Elders (15 page)

Passos looked to the kitchen doorway with expectation on his face.

“He isn’t here,” Josefina said. “Leandro’s not coming tonight.”

“Oh,” Passos said.

McLeod spoke up after a long silence. “We heard people going crazy earlier. Sounds like Brazil won today.”

“Four to one,” Maurilho said softly. “Final’s on Sunday. Against Argentina.”

“He’s out celebrating with friends,” Josefina said.

“At the bar?” Passos said.

Josefina turned her face aside at the question, her cheeks gathered into a pained, apologetic wince. The look seemed well-worn to McLeod, slipping easily, too easily, into the ruts of her features. He wondered how much occasion Leandro had given Josefina for
such a pained expression. And why their gospel hadn’t changed that.

“Oh,” Passos said.

“You know what?” McLeod said, after another silence. “You can’t control him, right? You can’t be responsible for him. He has his own agency, his own mind.”

“Right.
Right
,” Josefina said, lighting up the word. She straightened in her chair, seemed to take courage. “I was going to say that, Elder. Just that. I prayed about it, and I felt the Lord give me that answer. If Leandro doesn’t want it, I can’t force him, right? If he doesn’t want to quit smoking, if he doesn’t want to quit drinking—”

“He said he had quit drinking,” Passos said.

Josefina flushed red. Her eyes watered, brimmed over. “That’s what I mean. That’s what I mean. If he’s going to sit here and lie to you … Oh Elders, I hate it so much when he lies to you. You’re dedicating two years of your lives to God and the least you deserve … the least is honesty. And Elder McLeod, it’s your birthday, and Leandro promised he’d bring the cake. Tonight was going to be a surprise and—” She lost her next words in a choking, almost animal sound, something dredged from the bottom of her chest, a low, pitiful, scraped-out moan. It made McLeod’s own chest hurt, made his own eyes sting. Josefina put her hand to her sternum as if to restart the airflow. The stinging in Elder McLeod’s eyes turned to burning and he rushed to the kitchen. A bowl of nachos sat on the kitchen table. A few balloons bobbed slowly under the low-hung ceiling. He found a stack of napkins on the counter and ran one across his face—hard. He went back into the front room and
handed a napkin to Josefina. She took it and dabbed her eyes. She tried to laugh. “You guys must think I’m crazy, huh? The thing is, though, I’m not even sad anymore. We were going to be baptized on Sunday, both of us—that was going to be another surprise. Then late last night he comes home drunk as ever and this morning he leaves for the bar without a word, and all this when I’m … when we’re …” She looked down at what McLeod first thought was her lap, but then her hands formed around her stomach, delicately, and he understood. Tears slid down her cheeks in silence, and Rose reached over from the love seat and laid a hand on her forearm, like she’d known about it beforehand. Josefina smiled at Rose. “You’re not supposed to tell people until you’re sure it’s safe. Not for three months, they say. Another ruined surprise.”

“It’s safe,” Rose whispered. “It’s safe.”

McLeod studied Josefina’s stomach, irresistibly, and he couldn’t tell. She was in a flowing blouse, but even still: he felt he should be able to tell, and he couldn’t.

He was on the verge of saying something. He felt he should say something. He began to form
congratulations
, but Josefina faced the elders again with sudden, startling purpose. Her face was gleaming, her voice soft yet resolute. “I want to be baptized, Elders. I prayed to the Lord, like you taught me, and He told me what to do. He wants me to join His church as soon as possible. Then maybe Leandro will follow my example, right? Maybe he’ll want to follow me into the waters?” Her eyes sought approval from the elders, confirmation—mostly they sought it from McLeod. Maurilho and Rose and Rômulo studied the floor at the exact same angle, an inert choreography. McLeod felt lifeless—his face felt lifeless—empty of movement, empty of all expression. Josefina’s lips flattened into
a determined line. “Anyway, I prayed about it. The Lord told me what to do. I’m going to be baptized this Sunday.”

Passos stirred in his seat. “Listen, Josefina …” He paused. “I know you’re trying to—”

“I remember what you said. You prefer to wait until the spouse is ready. But I prayed about it, Elder. The Lord told me.”

Passos opened his mouth to speak again, then stopped.

“Maybe what my companion is trying to say,” McLeod came in, “is that there’s some paperwork we’ll need to put in process. There’s a baptismal interview, a few other things, and it might take longer than a few days.”

“As soon as possible then,” Josefina said. “As soon as possible.”

Early the next morning, in bed. The red numbers on McLeod’s bedside clock resolving unsteadily into 5:58, and in the time it took to blink, 5:59. More than half an hour before he needed to be up. He felt an unfamiliar heaviness in his body—the leaden feeling not of too little sleep but of too much, though he knew he hadn’t rested well. He remembered rousing hours earlier, around one o’clock, and then again at three thirty. Turning over each time, squinting, trying to make the red numbers come clear of their blur. He blinked again now, wiped the sleep from his eyes, and the numbers resolved for good: 6:00.

The rest of the world came clear on its own time, and no amount of squinting on McLeod’s part could preempt it, or delay it, or change it at all, really. Josefina believed; Leandro simply did not. Perhaps in some offset time and space it had always been this way. Perhaps the ranks of believers and doubters had already been
determined, split along an eternal binary. The heart swells with belief, like a child inside you—or it doesn’t. The ground is fertile, or it isn’t.

McLeod’s eyes had adjusted to the light in the room—blue-green, shading clearer—and now they moved from the pale rectangle of light in the middle of the floor to the foot of Passos’s bed. Only then did he see that the bed was empty, the faint-glowing sheets cast loosely over the mattress.

McLeod padded out into the entryway/living room, shielding his eyes from the bare bulb overhead. Through his squinting he thought he saw—then he knew he did, rubbing his eyes again—his senior companion, in full missionary dress, sitting at his, McLeod’s, desk. Elder Passos half turned at the sound of his approach. McLeod noticed his book,
A Dictionary of Mormon Arcana
, balancing facedown on the desk like a lean-to, and beside it, an open book of scripture.

“What’s going on?” McLeod said.

Passos pulled the chair from his own desk over to where he sat. “I want to show you something, Elder. Have a seat.”

“What are you doing?”

“Sit down and I’ll show you.”

McLeod went to the bathroom and came back and stood behind the chair, his hands gripping the back of it like a high railing.

“Will you please sit down?” Passos said.

“If I do, are you going to tell me how you possibly thought going through my private things was okay?” He pulled the chair away from Passos and dropped down into the seat.

“Elder, I have been pondering,” Passos said. McLeod noticed
the cadence in his voice already. “I have been reasoning with the Lord.”

“And how was
rea
-son-ing with the
Lord
?” McLeod said.

Passos’s eyebrows did their familiar knitting—the dark
V
, the face’s instinctual flinch. After a moment the hard line softened, relaxed, and Passos said, “Don’t you see, Elder? That right there is part of the problem.”

Elder Passos reached for the slim paperback and flipped it over and flattened the pages against the desk. He pointed to an entry that said “Jesus Christ as polygamist, early Mormon speculations about.”

“Let me guess,” McLeod said. “You’ve come around to the idea.”

The hand pointing to the page made a fist, suddenly, and pounded the book against the desk. McLeod flinched at the
crack
of the volume’s binding on the wood. “Don’t you see, Elder McLeod? This sarcasm, and this—” He waved the book in the air, nailed it to the desk again. “
This
is part of the problem!”

Elder McLeod met his senior companion’s stare, dead-on, for a long, still moment, silent but for the sounds of their quickened breathing, still but for the tiny flarings of their nostrils. He met the stare long enough to show he wasn’t afraid to meet it. Senior companion, district leader, zone leader, assistant to the president—none of it mattered. All the titles in the world didn’t matter to McLeod.

“Elder McLeod,” Passos said, and now his voice had changed, his eyes too. They beseeched. “I’ve been pondering about last night, pondering and praying about what we can do, what we
need
to do, to help Leandro. I woke up very early this morning. I arose
in the Lord. I arose in His grace and His Spirit, Elder McLeod, and I asked Him what to do, and He told me.”

Passos turned the open book of scripture to him. “Will you read verse nine, Elder? Aloud?” He preempted the look that McLeod could feel half twisting the corners of his mouth. “
Please
, companion. Please.”

McLeod cleared his throat and read quickly. “ ‘My brethren, all you that have assembled yourselves together, you that can hear my words which I shall speak unto you this day; for I have not commanded you to come up hither to trifle with the words which I shall speak, but that you should hearken unto me, and open your eyes that ye may hear, and your hearts that ye may understand, and your minds that the mysteries of God may be unfolded to your view.’ ”

He looked up from the verse to see Passos’s face trembling with soberness—big, funereal eyes. “Our sin,” he said, “has been to
trifle
with the words of God. We show up to Josefina and Leandro’s and what do we talk about? Football. Or work. Or how hot it is outside, how tasty the cookies are. We do too much chitchatting, too much joking around.”

“People like it,” McLeod said. “It’s friendly.”

Passos pursed his lips. “Elder McLeod, last night we had a birthday party, a ruined birthday party, instead of a missionary lesson. When we found out Leandro wasn’t coming to the discussion, isn’t living the truths we’ve taught him, doesn’t want to be baptized with his wife—the woman he’s about to start a family with, the woman he’s
supposed
to be with in the eternities—you take it all in stride. It doesn’t even faze you. Either of us! We’re too busy eating chips and cookies—it’d be a shame to let them go
to waste, right? Eating and drinking and making merry. That’s all we do lately! We play that stupid church-names game all day, and on P-Days we listen to that filth from your friends. Then we come home and we read
this
filth!” Passos picked up the slim volume. “How Jesus was married! Jesus was a polygamist! Jesus and all the rest of us will be polygamists in the afterlife!”

“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.