Winnipeg continued IV

Wait!, if you haven't read the beginning, you should

Winnipeg, the City
part1:
part2:
part3:


We stopped in front of his house. The walks had been cleared of snow, leaving a thick milky sunken path up to his door. We knocked, and waited, watching our breath leave us and vanish into the blackening blue of the evening. A woman opened the door. She stood holding the knob and smiled at us. She opened the outer door and motioned us to come in. From inside we heard loud conversation, laughing and dishes clanking. I thought we’d come to the wrong house, but the look on the woman’s face was welcoming though tired. She was short, I could see over her head as she led us down the narrow hall with the pictures and wood-burned poetry. I could see into the living room, the sagging couch along the opposite wall. The room was full of people milling and talking and eating. The small woman invited us to sit, and asked what she could get for us from the kitchen. Ham? Potatoes, were we allergic to anything?
“No, it all sounds great.”
It was warm, and I tugged my gloves off and began unzipping my coat. Jones unloosed his bag. He pulled the hat off his head, leaving his hair staticy. He looked at me and shrugged. People looked at us out of the corner of their eyes, but nobody spoke to us. Where was Randy? For the first time I saw the room with the lights on. It had an orange warmth inside. Much of the tobacco smell had been masked by scented candles which bounced their light along the yellow papered walls. The magazines had been removed from the coffee table. It had been dusted, and the floors cleaned. The couch shrugged off its shabbiness for a homely feel. The tobacco and cigarette papers were gone.
The woman returned with plates of food for us. She set them down and then sat next to me on the couch.
“There, it’s sort of last minute, but it’s cold out tonight and you both look like you won’t mind if it’s a Safeway ham and instant potatoes.”
“It looks great.” I said. Where was Randy? “Randy didn’t tell us you were having a Super Bowl party,” I said as I scooted forward onto the edge of the couch, and stabbed a tiny bit of potato onto my fork’s tips.
“Well, he didn’t know. Actually, this is all sort of a last minute deal. He told me you were coming over. That he invited you for dinner, and I don’t know where he has hidden your phone number, honestly I can’t find anything out from him anymore. Then thinking of you two walking down here, all the way down here from you apartment and finding an empty house and a long walk home…”
She shook her head and closed her eyes, breathing out of her nose.
“Anyway, let me get you some drinks.”
She stood and walked quickly away, back into the kitchen. I looked at Jones. He looked at me and stuffed a thick pink triangle of ham into his mouth.
“I guess we eat.” He said. And watch the game, I thought. Television is on the list of don’t for missionaries; along with reading secular books, popular music and movies. Jones bounced on his seat like a child, stuffing his mouth with potatoes and nodding. I shook my head, and ate. Where was Randy? I could smell alcohol, but saw none. Some people left, some others came. Most hung around the small dinning area between the kitchen and the living room giving us sidelong glances. The woman was gone a long time.
“Jones, we should probably go as soon as we’re done.”
“It’s cold outside, and it’s the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl.” He dragged out the end of bowl. “No more tracting tonight, no one’s letting us in. And what if Randy shows up? Where is he anyway?”
“Jones…”
The woman came back with two clear plastic cups full of dark bubbly drink. She set them down on the coffee table.
“Sorry to leave you so long.” She said.
“No worries. Is Randy here? He seemed a little out of sorts last night and…”
She held up her hand, cutting me off. She sat with one leg pulled up so she could face me. I sat, twisting at the waist to see her. She pondered. Her hair was thin and cut short to her jaw, a squash yellow. She had a round face, with blue eyes set in thin webbed slits. Wrinkles spread from the corners, and ran along her forehead. Her nose poked out like a tiny soft hook. She must have been in her mid to late fifties. She smiled with thin pink lips.
“Randy’s not going to be around too much for a while. He—I don’t know what to do with him anymore.” He eyes became moist. She jutted her bottom jaw forward. Then closed her eyes and breathed in. When she exhaled she opened her yes and smiled at us. “Thank you.” She reached out for my hand, and I let her take it. Her dry hands rubbed along the skin of my palms. Knobby, early arthritic, fingers wrapped around my hand. “He liked to talk to you. Thank you for listening to him. I can’t do it anymore. I don’t know what to do with that boy anymore. When he hurts others or when he hurts himself.” Her eyes closed again, allowing just one streaking tear to escape. Her thin nostrils became red-rimmed as they flared with her breathing.
For a while we sat and I let Jones watch the football game. Gradually the people crowded in closer to us until they were in our midst. We were surrounded, ensconced among this thatch of family and friends who all stared at the television in the corner. Some bounced up and down and yelled and laughed and whistled. Some sat and chatted. Jones melted in.
We walked to Kimberly Avenue where we hopped a bus and slipped into our apartment just before nine.
Elder Jones was transferred the following Wednesday. I saw Randy once more after that, with my new companion Elder Crane. We went to his house, which had turned gray inside, and sat at his ashy table where he talked quietly of Mohammed’s sword and how his mother was torturing him.

(3)Winnipeg continued...

Before you read, here is a link to parts 1 and 2 of the story
part 1:
part 2:



Part 3:

I woke up with the phone in my hands, Jones leaning over my face saying dude.
“What are you doing dude?”
“Randy called, and I fell asleep talking to him.”
Jones loped over to the couch under the window, wrapping his blanket around him, and falling like a dead tree onto the cushions. His black-socked feet poked out the bottom, and his dark fuzzy hair out the top.
“What did he want?”
“He was scared. More than usual.”
Jones laid his discussion book on the floor, opened somewhere in the middle and rested his face on the precipice of the couch, one eye looking down. The discussions were the lessons we taught. Each one contained several principles that built upon the previous discussion. The first discussion is what he had taught to Randy. God, then Christ, then prophets, Joseph Smith and finally the Book of Mormon. At the end of each discussion is a commitment. After the first visit we ask them to read a chapter out of the Book of Mormon. Third Nephi, chapter 11. The discussions were to be memorized, and recited verbatim if possible, allowing the Holy Spirit to prompt us in our teaching. Each missionary found a sort of space and structure that allowed the correct doctrine to be taught and gave place for their own unique speech and personality. I had mine down so that I could teach each discussion in several ways, given certain restrictions, like time or age or degrees of common belief. Jones was still working to memorize his first discussion. I watched his eye become thick, and droopy.
“I think I told him we’d come over today,” I said.
“Anything is better than tracting,” Jones said. “What time?”
“I think he mentioned dinner.”

That evening we picked a short street in the north section of our area. A short J shaped cul de sac called Chernichan drive. We started on the east side of the street, knocking on doors. Each door we went to led to rooms packed with people. Nobody let us in. Halfway around the circle a man asked us why weren’t we home watching the Super Bowl. We didn’t know it was on I said. We left that door thinking it might be worth abandoning our tracting and going straight to Randy’s house, but I said we had to at least finish the street. Besides, we weren’t expected at Randy’s house for at least an hour. It had been a slightly warm day and some of the snow had melted into thick puddles that now formed shiny sheets of thick ice in the gutters. Jones slipped several times and became agitated, cold and quiet.
“Nobody is going to let us in on Super Bowl Sunday. Lets go home,” he said.
I wanted to go home. The cold had gotten into my coat. My ears had become frozen and I felt a heavy tiredness fall upon me. It had taken longer than I thought for us to walk from our apartment to this little street lined with large crammed-in houses. No buses ran where we were, and I couldn’t shake the impending trudge back home, and then down to Randy’s house. We would finish this street.
Three houses from the end all the lights were off. We knocked, and waited. Then as we turned to leave, a car pulled in the driveway and into the garage. A woman jumped out, and yelled from around the corner to hold on, she’d let us in. A moment later several lights popped on in the living room and she opened the front door.
“Come in, come in! It’s cold out,” she said waving her arms in circles toward her. She was tall, in her early forties with long shiny blond hair that she’d twisted up in the back of her head and stabbed with a pen. Her teeth were immaculate, white and large and straight. She wore a thick tan coat and a red scarf, which she peeled off, inviting us to do the same. Underneath she had on dark blue scrubs and a light blue long sleeved under shirt. We loosed our winter coats and Jones pulled the hat off his fuzzy head. I feebly tugged at the fingers of my gloves.
“ok,” she finally said, standing up straight with a bounce and clasping her hands in front of her. “Now, what is this all about.”
I told her.
“That sounds lovely.” She turned, motioning us to follow her into the dining area where we sat at her table.
“How does this work?” she asked.
I pulled my discussions from my bag. I had bound all my discussion booklets into one volume with a fat plastic ring binding. I put a picture of Jesus on the cover and a picture of Joseph Smith’s first vision on the back. I looked at Jones, and he started teaching.
Jones talked about God. She believed in God. I talked about Jesus. She believed in Jesus. Jones talked about the Bible and it’s prophets. She read the Bible and she believed in prophets. Jones paused after this.
“What would you think if there was a prophet in our time? Someone who spoke with God and received revelation.” I asked.
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said.
“There is.” I told her about Joseph Smith. I told her of his first vision, quoting from Joseph’s own account, holding the picture on the back of my discussions up so she could see.
“Through this and other experiences Joseph Smith was called to be a prophet, like Moses and Noah and all the other prophets we talked about in the Bible. He saw God.”
I paused, waiting for a response. She sat quietly, with a tired look in her eyes.
“What about wolves in sheep’s clothing,” she asked.
My throat leaped, hoping Jones would take the segue.
“I think that scripture says, ‘by their fruits ye shall know them.’” He said. “One of the fruits brought forth by Joseph Smith was what we call the Book of Mormon. Have you ever seen this book?”
She hadn’t. He handed her the copy we’d been carrying with us all night. It was still cold, and the pages were loud and crisp when she leafed through it.
“This book is a second witness of Jesus Christ. It is the record of the prophets of the people who lived on the American continent during much of the same time as when the Bible was written. Joseph Smith was commanded of God to translated it.”
Jones’ booklet fell off his lap onto the floor. His eyes widened, he looked at me. I smiled at him. He looked back at her.
“There’s a part at the end, Moroni chapter ten…” He rifled through to the end of her book to the correct page.
“It contains a promise,” he continued. “that anyone who reads it, can find out if it is true. He paraphrased from the book, ‘“if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.’ Will you read the Book of Mormon?”
She was quiet a minute. “The whole thing?”
“That’d be great, but for starters we’ve highlighted a chapter in third Nephi that is a good starting point. It is a fulfillment of the prophecy in the Bible when Christ told his apostles, ‘Other sheep I have which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice. And there shall be one fold and one shepherd.”’
I opened the book up to the right page, which had been marked with a card.
She was quiet a minute. “yeah,” she said. Then, “I don’t know why but.” Stopping then starting on a different tack, “I had a really crappy day at work. I just wanted to come home and scream and go to bed, and then I saw you as I pulled up and I thought you were salesmen. But I opened the door and there you were with your red little faces and your nice suits all covered up with those big coats and you looked like you’d had really crappy days at work too. So, I thought I’d let you in. And then all of the sudden I didn’t want to scream any more, and I became completely enveloped in what you were saying. I don’t know if I completely understand what you’re getting at. But I’m interested in giving you guys a shot.”
When we stepped outside we froze again, but walked upright, our bags bouncing with our springy steps. Checking my watch I suddenly realized we were almost late for Randy. We tried to run, but the air felt grating in our lungs. No buses passed us. Inside warm yellow windows people laughed and ate and watched football. We walked as fast as we could, and finally got back to our apartment. We walked past the front of our building and crossed Henderson highway, and barely caught a bus going south. We rode in silence, all alone in the bus, smiling at each other stupidly. I heard Jones’ stomach gurgle twice before mine twanged. We jumped off the bus and headed down the long slick sidewalk to Randy’s house.

the story continues