by Larry Menlove

Elder Bicknell and Elder Vanguard looked down at the hard-pack road.

The old woman’s legs—thin, white, and spider-veined—stuck out from under her pale green housedress, which had scrunched up high around her thighs owing to the throes and contortions she had undergone.

Standing over their bicycles, hands gripping the tape of their handlebars, the young men—these elders—were convinced that her falling into the short scrub-grass in the road was simply part of a casting out against them—a holy roll on the good earth, in the dust, amongst the crawly things there. And they were patiently waiting for the glossolalia to begin.

But the old woman had not uttered a single unknown word throughout all her undulating, tearing at the grass, and dust eating, though she had said the following into the earth: “You; pipe; dirty (or kitty) boy; Mormons; fishers; river; great; terrible; hearts; fathers and mothers; brother Jeb; dunking,” and a muttering that sounded to the elders like, “sprechen sie Deutsch?”

Elder Bicknell—or “Bick” as Elder Vanguard liked to call him—turned his ear down to hear what might come next. Elder Vanguard—or “Van” as Bick liked to call him—did the same. And so both elders leaned over, their ties hanging above their bicycles’ skinny tires, staring at each other in anticipation.

Bick—the older of the two, at age twenty-years, six months, and three days—had seen this kind of thing before. Some of the folks around here didn’t just disbelieve the elder’s teachings, they believed that they were disciples of the Devil himself, and in the throes of their fear, would roll on the ground, howling in incomprehensible language, and ejecting a certain amount of saliva and cursing.

Bick spoke to the old woman. “Ma’am?”

Then, out of politeness, he waited for a reply. Which didn’t come.

“Ma’am, are you feeling OK?”

The old woman laid ramrod-flat, arms at her sides, legs slightly parted, sandal askew on one foot, standing between her two biggest toes, the other sandal off entire.

Bick threw a leg over the seat of his bike and lay it down carefully in the road. The bungee held his quad, tracting pamphlets, and extra Book of Mormons firmly to the rack. He took two steps toward the old lady then stopped and looked at Van. Van remained straddled over his bike: his nametag, cheap cycling helmet, and big white front teeth all crooked.

“Van?”

Van closed his mouth and looked up from the lady’s exposed legs and the bright pink, elastic-banded fringe at the bottom of her underwear.

“Van?”

“Huh?”

Bick raised his eyebrows. “Companions? Do everything together. Yeah? Come on, Elder.”

Van got off his bicycle, set the kickstand, and joined Bick in front of the lady.

Bick dropped to one knee and put a hand on her shoulder. “Ma’am?”

She didn’t move.

Van joined Bick and also placed his hand on her thin shoulder. A slow, airy wheeze came from the old lady’s flat bottom like an exhaled breath.

They stood up and took a step back.

“What the hell?” said Bick.

“Bick?” Van turned to him, “You just swore.”

Bick righted his bike and started back up the little turn-down road. He pushed the bike with one foot on the pedal and then threw his other leg over the seat and began pedaling hard, scriptures and tracting materials swaying back and forth on the rack.

“Bick! Where you going?” shouted Van. “She just passed some gas, Bick.” He lifted his bike and followed his companion. “Bick! She tooted! That’s all!”

When they reached the paved road, Bick stopped on top of the straight yellow line and leaned over the handlebars with his head down. Van pedaled up and stopped beside him.

“Shouldn’t we give her a blessing or something?”

Bick raised his head and looked around. The hard-pack dirt road continued on across the pavement, crisscrossing the main road. Tupelo trees jutted up everywhere. A light, warm breeze ruffled the grass. Back the way they had come along the pavement he could see the bridge over the river. Three dead opossums lay in differing stages of decomposition on the white line of the east direction lane, green bottle-flies squabbling in a high pitch above them. A cloud covered the sun for a moment like a hand passing over the eyes.

Bick sighed. He had nine months to go on his mission before he had to go back to Provo and face his life. Van, on the other hand, had just started: two short months here in Alabama. Bick had heard him cry nearly every night they’d been companioned up. But that wasn’t unusual; he’d cried himself to sleep plenty of times early on—though Bick suspected his reasons were different than Van’s. His girlfriend, Lindsay, had moved to Toronto a month after Bick had left on his mission and given birth to a baby a few months later. Then she’d put it up for adoption. He didn’t even know if it was a boy or girl.

Bick looked up the road and then he turned and looked out the two sides of the hard-pack. “We go back,” he said.

A raven had perched in a kudzu-choked tupelo branch over the old woman, who hadn’t moved. It had a noodle-looking weed in its beak, its head turning side-to-side with a casual air fitting the afternoon.

“Shoo, you bird.” Van waved his arms at the raven. Then he looked at the old lady. “Bick, I think she’s dead.”

“Check her pulse.”

Van got down beside her, dirtying the knees of his navy-blue slacks. He put his fingers against her wrist. He looked up at Bick. “I don’t know how! I can’t feel anything, Bick.” Van rocked back on his heels. “I think she’s dead. You check her.”

Bick stooped down and looked at her. Her face was mashed down in the grass, mouth open, top denture protruding between her lips. “I think you’re right.” He stood up. “Let’s ride in and see if we can find a phone or something. She must live around here.”

“What about a blessing, Bick?” Van reached into his front slacks pocket and produced a tiny golden metal vial on a key chain.

“Van, she’s dead. No blessing’s going to bring her back.”

They left the lady in the road, pedaled around her, and headed down the lane past more tupelo trees and magnolias blooming pink and fragrant—the scent of the river overarching all. Above a slight rise, a roof came into view, and they pedaled toward a small house nestled down in a depression of land. A Buick from the Johnson administration sat in a weed-plagued driveway in front: tires flat, hood propped open with a tin trashcan. A light bulb shone in the afternoon sun over a small porch burdened with a rattling refrigerator on two-by-fours beside the screen door. Empty whiskey bottles stacked on top of one another lined the concrete wall all along the foundation. An electrical wire sagged low to the ground between the house and a bent, kudzu-draped pole.

The elders got off their bikes. Out of habit, Elder Vanguard took his quad-combination and an extra give-away Book of Mormon from the bike rack, and together they walked up the slat-wood path to the front door.

Bick tapped on the screen. In answer, the refrigerator shut off. They heard a television inside the house—a game show host shouting the odds of winning, of changing someone’s life forever.

Bick knocked at the screen again. “Hello! Is there anyone home?” he shouted. “A lady’s fallen up the road here. We need some help. Anyone!”

Elder Bicknell tapped at the screen door again, and then opened it on its screeching spring.

“But, Bick?”

Bick stepped into the house. Van followed, thinking they would now have to knock on at least one—maybe three—more doors today. Never end on an odd number, his father always said. The screen shrieked and slammed behind Van. He yelped and dropped his books to the floor. As he stooped to pick them up, he knocked a cheap, round clock off the wall beside the door. He snatched it up and hung it crooked on its nail.

The kitchen smelled of yeast and something over-sweet, like rotting raisins. A steaming mug of coffee sat on the table next to a half-eaten powdered donut, both surrounded by a nest of old celebrity magazines.

The linoleum floor felt mushy under their feet. It reminded Van of the old floor he had sneaked across in the abandoned house back in Malad City, Idaho. He had seen his big sister, Tami, going in there with her boyfriend, and—being fifteen—desperately wanted to know if they were fornicating. Feeling oddly jealous, he had stood on that mushy floor and peeked through a crack in a backroom door to see his sister and her boyfriend kneeling on the floor, hand in hand, heads bowed. Praying.

The elders entered a hallway where the linoleum gave way to thick yellow carpet, and they walked toward the sound of the television. A commercial described the benefits of a particular insurance plan, reminding Bick of what he was offering: the restored gospel plan, eternal life, the keys to salvation, a forever family—though Bick’s family beginnings were scattered between here, Provo, Toronto, and wherever his son or daughter was now.

“Anyone home?” Bick called.

As he crept behind Bick, Van admired his companion’s will and courage. It was true that sometimes Bick cut corners or didn’t follow protocol: he skipped prayers, made phone calls too often, gazed overlong at attractive women, spent inordinate amounts of time in the shower, and used sullied language. Van himself had sworn once when he was nine. He could never quite recall the context of his foray into the dark languages, but he had used the words damn, hell, and shit all in one sentence at the dinner table. His father sent him to his room with a kick to his backside, and the next evening he had an interview with the bishop. The bishop, patient and kind, sent Van on his way with the admonition to speak only the words his mother used. He had done his best since then, but sometimes worried he might also be using the diction and speaking pace of a middle-aged woman.

Bick and Van stepped together into the doorway where the sound and flicker of the television spilled into the hall.

A young woman about their age stood on a tea-crate in the middle of the room. She was draped in a long, boney-white linen gown that fell straight down over her small breasts and slender hips. Her golden hair was piled on top of her head like pastry, and her arms hung at her side. The afternoon sun backlit her figure through an open window. She stared at them with blue eyes.

Bick and Van stared back.

“Have you come for me?”

Van made a sound that reverberated from the back of his throat like a purr.

“Is it time?”

Bick stirred. “There’s this lady, um, in the road up a ways, she, um . . .”

“Is it grandmother?”

“Yeah. I mean, I guess. She’s fallen and I, maybe she needs help.”

“Grandmother has her spells.”

The young woman jumped off the crate and punched a button on the television. There was silence in the room except for the gentle creak of floorboards under her bare feet as she stepped back onto the crate. She turned and faced the elders again, her arms at her sides.

“They should be along soon.”

Van stepped closer to the crate. He looked at her face, her nose and lips, the line of her neck, the strings tied in a bow over her bosom that held the slight gown together over her shoulders.

Bick said, “Would you like to hear more about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ?”

She cocked her head and looked at Van. “Are you with them? Are they here?” She looked past the elders. “Listen.”

They listened.

A distant melodic din hovered in the birdsong: a humming that oscillated with high pitches that might yet form into words. Maybe a song. Or a hymn.

The young woman’s chest rose, and she lifted her chin and arms toward the cracked, peeling ceiling. Her eyelids dropped and her mouth opened, her teeth sharp and small. She began to sway.

Van’s eye fell to the flesh below the gauzy gown she wore: her knees and calves bare, a fine sprig of hair along her shins. The light behind her cast a revelation through the gown.

The singing outside the house rose in pitch: “Oh saints, come forth from Bethlehem and see our Savior’s home . . .” 

“What is this?” Van said.

Bick looked at him. Van did not turn his gaze from the girl. Bick looked back. She swayed and jerked her hips in odd, sensually stilted gyrations that were impossible for either of them to ignore.

The singing intensified outside the windows, and the young woman jumped off the crate. She swept between the elders, gown grazing both of them, and blindly grabbed Van’s hand. He squealed, dropped his quad-combo, and lurched after her. She led him into the hallway, through the kitchen, out past the refrigerator on the porch, and into the yard.

Bick followed.

In the tupelo-shadowed sunlight, a procession of men, women, and children moved along the dirt lane. There were fifty people or more, and they sang as they walked, everyone holding someone else’s hand. Bick stopped on the porch as Van and the girl fell in rank and blended in with the others. Most of the women and girls wore white dresses, and most were barefoot. The men wore slacks and white shirts, some with ties. Soon the only way for Bick to pick Van out was by his helmet—still on, still crooked—moving and bobbing among the other heads in the slight dust kicked up as they rounded the corner and disappeared into the brush.

Bick moved across the grass to the edge of the dirt lane then stepped into the smooth rut and looked after the crowd. A straggler took his hand up and tugged him along. He looked and saw that it was the old lady they had left for dead. She smiled up at him, her denture plate back in place, road dirt turning to mud on the incisors.

“Let’s go,” she said. “His glory is in the doin’. He brought you here this day, he did.” She winked, turned her head, and pulled Bick along.

Ahead of them, a tiny girl with unruly hair and a gaunt face made up of chin, a long nose, and sharp cheekbones—like a cross in her face—stared at Bick through round, thick glasses over a woman’s shoulder. Her eyes were magnified and bright, all-seeing. She suddenly opened in a wide, gap-toothed smile and pointed a little finger at him. Over the singing, he heard, “Da da.”

“You shouldn’t be dating someone like that,” Bick’s mom had warned, shaking her head as she stirred the cake mix for his eighteenth birthday. But he had anyway—for a year before he left on his mission.

No one in Bick’s circle had known Lindsay was pregnant. Certainly not his mother or father or bishop. They couldn’t know. Some of their letters asked after her. How was she doing at college in Canada? Had she sent him any letters? No. But that was OK. She wasn’t Mormon. She had let him go, and he knew that was the right way for things to be.

But he missed her. And he regretted that he was only partially a father. He sometimes wondered what it might have been like to hold his child. All he knew was that some strangers were holding his baby. Maybe even right now, like he was holding this old woman’s hand as they walked behind the throng of singing.

He’d lost sight of Van’s helmet, but Bick felt confident he would catch up to him soon. The crowd moved along for another few hundred yards and Bick began to smell the cool, musty river water that flowed shallow and slow near the bank, and deeper and slower further in. The bushes had thickened, and the sunlight had been replaced by an almost tactile gloaming. The screech and tick of insects were a metronome for the hymns drifting into the bushes and out over the water.

As they exited the brush, Van saw that the people had gathered in a wide alluvial cut in the course of the river, worn over a millennium. They spread along the bank, queued in the dewy grass where a tall, middle-aged man finished the song alone in a rich baritone:

Oh brothers, oh brothers, let’s go down,

Let’s go down in the river where we will pray.

Our Father, oh our Father, won’t You hear us, hear us pray?

We’ve come to the river, this mighty river.

Take our sins, Father, oh Father, oh Father, take our sins away.

The old lady pulled on Van’s hand.

“Look yonder.” She pointed across the river. “There are fishers among us.”

A bald man with a sunburned scalp stooped in the water on the far shore while the water thrashed violently around him. He seemed engaged in a mighty wrestle with—Van squinted and suddenly drew in a breath—a huge fish. In fact, it seemed to be trying to eat him, having already worked its way up his arm. Either that, or the man’s arm was itself a huge catfish, its tail jerking to and fro.

“He takes the fish with his bare hands, so he does,” the old lady said. “Sometimes they go under the water and swim with them, so they do.”

The bald man scrambled onto the shore with the fish struggling on his arm. Another man took hold of it there and staggered with the fisherman up the bank. Once out of the water, the fish seemed to calm, allowing itself to be carried to whatever destiny awaited it, river water dripping from its tail and sagging fins.

The girl held Van’s hand still as they waited in line. Ahead, folks were walking into the water where it flowed slowly in the little backwash of the river’s turning. The girl looked up at him.

“I like you,” she said. She turned her chin down then looked back at him with her glacier blue eyes. “You remind me of a kindly sloth.”

Van closed his lips over his teeth and blushed.

“Don’t be shy. You have good blood. I can see. We’re here to be saved. Have you been saved?”

Van realized that he didn’t have any of his tracting materials, not even a complimentary Book of Mormon. All he had was his badge clipped to his white shirt.

“I’ve myself been baptized three times, and I’m grateful for each one. I don’t know what I would have become if I hadn’t been washed clean when I was. I suspect my soul would have grown more foul. Have you been baptized?”

Van nodded.

“That’s real good. I was twice by Brother Jeb, but this is my first time with Brother Smith. He’s a good preacher. Brother Jeb, turns out, was a purveyor of perfidy.” She focused on Van’s nametag. “What’s that mean, ‘Elder’? You don’t seem so old.”

Van cleared his throat of the crab apple that had seemed to appear there. “I’m a messenger of our Father in Heaven.” He looked around him as though he’d misplaced something. “Me and my companion, Elder Bicknell . . .”

“You going to get dunked with me today? That’s what grandmother calls it. She been dunked twenty times. Most of anyone I know.”

Van pulled his hand from the girl’s hold. She reached for him, grasping like she was trying to catch a bird.

“I’ve been put under the water twenty time.”

Bick watched the way the old lady’s yellowed fake front teeth trembled behind her thin lips like honeybees.

“Brother Jeb—that had done it most—was a purveyor of perfidy. It’s why we’re all here today. Did you see the way the Spirit run through me on the path there when you and your friend came along?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Twas the spirit of the Lord Jesus, mind you. His tongue I’ve learned from the new preacher, Brother Smith.”

The little girl in front of them had slipped from her mother’s arms and wandered near the high-cut riverbank. She was tossing leaves and rocks into the lazy churn of swirling eddies when she tottered over a bush stump and fell out of sight.

Bick let go of the old lady’s hand and ran to the bank. He could not see the girl, though an effervescent ripple bloomed from the edge of the high-cut where she had fallen. He leapt into the water and sank down through its cool depths. He opened his eyes in the murk and wondered how one could ever see in such gloom—to save a girl or catch a catfish. But then he saw a flash of gray silver and followed it down.

“Oh, brother Jones, having authority from our Lord himself, I do baptize thee in the name of God, his beloved Son, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

Brother Smith’s voice rang out with the timbre of a growling bear. It reached over the water and up the muddy embankment to the newly pure, standing wet and cold, sodden clothes clinging to their flesh. His prayer came to Van’s ears where he floundered in the slosh of sand and silt at the water’s edge.

The girl found his hand again and clutched it against the thin fabric of her gown, steadying, pulling him into the water. Down into the river.