders were in the Tabernacle the organist came in and played on it so beautifully that they said afterwards that while the music played they had stood there as if rooted to the floor, unable to move a muscle. Although they had never heard music before, they were so impressed by the extent to which God had finally managed to lead mankind on the road to perfection that tears were still streaming down their cheeks after they were out in the open again.

In a yard a stone’s throw to the east they caught sight of a string of oxen that had just arrived with some sledges loaded with gigantic granite blocks. Pastor Runólfur said that the main temple of mankind was being built on the other side of the street there. Already, its steep walls were soaring heavenwards. This granite, which was unique in the world, was brought from a quarry in a mountain far away in the wilderness. It took a month to haul each block to the site, and teams of oxen had toiled at this task night and day for many years. The oxen stood there slavering in their harness, and still wearing their Biblical expressions as before. It was not the first time that this cloven-footed species had hauled the materials required for praising God in the way He deserves; Pastor Runólfur mentioned in this connection the Pyramids, Borobudur in Indonesia, the Ziggurat, St. Peter’s Cathedral and many other structures.

These two Icelanders stood for a long time looking at the oxen standing there with eyes half-closed in divinely exalted rest while they waited for the cud to pop up through their gullets. The builders were arranging pulleys and tackle and getting ready to unload the granite blocks.

Steinar Steinsson could not resist saying, “It’s amazing how far man’s wisdom has led him. It would be difficult to do anything but follow such chosen leaders who have shown themselves as practical as the late Joseph Smith and his successor Brigham Young.”

Pastor Runólfur did not take his eyes off the oxen. Just like the time earlier that day when they had been staring at the house with many garrets, and the pastor had alluded to the Vestmannaeyjar monster, he now made a comment which came rather like a bolt from the blue (and this perhaps was the clue to the enigma that few could explain, why such an excellent clergyman in this community of saints should be allotted no other task than that of looking after fifteen sheep which had no other merit than the fatness of their tails):

“I am not at all impressed,” said Pastor Runólfur, “at how far man’s wisdom has managed to lead him; besides, it is not very great. What does surprise me, on the other hand, is how high their folly, their downright stupidity even, not to say their complete and utter blindness, has managed to raise them. Other things being equal, I prefer to follow the folly of man, for that has brought him farther than his wisdom.”

The oxen had started to chew the cud.

20

Learning
to understand bricks

In the baptismal register of the temple he is entered as Stone P. Stanford. No one is very sure where that curious P came from; some think it was one of Pastor Runólfur’s notions. In the bricklayer’s yard, as it is called, clay is mixed with straw; the straw binds the clay together. When the bricks have been moulded they are baked in the sun, that sun which the Lord of Hosts has given to people of correct opinions. Under this sun the porous lumps of clay are transformed into bricks. The stones that tumble down off the mountains of Steinahlíðar on to the home-fields are as froth compared to the hand-made Utah stones sun-baked by the grace of God. This particular brickyard lies east and a little to the south of the present monument to sixteen Icelanders who were among the first to trek across the wilderness. With Bishop Þjóðrekur’s permission, Ronki took Stanford to the yard and summoned the necessary people who could teach him the fundamentals of brick-making and provide him with the materials. Steinar walked around the place and studied the bricks and fingered the alien walls like a blind man. He introduced himself to the various kinds of clay. A brick-maker must be up early in the morning and have a supply of moulded bricks ready before dawn so that the sun has enough work to do when it rises.

“The Passion Hymns say it is only the ungodly who get up early,” said a dawn passer-by, only a moderately saintly person, who said he was on his way home to bed. “In fact, only those who cannot sleep for wickedness, like Pastor Runólfur,” he added.

“I find it distressing,” said the bricklayer, “to have nothing for the sun to shine on immediately it rises. And so I am kneading a little clay.”

“The sun shines on lots of things,” said the passer-by, “and not all equally beautiful.”

“In my opinion nothing the sun shines on is evil,” said Stone P. Stanford. “If the cosmic law were not tolerant by nature, it would have created nothing but sun, and no clay. Excuse me, but where are you coming from at this time of day?”

“Since you are so tolerant,” said the passer-by, “I suppose I might as well tell you. I am coming from my mistresses. I am a Lutheran.”

“You should become a Mormon, my dear chap,” said Stone P. Stanford. “Then you would be at liberty to have a long lie with your womenfolk.”

“That’s a liberty I least desire,” said the Lutheran. “No one understood that better than Joseph the Prophet. He looked enviously at every coffin on its way to the grave that winter when God had commanded him to marry his sixth wife. Could I ask you to do me a little favour?”

“What is that?” asked the bricklayer.

“Would you let me hide this bottle of schnapps in one of your brick-piles?” said the Lutheran.

People who wanted to build houses for themselves or for others came by on the road where the bricklayer was standing in his yard. They weighed his bricks in their hands with an expert air and said that they were poor adobes. And crooked, too, what’s more. A house built with them would soon collapse. Stanford explained that he was only making them for fun, in order to get to know bricks; he said he had for a long time wanted to understand this form of stone. “And anyway I am a light sleeper once the winter passes; and there are no women to keep me back in the mornings.”

“There is never any winter here to pass,” they said. “It’s not like in Iceland, where winters pass. I would sleep until midday if I made such bad bricks and had no wife either. These bricks are only worth half as much as Bishop Þjóðrekur’s bricks.”

“I never imagined for a moment that I would be reckoned half as good at bricks as Bishop Þjóðrekur,” said Stanford. “That’s good enough for me. Help yourself to these bricks and do what you like with them, friend.”

They drove off with Stanford’s bricks and gave little in exchange. But soon afterwards some other people arrived, saying that they had heard about these bricks and would like to have a look at them. Stanford had more bricks by now. They said they were really handsome bricks and offered high prices for them and, what is more, paid for them cash down. This former farmer from Steinahlíðar, who had scarcely ever seen minted silver before, now stood there in the middle of the Promised Land clutching a handful of large silver dollars. The sun shone on the money.

After that people kept dropping in, some with mules, and drove away with the bricks he had created; and he was left standing there with money in his hands.

Stanford felt that his understanding of bricks was not complete because he had never been present when walls and other structures were being built of this kind of stone. He now got permission to accompany his products to the sites where they were being used. As was previously written, the settlers in Spanish Fork, some of them Icelandic, some Welsh and a few of them Danish, were so well off by this time that they were tearing down as fast as they could the log-cabins which their sainted fathers, the desert-trekkers, had built for themselves when they crawled out of their dugouts.

It is obvious that a man descended from many generations of expert wall-builders in Steinahlíðar who had only had mountain-rubble to work with would not take long to learn to lay stones whose shape he himself had determined. People were soon beginning to admire the house-walls he built, and said that nowhere could one see such symmetry in brick-laying, always excepting the bricks that Bishop Þjóðrekur himself had laid; in Spanish Fork people went by the old German adage, that no one is better at anything than the boss. People asked how it came about that an unknown incomer could build walls of such artistic texture. Stone P. Stanford replied, “Brick, by the grace of God, is mankind’s most precious stone. That is because the brick is rectangular. That is what Bishop Þjóðrekur taught me when we drank water together in Denmark.”

“Are you a Mormon or a brick-worshipper?” people asked. “In Brigham Young’s mansion there are many doors,” said Stone P. Stanford, and tittered.

Since manual skill was promptly appreciated in Spanish Fork at its true worth, the bricklayer found it hard to avoid working night and day for other saints. Although his palms were often sore to begin with, particularly when he willy-nilly had to grasp handfuls of silver, he never disguised the fact that he thought that Providence had, contrary to expectation, proved a surprisingly nimble guide during these latter days.

On one occasion during an evening meeting in the church, when he had been called upon to step forward, he spoke as follows:

“ ‘This is the place’ is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun. I certainly never had many dreams of inheriting this palace for myself, for I am someone whom the Lord has scarcely intended to enjoy complete and utter happiness, but rather for my little children whom I left sleeping so beautifully and for the wife who was so compliant to her husband. When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast, as the hymn puts it. There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.”

The generations march by, obedient to their destiny, but in Spanish Fork there still stand houses built with such reverence by this man Stanford. His walls attract the eye more than other walls, and make one want to touch them with one’s fingers. Nor was this man who had made a casket for emperors and kings thought less of a craftsman in wood than in stone.

One day Stone P. Stanford was in his brickyard when a woman came by. She was good-looking and well-dressed, but a little past her prime; she was pale of complexion but dark of brow, with a veiled but penetrating gaze. She halted, leaned up against the fence that enclosed the brickyard, and stared at Sierra Benida in a trance. The sun was low in the west. Stanford greeted the woman; and when she bade good evening in return, her thin and brittle voice betrayed more self-pity and despair than circumstances seemed to warrant.

“Who are you, my good woman?” asked Stanford.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” she replied. “I am probably your elf-woman here. Certainly, you’ve never seen me even though I walk past here every day at about this time when I go to the store.”

“Many people walk past here,” said Stanford. “This is a broad and handsome road.”

“It’s little wonder you don’t notice an eyesore like me,” said the woman.

“To tell you the truth, it is the mules that catch my eye most of all, I am so unaccustomed to them,” said Stanford. “They are remarkably distinguished beasts.”

“Sorry,” said the woman. “Unfortunately I’m not a mule.”

She burst into peals of laughter at the fence, and it was as if some inner tension had snapped.

“Ronki says you are called Stonpi,” said the woman. “Is that true?”

“I’m ashamed to say that I, like you, no longer know myself,” said Stanford, “let alone what my name is. Heeheehee.”

“No wonder you don’t know yourself,” said the woman, and now she was no longer laughing. “Anyone who doesn’t know others doesn’t know himself.”

The bricklayer stopped thinking of his bricks for a moment and went over to the woman at the fence and almost stealthily allowed himself to announce his old name: “Old Steinar Steinsson of Hlíðar. But perhaps not.” When he had gone back to tend to his bricks, he added this philosophical epilogue: “Quite so.”

“And I was once called Þorbjörg,” said the woman. “Now I am called, at best, Borgi, and my daughter is called nothing at all.”

“How extraordinary,” said the bricklayer. “Hmmm. It has been wonderfully seasonable here this summer so far.”

“Seasonable?” said the woman. “What’s that?”

“I just meant that God can never be overpraised for the weather, like everything else,” said the bricklayer.

“Is He not being praised here incessantly?” said the woman. “I haven’t noticed any stinting of the prayer sessions. Even if you’re only offered a cup of mineral water from the spring, you get a rigmarole along with it. I say for myself that I would rather have a good cup of coffee without the prayers.”

“That’s perfectly true, pious sir, as the woman said to the ghost; or was it to the devil?” replied the bricklayer. “And now I shall tell you what happened to me. After drinking water in Denmark nearly a year ago, I lost all desire for coffee.”

The woman sighed wearily. “That’s the way it always goes when you want to give someone a treat: he doesn’t need it. When everyone has become sainted and is in Heaven, it’s impossible to do anyone any good. Or any harm either, come to that. It’s the same as in prison: everyone has everything. I had thought it would be a real act of charity to bring a lonely stranger coffee, even though it were only once a week.”

“I am ashamed to say that I am not so sainted that I would turn up my nose at a cup of coffee I was offered out of kindness,” said the bricklayer with a titter. “There is more to Heaven than mineral water alone. But once a week, my dear—is that not too much? Should we not say once a year? I could perhaps give you a hand some day with a brick or two if any of your walls needed repairing here and there. Hmmm. Incidentally, did I hear you aright, my dear, is the Gospel beginning to stick in your throat a little?”

“I believe what I like,” said the woman in that petulant tone of voice which never left her except when she burst out laughing. She kept on staring out over the brickyard and right through her interlocutor to the mountain on the other side. “Once, when I was a girl, someone tried to explain the Gospel to me. I laughed so much that I had to be carried out on a stretcher. I married a man who was a Josephite.”

“My word!” said the bricklayer. “Excuse my ignorance. What does your good husband believe in?”

“He believed that the Saviour would be coming soon,” said the woman. “And he believed that when the Saviour came, He would first go to meet a man whose name I forget, who lived in Independence, Missouri. Is that wrong?”

“It is at least a most remarkable idea,” said the bricklayer. “And since you have a husband, I would be just as pleased to have a talk with him and be allowed to call on you at home and drink some coffee with you both and discuss these phenomena.”

“Yes, you’re welcome to drink coffee with him,” said the woman. “You see, he left for Independence, Missouri, eighteen years ago, to wait for Jesus Christ to descend from Heaven.”

“Independence, Missouri. How extraordinary,” said the bricklayer. “A remarkable place, indeed. We were always taught, back home in Iceland, that when the Saviour returned He would arrive in Jehashaphat Valley.”

“If the Saviour returns at all,” said the woman, “why should He not come to Independence, Missouri? But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter whether He goes there or to some other place. I only know that my husband turned up missing.”

“Oh, really?” said the bricklayer. “Turned up missing? You have my sympathies.”

“Oh, it’s not really the first time they’ve turned up missing hereabouts,” said the woman. “They turn up missing in droves. But I think it pretty hard that the saints who can still be accounted for here in the Valley should not offer a respectable widow a helping hand, instead of exposing my daughter and myself to Lutherans. Excuse me, but has anyone left a bottle of schnapps anywhere here in a brick-pile, if I may ask? If so, I want to ask you to show me where it is, so that I can smash it against a stone.”