Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  If the town paved the road like they keep saying they’re going to then I wouldn’t have done it would I? They’re always talking, the politicians, the scoundrels who talk and talk. Criminals. Promise promise, don’t deliver, and then when it comes time for reelection, why they build some bridge or some useless park downtown for the rich people to walk across or sit in. I have a mind to sue the city. Or the state or whoever. I can’t walk on it. I can’t hardly stand up anymore. It’s all swelled up and it’s a nasty color I don’t even want to describe to you my little son. Little Tiago says I should go to the hospital but they’re scoundrels too, most of them are, and if I’m going to sit in a waiting room forever and a day I might as well sit and wait right here like I’m doing. I’m in the bedroom now.

  Tiago is helping out with the store and sometimes Felipe. Business is slow as usual of course. We were promised paved roads more than a year ago. That would help keep the dust down and out of the store. Poor Tiago spends half his time hosing down the sidewalk out front and even still we’ve had to lay down wax paper on top of the pastries and cheese bread. It looks unappetizing like that as I’m sure you can imagine.

  Anyway I hope and more than that I pray I’ll be back on my feet soon. I pray to God my ankle will feel better. Will you pray for me, Cristiano? You are a man of God now and the Lord hears the prayers of His faithful servants. Pray for Felipe too, I hardly see him anymore, just a little in the mornings, the late mornings, and then he leaves the house without a word. I don’t know where he goes, Tiago says it is to the football fields, but he won’t hardly listen to me anymore. He is very headstrong like his father was.

  Passos stopped, as he had every time he’d read the line. It set his jaw on edge, perhaps more so now as he saw how close it came to the end of the letter. A gratuitous add-on—a slap, and a sort of brag. Elder Passos knew, if only for a pained illumined instant, that he hated Nana’s mention of his father because she had known him and he really hadn’t. In Passos’s memory his father was a big loud man enveloped in an alcoholic cloud, then a ghost, a memory even in his memory. Tiago knew him only through photographs, which Elder Passos imagined must be easier. He envied that purity—the purity of blankness. Tiago held in his head no half-formed memories to swirl into the mix at the mention of their father, or at the suggestion that one or all of them might be like him in some way, this ghost, this faded man who had gone out of state in search of work, or so their mother had said for a long time. Passos must have been twelve or thirteen when she finally abandoned the story and started dating again. He was fourteen when she got sick.

  I pray that God will bless you, Cristiano. We all love you and miss you very much. Pray for my ankle and I know God will heal me.

  A great big hug,

  Nana

  Elder Passos held the letter above his desk, dropped it, watched it waft down in two swinging arcs to the wood. It depressed as it settled back against the desk. Not a single mention about his brothers’ schooling, not a word about church. Passos tried again to worry if they were going to either; he worried out of a kind of thin hope, for worry relies on at least the possibility of good outcomes; it needs that to tauten the line. But the line couldn’t hold. His brothers were in free fall. Nana couldn’t catch them. Neither could Passos, of course. He was here. Two thousand kilometers from home while his earthly house sank into the sand. What was he doing here? What was he really doing? Why was he dabbling in English, angling for the assistantship, when his own family needed him more than ever? It all seemed so suddenly petty and small and dislocated, the mission—or his did, anyway. It felt like a springboard, a means to some worldly end. He felt ashamed of himself.

  Passos was sixteen when the missionaries knocked on his door. It was a Saturday afternoon, almost a month to the day since the funeral. The fact of that. The unyielding fact. The smell of cancer still seeping from the walls of the house, like spoiled food, and riding on top of it a trace of stale flowers from the homeopathic experiments of the final withering months. The little house felt cavernous to Passos, oppressive, and though a knock came at the front door instead of a clap from behind the barred front gate, Passos got up and answered it right away, if only to reprieve the gloom. The sun flooded in, bright white, such that Passos had to shield his eyes as they adjusted to the two tall silhouettes in the doorway. They must have let themselves in past the outer gate, or maybe Felipe had left it open en route to the dirt field where he played more football now than ever.

  Passos’s eyes adjusted all the way as the silhouettes resolved into two young men, in business clothes, not much older than Passos, in fact—one of them pale, the other dark. They smiled like salesmen. They looked briefly behind him.

  “Good afternoon,” the darker one said, a Brazilian, though from his accent clearly not a northeasterner.

  Passos knew he looked younger than his sixteen years, so he put on his adult voice, a bit cagey, a bit suspicious. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  The Brazilian introduced them—they were missionaries, they taught about the restored gospel of Christ. Then the paler one spoke for the first time, his words thick as fists. “Is your mother here? Your father?”

  Passos felt the air go out of his chest. “What?”

  “Is your mother or father home? Can we speak with one of them?”

  “My mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother?”

  “Well … yes.”

  And all of a sudden he was covering his face, bent forward, feeling his shoulders convulse up and down. The moment rushed over Passos like a sickness, a sudden surge, as if his body were poised to empty out its toxins but nothing came out and nothing came out. He felt an involuntary tightness in his stomach, heard the Brazilian, “Hey, are you all right, hey, we’re sorry …” and it was all Passos could do to close the door.

  The next morning he stayed home from Mass, Tiago too. Of course Felipe stayed home. Felipe had been at the pickup field since sunup. On weekends now he barely left that field. He’d come home for a quick lunch bearing bloody dirt stains on his calves, his shins, since he didn’t wear guards. Last Saturday he had showed up with a thick streak of dried blood running from his nostril all the way to his chin. He said he’d left it like that, all morning, as a message. He’d slide tackle anybody, the biggest kid on the field. He didn’t care, and didn’t back down from a sucker punch.

  Passos and Tiago sat on the couch now, playing a card game in the dim grainy light of the floor lamp. The metal blinds let in sunlight that lay on the concrete floor in slowly broadening pinstripes. Passos could tell from the sharpness of the lines how bright and hot the morning must be. The sound of clapping came at the outer gate. Tiago went to the door and opened it into the glare and after a moment Passos could recognize, even from the couch, the missionaries, their white shirts and dark slacks, their smiles. Felipe had closed the gate behind him, apparently, or maybe Nana had on her way to the parish. In any case the two young men had respected it. The Brazilian one lifted his voice from across the dirt courtyard, making the same introduction to Tiago that he’d made to Passos the day before. Then the gringo asked if anyone else was home with him. His older brother maybe? They’d met yesterday.

  Tiago turned around with a sudden tightness in his face, but a look at Passos seemed to reassure him.

  Inside the house the missionaries sat opposite Passos and Tiago on chairs brought in from the kitchen. The paler missionary introduced himself as Elder James, an American from Salt Lake City. And Elder Dos Santos and his accent came from Porto Alegre, about as far from Recife as the country allowed. Passos introduced himself and Tiago, only nine then, shy and wounded, skittish. He mentioned Felipe, too, out on the pitch.

  “Can I ask,” Elder James said when Passos had finished, “can I ask where the adults are?”

  “Our father left and our mother died last month—of breast cancer,” Passos said, surprising himself with his directness. “Our grandmother takes care of us now. She’s at Mass thi
s morning.”

  The two elders nodded, grim little nods, their mouths going tight, their eyes soft, as if they’d prepared for this moment, like everybody else had. Then Elder James nodded to Dos Santos and Dos Santos’s face changed from sadness to a sort of pained urgency. He looked to Passos and his little brother, leaned forward in his chair, placed his elbows on his knees. “Cristiano, Tiago, we can’t imagine how hard this time must be for you. But we felt we needed to come here today and testify to you—to give you our word—that the Lord has provided a way for families to reunite in the next life, and to reunite as families, to be together forever. Our church truly believes that the grave has no victory—not over our bodies, not over our bonds of love. We want to teach you and your family about the priesthood that God has restored in these latter days—how that priesthood can seal things on earth as in heaven, and how you can have these blessings in your own life. May we teach you this, Cristiano? Tiago?”

  Passos’s little brother lifted up his face at him, a mix of fear and implicit trust. Passos looked at his brother, then back at the missionaries, and felt the emotion building in him again, a thousand tiny fists behind his eyes. He fought them back by dint of a violent furrowing expression; a wave of minor panic crossed the elders’ faces. His little brother’s expression wavered too. Passos felt himself slipping, going under, but before it could happen, before it happened again, he said, “Yes. Yes.”

  Four years later Elder Passos told the story very differently. He left out the crying, for one. The surges of sickness. He left out most of the emotion, the feeling; he couldn’t bear to see it dull. Already he had taken some of the deepest pain of his life and blunted it through overexposure, the story of his conversion like a river stone shorn of its edges from years of turning over. He’d told an abbreviated version of it to all his companions, including to McLeod, and even to a few investigators: how the missionaries came at a bad, bad time, or rather in the very nick of time. Passos knew the language of the story as well as the language of the missionary lessons—it was rote by now, automatic. How he’d been taught in charismatic Catholicism that his love for his mother was a lesser love, that in heaven he would have God and His angels for family. It just didn’t seem right to Passos. He wanted more—he needed more—and the Mormons promised it ardently. A gospel that could seal his family for eternity, steel it against the terrors of the grave.

  And here Elder Passos left off his recitation. Here or a little earlier. Never later. He never included the baptism itself: the feeling of coming out of the water into an embrace. He’d only ever mentioned this part to his brothers, and only once, a week after the baptism. They each confided the same experience. Nana had been at the service too, though only to watch. She couldn’t have understood. The feeling belonged to experience only, not to language.

  Then again, Elder Passos thought, so did most religious feeling; so did God, ultimately. The task of a missionary was to distill the infinite into the finite, the inexpressible into the expressible. Something always got lost in translation, but the effort still justified itself. It must. Only in his dark moods did Passos doubt this, only in his sloughs did he fret about roteness. Truth did not get less true by repeating it—it only seemed that way in the face of Opposition. Elder Passos felt it now, he realized, hunched over in the crook of his arms, on his desk, by himself. He felt an Opposer shudder down his back, and he immediately straightened in his desk chair. Head lifted, eyes wide, he focused on the two framed pictures on his desk: his grandmother and brothers standing in front of their house, and his mother sitting cross-legged in front of a dark green Christmas tree, holding up a snow-white sweater, and smiling into the future. Passos’s balance returned.

  Why shouldn’t he think about the future? Why shouldn’t he pursue his righteous ambitions? President Mason himself had said that the Brazilians should practice English with their American companions—“to lay up in store, intellectually and professionally.” Those were the mission president’s very words at the last zone leaders’ conference. Why would he say them if he didn’t mean them? And why, for that matter, would assistants to the mission president be eligible for scholarships to Brigham Young University if temporal welfare didn’t matter? He needed to lay up in store. To build a house on the rock, both spiritually and professionally. On the rock of salvation, and on a sure earthly foundation. Like Elder Dos Santos.

  João. He tried to get used to it. João had traveled to America after his mission to stay with Elder James (or Tyler) for a week, which turned into a few weeks, which turned into a few months, which led to his being admitted to BYU. He was finishing up school now, married and with a child, and with a good job already waiting in São Paulo on account of his language skills and his American degree.

  Elder Passos reached into his desk drawer—he felt a quick shot of fear, remembering the drawer’s contents—and carefully retrieved the photograph that had accompanied Dos Santos’s latest letter. It showed Dos Santos and his wife in front of the Salt Lake Temple, each of them cupping a hand under their one-year-old’s sweat-suited thigh. The chubby baby wore a blue pom-pom cap on his head, levitating between his parents. He reminded Passos of a smiling baby Buddha. Dos Santos and his wife (Renata—another expatriate) smiled too, beamed, their teeth as white as the snow in the background. “It’s winter here!” Dos Santos had penned in the bottom margin. The photograph reminded Passos of what he so liked in Dos Santos: his openness, his generosity, big enough to turn visible even in pictures. On the mission Dos Santos had been a young zone leader, just like Passos, only Dos Santos had been universally loved, all the members of the ward and all the other missionaries bustling to be near him. Why couldn’t Passos be more like that? If he were more open, more sociable, he might become the type of missionary to be liked, not merely respected.

  He looked up, craning around at the sound of bedsprings squeaking from the bedroom, a quick chorus of them. He heard bare feet slapping linoleum. A second later McLeod leaned his upper body into the yellow-green light of the hallway, looking surprised. “I thought for sure you’d have your head buried in a letter or something.” He gave a sideways grin. “Perhaps I should press my advantage.”

  McLeod crossed the room with a large thin book in his hand. He took a seat in his desk chair, facing it toward Passos. He dropped the book on Passos’s desk. On the cover a cartoon boy balanced atop a skinny plateau-like structure of broad colored stripes: it looked like a giant sombrero.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s yours if you want it,” McLeod said. “It was a farewell present from my mom, but I thought you could use it to practice English with. I’m sure it’s more interesting than that old grammar book you use. I’m pretty sure it’s mission-appropriate, too. It’s a children’s book.”

  “Oh, the Places You’ll Go?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Am I pronouncing it right?” Passos asked.

  “Perfect,” McLeod said.

  Passos flipped through the first few pages: landscapes the color of ice cream, the little boy traipsing through them in what looked like pajamas, and on each page a paragraph of clear, colloquial prose. He looked up at McLeod. “You’re giving this to me?”

  “I figure you’ll make better use of it,” McLeod said, adding in English, “Good luck!”

  Elder Passos felt something dislodge inside him, and spread. “Thank you, Elder. Really.”

  “Oh don’t thank me yet,” McLeod said. “You see, I was sitting in the bedroom a few minutes ago, reading some old letters, and all of a sudden I got bored with that and started thinking about your letter instead. You never told me what it was about, did you? I hadn’t forgotten. I’ve decided to be nosy, you see.”

  Passos smiled. “I didn’t think you had forgotten.”

  “Well?”

  He relented, though only for an abbreviated version: his grandmother, her ankle, his worries about her health. Nothing about his brothers, their truancy, their futures. Nothing much bigger than a
few sentences could hold.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” his companion said. He looked serious, genuinely concerned. “If there’s anything I can do, I hope you’ll feel comfortable asking.”

  “Thank you, Elder. Now your turn, right? What did you call it—your ‘reciprocal vulnerability’?”

  “ ‘Collateral,’ I believe, but ‘reciprocal’ is pretty nerdy too.” McLeod smiled. “But no, I mean, it’s basically just—well, father problems. You know.”

  “I don’t, actually.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like—”

  “I know you didn’t. What kind of problems?”

  “Well, for example, I was reading some of his letters in there. He doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s like, ‘Hi, how are you? How come you don’t bear your testimony in your letters home?’ My dad’s the bishop of the ward—I’m not sure if I told you that?—but it’s like he’s always wearing that hat when he writes. He wants me to come home like some Paul, some Peter—the kind of testimony that could send you to your martyrdom smiling. It’s never come as easy for me, though. But I love him. I don’t want to disappoint him … I don’t know.” After a long silence McLeod added, “That’s the abbreviated version anyway. More later maybe.”

  Elder Passos nodded. “Me too.”

  One morning in late January, Passos asked McLeod to come over to his desk, where he pointed to a green-furred Seuss character holding a black, cone-shaped object, and said, “How do you say that?”

  Passos asked the question in English, and McLeod once again felt a small jolt of surprise. “Your pronunciation,” he said, also in English. “I swear it’s getting better by the day.”

  “ ‘I swear’?” Passos repeated, tilting his head, and smiling from the compliment.