Elders (30 page)

Elder McLeod understood but he didn’t care. He didn’t have to now. He and Passos rode the bus back to Carinha in the same silence, stark and heavy and imperious. At a few moments that night, granted, and during the next several days, McLeod thought he might have sensed the silence softening, lifting. At a few moments he felt his companion’s eyes on him, though he couldn’t be sure if they implored him or bored into him. Perhaps Passos wanted to regain McLeod’s goodwill in regards to his parents’ basement. Perhaps he wanted to make his peace before transfers, play conciliator on the eve of his ascension to the assistantship, which he’d all but clinched with his ass-kissing performance at the zone conference. Or maybe he just wanted McLeod to look at him as he broke into one last smirk. In any case, McLeod never returned the gaze.

On the following Tuesday night, Transfers Eve, McLeod trailed his senior companion to the pay phone nearest their apartment. It had been nearly three weeks of silence and by now the elders had perfected their system for communicating
at
each other on matters of logistical import. McLeod had first used the system on
the Monday after their silence began, calling to inform Rose (and, more to the point, Maurilho) that they wouldn’t be coming to their house for lunch. “Something’s come up,” McLeod said in a loud, flat voice. Rose had merely asked, “Are you sure?” The week after that she merely sighed, and so on.

Elder Passos used the system less frequently, since as the senior companion he already exercised the prerogative to call the shots more or less as he pleased. But now, as McLeod stood beside him at the pay phone, it became clear from Passos’s voice that he intended McLeod to hear every word of his conversation. Passos spoke at full volume into the receiver: “Elder Tierney, is that you? … Fine, fine. I’m ready when you are … Yes, of course. At your convenience. Thank you.” He hung up the phone and waited.

Elder McLeod had only witnessed this particular process once before: on the eve of the last transfers, standing not far from where he stood now, overhearing Passos’s conversation with the assistants. Prior to that, he had always been on the blind end of the zone leaders’ calls, the information hot in their hands, the thrill of a power trip in their voices. You’re going here, or there—get packing. You’re getting a new companion—make sure the place is ready for company. And sometimes—nothing. No change at all. The next day a P-Day like any other. The sense of anticlimax, the leadenness, as if syrup ran in the veins. But was that really worse, McLeod thought, than the feeling of being jerked around like a pawn on God’s chessboard? Transferred missionaries barely had enough time to pack their things and get a few hours’ rest before they were due the next morning at the local
rodoviária
. No goodbyes to the people they’d befriended or taught, those fireworks already fading in the dark. No sense of a proper resolve at the end
of three months, six months, more—no period to end on, only a dash. The irreducible strangeness of the mission.

And strange, too, that in McLeod’s present circumstance, where he felt sure that one or both of them would be transferred, he
could
have made the time to say goodbye to friends and investigators, except that he had none to say goodbye to anymore. No more Josefina. No more Maurilho. Rose and Rômulo: collateral losses. And no more Passos, of course. What shoots of friendship had grown up between them had long since withered and returned to the ground. The thought of Dr. Seuss, or his nickname, or any of the things they’d joked about, laughed about, practiced English on—it all made Elder McLeod cringe. The very sight of Elder Passos, the peripheral
blur
of him, raised McLeod’s hackles in a way he could no longer control; it had hardened into reflex. Such that now, as McLeod waited along with his companion for Elder Tierney’s return call, he actually stood a few feet
behind
the pay phone’s blue plastic shell. All he saw of Passos were his legs.

Up above, McLeod could see the last holdouts of evening giving way before the first muted stars of the night. The top of the sky looked cobalt, the sides blue, the bottom gray. Not enough day remained to power the tunnel of refracted light along the tops of property walls; the jagged teeth rose instead in darkened silhouette. The phone rang out in the silence. Once. Then again. On the third ring Passos picked up and said, “Hello? … Yes, fine. I know how busy you must be.” His voice sounded falsely companionable, falsely cool. “So, yes, go right ahead. Pen at the ready … Yes, okay … Yes … Got it … To Pampulha, got it, yes …” Then he said, “Kimball gets a new companion? Okay. So he stays, then. Got it. Keep going.”

Elder McLeod noted what he took to be a gesture on his behalf—repeating aloud the news about a friend—but then, not thirty seconds later, Passos said in a buoyant voice, “So Sweeney’s going to Sete Lagoas, you say? He’s getting transferred way down there? Okay, got it, got it … And what about De Freira? … He stays? Okay. And Álvarez? … He stays too. Got it … And you didn’t mention Elder McLeod. Does that mean he stays? … McLeod stays in Carinha, got it. And so do I. One more transfer, then. Okay. Good night to you—”

McLeod rushed around to the front of the pay phone just as Passos ended the call. He pushed his companion aside, grabbed the receiver. “Hello? Hello?” He pulled a contact card from his breast pocket and dialed the mission office’s number on the back. Elder Tierney answered the office phone. “Yes, Elder Passos? Is there something else you needed?”

“This is McLeod. Did you say I’m
not
being transferred? I’m staying with Passos? Did I just hear that right?”

“Elder McLeod?” The voice on the line paused. “Elder, we have a longstanding system set up for relaying—”

“I want to talk to President Mason. Put me through to him right now.”

“Elder McLeod, do you have any idea how busy we are tonight?”

“Put me through to President Mason.”

“It’s out of the question, Elder. We have a system in place.”

The line clicked dead. McLeod choked the receiver, bowing his head in a surge of rage, feeling dizzy with it. After a moment he lowered the phone back to its cradle, a conscious, forced-gentle gesture. Then he stepped away from the pay phone and noticed his
companion at his left. Passos opened his palms to him, his mouth, but Elder McLeod warned them shut with one hateful look.

He sat in the blue chair in the entryway/living room, considering the sight of his shoes before him. Elder Passos was undressing in the bedroom, though McLeod didn’t hear him, didn’t even notice the light. McLeod felt furious and calm at once, numb and adrenal, resigned and scared. His body pulsed, yet strangely relaxed away from him, at the very thought of what he might do. If I take my shoes into the bedroom, he thought, that commits me. Then I’ll have decided to do it. Elder McLeod didn’t think about the money, or what he might wear. He didn’t think about the consequences, immediate or otherwise. For now he thought only of the shoes. They sat deflated and sad, side by side, several inches in front of him. He could simply slide them under the seat, as Passos had done, and as he normally did at the end of a day. He could treat tonight like any other. Dear God, if you exist at all, dear God, if you
are
in fact … He supposed this wasn’t what President Mason had in mind. He wasn’t kneeling. He wasn’t even closing his eyes.

McLeod tried again. He pushed his shoes aside—not under the chair but beside it—and he kneeled to pray, resting his elbows on the blue concave seat. The floor felt hard underneath him, unforgiving. His knees began to throb after only a minute or two—he had barely cleared the preliminaries of the prayer, the
I thank Thees
—and he wondered how he’d ever managed the long pleadings he offered almost nightly at the beginning of his mission.
Please God. Now. Make yourself known to me
, he used to pray.
I’m keeping up my side of the bargain. Keep yours
. One night in the MTC
Elder McLeod spent a full hour in prayer, mostly listening, mostly waiting, and at the end of it a repeated phrase, like a water drop gathering weight, released into his mind:
It’s enough, it’s enough, it’s enough …
But now it wasn’t. He prayed with a sterner, gamier heart. He offered less a plea than an ultimatum, a sort of threat: God, if you really exist, if you are at all, then you will stop me, you will protect my virtue … McLeod listened and waited, waited and listened.

He opened his eyes and saw the shoes. Why did their positioning matter anyway? It was because of the windows. The entryway/living room window was chest high and gave out onto the hard concrete, the
loud
concrete, of the outer courtyard. The bedroom window, waist high, by contrast, gave onto a strip of soft loamy earth to the
side
of the courtyard. Where McLeod put on his shoes mattered less—or it mattered, but only because he had already decided to leave from the bedroom window. Tonight.
Tonight
, McLeod decided.

Elder Passos lay
in bed with his English Bible open on the mattress in front of him. He read the book often lately for English practice and inspiration, though mostly for English practice. First Corinthians 14 sat under his gaze now, but it went unread as the events of the night drew his mind away into roiled reflection. Of course he hadn’t expected McLeod to take the news
well
. He hadn’t expected an instant change. But Elder Passos had expected at least something—some recognition, some acknowledgment of his vulnerability, or of the fact, at the very least, that this hadn’t been his fault any more than McLeod’s. Passos had probably wanted this even
less
than McLeod. But now here they were—another six weeks—and since there was nothing at all to be done about it, they might as well adapt to it with a measure of grace.

After the call with the assistants, Elder Passos had contacted all the senior companions in his zone, passing along the transfer news as McLeod paced back and forth behind the phone, adapting to his own transfer news with all the grace of a mental patient, kicking at the dirt, hurling rocks against property walls, erupting from his low steady mumble into guttural shouts.

“What was that noise?” Elder Sweeney had asked.

“My companion is upset,” Passos said.

“Is he still your companion?”

“Yes.”

Sweeney sighed. He laughed and sighed at the same time. He muttered in English, “Poor bastard.”

“I can understand you,” Passos said.

“Yeah, well, go easy on him, Passos. He’s having a pretty hard time of it.”

“And what about me? I’m not? Huh? He should go easy on
me
, Elder Sweeney! Elder Sweeney?”

But the line had gone dead.

In the bedroom now, Elder Passos readjusted the pillow propped up under his chest. He trained his eyes back on the verses in 1 Corinthians, and after a time his attention followed. The passage continued on the subject of love, or “charity,” as the King James Version had it. Passos turned a page with great care, wary of tearing it. Most of the pages were already brittle, some of the edges serrated like paper knives, though less from use, he gathered, than from brittling serrating time. Elder Passos had found the Bible a year or so earlier in the closet of his second missionary apartment, the book abandoned, apparently, by an outgoing elder. The missionary must have received it or inherited it many years earlier—a faded ink inscription on the front cover read
To our son: Herein you shall find the words of Life
—and he must have read it only once in a great while. Passos could find very few fingerprints on the pages, oils, smudges, grease stains; he could find no marginalia of any kind anywhere; and he found only a few colored pencil underlinings of the most obvious verses: Genesis 1:27, Amos 3:7, John 3:16 … In 1 Corinthians 13 someone had underlined Paul’s famous words about the need to put away childish things. Elder Passos tried to recall the exact language in English, though his effort lacked conviction. He turned back two pages and reread the
verse in question:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things
.

He thought of McLeod. How could he not? Passos, after all, had started reading the King James Bible in earnest after McLeod had taken back his cartoon book
Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
Passos didn’t miss the book at all: it had never really challenged him, and what little affection he’d had for the story, he had since put away and felt much better for it. He thought of McLeod, too, because of the chapter the verse came from. He happened to know that 1 Corinthians 13 was his companion’s favorite section in the Bible. McLeod had volunteered this information early on in their companionship in the casual, almost forgetful way that Passos hadn’t yet come to recognize as vain: “Oh, First Corinthians thirteen? Love it. Probably my favorite chapter in all scripture. Just beautiful, beautiful language. Memorized most of it I like it so much. That’s one place where nobody does it better than the King James.”

In retrospect it seemed inevitable to Elder Passos that McLeod should say that, and just that way. Of course he loved 1 Corinthians! All the tentative believers did, the worldly wise! To their minds Paul said nothing about obedience or devotion or actual literal belief except to say, Hey, don’t worry about that—just love, man. In general Passos knew to be wary of such feel-gooders, apostates defining love as lawlessness. Why hadn’t he been more wary of McLeod? Why hadn’t he seen through him all along? To think that all of McLeod’s flaws—his shallow-roots faith, his arrogance, his false superiority—all of them hid out in the open in that statement. McLeod loved 1 Corinthians 13, he and every other so-called Christian. And why did he love it? The beautiful language.
The undemanding surface of things. And why was the language so beautiful? Why was it, in fact, the very best? Because a group of aristocratic proto-Americans had written it. Because some English king hundreds of years ago had rammed it down the throats of half the world, made an imperialist weapon out of it. Because it trucked in obscurity, difficulty, in so-called tradition, in “hath” instead of “have,” “doeth” instead of “does,” “giveth” instead of “give,” and even “charity” instead of “love.”