Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  Abner and Junior had come home shortly after noon, Abner somber and uncommonly gentle. Ely Collins was dead, he had told her softly: horribly dead. She had wished to weep then, but had been unable. Now, he had said, much work lay ahead. Had he meant for her, too? The vague foreboding of ordeal had dismayed her. They had eaten Sunday dinner in virtual silence, all but Nat who had not returned home and who had not been seen by Junior at the mine. When Abner had retired to the front room, Junior’s plump white face had turned to her and he said, “He was frightening out there! Everybody cried! He made them!”

  More omens of disruption had touched her during family worship. Abner had passed the afternoon studying the Holy Bible, and by evening he had fallen strangely meditative. He had listened with curious patience as the children had recounted their evil doings, and instead of administering the usual castigations, had spoken solemnly with each of them about duty and led them, individually, in prayer. “The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge,” he had told Franny, “but the foolish despise wisdom and instruction.” To Junior, he had explained proverbially: “He hath made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made; his mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violence shall come down upon his own pate.” And he had instructed Junior how the ruthless avarice of the mine owners would bring disaster upon their pates, just as vice and waywardness had brought retributive death to many miners. Nathan, typically, had refused to say where he had been all day, or what it was he had brought home in a paper sack, would not even answer his father. Abner’s face had contracted darkly. “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother,” he had rumbled ominously, and for a moment the familiar thunderheads had seemed to be forming and Sarah had breathed easier, “the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young vultures shall eat it!” But he had pursued the matter no further, had turned to little Amanda to receive her admission of mocking her sister Franny that day and disobeying her mother, and had, with alarming tenderness, lectured the confused child on love, admonishing her to make love her aim, and to “desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy!” What had he meant by that? Unnerving portents everywhere! Praying with Amanda, Abner had cried upwards to the Lord: “Oh deliver not the soul of thy turtle-dove unto the wild beast! forget not the life of thy poor forever!”

  The children, disoriented by their father’s altered manner, had gradually grown more unruly, testing the new limits, and Sarah had feared for them. Only little Paul, whose turn was last, had remained wanly mute, apparently too young to perceive the shift. Once Nathan had whispered something in the boy’s ear, and he had begun to cry softly. That Nathan! She could have beat him herself! Abner had turned then to Paul, and whimpering, the boy had repeated what Amanda had revealed just before him. And then the doorbell had rung, bringing Sister Clara Collins and her tagtail daughter into the awry room, and Sarah had commenced to weep.

  Abner invited Sister Clara to join them in prayer, but she impatiently thrust her note into his hands, saying, “I need your guidance, Abner! It’s from Ely!” Sarah wished to see it, but feared Abner’s rebuke if she asked; Sister Clara determined the matter by snapping it out of Abner’s hand the moment he glanced up and planting it in Sarah’s. In tortured script, it read:

  DEAR CLARA AND ALL:

  I dissobayed and I know I must Die. Listen allways to the Holy Spirit in your Harts Abide in Grace. We will stand Together befor Our Lord the 8th of

  Even before Sarah finished it, Sister Clara was demanding: “But what can it mean? What do you take it to mean?” Sarah was too confused even to hook the words of it together sensibly. She waited anxiously, staring hard at the note, for Abner to remove the burden of that response from her, and at last he did: “I think it means that it’s better, if the will of God should so will, that ye suffer for well-doing than for evil-doing.” The words touched Sarah familiarly: she had awakened to them. They were to have been a part of Abner’s sermon this morning.

  “Maybe, Abner, but it ain’t all of it, it cain’t be. I know, God was tellin’ him to leave the mine and go preach, and Ely he didn’t do it, and so in a way he done wrong. Maybe. But what is troublin’ me so, Abner, is what does he mean about listenin’ to the Holy Spirit and standin’ together—”

  Abner, interrupting, growing nervous, explained that the Holy Spirit was the inspired word of the Holy Gospel; we must study it in our hearts and abide in Christ Jesus, so that our consciences will be clear when we must stand before Him “that is ready to judge the living and the dead—” The children were growing restless and noisy, but fell silent instantly before Abner’s sudden buffeting glare. “The living and the dead,” he repeated, then added, though his mind seemed to be on the children: “For the end of all things is at hand—”

  “That’s it, Abner!” Clara cried and Abner’s white face spun toward her, pinched inward in consternation. “The end of all things is at hand! Don’t you see—?”

  “Now, Sister Clara—”

  But the woman was in a frenzy and wouldn’t be hushed, though Sarah saw that Abner’s temper would not long be contained. “We will stand together before the Lord the eighth of—the eighth of when? Of when, Abner? That’s the point of it, don’t you see? Ely was tryin’ to tell us that God’s final judgment is near upon us!”

  A tremor of dread convulsed Sarah’s heavy body, iced her spine: the end! “Oh, Abner!” she cried, and reached for him. He shrugged her off sternly. The children had stood, stirred, and tears floated now in Franny’s eyes.

  Abner calmed them. He reminded Sister Clara that the accident had happened on the eighth of the month, that Ely had probably only meant to date his note to her.

  “Maybe,” Sister Clara said, clearly not convinced. “But ifn he died today, why did he put the eighth? And they ain’t a period there before. God’s signs to Ely seem terrible urgent to me, and I—Well, anyhow, I wanted both you folks to read it and meditate on it. Me and Elaine, we been showin’ it around tonight to all the friends. I mean to bring it with me to Evenin’ Circle next Sunday night, so’s we can all talk it over together. I hope I kin count on you two bein’ there.”

  Sarah nodded, of course, she always went, but glimpsed Abner’s sudden reprehensive glower—and understood then what it was he had been demanding of her all day—and why he must hate her, knowing she wasn’t able. “Yes,” he said, for them both.

  Sarah thought, as Sister Clara and her daughter departed, that the family worship would be considered ended for that night, but Abner shoved shut the door and spun enflamed on little Paul. “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass,” he recited thunderingly into the now-recognizable terror-riven room, “and a rod for the back of fools!” His freckled white hand, pinked with fine red hairs, grasped the razor strop and cracked it across his thigh.

  “No, Abner!” whispered Sarah. “Please!”

  With frightened fingers, Paul dutifully unbuttoned his pants. Abner, twitching with impatience, reached to tear them from him just as, in terror, the boy made water. It sprayed out in frantic spurts on Abner’s hands and knees—reflexively, Abner’s right hand whipped and the razor strop cracked like a rifle shot into the child’s wee fork. Paul screamed. Sarah cried, “No! Abner!”

  Abner, implacable, gripped the boy’s frail shoulder. “If thou beat a child with the rod,” he blustered, “he will not die!”

  But Franny, sobbing, covered Paul’s body with her own like a mother hen. “Beat me!” she cried.

  Abner was in a froth. Paul shrieked insanely under Franny’s shield. Sarah saw a horrible smile flirt at the corner of Junior’s mouth. She stood. Though terrified, she would not allow it again!

  But then Abner did a wonderful thing: he ordered them all out of the room but for Franny. Sarah wouldn’t even let them hear the flogging, she sent them straight to bed. Paul’s peewee was strangely flushed, but he had quieted at least, and she could hear him talking with Nathan in their room. Alone, outside
the door, Sarah listened to the blows fall.

  When Abner came to bed, his anger had abated. She was fearfully disturbed, but he was disinterested in her explications. She lay awake hopelessly, not knowing what it would all come to. In spite of Abner, Sarah had been cruelly penetrated by the prophetic vision in Brother Ely’s deathnote, and only one sinister mystery still vexed her: Why had the Lord chosen to take Brother Ely just the second before he would have completed the terrible message?

  7

  Until the lightness passes off, she sits on the edge of the bed, as though at a beginning place. Then she slides to the marble floor and pads in bare feet into her brother’s room. Withdrawn he lies, absorbed into the bed, one with it, dark etching on the immaculate sheets. “Giovanni!” she whispers. No sign is given her but the determined pulsing of a vein in his neck. His skin has shrunk taut over his high skull, exaggerating the recession of his hairline. His black hair is long on the neck, feathers dark and wild on the pillow. He is … somehow … changed: yes, a new brother must come of it. She fears for him. So white! The dried blood she’d seen on his face seems to have sunk beneath the surface, now mottles with rose the flesh’s pallor. For the first time since the night of the disaster, black doubts peck at her.

  Miller was met on Monday midmorning arrival by an officeful of comedy and the miner Willie Hall, who’d been waiting there since eight, Lou Jones having left for “Mick’s Dispensary,” leaving the message that the doctors advised complete rest and not to expect him for a week or two. His prank had been a complete success, and the wirecopy which he retrieved from the wastecan testified to UP’s subsequent panic. Someone had run over to the bus station to buy up the early morning editions from the city, and all but one carried it, one of them happily subheading the prayerbook episode. Miller equipped his ad force with copies to entertain the businessmen they called on that morning, and wrote up a boldface box for that night’s front page on “this strange and inexplicable lapse in East Condon journalism.” He wondered if the UP rep was still in town—man! the dumb bastard had even embellished his cribbed account with praise of Jones’“long and worthy experience” in the mines and his “model Christian fatherhood”! Such are history’s documents! He laughed. Miller had been seeking this vendetta ever since Jones had jockeyed through his latest typo a couple months ago on “the new Chronicle subscription rates, announced this week by publisher and editor Justin Milker,” which eventually made The New Yorker. He’d been burned more than once by Jones’ propensity for the rigged typo, his worst being when Mrs. Ted Cavanaugh, wife of the banker, was named “Lay of the Year at the Presbyterian Church”—Only by the grace of Ted’s fear of court publicity had they escaped being sued. Now he had squared it and had twitted the sloppy East Condoners as well.

  But, pleased as he was, he had little chance to enjoy it. His Monday edition lay blank before him, plugged only in part by the two full-page ads of condolence from businessmen, professionals, and organizations, and the uphill ritual of his newsday now had to be compressed into half the time. Yesterday’s special had devoured all his standing copy on the mine, leaving him at best some eighty or ninety column inches of unused miscellany lying idle. Yesterday’s photos were not printed, but there were a few old ones he could use a second time. Hastily, he plotted a six-page layout and sent back a pageful of wirecopy. He asked Willie Hall, seated stoically deadpan in the vortex of a pandemonium he didn’t understand, to give him five minutes more and raced over to Mickey DeMar’s Bar and Grill to deposit copies of the UP story with the morning klatchers. Found Jones in there with Ted Cavanaugh, dimestore owner Burt Robbins, and the Chamber of Commerce secretary, Jim Elliott, town’s tireless prince of gossips. Miller had a rushed coffee, while Mick and the others enjoyed the tale. It was a great entertainment, and others who arrived joined the laughter. Robbins, dependably acidic, tagged Jones with “Father” and the rest delightedly picked it up, all but Cavanaugh, who almost always excepted himself in the banter and who in any case had been cool toward Jones since the typo that had humiliated his wife. To escape the worsening consequences, Jones agreed to return to the stable, and that eased some the day’s increasing stress.

  While Jones issued wearily forth like a jaded elephant to collect the routine tidings, Miller hurried back to the waiting Willie Hall, and Hall had no sooner left than in came mine supervisor Barney Davis, and he was followed by Vince Bonali, one of the facebosses on at Number Nine Thursday night near the blast in the southeast section. It was after noon before he got his breath and ate the doughnut Annie had bought for him.

  From Hall, he picked up a small feature on the events that kept him home from the mine Thursday night and away from death. Spare stunted man in his early fifties, married but childless, with a long record of absenteeism in the mine, Hall explained that he had “had a hunch” about that night: it was on the eighth of the month, and one of his cousins had been hurt by a fall on the eighth of July some years back, and his bird dog had died the eighth of last December, just a month ago.

  “Now, I ain’t superstitious, Mr. Miller, I don’t hold no truck with black cats and suchlike, I ain’t no old woman. But, see, them mines they is always dangerous in the winter, now I’m fatalistic about it, I figger when the Good Lord He says my day is up, well, it’s up, but then in the summer they’s always these here falls. The roofs, why, they jis fall in. You kin usually hear them, they’s a kinder stretchin’ sound, a kinder crackle, oh, it ain’t near so bad in the winter. I don’t mind workin’ in the—but, see, in the winter then, everthing it gits all dried out and they’s a powerful lot of dust, and, you know, that dadblamed mine, they don’t lay enough rock dust, Mr. Miller, I’m tellin’ you the Lord’s own truth, they don’t give a care about us miners, they don’t give a care about nothin’ except makin’ money. Why, the coal dust gits so bad you cain’t even see them machines, them big machines, you jis trip right over them, your lights right on them and all. And that’s how it is that it’s winter when all these here explosions takes place. I don’t mind it in the summer so terrible much. But, you know, I don’t think I’m gonna work no more down in the mines. No, sir, I don’t think so.”

  Hall squirmed buglike in his chair, twisted his visored cap in his slender hands, pale mapped with blue veins. He refused the cigarette Miller offered him. “No, thanks, Mr. Miller. It’s right kind, but I don’t smoke none. No, listen, I got all this here coal dust down in my lungs, see, cause once you breathe it in, why, it don’t never come out again, and I’m afeered that smokin’ might touch off a kinder explosion right there in my lungs and, you know, smokin’ causes TB and this here dust it sticks to the wet part of the lungs, now a doctor told me this, Mr. Miller, it’s the Lord’s truth, and the lung it gits as tough as the backside of an old mule, and you start coughin’ and ifn you smoke, you git TB. Oxford, he smoked all the dadblamed time, and I always says to him, I says, Oxford, dadblame it—Oxford, he’s my buddy, he was my buddy, he got killt down there, Oxford Clemens, they all called him Ferd, but I called him Oxford, oh, he weren’t worth a hill a beans, he come from pretty poor stock, and that man he cussed and smoked all the time, but I ain’t one to use nicknames, see, I think it’s downright unfriendly, and, why, nobody called Jesus by no nickname, did they? But Oxford, he didn’t pay me no mind, he went right on smokin’. He had a cough, too, I weren’t surprised none. He even smoked down there in the mine, oh, it was agin the rules and all, but he never gave no care about no rules, when he wanted him a dadblamed smoke, he was gonna have it. Shoot, everbody else done the same, it weren’t jis Oxford. But our faceboss, that’s Angelo Moroni, Mr. Miller, he got killt, too, well, he didn’t like the idea none, and he always said, don’t lemme catch none a you guys smokin’ down here or I’ll have you outa here on your tail fast as scat, that’s more or less how he put it, but he never took the cigarettes away, so what happened is all these guys’d duck off in some room where they’d stopped working and sneak them a smoke now and agin, and, well, Mr. Miller, ifn they’da
smoked out in the haulageways in the open, it wouldn’ta been dangerous at all, but these here abandoned rooms, they’s plumb fulla gas, and everbody told Angelo that, but he jis said, dadblame it! I don’t want none a you guys to smoke at all and that’s period! That’s pretty much how he put it.”

  “How many years have you been a miner, Mr. Hall?”

  “Thirty-six years, Mr. Miller, thirty-six years, off and on.” The man had small eyes circled with worry lines, an overbite, very little chin. A light gray grizzle furred his cheeks.

  “Do you know Bruno well?”

  “No, I seen a lot of him, he was on my shift and all, but, no, I cain’t say as how I really know him. Always I felt sorry on account of the others they all picked on him a lot down there, but you couldn’t never git friendly with him, he was a kinder inter-verted type, ifn you know what I mean. Like you’d say it was a nice day, and he’d jis stare back at you. He was a funny bird.” Hall tilted his head to one side a moment as though listening, himself resembling for that instant a “funny bird,” and then he continued: “Knowed his buddy well. Wasn’t it a pity, Mr. Miller, how Ely Collins had to suffer? Don’t seem right somehow, man like that, he was our preacher, you know, how his leg got chopped off and how …” Hall’s voice trailed away as, gazing off, he suffered Collins’ mutilations. “He took a lotta trouble with Bruno, he was always tryin’ to save him, build him up.”

  “You mean he was trying to convert him from Catholicism?”

  “Not exactly, on account of he weren’t no Catholic, or leastways none a them other Roman fellers cared to claim him. They said he’d split off or somethin’ and I guess he’s sort of nothin’ at all.”

  “Did Collins talk to you about leaving the mine?”

  “No.”

  “Or seeing white birds in the workings?”