Elders (4 page)

“What if I can’t do it?” he said. “What if I get too homesick. What if … I mean … I could come home, right? If things got really bad? I could come home early and you wouldn’t be ashamed of me, right?”

“Oh sweetie,” his mother said.

His father cleared his throat. “You’re better than that, Seth. 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.”

“I know that, but I mean—”

“We know you’ll do well, Seth. Elder McLeod, I should call you. You’re an elder of the church now.”

Elder McLeod came to in the courtyard as a tall lanky shadow suddenly dissected the rectangle of light on the cement. The shadow disappeared, and the light with it a few seconds later, and for a moment the darkness was total. McLeod heard Passos call out, “Sorry, hold on.” The light came on through the bedroom window and another bright yellow rectangle leapt out into the courtyard, enveloping McLeod like a spotlight.

Elder Passos woke
the next morning to the sounds of sweeping—brisk, purposeful strokes. They seemed to come from the courtyard outside. Who was sweeping at—what time was it? Passos strained at his bedside clock: 6:09. His alarm wouldn’t sound for another twenty minutes. He slew his eyes across the room: an empty bed, and neatly made. The yolk-colored sheets hugged the mattress with military tightness, but that wasn’t surprising in itself. Passos had noted well McLeod’s tidiness, his zeal for symmetry. The two beds sat precisely equidistant from the window, the two stand-alone dressers, like upright coffins, equally spaced from the foot of the two beds. What surprised Elder Passos was the apparent fact of McLeod’s having risen on time, early even, some twenty minutes at least. In the week they had worked together McLeod had gotten out of bed each morning around eight, sometimes later, never uttering a word of explanation or excuse as he scudded across the hallway to the bathroom.

The sounds from outside stopped for a moment. Passos thought he heard metal on cement. A dustpan? He rolled back his head on the pillow with effort, emitting a glottal, bullfrog moan, but through the bedroom window he saw only sky, a gray wash. The sun hadn’t even crested the property wall.

On his way to the bathroom it occurred to Elder Passos to wonder again what had happened last night. He hadn’t actually asked his companion. He hadn’t dared to. McLeod had come in from
his little party looking not refreshed but funereal, his eyes raw-rimmed, heavy, his mouth drawn. At his bedside he’d knelt for ten minutes at least, offering by far the longest prayer Passos had seen from him, and the first personal prayer. Then he’d climbed into bed and faced the wall.

Passos heard the sweeping again as he came out of the bathroom. He crossed into the entryway, his bare feet slapping the green linoleum as he went. Through the open front door he could see McLeod, sure enough, working a broom over the remnants of last night’s fire, head down, already in his proselytizing clothes. McLeod finally looked up at the sound of Passos’s laughter.

“Oh, hey,” McLeod said. “What?”

“You tell me,” Passos said.

They ate breakfast together at seven o’clock, held personal study from seven thirty to eight thirty, companionship study from eight thirty to nine thirty. All of it straight out of the Missionary Handbook. You would have thought God Himself had dropped in to observe. At moments Passos wanted to laugh again, but he resisted. He decided not to ask anything about anything. Whatever this was felt newborn, fragile.

As soon as the elders left the apartment, the day began to waste away in door contacting—little there because of the championships, but what else could they do? And McLeod didn’t complain. At one point he did suggest they drop in and meet Maurilho, their Advocate with the Locals, as McLeod called him, and a good friend. Maurilho’s blue stucco house sat just off the main street, fairly close to the elders’ apartment, and very close, uncomfortably
close, to the neighborhood brothel, its darkened neon sign—
DRIVE-THRU
—like an unlit fuse. To even pass the drive-through’s outer walls, even in the middle of the day, set Elder Passos on edge, conjuring up images that reminded him in turn of the images he had hidden in the back of his desk drawer. He resolved to get rid of the magazine once and for all, and very soon.

Inside Maurilho’s house Passos met the big man himself: completely bald, a smiler, with a belly that slung down from his sternum like a giant kangaroo pouch. He met Rose, too, Maurilho’s wife, a tall and elegant woman, her skin stretched drumhead taut across high cheekbones, her hair tipping just this side of gray. Passos figured Maurilho must have drawn on a store of considerable wit and charm to marry her. He liked them both instantly. And their son, Rômulo, a fourteen-year-old with a buzz cut, a Ronaldo jersey, and a precocious air that reminded Passos of his little brother.

The elders sat opposite the little family on wooden chairs. Where are you from? How long have you been on the mission? How did you find the church? The usual questions. After Passos had answered each of them in brief—he gave his most basic conversion story, not even mentioning his mother’s death—he followed Maurilho’s eyes to his companion beside him. McLeod sat silent, smiling.

“What are you grinning at, whitey?” Maurilho said. He ran his palm over the high smooth dome of his head. “We look practically alike by now, don’t we?”

Rose caught Passos’s eye, said softly, “He’s just teasing him. They’re grand comics, these two.”

“Ah,” Passos said.

Elder McLeod mimicked Maurilho, smoothing his hand over his own head, the hair close-cropped and bleached almost invisibly blond by the sun.
Brancão
indeed. It occurred to Passos that McLeod was the palest companion he had had so far, by a wide margin.

“There are worse people to look like, right?” McLeod answered Maurilho. “How’s your team, by the way? You still thinking of painting a flag on your head?”

“Later on, maybe. It’s still early stages. Brazil beat Paraguay, four to one, in the first round. A little stroll on the pitch. It’ll get harder, though.”

“I assume it’s just South America, right? The U.S. isn’t playing?”

“No, they’re not invited. You guys are too busy stockpiling for war.”

“Maurilho,” Rose said, a note of warning in her voice.

“What she said,” McLeod said, and he smiled.

Maurilho smiled too, after a moment, and the conversation turned to other subjects. When these ran out, Rose got up and motioned for Rômulo to follow her into the kitchen, where they prepared drinks and snack plates for the rest of them. They all ate and drank in an alcove just off the kitchen. McLeod sat beside Maurilho and asked at one point how the job search was going. The big man dropped his head. McLeod chucked him, lightly, on the shoulder. They all clearly liked McLeod, and he them, but Passos felt a hanging back in himself at this intimate rapport, almost too intimate. Or was it? After the events of the last twenty-four hours Passos had reason to doubt his first impressions. Hadn’t the Lord Himself established rapports? Hadn’t He suffered even
little children to come to Him? He might have dandled them on his knee, done magic tricks for them. Elder Passos knew he could sometimes confuse mere soberness with righteousness, and he wanted to check that in himself—that and so much else. He decided to keep an open mind about McLeod’s—what to call it even? His openness? His familiarity? It was clear to him, in any case, that Maurilho and his family reciprocated McLeod’s warm feelings, and that they’d missed the memos circulating through the mission about McLeod’s mulishness and arrogance and sloth.

The evening drew down over Carinha in slow degrees, the light fading, dimming away the edges of the city, yet priming the color of laundry on the clotheslines, the whites ghostly blue in the almost dark. Rooftop satellites and antennae pricked the skyline like the bristled fur of a giant, sleeping animal. This was Elder Passos’s favorite time of day. The air got cool and dry, the tick and whir of unthreatening insects came up, replacing for the most part the whine of motors, and also, and best of all, the people came to their doors. More often than usual anyway. They answered in the unwind after work, or with the looseness of alcohol, or out of sheer recreational curiosity. The missionaries never
reaped
, of course. The harvests of truly interested investigators in this, the most Catholic state in one of the most Catholic countries in the world, were always modest. But missionary work, at bottom, did not concern itself with quantity, or with anything finite. The three people Passos had baptized had changed their lives and hearts forever, as he himself had done four years earlier, and they, like he, had
mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, some of them born, many more unborn, an infinite, waiting posterity like the sands of the sea or the stars of the sky, as the Lord had explained to Father Abraham. Passos tried to maintain an Abrahamic perspective on the hottest, barest days. He sought to persuade not all the stars in this sky but one star in a million, a golden elect, who in turn would beget numberless other stars, other
skies
, worlds without end.

Amen, Passos thought as their hour of after-dark tracting proved as fruitless as it had during the day. Amen and amen. Passos figured the flush of no-shows owed something to the championships as well. He remembered Josefina’s words—
Better do it after six, they’re day games
—and he smiled. Passos pictured the whole of Brazil sitting in front of a vast tentacular television, its million component screens reaching into a million different living rooms, uniting them by the same enthusiasm, the same broadcasts: the pregame shows, then the games themselves, then the postgame shows. A communal experience. He almost regretted to have to interrupt it, or have to
try
to interrupt it.

The elders approached Josefina’s door, with some trepidation, at a few minutes before seven. Where did the trepidation come from? Was it fear that a promising thing might come to nothing? That a solid contact might be lost? Or was it the prospect of having to knock more doors if the appointment with Josefina fell through? Elder McLeod knocked the door—“Here goes,” he said—before Passos could decide.

Josefina answered quickly, as if she’d been waiting. She opened the outer door with a smile. “Hello, what-do-I-call-yous.”

“I’m sorry?” Passos said.

“Your first names,” she said. “I didn’t get your first names yesterday.”

“Oh, well, we usually go by our titles. I’m Elder Passos.” He nodded at his companion, who wore a strange, plastic smile. “And this is Elder McLeod.”

McLeod took a breath. “You can just call us ‘Elders’ if you want. Like, ‘Hello, Elders.’ ” He laughed a bit. “Or whatever you prefer.”

Josefina smiled at the suggestion. She made a game-show sweep of her hand, said, “Please come in, Elders. It’s not much, but …” She trailed off as they came into the dirt-packed yard. Josefina led them into the front room of her house, where a thin wiry man in a cutoff T-shirt and shorts sat in the changing light of a TV set. Josefina introduced Leandro and turned off the set. Leandro’s mouth tightened, then slowly relaxed.