Lars Pearson was a great chuck of a man, a tall broad-shouldered, ruddy Norwegian whose lanky frame was filled out with massive bands of muscle acquired from many hard years of wheat farming. His thinning hair was tossed back in wavy shocks and added the dignity of experience to his imposing stature. Before he reached fifty years of age, his face was already deeply furrowed with downward-tending lines. The beating prairie sun and the punishing wind had permanently bronzed and leathered his skin. But it was his eyes that were unquestionably the most riveting, almost frightening, feature of his countenance, strained as they had been through the years into a perpetual squint. What those burning eyes of Lars Pearson discerned from their narrow slits, God only knew. It was as though he was making an intense study of everyone and everything he beheld. Even people whom he met only casually came away with the disconcerting feeling that they had just been analyzed by someone whose X-ray gaze had cut through to their most buried secrets. In short, his were the eyes of a man whose vision was resolutely fixed on some point in the distance, and his was the frame of a man who tirelessly strove to reach that point.
It was not without reason that people looked with awe on Lars Pearson, for more than once he had perceived, exposed, and even exploited the diligently concealed motives of others. He was not above capitalizing on others’ misfortunes to acquire more land and wealth for himself. By the end of World War One he was in full possession of six sections of land, including the farms of several hapless former neighbors. Lars Pearson’s ambition had made him a far wealthier man than his immigrant father had been, although not a perceptibly happier one. Setting and achieving new goals and surmounting new challenges seemed to be merely the food that kept him alive, for he did not appear to derive lasting satisfaction from his achievements. His plans were the stuff on which he thrived; once they had become accomplishments, they meant little to him. He simply could not sit back and enjoy the fruits of his labors. He was a man who was constantly looking ahead as far as there was anything to see. No wonder he was always squinting.
He had one overriding ambition in life: he would leave his son a prosperous and respected land baron, not the toiling serf of the soil that his father had left him. His son would not have to sweat as he had!
Of quite another sort was Julia Olsen Pearson. She too was the child of a poor hardworking immigrant Norwegian farmer, but it happened that her father, Ole Olsen, had come to the end of his days without sons or direct heirs to whom he could hand on his farm. This was how Lars came into possession of one of his acquired sections of land, some years after he had married Julia.
Young Julia had been swept quite off her feet when Lars started courting her. She was fair-skinned, slight in stature, and all woman. Hers was a reserved sort of haunting beauty that was emitted mostly from her tender deep-blue eyes reminiscent of a bank of early morning mist rising slowly out of a woodland lake into the pure dawn sky. They were dewy and gleaming, and they seemed to hold an enigma, telling only half of what was behind them and filtering their every message through a veil of melancholy before letting it seep out into the world. Now and then the veil lifted, and this Lars succeeded in doing often during their courtship. They were openly enchanted with one another. The current of Lars’ innate enthusiasm for life swept her out of her melancholy; for although she never was able to subscribe fully to the ambitious vision that sustained his spirits, she could not escape being infected by the spirits themselves. Any misgivings she might have had simply could not survive in the heat of their young love.
For his part, Lars had been plainly bewitched by the mystery that always seemed to be lurking just beneath the surface of Julia’s soft beauty. As with all things, he consciously set himself to conquering her affection. Even Lars, sturdy and self-confident as he was about everything else, trembled and stammered the first time she agreed to go with him to a Sunday afternoon outdoor meeting. But soon both of them entered into that blessed synthesis that feels like love—their hearts leapt anxiously within them when they were together, and yet their being together felt as natural and unaffected as a bee in a flower on a warm spring day.
Theirs was not a protracted courtship. In those simpler days people made decisions and wasted no time in carrying them through. At what point precisely it was that Lars’ vision morphed into an unrelenting obsession and Julia’s veil drew back over her eyes again it is impossible to say. What can be said is that the fusion of these two very different people did not last very long. Lars was still mystified and sometimes deeply discouraged by Julia’s withdrawal into herself, and Julia was still awed and occasionally even inspired by Lars’ vast resourcefulness. The cords of their hearts had been tied somehow together, but not the direction of their wills. They recaptured only rarely brief flashes of the mutual sincerity they enjoyed at first, sometimes in the intimacy of lovemaking; but more often it was the very emptiness of these “intimate” moments that cruelly revealed the widening gap between them.
There was yet one more difference which their courtship had minimized. Julia was acutely aware of the obligations placed upon her by her religion. God was good but just, in her mind. Her contemplative nature easily succumbed to the almost mystical forces of the Great Central Plain whose interminable expanses could swallow a man and well-nigh digest him too. It could suck him into its wind-whipped treeless bosom and batter him with the brute rage of its storms. It could parch him under the blistering fire of its sun and gnaw him with the desolation of its emptiness until he would bear on his body and in his soul all the scars and calluses inflicted over the years. And it had a voice that whispered in the grass and whistled around the lonely buildings and almost never fell silent: “What is man that Thou art mindful of him? What is man that Thou art mindful?… What is man?… What is man?…”
Julia Pearson could not escape that voice. She knew well how insignificant man is, and each manifestation of God’s goodness towards him struck wonder and apprehension in her heart—wonder at the greatness of God’s gifts to unworthy man and apprehension at the smallness of man’s gratitude for these undeserved gifts. She was plagued by the question: How much ingratitude does it take to trigger the righteous wrath of God?
In Lars, on the other hand, there was little of this awe. During their courtship he had gladly gone to church because he could sit next to Julia, and he had patiently listened to her musings about the spiritual realm without really connecting to them. The overall effect of her musings on him was to increase his desire to protect her from the perils and uncertainties he was sure she was imagining. It attracted him to her more than ever. He was just the man for her: it was second nature to him to calculate his risks ahead of time and know pretty well what his chances were of succeeding. The lion’s share of Lars Pearson’s fate lay in his own powerfully capable hands. With him she would soon realize how little there was to fear.
After their marriage, Lars lost interest in weekly church-going. There was often something more important demanding his attention. Julia grew fearful for his soul, and as success followed success in the realization of his ambitions, his Day of Reckoning seemed ever more imminent to her. A man could not forever ignore God and get away with it!
A son was born to them on May 20, 1901, in their second year of marriage. Julia’s labor was long and arduous. In the absence of a doctor, it was probably Lars’ experience with cows calving in the spring that saved the life of both mother and son. Julia was a very long time in recovering from it.
They named their son Stephan Lars Pearson.
Stephan Pearson, thought Julia. That is a good name. Our son will be as strong and God-fearing as St. Stephan the Martyr.
Stephan Lars Pearson, thought Lars. Now there’s a real name, fit for the next lord of this estate!