Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Passos, I didn’t say those things—”

  “I don’t care who said them! This is not my religion! It’s more trifling, is what it is!” He pounded the book again, rattling the desk, then leveled his finger at Elder McLeod. “That book is a bunch of trifling garbage, and it offends the Spirit. It’s holding us back. We’re going to burn it, Elder. We’re going to burn it right now.”

  “Excuse me?” McLeod laughed a breathy, incredulous laugh. He crossed his arms over his chest. “And who’s ‘we’? You and I, you mean? Or you and the Lord? Is this what he told you to do? To burn books?”

  Elder Passos scraped back his chair and stood abruptly. He crossed over to his own desk and opened the drawer and bent forward to get his arm in deep, as if to birth a calf. At last he pulled out a bright, glossy magazine. He rolled it up, closed the drawer. He came back to McLeod’s desk and stood above it. The rolled-up magazine shook in his hand.

  “What is it?” McLeod said, though by now he had an idea.

  Passos dropped the magazine on his desk; it bounced once and unrolled. A naked woman on the cover. Her legs just parted, reclining on a bed. How long had it been since he’d seen something like this, and not just the peripheral blur of it at newsstands? McLeod stared helplessly. “Elder,” Passos chided, and turned the magazine over. On the back cover a woman kneeled on all fours, her breasts hanging down like strange fruit. “Elder!” Passos said. He took the magazine and rolled it up and put it behind his back. “Is this something you struggle with too?”

  “Not lately,” McLeod said. He thought of the pictures wreathing the bathroom mirror, Passos’s guard against temptation, he realized: Jesus in Gethsemane, Jesus on the cross, Jesus with the little children, Jesus in the clouds of glory.

  “Okay, then,” Passos said. He nodded at the black paperback volume on the desk, not meeting McLeod’s eye. “We’ll repent of our sins together.”

  Passos took McLeod’s book from the desk and moved to the front door. McLeod followed without protest, the women spinning past the backs of his eyes like the images in a slot machine. Part of him tried to fix on the images. He felt he might need them later on.

  Outside, Passos knelt in the little concrete courtyard. He tore a few pages from the magazine for kindling, the scraps lurid with browns and beiges. He produced a book of matches from his pocket and lit and dropped the matches one by one, holding back his tie. The fire bloomed. Elder McLeod saw a shapely leg curling up and turning charcoal black. He saw a bare stomach singe and disappear. His companion fed the rest of the magazine into the fire and then, with a toss of his wrist, added the dictionary of Mormon arcana. The fire inhaled, then slowly exhaled. McLeod wondered aloud, half ironically, if his father would be proud of him at a moment like this.

  Passos said, “He’s proud of you. He is.”

  The fire swallowed up the book, burning away the pages like so much dross. In the clear morning light the flames were pale, unglowing, almost unnoticeable. You saw the fire mostly by its effects, the pages shrinking darkly, glowing a brief lantern-orange, then dimming to colorless ash.

  It was morning again, and again McLeod noticed his companion’s absence from the darkened room. The bare pillow, the collapsed luminescent sheets. He thought, too, he smelled something faintly burnt on the air. McLeod hazarded out into the light of the hallway, half bracing himself for another confrontation, half expecting to see Elder Passos at his desk, rifling through his drawer for contraband that wasn’t there. What little he’d had still lay in a pile of ashes in the courtyard. Passos is fallen too, McLeod remembered. Josefina is pregnant. The world is not what it seems.

  “Good morning, birthday boy! Well, slightly belated birthday boy.”

  The voice called out from the kitchen. McLeod craned his head to see down the hallway into the cramped little light-poor room: Passos stood in the center of it, fully dressed, and aproned. “I was just about to wake you up. Are you hungry?” He made a face, mocking his own question. “Let me put it this way: Could you be made to eat?”

  McLeod nodded.

  “Good,” Passos said. “Do what you need to do and come join me in the kitchen. I’ve got something for you.”

  A minute later McLeod left the lighted bathroom, the pictures on the mirror like sentinels now, and stepped into the redoubled darkness of the apartment. The hall and kitchen lights had been extinguished.

  “McLeod?” Passos called. “Follow my voice, okay? Trust me—it’s for effect.”

  McLeod palmed his way along the cool hallway wall toward the kitchen, following Passos’s “I’m here, I’m here,” and the rising smell of flour and sugar, somehow sharp. In the kitchen proper McLeod came to a stop. Passos said, as if answering the smell, “I’m not much of a baker, I guess. Or I’m a whole lot better at cheese bread than birthday cake. But—” The meager lightbulb came on and revealed a single-layer chocolate cake resting, rather sunken, in the middle of a plate in the middle of the kitchen table. The rounded slab looked something like a porcupine, covered in quills that on closer inspection—McLeod bending forward, peering, chuckling—turned out to be matches, twenty-one of them, stuck heads-up in the cake.

  “You made this for me?” McLeod said, still chuckling. He didn’t know how else to react.

  “I used some of your Nutella,” Passos said. “I hope that’s okay.” Then he said, “What? Why are you laughing?”

  “Was this your plan all along?” McLeod said. “To burn my book one morning, then make me a cake the next?”

  “Not just your book—”

  “I know, I know. It’s just … How early did you get up?”

  “Early.” Then again: “Why are you laughing?”

  “You’re insane, Passos.”

  “Why am I insane? Why would you say that?” His companion’s brows knitted halfway to the V.

  “It’s just a joke,” McLeod said. “I’m just saying—we burned the books, and now this cake here, which looks ready to blaze too, by the way.”

  “So you’d make that joke to Sweeney? You’d say that to a friend?”

  “You are my friend, Passos. And of course I’d say that to Sweeney—I do. He’s certifiable.”

  Elder Passos considered this for a moment. He wore a look of distracted concentration, as if he might be doing a math problem in his head. Then his stern face broke; he smiled at the cake. “It does look dangerous, doesn’t it?”

  “Who needs candles?” McLeod said.

  “Oh and here,” Passos said, retrieving from the chair beside him a small package wrapped in teaching pamphlets.

  McLeod felt surprised, and a little exposed. He tore the wrapping away quickly to not make too much of the moment: it was a blue hardback book, Vocabulário e gramática avançada, and it really was advanced, Passos was saying, sounding rushed and exposed as well, which endeared him to McLeod. He didn’t want to suggest that McLeod needed the practice, Passos was saying. He spoke so well already and so this book was more geared toward difficult reading—it had example passages from some of Brazil’s greatest writers; Passos himself had used a book just like it in his secondary school—and he figured it might be a nice introduction to Brazilian literature that was still within the mission rules. He knew that McLeod liked literature.

  Passos said, “So that’s that,” and took a matchbook out of his pocket.

  “Hey.” McLeod waited for Passos to look up at him. “I really like it, companion. Thank you.”

  “Well, good,” Passos said, and he smiled. He hit the light and struck a match in the darkness, touching it to a match head in the very center of the cake. The elders watched the little bloom of fire spread to the match head beside it and the one beside it, moving out and out, until the cake looked constellatory.

  Late Sunday morning they started for church on foot, through bright and bus-less streets, unpeopled but for the occasional aproned bartender setting up folding chairs at the edge of a dark-mouthed barzinho. Elder Passos could see the hunched forms of men inside—soli
der darknesses in the darkness. In t minus an hour the final would begin. In t minus two hours church would begin. This meant that sacrament meeting would overlap the game’s second half almost exactly, and Passos himself had been asked to speak. A personal visit from the bishop late last night. The concluding speaker had come down with something.

  The elders passed another assembling barzinho and Passos muttered, “I wish I could come down with something.” He sensed McLeod’s eyes on him. “I’m not complaining, I’m just saying. On a day like today who wouldn’t come down with something?”

  “ ‘To whom much is given,’ right?” McLeod said. He chuckled.

  Passos didn’t see humor in the situation, and he said as much. Only an outsider could insist on holding church services at the same time as the finals, as President Mason had done. Passos wasn’t sure a mission president even had that authority. Wouldn’t the authority reside with the local bishop? In any case, the president had made it known he’d be in attendance at the ward that afternoon, as if to intimidate it into obedience. And again, Passos wasn’t complaining—

  “You’re just saying,” McLeod said.

  “Well, it’s true, Elder. Do you doubt it?”

  “I don’t, actually. I’m just not used to you bad-mouthing the mission president. You of all people.”

  “I’m not bad-mouthing the mission president. And what does that mean—‘you of all people’?”

  “Nothing,” McLeod said. “I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “I’m not offended. I just don’t know what you mean.”

  “I misspoke.”

  A few minutes later Elder Passos banked left at the approach of the drive-through, detouring through the streets behind it. McLeod looked confused. “Why the scenic route?”

  “Use your imagination,” Passos said.

  His companion squinted in concentration.

  “Not literally,” Passos said. “You know what I mean. You’re a real comedian this morning, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  The elders passed the supermarket, the bank, the shops along the main street, all the windows mirrorlike in their darkness. The yellow-green banners spanning the intersections reminded Passos of the crossbeams over the Israelites’ doors. The Lord’s Passover. Obedience. Sacrifice. Elder Passos had fished the theme for his talk out of the preoccupations already swimming in his mind. Last night and this morning he’d made as many notes as time allowed, getting down the few complete sentences as they came to him. He intended his words for the whole congregation, of course, but specifically for Josefina. He felt certain she’d be there today. He felt certain Leandro would not be. Or maybe it wasn’t quite certainty; maybe it was fear. Creeping doubt. Something to be guarded against, combated. He couldn’t lose hope.

  Passos and McLeod had agreed to continue working so that Leandro might change his heart, and soon, that he and his wife might be baptized together. The Lord intended for a family to be joined for time and all eternity, but only members of the church could undergo the sealing ordinances. Baptizing Josefina without Leandro risked alienating Leandro completely, and cutting him off, everlastingly, from his wife and now his child. The point of the gospel, Passos meant to tell Josefina, was eternal family unity. He would tell her today. After sacrament meeting. After his talk on obedience and sacrifice. This is your sacrifice, Josefina. To wait just a little while longer. In the scheme of eternity, time is meaningless, and to have your family by your side is meaning itself.

  By the time the elders finally got downtown the aluminum grandstands had filled. People milled about the square, everyone in yellow, a giant convocation of bees crowding the hive: above their heads, a corridor of complicated light that ran from a high projecting booth behind the grandstand to a giant screen hanging from the town hall façade, showing pregame. The footage alternated between shots of a panel of suited men and a series of highlights from previous games, the field onscreen like a vast swimming pool of green, the figures streaking across it like water bugs … For a second Passos lost himself and stopped walking, awash in beauty.

  “Obedience and sacrifice?” McLeod said, looking back.

  “Indeed,” Passos sighed. “Indeed.”

  They funneled into an alleyway on their way out of the square, passing a group of young people the elders’ age, and all of them in the uniform of the day. Passos half put his head down, expecting ridicule—What, going to church? Today?—but the faces looked right past him toward the giant screen. Passos realized he’d actually been hoping for a little ribbing. He would have preferred it, almost any abuse, to this: this sense of invisibility, this sense of foreignness in his own country.

  They arrived well early at the church, just after the trumpetlike burst of air horns had announced kickoff. Elder Passos stopped in the chapel’s doorway and watched the bars at either end of the street: how they writhed with a sort of frantic attention, the folding chairs all empty as the wall of latecomers strained at the mouth of each bar, more like fish than bees now, a yellow school of them, each member bristling for a better view. Passos felt another stab of dislocation, and he couldn’t help thinking—the idea breached despite him—that he’d given up something of himself, something important, to be a member of what was still an American-controlled church, on an American-controlled mission, under an American mission president, a man who could look at an entire culture and see a game, merely, who could look at a countrywide communion and see a crowd.

  During sacrament meeting President Mason and Sister Mason, a plump, pale couple that could have been brother and sister as easily as husband and wife, sat in the otherwise empty front row, their pew upholstered, like all the pews, in a muted orange fabric that must have seemed fashionable or timeless at one point; it was neither now. From Elder Passos’s vantage—he sat on a dais at the front of the chapel—the pew backs and seats looked uglier than usual. His view of the room let Passos see just how few the bodies were to cover up or distract from the upholstery. He did notice Maurilho and Rose (but not Rômulo) in their usual place in the middle pews. Several other members Passos knew by sight sat scattered around them, to the left and right.

  Josefina sat in the very back pew, to Passos’s great relief, and his companion sat beside her. McLeod leaned over several times during the opening hymn, then the sacrament hymn, whispering to Josefina. He couldn’t know what McLeod was saying, of course, but the very fact of his whispering into her ear struck Passos as inappropriate no matter how didactic the look on his face.

  Elder Passos felt eyes on him—President Mason’s, small and blue—and he returned his attention to his hymnbook. After the sacrament hymn only three deacons stood up to distribute the broken bread and water, but they were more than adequate to the size of the congregation. Then the bishop, a balding, murmuring man, went to the pulpit at the front of the dais and introduced the speakers. José Melão, their youth speaker, went first, taking less than five minutes on the subject of faith. José’s mother, Sister Melão, followed him, treating the same subject in more adult terms, though not, Passos was startled to realize, in much longer ones. She started into her talk-ending testimony (“I know these things are true …”) after only ten minutes at the pulpit, which meant that Passos needed to fill—a wide-eyed stare at the wall clock, panicked calculation—some thirty-five minutes, or fifteen minutes in excess of the twenty he had only felt vaguely prepared to fill in the first place.

  Sister Melão sat down after a sparse, unisonous “Amen,” and Passos stood up, very slowly. He moved to the pulpit. It wasn’t half past the hour. He told a joke he’d heard once, stalling for time. A high priest dies in the middle of a quorum meeting, all those nodding gray heads, and it takes the paramedics three tries to find the one who’s really dead. Rose and Maurilho obliged with a laugh-groan; McLeod did too; even Sister Mason did. But the mission president himself sat straight-faced.

  Passos felt chastened. “Only kidding, of course.” He looked up at the clock but not long enough to make out the
precise minutes. What did he have—thirty-two minutes left, thirty? He gripped the pulpit on either side and put his head down and started reading more or less verbatim from his notes. He used none of his evangelical cadence; he couldn’t have conjured it if he’d wanted to. In a low, too-quick mumble he uttered sentences like, “Something else I wanted to say is, well, consider how long the Lord has required sacrifice of His people. Consider the Israelites …” or “Remember, too, that Moses’s law—the Law of Moses—was merely a preparatory law, as we read in the Book of Mormon …” or “I wanted to read a scripture about this. I’ll read the entire passage because I think … I think it just illustrates my point very well …”

  Elder Passos looked up at the clock as he reached the last bullet point on his page of notes, a bare directive: Close with the story about the Passover (Ex. 12:12–13)—the Lord’s Atonement—a broken heart and a contrite spirit … The clock showed twenty minutes remaining. He arranged in his head the story of the Passover while praying for a miracle of his own, a rescue of his own. And hadn’t he earned one? He had made himself clean; he had rid himself of his sins. Of the most obvious sins, anyway.

  Passos folded away his page of notes and looked up into the faces of the congregation: President’s and Sister Mason’s, Maurilho’s, Rose’s, his companion’s, Josefina’s. “You all know the story of Moses and the plagues, I’m sure, but I wanted to tell it again … because it’s a remarkable story, my brothers and sisters. It’s a truly remarkable story. The Lord tells Pharaoh, through His prophet Moses, to free the Israelites from bondage, and what does Pharaoh do? He hardens his heart. The Lord sends plagues—of frogs, lice, flies—upon all the land of Egypt, and still Pharaoh refuses to let God’s people go. The Lord destroys the Egyptians’ cattle. He sends a plague of pestilence, and another of boils, and another of hail. He sends locusts. He sends a terrible plague of three days’ darkness, and after all this, what does Pharaoh do? He hardens his heart even more. So what happens next? I want to read it to you, brothers and sisters. I’d be remiss to paraphrase the Lord’s words here. In Exodus, chapter twelve, the Lord has instituted the Passover: each family is to sacrifice an unblemished lamb, and take the blood of that lamb and put it on their doorposts, then eat the lamb standing up, with their shoes on, eating it with bread that hasn’t even risen, ready to flee at a moment’s notice, and why? In verses twelve and thirteen of chapter twelve, the Lord tells us: ‘For on this same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague of destruction will not touch you when I strike the land of Egypt.’