The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

Out of sight in a hollow to the east of the farm knoll rose the church; with a grassy slope behind the chancel. They had begun pouring the concrete the previous autumn, but had not had the money to buy a roof. The walls had stood in their molds until now, springtime, when the money started to arrive from the Treasury to buy a roof. I was sitting down in the gulley beside the stream, where the smell of the reeds is stronger in winter than in summer; it was here that we had played as children with sheep's horns and jawbones, and filled a rusty tin can in the stream with the sort of water that could just as easily be cocoa, or mutton broth, or schnapps. And later there stood a tent here on the bank for three late-summer nights. And as I sat there I could hear above the murmur of the water the hammering of the church-builders alternating with the cries of the golden plover.

A long time ago there had been a church parish here of twelve farms, some say eighteen, but during the last century the church was abandoned. Now another church was rising here, even though there were only three farms left in the valley-and the third farmer, Jon of Bard, the head carpenter, only counted as half or scarcely that, having lost his wife and with his children away in the south and fire no longer kindled in the farm except for the fire that burned within the man himself; and his faith the sort of horseman's faith that it would be more accurate to connect with the phallus than with Christ. Bard-Jon never called a church anything but "God's window-horse," nor the pastor anything but "the stallion of the soul-stud"; and neither I nor others were ever aware that he knew any other prayer than the old Skagafjord Lord's Prayer which starts like this: "Our Father, oh, is that blasted piebald foal not tearing around all over the place again. " And that prayer he would mumble to himself all day long.