Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Passos watched the sights of the city, familiar to him now, pass by like the frames of a silent film. The glass storefronts of downtown with the sun tracking in them, a slow, mute meteor. The public green, the Assembly of God megachurch, its gray steeples like turrets. Then under the overpass and left toward home, past the supermarket, the bank, past blocks of apartment buildings, past the drive-through—that stain on the neighborhood, on the whole city. In spite of himself Passos thought of what went on behind those walls. He thought of the magazine still hidden in his desk drawer. The sting of guilt, and now of hypocrisy. How could he make demands on McLeod about purity when he himself was impure? And his house on the rock, his thoughts of America—now more like prospects than thoughts, more like plans—how could he threaten all that? McLeod had heard back from his mother already. Apparently he’d suggested the idea of Passos coming to stay with them weeks ago, before his family’s basement had even been finished. They’d be glad to make room for a friend of his, McLeod’s mother had said. They’d actually been hoping for an LDS tenant, and they knew how important an immersion experience was for language learning. She said they’d even be willing to help with expenses on the understanding that Elder Passos would earn it back through work around the house or yard—maybe help with the new patio she’d been talking about for a year and a half? She never did lack for projects.

  That was a week ago. Passos felt grateful for the offer, excited, but at times he felt another set of emotions underneath, more grayscale, more ambivalent. Something about the sudden solicitousness of it all. The heroic Americans rescuing the poor favela dweller. He didn’t want to be an object of charity. And why did they assume he could only do yard work? He wondered how Dos Santos would balance these feelings—he wondered how he did balance them, or if he even needed to—and usually it was that thought, sanguine Dos Santos, savvy Dos Santos, that brought Passos back around to consider the great blessing, the great opportunity in front of him. For one foundation builds the other, he reminded himself. A spiritual house on the rock, and now a temporal one.

  The bus let them out about a block short of the drive-through, a block and a half from Maurilho’s. Elder Passos led his companion past the brothel’s outer walls at a near run, Maurilho’s blue-painted house jogging up above the property wall as the elders rounded the final corner. Inside the house he and McLeod heaved sighs to be finally off their feet. Maurilho updated them on the championships. It looked like Argentina would beat Chile easily that afternoon. That’s what all the pregame was saying. If the bars stayed quiet that night, they could know that Argentina was into the finals. But it didn’t matter: Brazil was good enough to beat them, them and all their money, their European airs. Brazil itself faced off against Venezuela tomorrow. Same thing: listen for the bars.

  “Are you going to watch the game this afternoon? Or do you have another job interview?” Passos asked.

  “Nope. Nothing’s doing out there. Nothing at all.”

  “Dad’s even letting me skip the rest of school,” Rômulo said, shuffling into the living room in his Ronaldo jersey and a lopsided smile. He shook hands with the elders, sat down beside his father on the couch.

  “It’s not like they’re getting in any teaching these days,” Maurilho said.

  “You don’t have to tell us about not teaching,” Passos said, but he smiled, and got more comfortable on the couch.

  Maurilho cleared his throat, and his face changed. “Meanwhile and in other news—” He turned to McLeod. “It sounds like Bush really is thinking about a Mideast invasion. Just like his daddy. You’d better tell your president to take his finger off the trigger.”

  McLeod rolled his eyes—in jest, Passos thought, though he wasn’t sure.

  Rômulo said, “Okay, Pop, come on.”

  “What? America hasn’t spilled enough blood already? Bush better be blowing smoke, whitey. You tell him.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that,” McLeod said. “I’ll be sure to tell him that the next time we talk.”

  “Pop,” Rômulo said, “remember the pamphlet? You want me to get it? I’ll get it.”

  “Huh?” Maurilho said. “Oh yeah, yeah. Go get it.”

  Rômulo went into the back room and his father turned his attention back to McLeod. He raised a finger that looked ready to hold forth, or scold.

  Passos said, “What’s this pamphlet about?”

  “Oh, it’s just something my evangelical neighbor gave me. He thinks Mormons are going to hell.”

  Rômulo emerged from the back room with a small pamphlet, the paper unglossed, the graphics gray and pixilated as if they’d been printed from a home computer and photocopied. Rômulo unfolded the pamphlet and swept his free hand across it like a model on a TV shopping show. Then he handed it to his father. “Do one of your readings, Pop.”

  The big man cleared his throat and read the title, “What Mormons Really Believe,” placing ominous stress on the Really, warming to his role. “ ‘Did you know Mormons,’ ” he quoted in a high mocking voice, “ ‘believe Jesus was sexually active?’ ”

  “Oh brother,” McLeod said. “One of these, huh?”

  “ ‘Did you know Mormons believe that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers?’ ” Maurilho lowered the pamphlet and raised his eyebrows. “Whitey? You didn’t know that, did you? That Jesus and the Devil shared a bunk bed in the preexistence? Hmm? Did you?”

  “It’s truly shocking.”

  “Passos? Hmmm?”

  He played along, offered, “I hadn’t heard about the bunk bed,” and smiled a distracted, inward smile. Where had the first distortion come from? Jesus as sexually active? He hadn’t heard that one before.

  Elder Passos hated these conversations, common though they were around the mission. He found them not at all funny, not at all constructive. Rarely did the anti-Mormons much deviate from their limited scripts—Jesus and Lucifer as brothers, polygamy, cultish temple rites, Joseph Smith worship, man-Gods—but the propaganda still set him on edge, and not because he couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. It made him edgy by virtue of the fact that it reminded him, almost inevitably, of edgier times: the first months after his and his brothers’ baptisms and the barrage of “concern” from his grandmother and her devout friends: the pamphlets Nana brought home with her from Mass (“If I’d known what those young men were teaching you I’d have never allowed it”), and the scraps of paper inserted as bookmarks into his Bible, bearing Nana’s unmistakable scrawl: Read the Lord’s words about false prophets in the last days, or Read what Paul says about an angel descending and preaching a different gospel. “Let them be anathema!” Read the Word, the true Word, and pray about it, my little son. That’s all I ask of you. I love you. He remembered one Sunday afternoon in particular. He and his brothers had just returned from church when Nana and one of her friends from the parish marched into the house, their Bibles under their arms, and sat down across from them as the missionaries had done just a few months earlier.

  “Sister Renilde understands the Word even better than I do,” Nana said by way of explanation.

  The old woman gave a thin smile. “We’ve missed you at the parish, boys.” Her voice was dry, perfunctory. Passos recognized this woman from the many years he and his mother and brothers attended church with her, though they had never much spoken. She kept to herself, sitting in a pew apart and rocking her upper body over the open pages of her Bible, moaning. Even in a church as Spirit-haunted as the one Passos grew up in, she was an unusually spectral figure.

  “So serious, that woman,” his mother once remarked to him, “so very, very serious. Only your grandmother has the courage to even talk to her. Bless Nana’s Christian heart.”

  And now his grandmother sat beside the woman in their living room, turning pages in her Bible, following Sister Renilde’s lead. Nana glanced up at one point, said, “Boys, do you have your Bibles nearby? Would you go get them please?”

  Tiago, on Passos’s left, and even Felipe on his right, looked to him, their
faces uncertain. Passos stretched out a hand to either side.

  “No. We’d rather not do that,” Passos said. He had just turned seventeen.

  “Your grandmother is only trying to help you,” the woman said, not looking up from her Bible. She found the page she sought, then she slew her eyes over to Passos alone. “Have you read any of the passages your grandmother marked? Did you ask the good Lord to guide you?”

  “We’re not children anymore,” Passos said. “We can make our own—”

  “Luke, chapter twenty-one, verse eight.” The woman read: “ ‘And Jesus said, Beware that you are not deceived, for many will come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time is near; therefore do not go after them.’ ”

  She turned her face up and encased them, each of them, in a long stare. “The word of the Lord. Thanks be to the Lord. May He lead us and guide us in the true path.”

  “I am grateful to the Lord,” Passos said, “and I do believe—we do believe—that He is guiding us along the true path.”

  “But who are these young men who come to visit you? What can they know about the Lord’s Word? They are no older than you.”

  “They know more than you do,” Felipe said suddenly. “What do you know?”

  Passos put a hand to his brother’s knee. He felt a rigidness in Felipe’s body, an anger that surprised him, though he felt it in himself too.

  Sister Renilde flipped to another passage. “Galatians, chapter one, verse eight. ‘But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be anathema!’ ” She slid her eyes up again. “The Word is speaking to you directly. An angel from heaven, like your Angel of Mormon who brought the Book of Mormon, which is not the Lord’s gospel but the Devil’s. The very Word of the Lord is telling you that. Thanks be to the Lord.”

  Passos stared at the woman with something close to hatred. “Are you finished? Because I have a question for you now.”

  She kept her head down, flipping to another passage.

  “Where’s my mother?” Passos said.

  Sister Renilde stopped. Nana looked up, an expression of pained surprise. Passos kept his eyes fixed on the old woman, her gray, still head. She didn’t look up. “Where is our mother right now?” he said. “Can you tell me that? Who is she now? When will we see her again? What does your Word have to say about that?”

  “Oh my little son,” Nana said, but Sister Renilde held up a hand. Then, slowly, she lowered it to the pages of her Bible and began flipping, flipping. She stopped. “Matthew, chapter twenty-two, verses twenty-nine through thirty. ‘And Jesus said, You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.’ ”

  The woman lifted her head altogether now. She tempered the look of cold righteousness in her eyes, or she tried to, and this only angered Passos more. He felt the sickness building in him again, the first signs of an emotion so much bigger than him, so much bigger than all of them, a shadow overspreading the world, that Passos knew it must come from God. But still he resisted it.

  “In heaven we will have God and His angels for family,” Sister Renilde said. “This is the Word of the—”

  “No!” Passos shouted. “It’s not good enough! It’s not—” He broke off, gritting his teeth to keep from crying. He felt the muscles tightening, burning in his jaw, and the rigidness in the body of his brother at his right, and now, on his left, the first shivering convulsions in little Tiago.

  “Not ‘good enough’?” Sister Renilde repeated. “It is not for us to judge the Word. The Word judges us. God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

  “No,” Passos said, his voice quiet, fallen back. “You’re wrong. I know what I know. All three of us. We know what we know.”

  The sound of tearing brought Elder Passos out from under his memories.

  “It goes on like that for three pages,” Maurilho said. He tore the pamphlet crosswise now, slowly, ceremoniously, as if he’d been waiting to do it. “Half-truths and exaggerations. Everything out of context.”

  “Was that the nonsense from the neighbor?” Rose said, appearing in the living-room doorway for the first time. They all exchanged nods and smiles.

  “Maurilho was reading us selections,” McLeod said. “Most entertainment we’ve had all week.”

  They filed into the kitchen/dining room where the rectangular wooden table was set more elaborately than usual: matching white porcelain dishes and plates, steaming bowls of rice and beans, a side of farofa, dishes of carrots, chicken, potato salad. A glass pitcher of maracujá sat beading in the center of the table, and at his companion’s place a can of Guaraná sweated too. Passos spied a very American-looking chocolate cake on the kitchen counter behind McLeod.

  Maurilho settled into his seat at the head of the table, beaming. “Ah, Elders. I love Mondays. Best food of the week, hands down.”

  “Only when it’s warm,” Rose said.

  Maurilho took the hint. “Elder Passos, would you offer the blessing?”

  Elder Passos gave thanks for the food and the hands that had prepared it, for all their many blessings, and as he opened his eyes after the prayer a familiar warmth washed over him—that sense of peace, an almost sedated feeling, like relaxing under your covers at night. No matter how rote the prayer, he thought, prayer worked. The gospel worked. I know what I know. If only for a moment, then, Elder Passos felt at utter peace with his life and what he was doing with it for these two years. He was thousands of kilometers from his family, true, but he had reason to hope—he had reason to expect—that their hardest days lay behind them. He felt at peace with the righteous ambition inside him. He felt at peace with his sins even, for he knew he would abandon them. He and McLeod would both be meet for the message, would work harder than ever to make Leandro soften, and if the Lord willed it, Passos knew Leandro would soften.

  Just then McLeod’s hand reached into Passos’s line of sight and ladled spoonfuls of rice onto his plate, then beans—not on top of the rice, but beside it, just as he liked. Passos looked into his junior companion’s face, stout and pink, like an under-ripe strawberry, and he smiled. He felt at peace with his companion too. McLeod might be irreverent at times, and too timid in teaching, but he was good and kind and generous.

  “Thank you, Elder,” Passos said, “but shouldn’t I be serving you? You’re the birthday boy.”

  “Your birthday’s today?” Rose said. “I thought it was Thursday.”

  “It’s actually tomorrow,” McLeod said, “but Thursday’s the party. Are you guys still coming?”

  Maurilho looked up from his food. “You mean the party at Josefina’s and—oh, I should know this by now—”

  “Leandro,” Passos said. “McLeod just mentioned his birthday in passing and they insisted on hosting a party. Those people are just amazing. Golden.”

  “Is Leandro still …?” Maurilho said, and mimed smoking a cigarette, sucking and blowing.

  McLeod nodded his head in response, letting it sink with each nod. “It’s getting worse, actually. We come in the house now and you can smell it on him. I’m sure Josefina’s working with him—she really is golden—I’m just not sure Leandro’s as interested.”

  “Well,” Maurilho said, hovering a forkful of rice halfway to his mouth. He shook his head and mumbled, “Yeah, that’s tough,” and took a bite. McLeod nodded again and took a bite of his own food. The whole table nodded, a brief wave of sympathy, then continued on with their meal, as if his companion’s pessimism were sure prophecy, as if everyone had already given up Leandro for lost. Passos looked around for a face to share in his sense of wrong, and finding none, he turned to his companion. Look at him: chewing, staring off like a cow, as if nothing had happened, as if he were just a bystander.

  “Elder McLeod,” Passos said, and stopped. The virulence in his voice surprised even him. The table froze. His companion turned, w
ide-eyed.

  “We don’t know that Leandro smokes,” Passos said.

  McLeod paused. “Well, I think … I think it’s a pretty safe assumption. I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  “Realistic,” Passos said—spat, really. Again he surprised himself. The silence wound around them all like something living, snakelike. The sounds of chewing magnified.

  After a long time Rose said, “Do you like the food, Elders?”

  The next morning during companionship study Elder Passos apologized for his outburst, as he called it. He knew the word was an overstatement, but he wanted to hedge on the side of penitence, especially in his role as the senior companion and zone leader, in his role as the exemplar.

  McLeod raised a quick clement hand, which bothered Passos. He decided to go a step further. “On a different note, I’ve been meaning to ask you about something from Maurilho’s pamphlet yesterday.”

  He would let McLeod play teacher to his senior companion, something juniors, and Americans in general, seemed to relish. McLeod especially seemed to pride himself on his knowledge of the gospel, if not his testimony of it. Learning, always learning, as Paul said, but never coming to a knowledge of the truth. More than once during companionship study McLeod had sought to settle a debate by recoursing to his Bible Dictionary, a feature available only in the English version of the quad, or to one of the missionary classics, so-called, also available only in English. Sometimes the debates concerned doctrine—usually obscure, inessential doctrine—and sometimes church history, which Passos considered inessential by definition. For how could the temporal chronology of the church at all rival in importance the gospel contained within the church? The gospel was bigger than any nation or tongue, bigger than any localized history. Not that Elder Passos didn’t take a certain interest. He’d learned all about polygamy, when and why it ended, all about the ban on blacks in the priesthood, when and why it ended. If only to arm himself against his grandmother and her friends, Passos had taken the church’s several skeletons out of the closet, one by one, and turned them around in the light.