Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  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. . . .”

  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 conferen
ce 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!