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 laug
hter. 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?’ ”
“I shall truly do my best to get Pastor Runólfur to take off his clerical coat so that he can begin to earn a living and become at least a Ward chairman, if nothing else,” said Stone P. Stanford. “I can see from the way he looks after Bishop Þjóðrekur’s sheep that he could be an outstanding head of a family if he would covenant himself just one or two wives in marriage.”
“And what about yourself?” said the woman.
“By the way, don’t you think I should remove my jacket and take a look at the worst cracks in your walls? To tell you the truth, I freely acknowledge, even though I am sorely ashamed of it, that I broke my promise to you over a trivial thing I offered to do for you a long time ago. But the night’s not over yet, as the ghosts say, heeheehee,” said the bricklayer. “Excuse me, but are my eyes deceiving me, if I may ask? Or are the doors in the house gone?”
“We used them for the fire in the cold weather the winter before last, just after my daughter had her baby,” said the woman. “We didn’t need to shut the doors on one another any more, anyway. Our Lutheran was gone.”
The bricklayer now went on a brief tour of inspection of the house, outside and in, and was more and more appalled the more he saw of it. One could scarcely set foot in some of the rooms for ants and beetles, and the brambles and weeds around the house were swarming with wild animals of the lesser orders, most of them harmless, although at one spot there was a glint of the eyes of a viper.
“Well, I shall not detain you ladies any longer on this occasion, and thank you for showing me the house, which could certainly be improved, come to that, like most other human handiworks,” he said. “But it is not always so obvious where one should make a start when one is faced with a fallen wall.”
“It’s a great shame not to have any coffee left nowadays to offer a visitor,” said the woman.
“Oh, don’t give it a thought, dear lady, I am still living on the coffee I got from you in the past, not to mention the coffee you sent me once by your daughter,” said the bricklayer, and kissed her. “Think kindly of me, both of you. And if I should not run into your daughter out in the orchard, give her my warmest greetings; she is a very fine girl, even if she is not simpering all the time, no more than her mother, heeheehee; and that’s a grand little boy she has—to tell you the truth he reminds me most of my daughter’s son, with whom I was presented right out of the blue here the other day, as it were—or to be more accurate, with God’s help, I had never been given; indeed I dare not look in his direction in case I entice him away from a better father than I am. And now, where did I leave my hat, for I hope I did not come hatless into someone else’s house? And as far as I can remember I was taking it off to someone out in the road there not so long ago.”
The woman made no reply but looked at him from the remoteness of the soul in that huge, deep and tear-filled silence of human life that nothing could break except laughter.
He found his hat at last in the corner where he had put it.
It was not until he had stepped out of the room into the little hallway and had opened the outer door, with due creaking and grating, that he remembered a small matter he had nearly forgotten. He pushed the door to, turned back into the room, and said casually to the woman who had once more seated herself at the back-facing window with her darning: “It is not so easy as all that to get rid of this old fellow from Steinahlíðar once you have hooked him, and that is how it is now. But when I see of what poor adobe the house is built, and your windows all broken by these rascals, and your doors long since converted into kindling, and the sewing-machine that Pastor Runólfur proved to me over and over again was a token of the victory of the All-Wisdom here in Spanish Fork . . .”
“Would it be impertinent to ask what you are talking about?” said the woman.
“Hmmm,” he said. “I was just wondering whether I could invite you both to come over to my new house and live there? There is a remarkably attractive view from the attic window looking towards Sierra Benida, which I consider to be the ideal mountain. I will be getting old soon and am making ready to leave here. And then it is not such a bad thing to have around some reliable people, particularly women, who are loyal to one. And I offer you both in exchange the seal of marriage that women need to have in heaven.”
Next morning Stone P. Stanford made up his mind to make one more attempt to find suitable curtains for his upstairs window, from which one could see the truth in mountain form, the view which no fabric seemed to be worthy to curtain. Now we shall hear what happened when he set off on his search.
When he had gone a little way along the main road he saw that the householders on both sides of the road were driving sheep from their gardens in great wrath. Finally the ewes clustered together in the middle of the road, bleating irresolutely, and some of them started butting one another as if they could not agree what they should do now that they had no other refuge than the gravelled road where freedom grew, but not grass. The bricklayer counted them from ingrained habit; there were fifteen, all of them with fat tails which far surpassed the stumpy tails on Icelandic sheep.
“What sheep are these?” he asked.
Someone from the neighbourhood, exhausted from driving the sheep out of his garden, answered by asking him whether he did not see that these were Bishop Þjóðrekur’s soup-pot sheep: “Would you believe it? Pastor Runólfur just upped and let them free this morning.”
Another man joined them and said, “Ronki has quite obviously gone off his head. He was seen at dawn this morning staggering along with his trunk on his back, moving house. He seems to have moved into the dugout where the Lutheran lived.”
A third man came along and said, “Have you heard that the Josephite women threw him out with the porridge scrapings from the Bishop’s House last night?”
It was mentioned in this book previously that in Spanish Fork there stood the sorriest Lutheran church in the world; the young Josephite girl had said of it once that there was only room for about one mule to stand upright in it. On top of this box, which stood there up on a hillock, a tower had been stuck,
which was little bigger than a good-sized coffee-grinder. And on top of the tower the Lutherans had put a cross, a symbol which the Latter-Day Saints call a heretical token derived from the Pope, an inheritance from the Great Apostasy. There had originally been four windows in this church. But when Pastor Runólfur lost his Lutheran faith and the congregation broke up and scattered to the four winds, the windows were all stoned and broken as is the custom of boys all over the world wherever they see a spiritually dilapidated house. For years now there had been boards nailed over the paneless windows, and there was nothing left of the cross except for a broken stump.
Stone P. Stanford was going past this deserted church which was like the famous church in the poem, the one on the barren mountain, “as deserted as on Judgement Day.” But now something new was afoot; someone had put a ladder up against the wall of the church and had managed to climb all the way up to the little tower. He was trying to mend the cross. He was in his shirt-sleeves. His clerical coat, the most distinguished garment in Spanish Fork before or since, had been folded lengthwise, with the lining outside, and laid over one rung of the ladder. Stone P. Stanford stopped on the road, took of his hat and shouted to him, “May God give you a good morning, my dear Pastor Runólfur.” But Pastor Runólfur made no reply and carried on mending the cross.
30
Ending
At this stage the management of the Mormon mission to Iceland had been transferred from Denmark to Scotland; that is where the headquarters were, as one puts it nowadays, but in the past it would have been called the archiepiscopal seat. At this seat there was a school at which Mormon priests were trained in the technique of preaching the Gospel in the new fashion to Gentiles of other lands. Stone P. Stanford was sent over there from Utah to study for a winter before he went to Iceland to succeed Bishop Þjóðrekur and other saints who had gone there. The bricklayer is reported to have said later that there he had learned theology with the part of the head that begins above the nose; whereas until then he had drunk it through the nose, like snuff from a wooden horn.
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