All Is Swell

by Robert Farrell Smith

  I had less of a chance now then ever, seeing how Leo had cut back on his driving time ever since he had begun courting CleeDee Lipton. CleeDee didn’t like the feel of the wind against her extra-sensitive face. CleeDee chapped easy. At five miles an hour, a stagnant breeze could suck every bit of moisture out of her chalky mug and leave her scaly and unable to smile. And, as even the most ignorant local knew, CleeDee’s best and only feature was her smile.

  The only other motor vehicle in Thelma’s Way was Digby Heck’s ancient dirt bike. Teddy Yetch had given it to him the year before on his sixteenth birthday. Teddy was too old to ride on it any longer—operating the clutch did a number on her arthritis, and the vibrating of the engine caused her teeth to slip out.

  Digby loved it. There was only one problem: Digby had tiny ears. Sunglasses just wouldn’t stay on his face as he rode. He tried taping eyewear on, but pulling the tape off all the time was making him prematurely bald.

  Well, necessity gave birth to one odd invention. Inspired by a bowl of leftover casserole in his family’s refrigerator, Digby went down to the Virgil’s Find Shop and Save and bought him a couple of rolls of clear plastic Saran Wrap. A stroke of pure genius. Digby simply wrapped it around the top half of his head, covering his open eyes and voila, his sensitive peepers were protected. His mother even made him a little leather pouch that hooked onto the handlebars and held an economy-sized roll of the wrap. It was quite a sight to have Digby pull up next to you, his hair matted down by the wrap and his wide brown eyes pressed completely open.

  At the moment, Elder Boone and I were on the path on our way to Virgil’s Find to attend zone conference with President Clasp. I always liked getting out of Thelma’s Way and meeting with other elders. Since the meeting would run late, Elder Boone and I had made plans to stay the night with Elder Minert and Elder Nicks in Virgil’s Find.

  We were about half-way there when we spotted an unknown person coming the other way. Having been in Thelma’s Way for over three months, I thought I had at least seen most of the locals, but I didn’t recognize this gentleman. He had dark black hair that didn’t bounce or move as he walked, making it look like he was wearing a helmet. He wore a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and boots that topped off well above his ankles. His straight nose and tiny brown eyes looked silly the way they were placed on his face, as if God had decided to try something different and arrange his features unevenly. His big mouth gaped open to a smile as we came near to him.

  He stopped in front of us, in the middle of the trail. He folded his arms in front of him. Not thinking much of it, Elder Boone and I broke to go around him, but he stretched out his arms to hold us back.

  “Excuse us,” I said politely as I tried to walk around.

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer, “I shall be recognized.”

  “I’m Elder Williams,” I said, sticking my hand out.

  “You are a child,” he snipped, refusing to shake my hand. “I am an adult. Show some respect.”

  I think he wanted me to bow to him or something.

  Elder Boone gave it a go.

  “I’m—”

  “Can’t you see the light around me?” he interrupted. “Can’t you?”

  We both looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Of course you can’t,” he sizzled. “You’re numb to the spirit, and withered on the bush. Lock horns and be gone.”

  The clear doctrine, the compassionate delivery, the feeling of utter and complete peace. I suddenly knew who I was talking to.

  “Paul?” I asked. “Paul Leeper?”

  “The truth has been manifest unto you. Drink and go home bloated,” he blessed me.

  This was Paul. I was standing before apostate Paul. The havoc-wreaking, Book-of-Mormon-stealing, town- splitting, lies-spewing, reason-I’m-now-in-Thelma’s Way, archenemy Paul. Larger than life, yet at least three inches shorter than I.

  Elder Boone gritted his teeth. “You’re Paul?” he asked.

  Paul sort of curtsied.

  “The Paul that went to Rome?”

  “Saw the finger,” Paul boomed, pulling out a postcard from his back pocket and flashing it before our view. The post card was worn and bent, but you could still see the finger, encased in glass, looking as if it were just floating in midair. Paul smiled smugly.

  What Paul didn’t know was that I had done my homework. About three P-days ago, Elder Boone and I had gone into Virgil’s Find to do some grocery shopping, and we stopped by the public library to find out if they really did have the finger of Thomas on display at the Vatican. I found out that there was a finger on display, but that most real scholars didn’t believe it was actually Thomas’s finger. For all practical purposes it was probably some common schmo who had lost his finger dicing up beets and then discovered his loose digit could make him a few bucks.

  I told this to Paul. Surprisingly, he was not at all grateful for having been enlightened. His face turned red and his hair actually seemed to darken.

  “You’re him,” he said suddenly, holding his trembling hand over his big open mouth and pointing at me with the other. “You are the detractor I prophesied about.”

  “Now wait a second,” Elder Boone jumped in. “When did you prophesy about—”

  “Elder Williams,” Paul interrupted. He had a hard time letting others get a word in edgewise. He looked at my name tag and gasped.

  “Williams. Moments ago as I was walking, I was prophesying to myself, and voices told me to beware of a coming detractor for he would do the will of the underworld.” He stepped back for dramatic effect. “Williams . . . Will . . . Will of the Underworld.”

  I tried not to smile.

  “Will of the Underworld,” he screamed, his misplaced eyes bulging from his head. Then again, more quietly, as if he were pronouncing a title upon me. “Will of the Underworld.”

  He kept repeating the phrase in a gradual crescendo as he scrambled off the trail and into the forest.

  Elder Boone and I just stood there for a moment.

  “Nice guy,” Elder Boone joked, breaking the silence.

  “Wow, I feel so important,” I said.

  “Will of the Underworld,” he said, and he bowed.

  We made it to Virgil’s Find without anymore incidents, unless, of course, you consider forty-year-old Ed Washington running past us wearing nothing but shorts and shoes and yelling for his mother, an incident.

  16

  Geronimo

  Grace had been fine with her life.

  All right, that wasn’t completely true. She had a few concerns. Growing up in Thelma’s Way had not always been easy. There had been times she wanted to strike it out on her own. She dreamed about traveling to distant countries. She thought about college, out-of-state, anything that was a ticket out.

  It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by her heritage; she just wanted to try something new, something better.

  On the other hand, Grace liked things simple. She sometimes felt it should be enough that God had given her a brain to think with, two legs for walking, the forest around her for beauty, and the Virgil’s Find public library. Things could be worse and she knew it. She shouldn’t be waiting around for handouts.

  But Trust Williams in Thelma’s Way was something like a handout.

  He was different from the rest. Her whole life Grace had been able to see into people’s heads, get vague impressions of their thoughts. Trust was a stranger; his mind was harder to view, but the slivers she caught glimpses of were promising. No doubt he sensed he had fallen off the back of the planet landing in Thelma’s Way, and he was right. But there was something within him that cared, whether he knew it or not, something willing to learn. It was honesty. She was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  Grace had yet to meet Trust face-to-face. She knew he wouldn’t be stationed in Thelma’s Way for long, not if Paul could have his way. He was currently going about door to door with that nonsense about the “Will of
the Underworld.” Paul must have sensed it too. Trust Williams was a threat.

  Grace had never really cared for Paul and his lying ways. Others in town seemed willing to let it slide. He had, after all, wooed away two-thirds of the local branch. Sure, they had deserted him after he stole that Book of Mormon, but Grace wasn’t so sure he couldn’t do it again.

  She opened the door to her hidden cabin and walked inside. She placed some wildflowers in a vase on the table. She set her books on her chair. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t go back to church until the missionaries were gone, but she was considering breaking her vow. She could get a better glimpse of Trust at church. She had to find out more about him before it was too late, didn’t she?

  Then she thought better of it. What possible future could there be for her with some rule-bound missionary from far away?

  “Grow up, Grace,” she scolded herself. “It’s all or nothing with you. Only heaven can intervene.”

  And heaven has a way of taking its own sweet time.

  17

  The Introduction of Grace

  Month Six

  Reports came in. Paul was using his “Will of the Underworld” prophecy to try to scare people into avoiding me. CleeDee had been walking across the meadow when Paul all but materialized from behind a clump of grass.

  “Will of the Underworld,” he told her, pointing to our cabin. “Will of the Underworld. Beware.”

  He was trying to scare us, too. He wrote threatening things in the dirt in front of our cabin and threw rocks at the outhouse when I was in it. He pinned notes to our door with hieroglyphic scribbles on them. I later found out from Pap Wilson that Paul was working on his own alphabet and language.

  I could think of a few words I would like him to translate.

  The town had held another sesquicentennial planning meeting a few weeks back. Things were still moving along slowly. Sister Watson had not yet completed the actual script. She claimed her work with P.I.G. was really blocking the creative inspiration that this particular pageant required. Toby had finished the blueprints of the stage, and Patty Heck had begun sewing some costumes. I was starting to see the wisdom in allowing so much lead time before the actual play. This town moved slowly.

  Summer had become winter, and winter was trying to outdo itself—flexing its cold, hard muscles and smiling its brittle teeth. The days had become shorter but felt longer. The nights had grown lengthy, and yet it seemed as if my head barely hit the pillow before morning poked its obnoxious nose around. Like the seasons, my soul was locking up. I didn’t feel like I was becoming the missionary I should be. I needed to try harder. I felt as if the only thing I had to show for myself were my worn-out shoes and the beginnings of a backwoods accent.

  Bishop Watson and Brother Heck were doing a pretty good job of holding our fifteen or so members together. They missed the Parley P. Pratt first-edition Book of Mormon that had sat as the ward’s keystone and foundation for so many years, but they were coping.

  Sister Watson and the members of P.I.G. had made a formal request of Paul asking for the book’s return. They had offered to forgive him of all wrongdoing if he would simply give it back. They invited Paul over to the boardinghouse where they all gathered around a couple of long banquet tables. Sister Watson placed an empty basket next to a plate of cookies that Sister Teddy Yetch had brought for after the meeting. The members of P.I.G. told Paul they would turn off the lights and then, under cover of darkness, whoever had stolen the Book of Mormon could place it in the empty basket and be done with it.

  Sister Watson turned off the lights. There were sounds of movement and shifting. She quickly flicked the lights back on. The basket was still empty and now Teddy’s cookies were missing. Everyone sat there with full mouths as Sister Watson looked on in disgust. Well, if she had been disgusted by them all swiping cookies, she must have been even more grossed out when, moments later, everyone’s taste buds told them to abort. People began spitting and coughing as they tried to obliterate the taste of Teddy’s Spicy Raisin Mustard Snaps. Teddy, of course, went home offended, and the Book of Mormon was no closer to being back where it belonged.

  One personal mission discovery so far was the realization that my mother had a weird flare for sending creative care packages. Mom and I were close, but sometimes I didn’t feel like she really knew me. Part of the problem was that she was fairly timid and reserved. The moment any real emotion began to surface, she would scurry away like a frightened lizard. At last, it seemed, she had found a way to express herself.

  She sent me new shoes, and old shoes other people in the ward no longer wanted. Forget the fact that most of them weren’t my size. I guess she knew we were really hard on our footwear. She sent me cookies by the pound, and big posters with cute animals saying positive things. She sent me can after can of bug repellent, and notebooks filled with photocopied crossword puzzles and dot-to-dots for those times when I was discouraged. I had already completed most of the puzzles—discouragement was a familiar feeling these days.

  We were finding work to do, but it was busy work, unproductive work. I had all my discussions memorized down cold due to the fact that I had given them to every inactive who would lend an ear. Despite the distraction of Paul, people apparently still liked hearing me ramble. Time and time again they would invite my companion and me over to present the discussions. Then, when we had taught them and challenged them to commit to Christ and become more active, they’d ask us if we had any free videos (which most of them couldn’t even play) and shoo us out the door.

  Thankfully, we had one person in our teaching pool. We were working with automotive expert Leo Tip. He was twenty years old and had been raised in a Mormon home. His father had passed away years ago, and his mother had died just last spring. He lived alone in a rather large house up on top of Lush Point, a small hill that overlooked the meadow. His father had invented a twisty wire with which you could tie off rope or cord. The invention was called “The Pincher.” Leo had shown me one once. I thought it greatly resembled a garbage-bag twist tie, but what did I know? Anyhow, Leo still received small royalty checks in the mail every month from the sales of his father’s invention.

  Leo had never been baptized into the Mormon church because his father was a rather large man who didn’t feel comfortable getting wet in white clothes. And instead of getting someone else to baptize their son, the Tips just kept on postponing it until Father Leo lost weight. Well, the size of his grave plot in the Tip family corner of the cemetery stands in testimony to the fact that Brother Tip never did master the weight issue. After his passing, talk of Leo getting baptized never came up again—that is, until we were going over the ward records with Bishop Watson and discovered that, technically, Leo was still not a member—a real, live, honest-to-goodness nonmember right there in Thelma’s Way. It was a glimmer of hope.

  The glimmer was fleeting.

  Leo humored us by letting us teach him, but really he had his heart set on waiting until the next life where he knew his father would be thin and then having him perform the baptism. I tried to explain that things didn’t work that way, but there was no budging him. It was a family thing. I was confused.

  On the personal side, things were equally confusing. Lucy was writing me less frequently, and in her last letter she had dropped the name of some guy named Lance.

  . . . my car is being serviced, but Lance has been kind enough to drive me to and fro. I don’t know what I’d do without him.

  That was all she had said, but I was now in utter despair over her state of mind concerning me. Was this Lance some ninety-year-old uncle who had nothing to do but drive his niece around? Maybe he was a fifteen-year-old kid who had just gotten his driver’s permit and needed someone to ride along with him as he gained experience. Or maybe it was some creep gaining experience of a different kind. Lucy was my girl. I knew that, and I had worked most of my life to get her to at least think about knowing it. I could feel our would-be relationship crumbling.
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  Things looked grim.

  Elder Boone had obviously been living more righteously than I, because he had received a transfer out. It came; he went; and now I was companions with Elder Sims.

  Elder Sims was short, quiet, and bossy. He had the charisma of a well-groomed dirt clod. He rarely spoke any louder than a mumble, and he insisted on never being more than a foot and a half away from me. He was from New Plymouth, Idaho, a town not too much bigger than Thelma’s Way. I was having a terribly hard time getting along with him. He seemed to flutter around me like a mumbling pest.

  It was late January in Thelma’s Way and, I suppose, in the rest of the world as well. We had gotten a little snow and lots of cold. The ground was brown and white, but the evergreen trees and bushes kept their color all year long in Thelma’s Way. The meadow was dead, blanketed only in snow and checkered with footprints and trails.

  I looked out our front door at the dark meadow. It was late in the evening, and Elder Sims and I had just finished our companion study. We had read a potpourri of scriptures all with the common theme of enduring to the end. I was feeling discouraged. This was not how I had imagined my mission would be. I felt like I had been cubby-holed. Set aside. President Clasp had simply put me here and was now refusing to deal with me until later.

  These people, bless their souls, were no more interested in coming back to full activity than I was in picking out a plot here and settling down. We had taught countless discussions and new-member lessons, eaten with these people, mended their fences, plowed their grounds, canned their food, and baby-sat their children; all with zero results. People saw us as nothing more than two kind boys with way better clothes than they had. Besides, with so few non-members, it was hard not to feel we lacked real missionary purpose.

  Bishop Watson was somewhat helpful, and Brother Heck was supportive to a point. But both of them were pretty much resigned to the fact that things would never get better.