Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  McLeod translated the phrase.

  “Ah, I see.” Passos nodded his thanks. Then he tapped at the strange object on the page again.

  “It sort of looks like an umbrella,” McLeod said.

  “How is it?”

  “Umbrella.” Then slowly: “Um-brel-la.”

  Passos repeated it even more slowly, weighing each syllable, seeming to taste the word. “Um-brel-la. Umbrella. Umbrella. Wow. What a beautiful word. It is too beautiful for English.”

  “Careful now,” McLeod said, mock-stern.

  The elders ate breakfast together after personal study, continuing their English practice over a meal of day-old cheese bread from the padaría down the street and gamy sinewy mango wind-fallen from the tree behind the padaría. Mangos often figured in the meals Elder McLeod prepared for himself at the apartment, especially toward the end of the month as his stipend waned. The mango trees and cherry trees particularly preened themselves as sources of caloric supplement to his diet of Nutella sandwiches and Guaraná. McLeod could have written his parents for extra money, as he knew some of the other Americans did on the sly, but besides the fact that President Mason had proscribed that very practice, McLeod wanted to limit himself to the closed economy of the mission. How easy it would be for him to step outside it—write home for a get-out-of-jail-free pass after a pricey dinner, say, like the one he and Passos had had at the rodízio a few weeks ago—but how galling it would be for others, and how insidious. McLeod knew Passos, for one, came from poverty. Two P-Days ago he’d observed him, quite by accident, folding a stack of reais into his letter home. And he’d seen the tiny house too, the hut his family lived in; it formed the backdrop to the picture Passos kept on his desk: two spiky-haired teens and a much shorter, older woman, and behind them a self-built brick box of the kind McLeod had seen in Zé’s hilltop neighborhood.

  The elders switched back to Portuguese for companionship study, dividing up the crucial lesson they would teach that night to Josefina and Leandro. Lesson six. It called for a discussion of the temple, the restored priesthood, the doctrine of eternal families, then the challenge to be baptized in the true church of Christ. Passos said he wanted them to stick largely to the script, including and especially the baptismal challenge (“You ever done one?” he asked McLeod. “No? Then tonight’s your night, companion”). And this notwithstanding the fact that Leandro had weathered the last two difficult discussions with far less aplomb than Josefina. Leandro’s eyes, if not quite his mouth, had balked at the Word of Wisdom in lesson four—no coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol—and again at the law of tithing in lesson five, the law of fasting, the law of chastity … Where Josefina now accepted these tenets with a redoubled, almost unquestioning zeal (“I don’t like coffee anyway …” “I’m excited to pay tithing …”), Leandro looked on with a wavering smile, the way a bettor might watch his horse’s lead start to shrink. He remained nothing if not polite—always attentive, always smiling, nodding—but a certain distance intervened now, a holding back. Sometimes he turned to his wife during the lessons and his eyes communicated a sort of pleading, or so Elder McLeod interpreted it. What was wrong with how things were? What was wrong with Catholicism? You want to go to Mass more often? We’ll go more often. But this? What are we doing, Josefina? During one of the elders’ last visits, a routine follow-up, Leandro had excused himself to use the bathroom. “Go on without me,” he’d said. They waited. But then whole minutes passed as the three of them chatted, lapsing into occasional silences, chatting some more, until Josefina suddenly raised a finger to shush them. The burble of a TV wafted in from the back room. She called out to her husband. “Honey? You’re not watching postgame, are you?” A minute later Leandro returned, eyes downcast. “Sorry about that. I was in the bathroom.”

  At the end of companionship study Elder McLeod and Elder Passos moved to the blue chairs near the front door. They put on their dusty battered shoes and knelt for companionship prayer, which Passos offered, praying for Leandro particularly. Then they stood up and moved to the door. Passos opened it, paused. He turned to McLeod, holding out his hand to shake. McLeod took his companion’s hand uncertainly.

  “I want to start doing something my first companion used to do with me,” Passos said, looking McLeod straight in the eye. “We’d grip hands every morning before we left and bear testimony to each other, remind each other why we were doing what we were doing. I’ll start. I know this is the true church of Christ, Elder McLeod. That this is the Lord’s work we’re engaged in, and that we are His duly ordained ministers on this earth. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

  “Amen,” McLeod said. He hesitated. “I know that too, Elder Passos. I know that …”

  McLeod waited for alighting hands, something, and for a moment he thought he might have felt it, or maybe not. The confirmation of the Spirit. Saint John’s litmus test. Was he imagining it? Did he want it too badly? His senior companion drew his attention back to him, dipping his head.

  McLeod said, “And … that’s all. For today anyway. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”

  Was he imagining it?

  McLeod paced through the morning and afternoon, knocking as needed, smiling as needed, but almost nobody answered, not even the members’ houses they knocked, and soon he fell into a sort of trance as he followed his senior companion through the stages of another day: doors, street contacts, a padaría for lunch, more doors.

  He was trying again, like Sweeney and Kimball wanted, like his father wanted, but what did that actually mean? What did it mean to will belief? He wanted faith to be effortless; he wanted God to compel it in him. He wanted the doctrinal earth to feel solid underfoot, but it didn’t, and maybe it never would. He recalled his father’s words: You’ll feel like you’re falling, because you are. One Sunday in the winter of his senior year he went to church for the sole purpose of seeing Jen, who had stopped answering his calls, his e-mails. The week before had been the fight in his idling Cavalier: the panic in her voice, his shouted words … That Sunday at church she managed to avoid him by traveling in a protective detail of friends, male and female, and all of them glaring or shaking their heads at him. After services let out McLeod headed for the parking lot, but one of his father’s counselors in the bishopric, a thin bespectacled man who smiled too much, caught up with him a few yards shy of his car. “Seth, sorry, but your father wanted to see you.”

  “Tell him I’ll see him at home.”

  “No, he said—he wanted to see you in his office. The bishop’s office.”

  McLeod furrowed instantly. “Why?”

  The counselor shrugged his shoulders, gave a quick grimace-grin.

  Inside the church, McLeod navigated the still-crowded hallways at a pace that betrayed his resentment and attempted to quell his rising fear, as if he could wind-sweep it away, outpace it. He came to the windowless, nondescript wooden door and knocked after only a brief hesitation. His father opened the door a moment later. “Come on in, Seth.”

  “What do you want, Dad? Why can’t we do this at home? I want to get out of here.”

  “Please come in, Seth. It won’t take long.”

  McLeod followed his father into the tiny office and sat down across from him in front of a small brown desk that filled out most of the room: a few folding chairs lined the walls, a safe in the corner, a filing cabinet, a picture of the risen Christ on the wall.

  “I’d like to begin with a prayer, Seth, if that’s all right. May I offer it?”

  “Why yes, Bishop McLeod, please do, please do,” he said in his coldest voice, but even that betrayed a tremor.

  His father sighed as he bowed his head. He asked the Lord to open their hearts as they discussed spiritual goals. He gave thanks for repentance, and for the atonement of Christ that made repentance possible.

  “Repentance, eh?” McLeod said after the prayer. “Spiritual goals? What’s this all about, Bishop McLeod?”

  His father sighed again. “I know this is awkward for y
ou, Seth, but it’s not complicated. I wanted to meet with you in my office here at church because I’m acting now in my capacity as your bishop. Jen Tanner came to see me this morning.”

  McLeod went meek for a moment, thrown back. “She did?” Then his breath returned to him, and his anger. “Of course she did. What did she say about me? What grand conclusions did the two of you draw about the state of my soul?”

  “We didn’t talk about you, Seth. We talked about her. She felt she needed to tell me some things that had happened, for the sake of her repentance, not yours. But do you want to tell me anything? I’m not here to judge; I’m here to help.”

  McLeod sat in rigid, determined silence. He fixed his father with as blank a stare as he could manage.

  “Well, I’m not here to pry a confession out of you, but I do think—and I suppose I’m talking as your father now—I think you owe Jen an apology. That’s your first assignment. You owe her a real apology. Not because you’re a member of the church but because you’re a decent person, do you understand? I know you have doubts, Seth, and I know …” His father’s eye caught on the slim black volume that McLeod had brought to church in place of his scriptures; he picked it up from the corner of the desk, inspecting it. “A Dictionary of Mormon Arcana, huh? You really think you’re going to find the answers in here? And the fact that you’d bring this garbage to church, Seth … I don’t understand it.”

  “That ‘garbage’ is written by a Mormon historian,” McLeod said, grabbing back the book.

  “Mormon in name only, I’m sure,” his father said. “Seth, there’s nothing special in doubting. Some of my colleagues at the office are devout atheists, and when we do talk about religion—it’s rare, but when we do—they go on and on about the ‘courage to question.’ But do you know what I think? I think the real courage is in trying to believe. Doubt comes easy for a lot of people. It comes easy for people like you and me, Seth. But do you know what doesn’t come easy? Faith. Faithfulness. Obedience. Humility. Self-denial. Self-sacrifice. There’s your courage. It’s not easy to conform your life to a worldview that makes demands, that is not morally relative. You can’t cheat on your wife with impunity here, you can’t pursue your every whim. You need to love your neighbor as yourself, and even your enemies. There’s your courage.

  “Now, I’ve got another assignment for you, Seth. I’ve got an experiment for you to carry out. I want you to conduct an ‘experiment on the word,’ as Alma calls it. Read the scriptures—forget your so-called arcana, forget that garbage. Read the scriptures. I know you’ve read them before, but I want you to really read them this time, that is to say act on them, live them. You won’t find what you’re looking for in your head, or even in your heart—not at first—but in your arms and legs and mouth. ‘Faith is a principle of action.’ That’s the prophet Joseph Smith. Or the Lord Himself: ‘If any man will do God’s will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.’ What are you writing? Are you writing these down?”

  “I’m not opposed to this stuff,” McLeod said. “I’m not afraid of it. But I’m not afraid of the arcana either. I’m not afraid of any knowledge.”

  “Good,” his father said. “That last one was John, seven seventeen, one of my favorites. Saint John’s litmus test, I call it. Action precedes testimony—action produces it. You’re eighteen years old, Seth. You’ll be nineteen in a little over six months. And I feel obligated to tell you, as both your father and your bishop, that the Lord expects all worthy young men to serve a mission. You’ve done nothing to permanently disqualify you from that worthiness. And your doubts certainly don’t disqualify you. But what you need to do is apologize to Jen, as many times as it takes, and to experiment on the word. Those are your assignments. Your testimony will come—I promise you it’ll come—but when it does, it won’t come as a lightning bolt. It doesn’t work like that—at least not for me, and I doubt it will for you either. It’ll be a feeling of abandon. It’ll be a feeling of discomfort. You’ll feel like you’re falling, because you are. That’s the leap, Seth.”

  The day had moved at a glacial pace, but still: by the time he and Passos arrived at Josefina’s for the lesson that night, the baptismal lesson, Elder McLeod felt he needed more time.

  “You’ve got this,” Passos said to him, a low reassurance as they waited for Josefina to answer the door.

  Let me leap, McLeod thought. Let me leap. But then Leandro, and not Josefina, came to the door. He wore a red tank top that made his arms look longer, more segmented than usual, like a marionette’s, and he smelled of cigarettes, a diffuse but unmistakable odor. He’d grown a dark goatee since the elders had last seen him.

  Leandro gave a curt brief smile, said, “Come in, Elders,” and led them toward the house. In the front room they took their regular places and started asking Leandro about his work, about the championships, how Brazil was doing in the tournament, and so on, with Elder McLeod wondering all the while where Josefina was.

  “So we’re into the quarters?” Passos was saying.

  Then she emerged from the kitchen and McLeod felt a smile stretch and stretch across his face. He almost sighed with relief. Josefina carried a glass of pulpy red juice in either hand, balanced a plate of biscoitos in the crook of her left arm, and with her teeth she clenched the top of a bag of corn chips. She gestured at the plate with her head for him and Passos to take a cookie, which they did. Then McLeod lifted the plate from her arm as she stooped to put down the glasses on the table and release the bag, catlike, from her mouth. In the process her blouse dipped open, revealing brown, secret skin. McLeod tried, failed to angle his eyes away.

  Josefina straightened up again, laughing. “Phew.”

  “Quite a feast,” Passos said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “What do you mean what’s the occasion?” Josefina backed into her seat next to Leandro, gesturing at the food with her hands. “Go ahead—eat!”

  They all traded words between crunching bites of chips, cookies, sips of cherry juice mixed with something sour, then more chips, more cookies. She told them about a chapter in the Book of Mormon she’d particularly liked, smiling as she talked, gesticulating, filling her entryway/living room with a sort of osmosed vibrancy. And this really was her room. Her house. Ownership belonged to the more enthusiastic, the more zealous, and McLeod now knew that Josefina’s zeal was genuine. She ate very little herself, mostly talking, watching the elders eat, smiling. At one point her husband half stood and leaned forward for another cookie. “Uh-uh,” she said. Leandro glared at her. Passos picked up the cookie plate and held it for Leandro—“There’s too much for us. Here”—and Leandro took a handful. He sat back down, leaning away from his wife, furrowing as he took quick squirrel-like bites down the length of the white rectangular wafers.

  Soon enough the eating slowed, then stopped, and the missionaries set to the business at hand. At the very first words of the lesson (“Our Father’s plan for us,” Passos said, “is an eternal plan”), Elder McLeod felt his stomach muscles tighten. He felt the definite discomfort his father had promised, and managed to find a certain reassurance in this. Less so in the feeling of nervousness like nausea, the feeling that only got stronger as the lesson progressed, drawing all clarity of thought and speech into a merciless orbit around it. The stress of caring. Elder McLeod had not anticipated it. He recited his sections of the lesson in a kind of automated haze, moving quickly through the concepts, asking closed-ended questions of Josefina and Leandro, especially Leandro. McLeod couldn’t stop looking at him, and in the wrong way, watching his eyes, dark and expressionless as a doll’s. In the second-to-last section Elder Passos drew up to the lesson’s emotional crescendo—“It is the power to seal families for time and all eternity, steel them against the terrors of the grave, worlds without end”—but even then Leandro’s eyes remained lusterless, unmoved.

  “I testify of this power,” Passos concluded. “I know it is real indeed, very real. It is the doctr
inal capstone of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, the key to our salvation in the presence of God, with our families. Our eternal families.”

  A trace of Passos’s charism heat was in the air after he finished, sliding about the room. But McLeod didn’t feel it, didn’t pay attention. He couldn’t. He felt Passos’s hand on his knee, and that barely. Then he saw the grave look on his companion’s face—his eyebrows halfway to the V—and his slow, deep nod.

  McLeod turned to his audience. He cleared his throat and began, “Josefina and Leandro, we believe—rather, we know—that this message is true and saving. We know that all the messages we’ve shared with you are true. The restored gospel of Jesus Christ will bring us peace and security in this life and in the next, if we but follow it. But we must follow it. It is not an idle gospel. It is a gospel of action. We want to invite you, Josefina and Leandro, to take the important action of being baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Elder McLeod half opened his mouth to add something more, then he stopped.

  Josefina raised her eyebrows. “Were you finished?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Josefina nodded, made a low sublingual sound; it might have been “Hmmm, hmmm.” She closed her eyes, nodding again, as if she’d expected everything McLeod had just said. She kept her lids shut in meditation. A long, silent minute passed. Then Josefina opened her eyes and turned to her husband, sunk down in the threadbare sofa like an emaciate. He looked limp, boneless. He didn’t return his wife’s gaze.

  Josefina said, “Elders, I think we need more time. I want to be baptized in this church—it’s real for me now—but I want to take that step alongside my husband.”

  McLeod reacted to the note of apology in Josefina’s voice. “Oh of course, of course. That’s only natural. We—”

  “It’s more than natural,” Passos cut in. “It’s ordained of God. We encourage couples to wait until both parties are ready. The church believes in family unity, as I said. It is built on that. The very kingdom of heaven, as I just said, is built on that.” All hints of warmth had left Passos’s voice, and even McLeod could hear that. Now it was Passos who vibrated with a nervous, nerve-racking energy, as if each of his words had a fuse attached to it. “You say you need more time? Leandro? Is that right? If you do, that’s fine. You need more time, Leandro? Is that right?”