Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Of course, Mom.”

  “They look up to you.”

  “It’s not forever, anyway.”

  “You have to promise me you won’t forget about them.”

  “Mom, come on.”

  “Promise me, son. You’re a good boy, but promise me.”

  “I promise you.”

  The trail widened out and the water slid away and the dappled light through the trees undappled, got steady and bright until it filled the vast green field that opened up in front of them. In the far corner of the field, two trees. They stood a good fifty meters apart. Passos and his mother crossed to the first tree, a towering mango, in a matter of steps. They plucked lunch from the reachable branches and ate it in the tree’s expansive shade. Passos in bed could almost taste the sweet syrupy pulp on his tongue, feel it in between his teeth, gritty and reassuring. His mother laughed at him—“My little pig!”—and cupped her chin to show him what she meant. Passos wiped the same spot on his face and came away with an orange-red slime.

  “So,” his mother said, and she stood up and produced two homemade kites for them to fly, slanted boxes made out of grocery bags and balsam. The sun shone even brighter now. The wind picked up. The kites lifted and shrank to the size of postage stamps in a scrubbed blue sky. Toward evening Passos tired and sat down against the tree trunk. He read from his scriptures—his Bible in English—and only then did he notice the missionary clothes he wore. He looked over at his mother as she reeled in the kites, first hers, then his. She smiled mysteriously, as if thinking some private little thought. Then she turned her head, sensing his eyes on her, and her smile widened. “My little scholar,” she said.

  Passos smiled too, though a bit unsurely.

  “What is it, son?” his mother said. “You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Good.” Her voice rebounded, light as a song in her throat. “Good, good. We’ll wait for the fireflies.”

  Passos nodded. He felt content and secure. He read for a minute more, then closed his eyes, leaning against the trunk of the mango tree. He remembered the second tree, some distance away, and he opened his eyes to study it. He picked up a wind-fallen mango and stood up and threw it as far as he could toward the tree. It fell well short.

  He heard footsteps behind him. His mother gripped a green, spotted mango in her right hand. “Watch what your old mother can do,” she said. “Are you watching?” She cocked her arm far back behind her head, hopped once, then twice on her back leg, then whirled around like a discus thrower and sent the mango flying through the air. The oblong fruit described a rainbow arc until it thunked against a low bough, dropping what sounded like large pinecones, loosing a shiver of white fuzz. The fuzz—a snowy scrim—updrafted and eddied on the breeze. It finally settled on the ground around the tree, coating its exposed, prodigious roots.

  Passos tilted his head. “What kind of tree is that?”

  His mother looked surprised. “You never played Brazilian snowstorm, my little son?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why, it’s a snowstorm tree. Here.” She led them to the squat twisted tree base. Against the trunk, its bark gray and papery, his mother put out her hand to steady herself. She reached down and retrieved from between two roots a small green pod, cleanly burst down the middle, with its white fibrous insides showing. “These sides peel back,” his mother explained, “until it’s just the fluffy seeds, you see?” Then she lofted the pod straight up into the canopy of dark impenetrable green. Some leaves wafted down before another cloud of white, like an annunciation. Passos’s mother bent down for more pods and he followed her lead, collecting a handful and unloading it, one by one, into the tree. The snow shook down in successive waves. It fell on his hair, his neck. It tickled his skin; it made him chuckle. He was chuckling with the sensation, then suddenly he was laughing, then suddenly, boyishly, he was spinning around. He put his arms out, gathering speed, spinning, making the white stuff coat him, making it swirl all around him in the darkening air. Over the whoosh of his movement he heard his mother laughing too, a bright, clear, girlish laugh. They laughed in chorus, mother and son—they didn’t know why they laughed, only that they did, as if in defiance of the dream that was dimming away now, bleaching out, the surface approaching in spite of Passos’s best efforts to stay under forever, to live there and breathe there, away from the world of waking sights, waking sounds.

  The bedside clock said 5:34. He heard a subtle click in the hallway outside the bedroom. A band of yellow light appeared under the door. He listened for footsteps, thought he heard them: shuffling steps, soft as sails. Elder Passos jerked upright out of bed, caught in a sudden breathless clutch that breached the chrysalis of sleep once and for all. He pressed his ear to the wall. He heard a metallic scrape against the linoleum, the scrape of a chair leg, it sounded like. He heard the hollow knock of rubber against the floor. Was someone taking off his shoes? Or stealing theirs? He looked across the room for the first time. McLeod’s bed was empty, still made up. Of course, he thought. Of course. What kind of intruder turns on the light, anyway? Passos released his breath. Why had he rushed to the thought of an intruder? McLeod had gotten up early before. Not lately, but still. Nothing else made sense.

  Passos lay back down as if to enforce a calmness of mind. He closed his eyes in an attempt to get back to sleep, a futile attempt, he suspected, but he tried anyway. He tried to rejoin the dream with his mother—a pair of trees, a kind of snow, his mother’s laughter—but as he struggled to conjure these images again, another set of stimuli recurred to him with the sudden force of memory: the key in the front door, the scrape on the linoleum, the clatter of the outer gate before that. Hadn’t these been the very sounds to bring him up from his dream in the first place?

  Elder Passos sat up again, trained his gaze on the glowing strip of light under the doorway. For a moment the strip seemed to waver, seemed surreal, and so, too, the idea of his companion leaving the apartment in the middle of the night. But what else could the sounds mean? Outer door, front door. The key in the lock, then footsteps inside. Passos rubbed hard at his eyes, sitting up all the way now, making sure he had left the dreaming state. But to wonder about a dream is to have left it already. Passos suddenly felt certain that his companion had left the house, alone, and in the night, a gross violation of missionary rules. He remembered McLeod’s shoes strangely placed at his bedside. Exactly when had he left? For how long? For what purpose? Passos didn’t know, but he didn’t need to know. I hold a trump card now, he thought.

  Then he thought of his mother in the dream. You’re a good boy, but promise me, she’d said. That “but”—it pierced all the way to the bone. But what other options did he have? Should he pretend he hadn’t heard his companion coming in the front gate at five thirty in the morning? Should he turn a blind, uncaring eye? In the event of a companion’s serious misconduct—serious sin, potentially—a missionary did best to turn the matter over to the presiding priesthood authority. President Mason, in this case. Perhaps Passos had been handed a gift, he and McLeod both. It might not be too late for a change of transfer plans—Passos to the office and McLeod to another companion, or home early if necessary, however the president saw fit to handle him. It could be as simple as a phone call: an apology to the president for calling so early in the morning and an expression of concern for his junior companion, who had finally gone beyond Passos’s ability to control, who needed more guidance than he could provide.

  Elder Passos heard another short scrape of a chair readjusting under his companion’s weight. What was he doing out there? Why had he left the apartment? What had he done?

  He couldn’t exactly go strike up a conversation about it with McLeod. Never mind that they hadn’t spoken in three weeks—to even go out into the front room would be to acknowledge what he knew, to tip his hand. Much better to make a private phone call to the president, give him and McLeod the out they both wanted. Elder Passos didn
’t need McLeod’s parents, anyway. He only needed a recommendation from the president, a student visa, and the rest, he felt confident, would take care of itself. And of course, of course he would remember his brothers. He would bring Nana over too, if she could ever be persuaded. If not, he would return after four years, maybe less, with an American degree in hand, and the world that much wider, that much better for him. Elder Passos knew now to build his house on two foundations—the spiritual and the secular. He knew his mother would be proud of him. He was a good boy, she’d said. But what did she mean by that “but”?

  Passos heard another sound from the front room, a different sound, a sort of scratching. Tapping and scratching. He tried to ignore it. He covered his ears. Then the scratching noise stopped and a long silence followed. Elder Passos stiffened in his bed. If McLeod tried to sneak back into the bedroom, let him. He closed his eyes now, pretending to sleep. But the noise in the front room resumed. What was it? Where was it coming from?

  Passos knew he couldn’t afford to wonder. He started praying, to distract himself as much as anything. It was a sort of reflex, but soon he meant it. Elder Passos’s thoughts rose up into genuine prayer the way the mind slips down into dreaming—in an act of ungovernable grace. His God-led thoughts led from his mother to his brothers, Nana, the mission, all of it, the whole purpose—and then to McLeod. He stopped on McLeod. Something stopped him there. A feeling of warning. What had Passos decided just last night? What had he resolved to do just hours earlier? Give him time. Give him a little more time. It implied a chance, a chance, at least, at explanation. Maybe McLeod had gone for a walk in the moonlight—a serious mistake but not mission-ending, not enough for a dishonorable release. How could Passos be such an unjust judge? If he expected a chance from the president, if he expected a chance from BYU, then didn’t he owe one to Elder McLeod? Didn’t he owe him at least the question? You’re a good boy, his mother had said, but.

  The feeling of warning still hovered like a fog in Passos’s mind, though little by little it lifted, breaking altogether when a resolution took its place. Give him a little more time. Give him a chance. Never mind the call to the president. He’d get to the office soon enough. The president had all but promised him the assistantship next transfer. For now just concentrate on that companion of yours. He owed him the question at least.

  Passos opened his eyes. The glowing yellow band at the foot of the door glowing softer. The rising warmth in the room. This way, besides, he could still call the president if he needed to—it would be trickier, but he could do it—and he could also satisfy his curiosity, growing more intense by the second. Where had McLeod actually gone? What had he done? Why? And what was he doing now? What was that noise—Passos heard it again—that tiny, insistent tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching. It sounded like mice in the walls. It drove Passos to his feet.

  Elder McLeod looked up from his work to the window, still mostly dark. The bare bulb overhead cast overlapping shadows on the ceiling, a sort of flowering out from the center. The bulb, as always, gave off little light, but enough for McLeod’s present purpose. He held Passos’s left shoe in his left hand, sole up, taking a retracted pen tip to the packed-in dirt between the grooves, scraping at the dirt, then trying to tap the remainder free. Scraping, then tapping. Taking action. Elder McLeod thought of President Mason, who had given him the idea, but he thought of his father more. In the car at Logan Airport, not two hours before takeoff. His father’s warm blessing hands on his head. And his assurances. You wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t going to do it well. That’s one of the things I most admire about you.

  McLeod thought his father would be proud of him now, seeing him at work on his companion’s shoes. The gospel of doing. Faith as a principle of action. Saint John’s litmus test. The old tropes. If he could will himself to care, he could will himself to obey. If not out of love or belief, then out of fear. Maybe that was the whole game.

  In any case, Elder McLeod felt a strange excitement as he carried out his good deed, tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching, the rhythmic energy of his hands imparting energy to his heart such that his feelings began to align against his thoughts in an almost exact counterpoint. I have set both feet, he felt, on a course that will restore my companionship to good faith, that will provide the impetus for a strong end to my mission, a triumphal end, and that will trigger God’s grace in my heart, a permanent testimony. McLeod smiled at himself. He pulled back to his thoughts.

  At the very least he could say he had tried something, and who knew? He might surprise Passos with the sheer suddenness of the gesture, the unexpectedness, as Passos had surprised him that first day with the Guaraná. Did you do this? he would say, and to him, audibly, unmistakably, the sound of a cease-fire. Holding up the shoes, like dull mirrors, and saying, You did this, Elder McLeod?

  And McLeod would nod and say, I’m sorry, Elder Passos. Not about—gesturing to the shoes—not about that, obviously. That I meant. I’m sorry about everything else. You know?

  Passos would nod too, or maybe not, but in any case McLeod would cross the entryway/living room to his desk and lever out the Seuss book he’d demanded back. He could hold it out to him: Here, take it. This is another thing I’m sorry about. It was a gift, and it’s yours.

  Passos would accept the return of the gift, with thanks. Then he would cross the room to his desk, digging through the drawer and retrieving the blue grammar book that Passos had given him as a birthday present and that he, McLeod, had returned out of spite, leaving a spiteful note in the pages. He really did regret that. He felt a sea of regrets welling up in him, huge crashing waves. He could tell that to Passos—the shoe-cleaning could occasion it—and maybe he really could restore his companionship to good faith.

  Maybe. Could. Would. Might. The very language of his hope spread over McLeod’s thoughts like a sedative, a check to keep his expectations in balance. He had felt this sense of performance before, this sense of personal history-making in situ, of doing something and knowing already how he’d describe it months, even years, afterward. One afternoon in his first area he had spotted a little girl with big hungry eyes. Gaping eyes, McLeod had thought. “Gaping” was just how he would describe them. He bought an ice-cream cone and motioned for the girl to come over and help herself. She moved to the cone and took it from his hand and looked at him flatly and walked away. A few months later he had stayed up half the night composing his homecoming talk; he hadn’t been eight months into his mission at the time. The talk began: I wasn’t eight months into my mission when I started composing this homecoming talk … The next morning he read over his too-clever effusions of the night before, and threw the pages away.

  And he was doing it again now—on some level he knew that. The way he took breaks from cleaning Passos’s shoes to observe the room, frame it for memory’s sake, for posterity’s. The entryway/living room in a dim yellow light. Shadows clinging to the corners. The air warm, the floor cool underfoot. In a gesture of charity—It never faileth, Paul said—he had taken up his companion’s worn and dusty shoes to clean them, including the soles. Of course McLeod hoped something good might come of it. The heart is a hopeful, incorrigible thing.

  McLeod finished Passos’s left shoe and took up the right, making a fist of his hand and using it as a shoe horn. He brushed the dirt clods off with his free hand, removing the loose earth preparatory to the thorough treatment: the old toothbrush, the tin of shoe black, the small felt buffing rag retrieved from the recesses of his desk drawer. In the absence of a drop cloth, a loose circle of dirty precipitation had formed on the floor in front of McLeod’s chair. He planned to sweep up before Passos awoke, which he figured would be in an hour or so, a little under. He didn’t feel rushed, but he wanted to have time to spare. He took out his pen again, tip retracted, and started working at the stubborn tracks of dust that crusted into the grooves along the side of the right shoe, scratching at the dirt, then tapping at it, th
en scratching at it again, and so on. Elder McLeod had never cleaned his own shoes so thoroughly, much less a companion’s shoes. He went at the cracks and veins of dirt with the avid, improvisational élan of a novice. Much of the dirt would take up residence again, by midday that day, in the very crevices he cleaned. The essence of the gesture lay not in utility but in ceremony, old as forgiveness itself. I am doing this for you, Passos, McLeod thought, not because it is practical but because it is impractical. I am doing this for you because you—

  He looked up at the sound of bare feet slapping the linoleum.

  Elder Passos, in shorts and garment top, stopped just past the hallway. He looked at McLeod, squinting. He visored his eyes, still squinting. “What are you doing?”

  McLeod froze, pen in one hand, shoe in the other, as if he’d been caught in a shameful act. His companion’s words confused him. Their tone confused him: rough, abrading. The first words to him in more than three weeks and they sounded like an accusation. A threat.

  Passos’s brows suddenly snapped all the way to the V. “Is that a pen? Hey! What are you doing to my shoe?”

  McLeod opened his mouth to respond—“Wah …”—but only a wordless noise came out. He watched his companion’s posture change, spring-load, and he tensed himself.

  McLeod tried again. “Wait. No.” The words felt leaden, slow on his tongue, as if three weeks of silence and the night’s exhaustion had combined to atrophy his very ability to speak. The words labored up like a pair of wounded birds in the space between the two elders, the space Passos was suddenly closing as he glowered across the room. McLeod dropped the pen and took up Passos’s shoe instead, cocked it back at his ear. Passos hesitated a beat, then another, and rushed, nose-first, into the airborne shoe. The collision made a sharp, wet thwock. The shoe fell to the ground and Passos followed it and McLeod saw dark blood forming up in his companion’s nostrils. Passos looked dazed, blinking rapidly, touching his fingers to the blood, coming to a number of realizations. Elder McLeod crouched in a wrestler’s stance in front of the chair. He felt the other shoe gripped in his hand now, and he came to realizations of his own.