For behold the field is white already to harvest;
and lo, he that thrusteth in his sickle with his might,
the same layeth up in store that he perisheth not,
but bringeth salvation to his soul…
—Doctrine and Covenants 4:4
Four missionaries sat in the dim chapel of a Mormon church in Ravenna, Italy. The longest in the mission, Elder Dupree, knowing that the matter had to be decided quickly, glared across a plastic folding table at Elder Young’s muscled arms. Their companions, Wills and Smoot, both no more than six weeks in Italy, sat in maroon plastic chairs on a raised stage at the front of the chapel. Their white shirts, still creased down the starched sleeves, glowed like fresh snow under the chapel’s fluorescent lights. DuPree and Smoot’s African investigator, Yaya Koffi, sat at the head of the table, a wall of brilliant white teeth gleaming through his smiling lips. Yaya, an honest-to-God refugee from a rural village in the Republic of the Congo, who’d crossed tangled jungle and scorched desert and braved a treacherous sea voyage with greedy, homicidal smugglers to reach Italy, was the matter that had to be decided: Who would baptize Yaya?
“He’s ours,” DuPree said, jabbing at the tabletop with his index finger. “We baptize him.”
“But Wills and I taught him, too,” Young said, his voice calm and unhurried. He slid his left thumbnail between the blades of a nail clipper and squeezed the lever. The hollow pop of the severing nail echoed through the chapel.
A drop of sweat dribbled down DuPree’s neck. His voice vibrated out of his throat. “Bullshit,” DuPree said. “You and Wills—”
Young lifted his hand, the open palm facing DuPree. He squinted at the smooth edge of his trimmed thumbnail. “Keep it Old Testament, DuPree,” Young said.
DuPree dragged the back of his hand across his damp forehead. At Laramie High School, he’d wrestled varsity and done a little amateur tie-down roping at the Laramie Jubilee Days Rodeo, and even though Young had gone to state as a tight end for Bountiful High School and had him by at least forty pounds, DuPree was sure he could vault the table, yank Young’s right arm between his legs, and squeeze his nuts until he squealed like a pig. “Fine,” DuPree said. “Bull crap. You guys taught him a couple lessons—just so Smoot and I could baptize him before I go home next week.”
“And you should have passed him along to us,” Young said. “He lives in Bologna, would go to church in Bologna. Bologna’s our city. He just works in Ravenna.”
DuPree turned to Yaya. He spoke slowly. “Yaya, chi ti batezzará? Who do you want to baptize you?”
“Baptized is bien,” Yaya said, bowing his head.
“Yes, yes, baptism good,” DuPree said, patting Yaya’s slim left shoulder. “But who”—he thumped his chest with a fist and then pointed across the table to Young—“who do you want baptize you? Baptize.”
Yaya’s smile swelled. His eyes brimmed with tears. He brought his hand to his heart, then gazed up at the chapel ceiling. “Yes. Battesimo true. God est bon. God give prospérité.”
The muscles in DuPree’s neck seemed to deflate, his chin drooping until it touched the hard knot of his tie. This is how it’d been for the last month as he and Smoot taught Yaya in a city park across the street from the supermarket where Yaya unloaded trucks at night, all paid under the table. A little Italian, some English and French, and depths of pantomime that DuPree didn’t know he had in him. The missionary discussions progressed so slowly that DuPree had feared he’d be back in Wyoming before Yaya was baptized—and that’s why he’d asked Young and Wills to teach Yaya a couple of discussions when he was back in Bologna on his days off. And here was Young, former assistant to President Payne and now a zone leader, come all the way to Ravenna to tell DuPree that he couldn’t baptize Yaya.
DuPree shifted his sweaty butt in the molded plastic chair. He could hear Wills, Young’s companion, across the chapel practicing lines from a missionary discussion in a low, gruff voice: Dobbiamo anche amare il nostro prossimo. Wills was cut from the same cloth as Young, the same tall, muscled body tempered through years of varsity football and basketball, the same square jaw and cocky smile smeared across his face. DuPree knew why President Payne had put them together, knew that soon enough Wills would be Assistant to the President. Then DuPree looked over at Smoot, his short, stick-thin companion from Vernal, Utah, asleep and slobbering all over his blue polyester tie, his thick glasses sunk to the tip of his pimpled nose.
Still, DuPree envied Smoot and Wills, both new enough in the mission to believe in the greatness of the harvest, all those baptisms they’d rack up with enough faith, sacrifice, and hard work—just as DuPree had once believed. But here he was, one week from home, the white baptismal pants he’d brought into the mission and carried faithfully from city to city still on the high shelf in his bedroom closet, still sealed in sterile plastic. DuPree wanted to baptize someone, anyone. He wanted that picture of himself and his investigator dressed in white, toothy grins in front of a full baptismal font, just like all the pictures his older brother, Rick, sent home from his mission in São Paulo. DuPree wanted a story, something inspiring to tell from the pulpit for his homecoming talk.
DuPree swallowed hard at a bristly lump in his throat. He glanced at Yaya and then back to Young. He spoke in a whisper. “Come on, let me have this one, Young. In a week I’m home. Two years and not one baptism. Nothing.” DuPree looked down at his clasped hands on the table, as if he were praying.
The muscles in Young’s jaw pulsed. He looked over at Wills and Smoot, and then back to DuPree. “And you think I’ve baptized anyone?” he said, so low that DuPree had to lean in to hear. Something had changed on Young’s face, his crooked smile deflated, his chin sunk until he stared down at the white tabletop.
“That family you baptized in your first city,” DuPree said. “The whole mission talked about it, how golden they were, how the father would be a branch president.”
“I didn’t baptize them,” Young said. “My companion did. All of them. Frickin’ Sanders. He said not to worry about it, that I’d get my chance. One month in the mission—what did I know? He made it sound like we’d baptize a family every month.” Young flicked a thin crescent of fingernail from the tabletop. “And that family. They lasted about a month, and then back to the Catholic Church. Last time I saw the father, right before I transferred, he thanked me, tears in his eyes, for restoring his Catholic faith. That’s what he said. I can’t go home and tell people that. But this guy.” Young jerked his head in Yaya’s direction. “What a story.”
“But you still have four months in the mission,” DuPree said. “You have time. I’m done. Next week I’m on a plane.”
Young tilted his head back until he peered down the thin ridge of his nose at DuPree. Something stony returned to his face. “Rules are rules. If Yaya lives in Bologna, he goes to church in Bologna. That means we baptize him.” Young’s thick shoulders lifted and fell—and then his stupid, lopsided smile bloomed until it was like a sticker pressed to his face. “President Payne would agree.”
DuPree’s hands compressed into tight fists, the tendons creaked. There was a taste in his parched mouth, something like pulverized, wind-blown manure—because DuPree understood that Young, with his pedigreed last name and President Payne’s ear just a phone call away, would get exactly what he wanted, just as he always had.
DuPree, hardly aware, grabbed Yaya’s bony wrist, an unexpected thought firing through his brain. “You sure about that, Young?” DuPree felt his knotted shoulder blades release. “You sure President Payne, with all those good-ol’-boy sheep ranchin’ stories from growin’ up in Southern Utah”—DuPree laid on a thick country twang—“wouldn’t take pity on a poor Wyoming cowpoke, wouldn’t bend the rules a little? Maybe I’ll just call and ask him.”
The stony look on Young’s face collapsed. His eyes slimmed and his full lips pressed together and shrunk at the corners. As if set on a spring, Young’s hand launched from under the table, his thick fingers coiling around Yaya’s other wrist.
Yaya bowed his head and closed his eyes, thinking they were about to pray.
“He’s mine,” DuPree said.
“Like fuck he is,” Young said.
DuPree examined the circuit of veins and sharp delineation of muscle in Young’s arm and followed the arm to the shoulder and then to Young’s face, the smooth skin of his neck darkened into a rose red, his upper lip curled, and his forehead a smashed pallet of wavy ridges. DuPree’s fingers compressed around Yaya’s wrist.
And then DuPree and Young were on their feet, the plastic chairs shooting out from under them and toppling over, both pulling at Yaya’s wrists with such force that Yaya lifted from his chair, his white Adidas momentarily leaving the chapel’s tile floor. His brown eyes bulged with terror. “Elders,” he squealed. “Elders, mes bras!” But DuPree only understood the greedy suck and release of Young’s breathing, and the rapid thud of his own heart in his ears.
DuPree could only see Young’s rosy face like an overinflated balloon against a background of fuzzy, pulsing darkness, could only feel the feral tug Young exerted on Yaya’s thin wrist and his own furious pull. Then something detached into DuPree’s hand and dropped to the floor. Something felt slippery. Then DuPree and Young had Yaya by the scrawny forearms and then by his knobby elbows, and somewhere in the distant, vibrating darkness DuPree perceived a shrill animal scream.
Young’s companion, Wills, floated into the dark space next to Young, his eyes like golf balls bursting from the sockets as he clawed at Young’s hands. And then Smoot was at DuPree’s side, shaking his shoulder, Smoot’s words, meaningless and distant, ricocheting through the darkness. “St—elder—op!” Smoot screeched. “Him. Stop! Kill. You’ll. Stop!”
DuPree gripped Yaya’s shoulder, his nails digging in against Young’s powerful pull, and still the hiss of Smoot’s voice in his ear and Smoot’s puny hands gripping his elbow. DuPree widened his legs to get more leverage, but the ground had become slippery, his worn Wingtips sliding beneath him.
“Mine! Mine! Mine!” DuPree began to chant, desperately needing Smoot to understand that Yaya was theirs, that this might be their only chance to baptize anyone. Young took up the chant, too, pulling even more ferociously at Yaya. And with the chant echoing off the chapel’s plaster walls—“Mine! Mine! Mine!”—DuPree saw a change on Wills’s and Smoot’s faces, a sudden awareness and then rage.
Then both Wills and Smoot, each gripping an ankle, tugged Yaya’s legs into a deep split. DuPree reached his arm around Yaya’s neck, the other grabbing at Yaya’s side, the clothes tearing away, the skin warm and wet under DuPree’s fingers. Young’s face was now so close that DuPree felt Young’s heated, minty breath on his cheek.
“Maman,” Yaya whispered. “Maman.” And then he said no more.
And that feeble voice, as if traveling over a vast distance, came to DuPree, scattering the fuzzy darkness at the edge of his vision. He stopped pulling at Yaya.
Young stopped.
Wills and Smoot stopped.
A ringing hush filled the chapel as they stared at each other. Blood coated their hands and faces, splotched their white shirts, dripped from the ceiling’s fluorescent lights like heavy raindrops, speckled the white plaster walls like a demented painter’s art. DuPree, his arm still locked around Yaya’s neck, gaped at the still face, sleek with sweat and blood, at the wide-eyed, slack-mouthed mask, at the frayed shreds of clothing draping Yaya’s body, at the yawning, crimson pit below Yaya’s stomach and the pink, ribbed ropes of intestines spilling out. Yaya’s right arm, detached from the body and torn into two ragged pieces, lay at Young’s feet. Wills, cross-legged on the ground and teethed bared, hugged Yaya’s severed right leg, and Smoot still clung to Yaya’s left ankle, breathing hard and blinking through the smear of blood on his drooping glasses. Beyond the chapel walls, the gravely roar of a garbage truck, hydraulics whining, momentarily materialized and then dissolved into silence.
DuPree’s body shook, a glacial shiver migrating from his shoulders and down to his knees. He opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue had a leaden weight to it. His gaze fell to the plastic table, to Yaya’s left thumb that lay in a widening puddle of blood. Still holding to Yaya, DuPree, experiencing a momentary burst of hope, lifted the warm thumb and attempted to reattach it to Yaya’s fingerless hand—yet the finger fell back onto the table with a fleshy thump.
Something swelled in DuPree’s throat. He wanted to weep. “God, what have we done?” he rasped, staring at Young, at his untucked shirt and at the swatch of blood-coated hair that rose above his forehead like a cresting wave. Air whistled through Young’s flared nostrils.
Young didn’t speak, just lowered himself onto one knee like he was about to tie his shoe, his eyes bouncing between DuPree and the chapel’s gory tile floor. He grabbed the detached upper half of Yaya’s arm, then the lower half, cradling both before reaching to pluck Yaya’s scattered fingers from the floor and stuff them in his right front pocket. Something churned in Young’s throat, a meaty growl, and then he snarled, “Mine!” right before his teeth clamped onto Yaya’s upper right arm.
DuPree’s molars ground together. Young wouldn’t take Yaya from him! And then DuPree’s front teeth sank into Yaya’s left shoulder, tearing at the skin and muscle, a tendon catching between his teeth like a strand of dental floss. He swallowed hard, again and again, his eyes filling with tears as the four of them chanted between frenzied mouthfuls of Yaya, “Mine! Mine! Mine!”
—
That next week, the local newspaper briefly noted a sanitation worker’s grisly discovery in the city landfill: the mangled leg, still shod in a white Adidas shoe, of a sub-Saharan male, age 18 to 25. The forensic division of Ravenna’s Carabinieri closed the case with little investigation. A homeless migrant passing through, they concluded, a scavenger, probably intoxicated, buried and suffocated under a shifting heap of trash, and then the work of a few stray dogs. The old Italian pensioners pacing Piazza del Popolo had their own opinions before moving on to bicker about Italy’s dismal chances in next year’s World Cup. Good riddance, they agreed, another stupid straniero gone, one less drain on the system.
Yet nearly three thousand miles away—far beyond the terra cotta roofs and terraced vineyards of the Italian countryside, beyond the Mediterranean, beyond the vast, burning Sahara and the arid savanna dotted with Acacias, to a small Congolese village on the edge of a lowland forest of palms and towering African teak—a woman boiled sweet potatoes over an open fire, a braided lock of gray hair peeking out from under her green headscarf. “My son?” she said to an older woman in a blue liputa who’d stopped to visit before returning to her village. “Yes, probably still in Italy or maybe France by now. He never was one to write much. And his last letter, almost three months ago, barely a page, and most of it just a silly story two white boys told him about an angel and a man with a gold book. My son, with his head full of clouds, a lamb who’d step into a pit of vipers to make one his friend. God keep him safe—and God forgive me. You know what I did, sister? I wrote him right back, told him to steal that gold book if he ever gets the chance, sell it, and live like a king. And why not? Those people up there have taken enough from us. And then with all that money, maybe he’ll finally send for me. And when he does, I’ll scold him once for not writing home more often and then forgive him. And then I’ll make him fried plantains and poulet à la moambé with plenty of red pepper, just as he likes it, and we’ll sit and eat, and he’ll tell me everything about his journey.”
