A Grain of Wheat Read online

  A Grain of Wheat

  A Grain of Wheat

  Joseph Robert Jacobson

  © 2020 Joseph Robert Jacobson

  A Grain of Wheat

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Elm Hill, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Elm Hill and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Elm Hill titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Copyright 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version. Public domain.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020900762

  ISBN 978-1-400330416 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-400330423 (Hardbound)

  ISBN 978-1-400330430 (eBook)

  Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook

  Please note that footnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication.

  DEDICATION

  To Carolyn, my lifelong Kay.

  To Ann, my real live Cecilia.

  To Theresa, my Third Angel.

  And with my heartfelt thanks to the excellent support staff at Elm Hill Books.

  Contents

  Author’s Foreword

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Book Two

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Book Three A

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Book Three B

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Epilogue

  Author’s Foreword

  In June of 2018, after the death of Carolyn, my wife of nearly fifty-three years, I discovered a small box squirreled away in a storage trailer on our farm. It contained a carbon copy of the manuscript of this book. I opened the box for the first time in fifty-six years and began reading out of curiosity. I was alternately shocked, blown away, and deeply moved by what I read.

  I recalled that a good friend of mine had submitted it to a publisher in 1962 when I was studying in France and had received a rejection slip. Reading it fifty-six years later, I think I understand why. I immediately went to work on two sections toward the end of the book, both abbreviating them and reshaping their contents. I then submitted the manuscript to our daughter, Theresa, to get her take on it. She made a couple of good suggestions which I have incorporated into the new laptop version of the manuscript.

  “Dad,” she said, “this has to be published. I can’t believe you wrote it so long ago. This is as good as anything we read in English literature. People need to read it now more than ever.”

  Book One was written during the summer of 1961 when I was serving as a lookout fireman stationed on Loon Creek Point in what was then the Primitive Area of the Challis National Forest in central Idaho. Books Two and Three were written in the following months during my senior year at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. I then transferred everything from my longhand scribble onto a typewritten manuscript with a carbon copy. The job was completed by the end of the school year. Once it was done and commended to my friend, I never laid eyes on it again until last June. That’s when it blew me out of the water.

  The main characters in the book are inspired by real people, as are many of the minor characters. Many episodes throughout the book likewise reflect actual happenings. Of course, as author I assume full responsibility for the form they take in a work of fiction. It has been tempting to revise it more than I have. But as an old man, I am loath to tamper with the fires and passions of the youth I once was.

  I hope our daughter is right. I hope that you are drawn into the story, that you will laugh and cry, and that in the end you will be glad you read it.

  Joseph Robert Jacobson, Autumn, 2018

  Prologue

  At first I was more than puzzled that Dr. Stephan Pearson was calling on me to spend his last days with him, but I soon realized that under the circumstances I was the only person to whom he could turn. He needed someone who could understand and represent fairly his relationship with my cousin, Cecilia Endsrud, and who could interconnect with some accuracy the events of the subsequent course of his life. I see all this now, but when I received fro
m him the following telegram, I was thoroughly baffled as to what the chairman of the Department of Physics at my alma mater, Christiania College, wanted with me at a time like this:

  APRIL 27, 1960

  DEAR PAUL

  PLEASE COME TO MY HOME IN ST MARK AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP I NEED YOU VERY MUCH STOP I BELIEVE I AM RIGHT IN ASKING YOU TO DROP EVERYTHING AND COME STOP I SHALL PROBABLY HAVE DIED BY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK STOP BY COMING YOU WILL PREVENT THE ONLY TRUE GOOD IN ME FROM DYING WITH ME STOP

  STEVE

  Needless to say, I was at his side the following morning.

  Over the next few days he used his very last reserves of strength to pour out to me the story he felt so compelled to tell. I hung on every word he uttered and took copious notes. It helped that I was already acquainted with its broad outline and in certain places also with many of its details. Verbatim accounts, of course, have had to be reconstructed, but many of them I jotted down while still in the fever of the spirit in which Steve related them. Thanks to his phenomenal memory, I am sure that many conversations appear here substantially as they occurred.

  I am not a professional author, yet I do not present this work with apologies. For I am certain that its own inherent strengths will more than compensate for the literary shortcomings of the one who recorded it.

  Stephan Pearson’s pilgrimage through life, though unique in so many ways, can be seen in other ways as a template for the still unfolding pilgrimage of modern Western society. In that sense it touches almost every one of us. The big question mark is whether our society, before it is too late, is capable of coming to terms with what it took him a lifetime to learn. Only God knows.

  Book One

  I

  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!

  II

  Growing up as an only child in the middle of the empty prairie must be desolate under any circumstances, but for Stephan Pearson the desolation was intensified by an empty home. Ever since he could remember, his father had been gone all day every day and his mother had taken refuge in an inconspicuous corner of the large farmhouse as soon as her chores were over, leaving him to fend for himself. He heard his father speak only when a friend came to call, usually on some farm business. The few words beyond the absolutely necessary that he heard from his mother usually came in the evening as she tucked him into bed. She would sit near the foot of the bed and join him in his bedtime prayers. Then she would address him for a few moments in low tones of furtive admonition. She spoke of things he did not really understand. She would say things like, “Listen, Stevie. It doesn’t please God to think only about how to raise more wheat so you can get richer.” Very often, bending low over him to kiss his forehead, she would preface the kiss with a remark like, “Stevie Boy, when you grow up you will think about what makes God happy, won’t you?” And he would fall asleep with confusing and vaguely suggestive thoughts turning in his head.