Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Dr. and Mrs. Jeremy Ledgewood

  are pleased to announce

  the marriage of their daughter

  Tiffany Anne Ledgewood

  to

  Corey Bruce Jensen

  on Saturday, the second day of August

  Two thousand and three

  in the Salt Lake City LDS Temple.

  You are cordially invited to attend a

  reception held in their honor.

  Then the note. It filled half a page with tiny looping words about how sorry she was that she hadn’t told him sooner, how she’d tried but she hadn’t known what to say, how it had happened so fast, though of course the Spirit had confirmed it. “I still don’t know what to say. I guess I just hope you’ll be able to understand someday and I hope you’ll still finish your mission with honor. I know you might not want to hear this right now but I’ll always consider you a friend, Andy. I’m so proud of you.” The next line had been scribbled over. McLeod could just make out “I never …” The note concluded: “Affectionately, Tiffany.”

  McLeod looked up from the kitchen counter to the closed bedroom door, then to Kimball. “What’s he doing in there?”

  Kimball shrugged his shoulders.

  “And he’s been in there since this morning?”

  He nodded.

  Elder McLeod took eggshell steps across the kitchen, opening cupboards in search of food. He found a box of imitation Cocoa Puffs in one cupboard and took it to the threshold of Sweeney’s bedroom door. He held up crossed fingers to Kimball, then he knocked once and entered.

  The room was dark and very still. The blinds shut. The fan turned off. The sound of rain drummed distantly on the roof. The air thick and close with heat. Elder McLeod waited for his eyes to adjust, then he crossed the room, stepping on stiff pieces of paper from the sound of it. Sweeney didn’t move. He lay facedown on his bed, his arms stretched up above him, his legs in strict unnatural parallel. He looked like a victim on the rack.

  A narrow shaft of gray light broke through the gap where the metal blinds met, making a halfhearted partition of the room. McLeod sat down to one side of it, on Nunes’s bed. He picked up one of the stiff pieces of paper and examined it in the shaft of light: a torn Polaroid of the lower half of Tiffany’s cross-country stride, the long white legs amputated just above the knees, one of them straight, the other bent. Other shreds showed faces with no bodies, a group of headless girls on horseback, an oak tree split right down the middle. Sweeney stood just off-center in the latter picture, extending three-quarters of his arm to a rude white tear.

  “What are you doing?” Sweeney said.

  McLeod shook the box of cereal. “I brought you some lunch.”

  “McLeod?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, McLeod.”

  Sweeney settled his head in the crook of his elbow, let out a quavering sigh. McLeod shook the box again and opened it. He pulled out a handful of dark, vaguely sticky spheres, extending the handful toward Sweeney’s face, holding it out the way you hold out feed to horses. After a time Sweeney rolled over to face him; he propped his head up on his fist. He looked at Elder McLeod’s outstretched hand for a long minute, then reached out and overturned it. The little spheres made hollow reports on the linoleum, rattling as they came to rest. McLeod reached into the box and produced another handful, which Sweeney overturned again. McLeod laughed a little.

  “Do it again,” Sweeney said.

  McLeod did it again. Sweeney flung McLeod’s hand up, or slapped it up, a loud, echoey uppercut of a slap that sent the imitation Cocoa Puffs flying. McLeod and Sweeney laughed together.

  “Just give me the fucking box,” Sweeney said. “And don’t you dare tell me to keep it Bible. Not today.”

  Elder McLeod handed over the box of cereal. “Today is an exception.”

  “You’re fucking right today is a fucking exception.”

  Sweeney plunged half of his arm into the box, then shoved the puffs into his mouth, making loud rapid crunching sounds. He repeated the process half a dozen times, coming up for air every two or three handfuls.

  “I figured you were hungry,” McLeod said.

  “Did you bring anything to drink?”

  “I can get something for you.”

  “No,” Sweeney said. “I’ll get it.”

  Elder Sweeney let the box fall to the floor, swung up out of the bed, crushed his way across the room. He opened the door and staggered out into the gray light, his arm shielding his eyes. Elder McLeod followed at a distance. In the kitchen Kimball stood before the tatters of the announcement and the note, studying them. He sipped a glass of chocolate milk. He looked up as Sweeney and McLeod came into the room, tried to cover up what he’d uncovered. Elder Sweeney pushed him aside and stared at the announcement, his mouth open—wider, wider—like he’d just had the wind knocked out of him. Again. His eyes began to fill. Kimball made an apologetic wince at McLeod, then looked down.

  Elder McLeod went to the fridge and filled a glass of water and brought it over to Sweeney. He pulled him away from the counter, turned him. He pressed the glass into Sweeney’s hand the way he’d once pressed contact cards on strangers: Dear sir, dear madam, this can help. We promise.

  Kimball swept the pieces of the announcement and the note into his hand and dropped them in the trash, though not without Sweeney noticing.

  “In the trash is where it belongs,” McLeod said. “The best thing you can do is ignore it. And drink your water.”

  Elder McLeod stepped back against the wall beside the window, leaning there, and Elder Kimball joined him. The two of them watching Sweeney as if from an observation room. The front of Sweeney’s corkscrew pate matted down, his eyes red and unfocused. The absent sips from his glass of water. “You disappeared again, McLeod,” he said, not looking up. “Where’d you go this time?”

  “Stuff with Passos again. But it’s almost over. Next week at zone conference I’m demanding a transfer from the president. Then no more of the vanishing acts. The last transfer of our missions will be the best one yet.”

  “Oh sure, sure, sure …” Sweeney said, trailing off. He laughed. “And I’m sure President Mason will give you exactly what you want, McLeod. Since he loves you so much, right?”

  Sweeney laughed again, a loud uninhibited laugh that cut off as if caught in a reversal of wind. He drank down the rest of his water in one long, breathless gulp. Then he held out the glass and let it slip from his hand; it bounced once and shattered on the linoleum. McLeod and Kimball looked at the shimmering mess, then at Sweeney, who was looking beyond it. Sweeney took two quick strides to the drying rack and got out another glass that he also dropped, a neat, almost dainty gesture. He dropped another glass, then another. Elders McLeod and Kimball watched in grim recognition. A porcelain cereal bowl hit the floor and radiated shards. A dinner plate cracked in half on impact. Neither McLeod nor Kimball said anything, and neither moved, but then Sweeney finished the drying rack and went to the cupboard, started raking the dishes from the shelves, a guttural roar building in his throat. A heavy mixing bowl smashed into pieces at Kimball’s feet. He jumped back. “Hey!” Another smashed too close to McLeod. He and Kimball ran for the living room. Sweeney followed after them, flipping the wooden dining table, kicking out the four drop flaps with as many shouts. He swept the desks, toppled the stacks in the corners, kicking books and pamphlets across the room as he tore down the pictures from the walls, the map of the area, the monthly calendar—none of it mattered anymore. Sweeney moved Kimball and McLeod around the room as if by opposing magnetic force. He finally slowed near the front door, pausing there, his breathing loud and ragged, his eyes wild. Then, as if to avoid taking stock of the futility now littering the room, he sprinted headlong for the bedroom door, just short of which Elder McLeod checked him into the wall. McLeod held on to Sweeney, lowering him down to the floor, saying, “I’m sorry, okay? But come on. Are you okay?”

  And Sweeney just gasped and gasped for br
eath until he caught it on a choking sob.

  The rain kept up. It thickened and bowed. It swept the streets in gusting scrims, making a mockery of all umbrellas, as the three elders descended at the stop near the drive-through. The crosstown bus went no closer to home. Elders Passos and Nunes and Batista would have to take the rest on foot. The bus pulled away, sprouting thick crescents of water from the wheel wells. Passos and Nunes stepped back under the awning. Batista stood planted in the coursing gutter, pushing little wavelets up and over his rubber overshoes. “Oh, are my feet in the water?” he said. “Didn’t even notice, brethren. Didn’t even notice.”

  He laughed, and Nunes laughed too, but said how ridiculous Batista looked in those things, like a circus clown. They spent several seconds back-and-forthing the pros and cons of overshoes until Passos put an end to the conversation. “I’ve only ever seen Americans wearing them. Come on.”

  Elder Passos led a spirited run-walk for several minutes as Nunes and Batista tittered behind him. They kicked up puddles at each other, like children, some of the water splashing the backs of Passos’s pant legs, which were already soaked. At moments he almost regretted being rid of McLeod in exchange for these childish greenies—childish, not childlike.

  They reached the bus stop closest to the apartment, paused under the awning to catch their breaths. The rain on the cement slab above them sounded like TV static at full blast. Elder Nunes raised his voice almost to a shout and Passos still couldn’t quite hear what he said.

  “What was that?” Passos shouted.

  “I said I sure hope you didn’t leave your laundry out in this.”

  Elder Passos slumped his head into his palm, remembering.

  “Did you really?” Nunes said. “I was just kidding.”

  “Great,” Passos said. “Some P-Day.”

  “You didn’t know it was going to rain today?”

  “How would I have known that, Elder?”

  “You just feel it, man. You’re Brazilian.”

  “He’s from the northeast,” Batista said. “They’re all Bedouins up there.”

  More tittering from Nunes and Batista. More soaking rain as they made the final dash for home. They turned off the main road onto the elders’ street, running along the rivers that gushed at the curbsides and deposited trash and mango leaves at the eddying flooded drain grates. Passos jumped the river onto the sidewalk as he neared his front gate. He thrust his hand into the mail slot, came away with a clutch of envelopes. In the courtyard the rain boiled in several centimeters of standing water. Passos and Nunes, and even Batista with his overshoes, started stepping and stepping like flamingoes, trying to keep their feet dry as they tore down the morning’s laundry from the clothesline. Elder Passos had a mind to leave McLeod’s laundry out, but Nunes and Batista had already grabbed indiscriminate handfuls of garments socks shirts pants ties, mixing the just with the unjust. Inside, the laundry took over the apartment, laid out to dry, or re-dry, on chair backs, tables, desks, countertops, doorknobs, door edges, anything and everything. An hour later a dank fungal stench suffused the air and the elders had to push through still-dripping clothes as if through jungle brush just to move about the apartment. Elder Passos spent the first part of the afternoon reading the letter Nana had sent, responding to it, then encouraging Nunes and Batista to do the same. Had they already written their letters home? he asked. Didn’t they have people worrying about them, wondering?

  Passos spent the second half of the afternoon cutting out pictures of Jesus from church magazines and redoing the mirror, making it thick with images. Jesus in the manger. Jesus in the temple. Jesus with the woman at the well, with His disciples. Jesus with the little children, heirs of the kingdom of heaven, He said, and also Allow them to come to me. Allow them to be childlike, not childish, not inane, laughing at who knows what in the bedroom, swapping wisecracks, just like McLeod and his set of jokesters. They should be writing their families to let them know they’re alive, to bear testimony to them, to be missionaries. Why was he so surrounded by idiots? Why did they all think they were here? To tell stupid jokes? To win popularity contests? Jesus at the Last Supper, the washing of the feet. Jesus atoning in Gethsemane, the agony on His face, His betrayal by Judas. Elder Passos arranged each picture so that it just overlapped the one beneath it, so that he could fit as many pictures in as possible. He looked at all of the cutouts so far, the mounting sweep of them, one image bleeding into another into another, a sort of kaleidoscopic montage of His Life and Passion.

  Passos’s grandmother still ailed. This was the word she used. “I am still ailing, my little son. Unfortunately.” She said she’d thought enough time had passed, but after a day behind the counter her ankle had swelled up again, even bigger than before, round and dark as an avocado. The pain laid her low for another week. She couldn’t even think anymore. Felipe and Tiago had to all but carry her onto the bus to go to the doctors. White-coated scoundrels, all of them. The endless waiting rooms, the flat-faced receptionists. And then, adding insult to injury, they kept her there, said she ailed from more than a sprain—an ill-healed fracture, they said. Had to break it again to set it right. Could he believe it? She was writing him from the convalescence ward now. She’d be there a week, they said, maybe more. Tiago visited often, even Felipe. They were both good boys. She ought to sue the city. They’d promised pavement more than a year ago, and now the scoundrels said she’d need to use a walker for six weeks—either that or some motorized cart, probably some old golf cart from the States. Ha!

  Nana bucked up for him, he knew. She tried to make a joke of things—“Ha!”—but it wasn’t funny. Elder Passos could see the writing on the wall. On the mirror. Jesus before Pilate, before the Pharisees and Sadducees, fattened snarling men. Jesus amid the jeering Roman soldiers. To this end was I born, He said. It was not a funny message. Elder Passos could see into the mirror and beyond it, could see through the glass, for a moment, clearly. Tiago and Felipe visited Nana often, which meant that neither of them went much to school or church. It had been this way for two months now, more. They took turns behind the counter during the day, one bringing in what little business the street offered while the other played pickup football games. At night they helped Nana, or now visited her in the hospital. In two months more, maybe longer, Nana would start walking again, tending the store again—a trickle of customers, a river of bills. The street would stay dusty and unpaved, the life meager. There was nothing there for them. Jesus at Golgotha, on the cross. Jesus risen up on the morning of the third day. Touch me not, He said, for I have not yet ascended. Then Jesus with the apostles before his final ascension, and the commandment to go into all the world and take the gospel to every creature. Jesus beside the Father, in the clouds of glory, and the promise that He will soon come again. From birth to death to rebirth, the whole story, and all of it staring him in the face, a premonition.

  He knew his companion couldn’t be trusted, couldn’t be counted on. The silence meant the end of the basement apartment—he felt sure of it. Passos couldn’t untell the lies McLeod had no doubt told his parents about him. He couldn’t undo that damage. He needed the assistantship, the BYU scholarship. Elder Passos thought of the opening talk he would give at Tuesday’s zone conference—a standing assignment, the talk, that in the hands of many zone leaders became little more than a précis for the president’s longer address. The president had assigned Passos to discuss the new rules about family-oriented teaching from a practical, missionary standpoint. But Passos would do much more than that. He would get President Mason’s attention; he would convert the missionaries of his zone to the procedural by way of the doctrinal, by way of the spiritual. The noise of the world. The shelter in inspired rules. The small means by which great things come to pass. Elder Passos removed a note card from his breast pocket and jotted down another idea. The great and eternal blessings of obedience, which is all the Lord asks of us, remember—obedience: no more or less than that.

  Passos repeated
this last phrase aloud, slowly, and with oratorical emphasis, in the finished bathroom mirror: “Obedience: no more or less than that.”

  At a little after nine o’clock that night Elder McLeod arrived with his friends in tow, the three of them ashen and funereal, Passos saw, at the prospect of reuniting with their assigned companions. He ought to address companionship unity in his talk as well. He ought to stress that.

  Elders Batista and Kimball and Nunes and Sweeney filed away into the night a few minutes later, leaving the apartment to descend back into its pall of silence. But Passos felt confident he could handle it. If things went according to plan, he’d only have to deal with McLeod for two more weeks. True, they hadn’t been together for very long, not even two transfers yet, but in order for Passos to serve as an assistant for any significant length of time he needed to move up to the mission office soon, and why not this transfer? He might even hint at this to the president in his upcoming interview. That and the BYU scholarship. He could mention how he’d always dreamed of going there, but of course the money and the distance and all that bureaucracy … Let President Mason reassure him. Then let Passos respond with a well-turned bit of English, something very American, something to demonstrate his growing mastery of the language.

  The next day the elders were more tentative in their silence. They gestured to each other, made occasional eye contact. More than once Elder Passos thought McLeod might just say something. He would have welcomed the change, any move toward reconciling, if only for the purpose of the interview with the president. He hadn’t yet figured out how to describe the silence in terms that would absolve him, as the senior companion, of all blame.

  They lunched unceremoniously at a padaría downtown, eating cheese bread, sitting on a pair of folding chairs. Leaving the store, Passos saw Josefina studying the wares in a shop window on a nearby corner. A woman about Josefina’s height, in any case, in a loose-fitting blouse. The same posture, the same dark hair—or was it? Passos quickened his step, and McLeod beside him. When they were half a block away the woman glanced in their direction, made a face, her pinched features not at all like Josefina’s, and hurried into the shop. Passos and McLeod slowed down together, nearly stopped, as if they’d entered a slower, thicker medium.