All Is Swell

by Robert Farrell Smith

  “Let’s wait until the Lord comes,” Brother Heck said. “He’ll straighten things out.”

  It was useless. I kept writing President Clasp and suggesting that perhaps he should close the area. We were doing no good. We could serve better someplace else.

  Elder Sims came up and stood behind me as I looked out the door at the black night.

  “It’s dark,” he commented.

  “I’m going to go pray,” I said.

  Elder Sims frowned.

  There was an old tree stump behind our house that I used to pray on. It wasn’t the most comfortable place to kneel, but I could be alone. The little window at the back of our cabin looked out over the stump so my companion could keep a constant eye on me. Elder Sims would watch me go out the front door and then follow me so he could see me walk along the length of the cabin. Then he would run back inside and up to the rear window so that he only had me out of his sight for a couple of seconds.

  I would pray for hours out at that stump just so I could have some space. And always when I would look up, there would be Elder Sims, his face pressed against the back window, keeping a constant vigil on me. It was unnerving, or comforting, depending on the definition of those two words. Elder Boone had been big on always getting up on time—that was his favorite rule. Elder Sims was big on the never-let-your-companion-out-of-your-sight rule. I knew it made him nervous to have me out of his view for even an instant. In his mind it must have been possible to do all the worst sins and a couple of the minor ones in a blink of the eye.

  I walked out of our place and headed towards the stump, grateful just to be out of the house. Elder Sims followed me and then scurried back inside to watch me through the back window. It was a dark and cold night. A light snow had begun to fall. I had on my coat and gloves—I was bundled up for as long a prayer as it was going to take for me to feel right with the world again.

  I knelt down and poured my heart out over the cold snow. The words came easily, even if they didn’t make a lot of sense. I prayed for warmer weather, but thanked God for the cold that kept the bugs down. I thanked Him for the chance to serve, and begged for the chance to serve elsewhere. I prayed for patience to endure Elder Sims, but asked for a new companion.

  There was a dull sensation of time passing. Every once in a while I would hear Elder Sims tapping on the glass, which did nothing but increase my resolve to lose myself in prayer. And lose myself, I did.

  I can’t remember falling asleep, but when I woke up my body was shaking. I was covered from head to toe with a two-inch blanket of snow, but through the snow muffling my ears, I could hear a voice.

  “Wake up. You’ll freeze out here.”

  I murmured, mumbled, and shooed.

  The voice shook and spoke louder, a new sense of cold creeping over my sleeping body.

  “Get up. You’ll sleep yourself to death.”

  I opened my tired, cold eyes. My head was still resting on my arms. There were about two inches of snow covering me. I wanted to stand and shake myself off, but I could barely move. I had drooled into my arms and it was now frozen and sticking to my face. My legs were not only asleep, they had gone into hibernation. I tried to will them back to life.

  “You’ve got to get up,” the voice said again. “We need to get you warm.”

  I managed to move my drool-caked face a little to the right to see who was speaking to me. I felt like “Slobbery,” the eighth and unknown dwarf as I stared up into the moonlight.

  It had to be about two o’clock in the morning. The snow had stopped, and a huge moon was hovering over the layer of clouds that were resting just above the ground. The moon lit the gray clouds with a soft white. Here and there a ray of moonlight had poked through and was kneading the new snow on the ground with its bright hands. One of those beams of light was resting on whoever it was that had woken me and perhaps saved my life.

  From where I knelt she looked tall. She had on leather boots. She was wearing a big wool coat with a hood over her head, and red hair spilled out from beneath it in such amounts that I could barely see her face. The moonlight made her look like a ghost, or an angel.

  “Who . . .”

  She didn’t let me finish. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up. My legs cracked in protest. She helped me brush snow off of myself. I suddenly remembered Elder Sims. I looked towards the window and there he was, staring at me with closed eyelids. I assumed he was asleep. Had he been awake, he would have already screamed and run out to rescue me from this girl.

  She helped me walk back around our cabin and to the front door. She pushed open the door, and I could see that she wasn’t wearing gloves. She had long fingers that seemed to flutter as she moved them. With the sound of the door opening, Elder Sims was instantly at attention. His mouth gaped large enough to cram a cantaloupe into it.

  “Elder,” he screamed, being more vocal than I had ever heard him.

  I thought he was concerned for my health. I thought he was worried about my frozen condition. I thought he could see that I was mangled and shivering.

  But all he could say was, “You’re with a girl!”

  The oil lamp was still burning, keeping the cabin nice and bright. I turned my head to get a better look at her. She stood just inside the door, her right hand holding my left elbow. Her coat was wet with snow, and her cheeks were red with cold. She tried to turn away as I gazed at her.

  She wasn’t beautiful, but she wasn’t ugly either. She had dark green eyes, and her skin was pale, unlike anything I had ever seen before. She didn’t smile. There was something mysterious about her. Maybe it was just that my neck was stiff and I was staring at her crookedly. Her large coat made her look big, but the tiny bit of shin showing just above her boots and below her coat told the real story.

  “What are you doing with a girl?” Elder Sims asked. He was flustered and concerned.

  “I fell asleep while I was praying and she woke me up,” I explained.

  “You were sleeping,” he moaned.

  “It was an accident.”

  “Most sins are.”

  I turned to my visitor to say “Sorry, he’s nuts,” but she was gone. There was nothing but an empty door and the chill of the night.

  “Where’d she go?” I said, almost to myself.

  Elder Sims answered me by running and closing the door. He latched it, locked it, and then stood with his back against it as if he alone were keeping all evil at bay.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you pray alone,” he mumbled. “I knew it.”

  I walked over to the stove, put two logs onto the dying embers, and then stood there shivering and trying to warm myself up. Heat slowly escaped the old iron stove as it sweated and crackled, the new logs giving it a fresh fire in the belly.

  “I’m going to write President Clasp,” Elder Sims informed me.

  “Tell him hi,” I said.

  I knew that I should be kinder. I knew I owed him an explanation. I owed him an apology. I knew all this, but I chose to ignore it, at least until morning, maybe until one of us got transferred. I was cold, cranky, and intrigued by the mysterious girl who had just helped me. After about fifteen minutes, I crawled into bed. Elder Sims still sat there on his bed scribbling away. President Clasp was going to receive one long letter.

  Good, I thought as I drifted off to sleep. Maybe my companion’s concerns would get me transferred. It struck me, however, that I wasn’t as gung-ho to leave Thelma’s Way as I had once been.

  Odd.

  Very odd.

  I fell asleep seeing red.

  18

  Seek and Seek

  In the morning, I sat down to a breakfast of cold cereal and bread. Elder Sims sat down next to me. He had already eaten.

  “Who is she?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “How long have you two been meeting?”

  “I’d never met her before.”

  Elder Sims guffawed. “Come on, Elder,” he said. �
��I am the senior companion.”

  This was true. I had hoped after Elder Boone had been transferred that I would get to be a senior companion, perhaps even train a new elder, but instead Elder Sims was sent here to be my big brother and leader. It was his position to call all the shots.

  “I’ve known her for about four months,” I lied.

  “And?” Elder Sims prodded, ready for the sordid details he had already imagined.

  “And that’s not the truth. I just met her last night.”

  He arrged.

  “What’s her name?” he asked harshly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she Mormon?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  He sat up in his chair.

  “Holding back potential investigators?” he asked, even more furious. “Waiting until I get transferred so you can teach her and count her as your own?”

  “What?” I asked, amazed. “Listen. I fell asleep while praying last night and she woke me up and brought me in. That’s it.”

  Elder Sims watched me chew and swallow a big bite of cereal.

  “So, is that your secret meeting place?” he finally asked.

  “I’ve never met her before,” I said, exasperated.

  “Do you pull the blinds down over the window to signal her to meet you there?”

  This was ridiculous.

  “We don’t have blinds on our windows.”

  “Do you stand in front of the windows then, and flash hand signals or maybe do some sort of love dance?”

  “Elder,” I demanded.

  “At least I’m fit to wear the title,” he said, standing up. “I’m now going to kneel and pray for you.”

  I watched him kneel beside his bed and ask for forgiveness for me. I tried to be appreciative. I had a lot of things I needed forgiveness for, but the situation last night was not one of them.

  When he was done, he got up and wanted a hug. I refused. We read D&C section 132 together and then headed out.

  Snow had covered everything. Our shoes crunched as we stepped along. We stopped off at the boardinghouse to say hello to whoever might be there. Despite the cold, Ed Washington and old Briant Willpts were sitting outside on the porch arguing about how many inches had fallen.

  Elder Sims and I stopped and made a little bit of small talk with the two of them. Then I asked, “Are there many folks around here with red hair?”

  Elder Sims shot me a dirty look.

  “Now, let’s see,” Ed thought. “Toby’s got red hair on his arms but black on his head.”

  “Other way around,” Briant corrected. “Other way around.”

  “Don’t mother me,” Ed warned him.

  Ed had a rather bad mother complex. Sister Washington refused to let him be his own man. Though he was about forty years old, he still lived at home and at her beck and call. Ed had thick hair that left him no forehead and no neck.

  “What about women?” I asked.

  “Don’t know much about them,” Briant admitted.

  “No, what about women with red hair?” I clarified.

  “I suppose they act similar to those with black or brown hair.”

  This was pointless.

  Elder Sims grabbed my arm and pulled me off the porch.

  “We’ve got work to do,” he said to Ed and Briant.

  We walked across the meadow to Bishop Watson’s home. Sister Watson was the only one in at the moment. She was working on the infamous pageant script. The Watsons had no children and ran a little mail-order business out of their home. They sold handmade soap in fancy handmade packaging. Sister Watson made the soap, and Bishop Watson packaged it up and delivered it to Virgil’s Find, where it was sent out around the world. Their house always smelled like lye.

  Sister Watson invited us in and gave us a half a chicken that she and her husband hadn’t been able to finish off. I took the wrapped chicken and put it into my backpack. We had been meeting with the Watsons and challenging them to pray for one of their friends so that the Spirit might soften their hearts and prepare them for us to come over and help reactivate them. Sister Watson was pretty nervous about forcing us upon one of her inactive friends. She claimed she was being more courteous than coward. I explained to her that her husband was the bishop and that it was their responsibility as well as ours to reactivate these people. She told me that she would feel more comfortable just waving at them when she walked by their homes. The ward was doomed.

  “Maybe when you’re talking to people about the sesquicentennial pageant, you could also encourage them to come out to church,” I suggested.

  “I never mix politics with religion,” she replied.

  “It’s not really politics,” I pointed out.

  “I guess you don’t understand all the behind the scenes work this pageant involves. There’s a definite underbelly to it. Lots of lobbying and politicking. I had to give Mindy at the Virgil’s Find library two free bars of soap in order for her to hang our flier on the community bulletin board.”

  As we were leaving Sister Watson’s home, I worked up the nerve to ask.

  “Are there many women with red hair around here?”

  Sister Watson just stared at me. “Is that anything for a missionary to be concerned about?” she asked, her mouth open but not moving as she spoke.

  “Well, I was—”

  Interrupted.

  “Forgive my companion,” Elder Sims jumped in. “He had a rather late night.”

  Sister Watson adjusted her wig as if she were tipping her hat to us. Then we stepped outside and headed up the hill towards the Heck home. We were giving the lessons to Narlette. She was about to turn eight and be baptized, and her folks felt it would be good for her to have a better understanding of the gospel.

  Brother Heck was doing all right. He had had a tobacco relapse about two months previous, but nothing since then. Elder Boone and I had had to stop him from digging his own grave in an attempt to bury himself alive. It was a close call.

  We reached the Heck home and knocked on the door. Sister Patty Heck let us in. The Hecks had a nice house. It was clean, fairly modern, and big. Sister Heck worked for a laundromat in Virgil’s Find. She did all of their altering and specialty mending. Once a week she would hike into town and pick up a bundle of clothes. Then she would haul them back home and work on them. She was a master seamstress. There was not a pattern she would not attempt, conquer, and then somehow improve. She made all her family’s clothes, was in charge of the costumes for the sesquicentennial pageant, repaired the Thelma’s Way official flag after it was struck by lightning, and stitched up Digby after their dog, Limpy, bit him.

  She was a small woman with a big head, and she always wore a skirt and a determined look on her face. She had a way of looking past you. It was as if she were constantly looking over your shoulder at something far more interesting and important. She had long, dark hair and strong, tiny hands. She wasn’t mean, but she wasn’t necessarily nice. She was a neutral personality. She was Sister Patty Heck. She was asking us to sit.

  Elder Sims and I sat down on their couch and waited for Narlette. Narlette was one of the many mountain kids who was home schooled. Her parents took her out of school a few years back after Miss Flitrey suggested that Narlette’s own relatives might have been descended from apes.

  The very idea.

  The Hecks felt personally insulted. Sister Heck waited by the phone for an apology, but it never came. (Miss Flitrey was not one to back down.) So now, thanks to a large amount of righteous indignation and her own hard-earned G.E.D., Sister Heck was home schooling her children. The responsibility added immensely to her already hectic schedule, but she managed to find time between cuffing and mending. She also discovered that kids could learn while working. Narlette was improving her math by keeping her mother’s books; and her older brother, Digby, had won first prize in the Heck family science fair for his assigned experiment of painting the porch to see if that would improve its resistance to
rain.

  Yes, home schooling was working out just fine for the Hecks. Brother Heck even helped out when he could, his livelihood providing him with a rather flexible schedule. Brother Heck, like so many others here in town, did odd jobs. He fixed roofs for food, repaired appliances for clothes, and dug trenches for a little spending money. He sold eggs at the Virgil’s Find farmers’ market and blood at the regional blood bank.

  Narlette came downstairs and joined us in the living room. The lesson went rather well up until the point when Narlette lost all interest and began singing to herself as we taught. She kept getting louder until we gave up. I closed with my testimony and a challenge for her to read her scriptures with her family. She said she would and would we care to see the scar she had procured by falling off the old burnt Girth River bridge.

  Fair trade.

  As Sister Heck served us an early lunch of peas and ham, I decided to probe just one more time for information concerning my visitor last night.

  “So,” I said, “you must know just about everyone around here.”

  “Pride myself on being familiar with the community,” she replied, passing me a big bowl of white gravy.

  “There are a lot of different-looking people around here,” I declared, my observation sounding meaner than I had meant it to.

  “God may not have put the best-looking folks here in the meadow, but he made them sturdy and simple.”

  Now she was on the offensive.

  “What I mean is that there are a lot of different colors of hair.”

  Sister Heck, Narlette, and Elder Sims just stared at me as if I were dumb. I shoved a bunch of cold ham in my mouth, hoping to choke myself to death.

  Sister Heck decided it would be best to change the subject.

  “Do you elders think you’ll have a baptism soon?”

  My full mouth restricted me from speaking.

  “Leo Tip is interested,” Elder Sims replied.

  “Leo will never go under,” Sister Heck informed us. “He’s permanently dry. Too much love for material things.”

  We took a few minutes to silently enjoy our meal.