Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  “Seein’ birds? No, not Ely, musta been somebody else.”

  “And now you’re thinking of retiring, Mr. Hall?”

  “Well, now, I won’t exactly say that, Mr. Miller, but I’m gonna be lookin’ around. I ain’t too old to learn a new trade. My wife Mabel she thinks I oughter start over in somethin’ where I kin work out in the open. I ain’t afeerd none a the mines, a miner he ain’t skeered about goin’ down, else he’d never go, you git fatalistic, but it’s jis they’s so dadblamed unhealthy. Besides, that there bed is playin’ out, and now they’s this mess down there to clean up—you know, they don’t give no care at all about the poor miner what gits throwed outa his job, they jis only reckon up what it’s gonna cost them to fix up all the damage, and they reckon up how much they kin make off the coal that’s left, and they add and subtract, and it all depends on the number they end up with, see, no, it’s the Lord’s own truth, Mr. Miller. It don’t come to their minds none about us poor miners, outa work and too dadblamed old to start over again. Why, I don’t know what I’d do now, see, I’m over fifty, and you cain’t learn an old dog, as the feller says, why, they’re jis leavin’ us to rot!”

  “That pansy!” Davis grinned later, when Miller described the interview. “Why sometimes right in the middle of a shift, he’d start bellyaching about the smoke and cry around there was going to be an accident and he’d refuse to work. He hasn’t got the nerve for the job.”

  “Maybe,” said Miller, “but, still, there he was, right afterwards, volunteering for rescue crews and taking twice the risk of usual work.”

  “Feeling guilty probably,” said Davis.

  “Here, Barney, before I forget. I saved you a couple extra copies of the special. Your ugly mug made it again.”

  “What the hell! Two nights running! I’m getting famous!” Davis opened the paper, searched out his photograph, studied it a moment, then tossed it down on the desk with an effort at indifference, handsome square jaw set in disdain. “Think you’ll win some more prizes with it?”

  “Maybe. If your picture doesn’t stop them.” Barney laughed and Miller asked, “What caused it, Barney? Have you figured it out?”

  “Smoking, Tiger. I’d bet my last buck on it. We located two or three possible areas where it might have been touched off. Trouble is, the first blast set off secondary ones, so you can’t always be sure which is the first one. But we’re pretty convinced one of those guys or more was smoking.”

  “Who’s ‘we,’ Barney? You mean the operators?”

  “Well,” said Davis with a loose laugh, touching the bridge of his rimless glasses, “you don’t figure the union’s gonna volunteer that, do you? Anyhow, we already found some cigarettes.”

  “Whose were they?”

  “I don’t want you to print any of this now, Miller, it would only prejudice the inspections, but we found them next to a new kid, his first night down there, kid named Tony Rosselli, by him and a timberman, Oxford Clemens.” Clemens was out of Miller’s own generation, and his violent death, like a breath of his own approaching doom, had preyed on Miller more than any of the other ninety-six. Ox had been his adolescent effort at rehabilitation of the downtrodden, and though Clemens as hero had disconcerted him, the emotions and indistinct yearnings of that sophomoric time had their claws in him yet. “We didn’t find any matches, but they may have got blown up or maybe one of the rescuers snuck them out.”

  “Why was there so much fire, Barney?”

  “You’re getting at we didn’t have enough rock dust down,” Davis said defensively, adjusting again the glasses on his small sharp nose. “I know, that’s what the union propaganda’s trying to establish. Sure, it could have been better, it always could have been better, it’s one of those things you can never do enough. But we passed all the inspections, Miller, and we’d just ordered some more, figured to lay it down in February, but, well, it just didn’t work out the best possible way—we didn’t want those guys to die, Miller.”

  “No, I know, Barney, but—”

  “I wish to hell we had had more rock dust down, I can tell you that, I’m goddamn sorry how it has turned out. But that’s a small thing, you don’t need any rock dust at all if you don’t have fire in the first place. Why, we hold safety meetings every month, and do you think it does one goddamn bit of good? Those bastards go right on smoking—what can you do?—and not taking care of their machinery, just asking for trouble. Sometimes, it’s just like they’re daring the goddamn mines to fall on their heads and half hoping it will, like that’s gonna prove something or something.”

  Miller asked the question he supposed he’d be asking for weeks to come: “What about it, Barney: think you’ll reopen?”

  “Can’t say yet, Miller. I hope so. It’s my job, too, after all. After the official inspections, we’ll survey the mine, consider its potential, and if there’s any goddamn chance at all it can be profitably reopened, why, we’ll do it. There’s too many people around here depend on that mine, Miller, and we don’t want to let them down. We’re not a charity, but we’re not pigs either. If you’re gonna print anything, I’d suggest you say that at this time the company has no intention of closing the mine. I think you can say that.” Davis got up to go. “And, say, I just want to mention, we didn’t think too much of that story by Chigi. He was just one guy of hundreds out there working their asses off and it seemed like his story made it out he went down there single-handed and carried Bruno out on his goddamn back.”

  “Really? I thought it was pretty fair, Barney—”

  “Well, I’m exaggerating. But I just wanted you to know—and it didn’t exactly paint the mine as the prettiest place in the country to work, either, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well,” Miller laughed, “it isn’t.”

  They stood, and while they were shaking hands, Vince Bonali walked in. Greetings were exchanged. Bonali wallowed a cheap fat cigar around in his mouth. “You got a real parade today, Miller,” Davis said.

  “Hell, you can’t hog it all,” Bonali said.

  Davis laughed unconvincingly and, with good-byes, left.

  Miller took down Bonali’s account of the night of the disaster. Bonali was faceboss over eighteen men in twelfth west off old Main South, not too distant from where Bruno and the other six had entombed themselves up in fourteenth east; he had been in the zone of impact and only yards out of the sections where the fire had reached. With the habit of all facebosses Miller had ever known, he provided an extensive preamble on his own merits as a miner, punctuating with stabs of his mutilated cigar. As he talked he grew excited, nearly shouting. No longer looking at Miller, he seemed to be concentrating on some point about five or six feet out in front of him. Big barrel-chested guy with a voice that filled the office. Impressive man. Probably a good faceboss, all right. “So I run back and already the shit’s so thick you can’t see. I find out there’s four guys have bugged out. Two of them, Lucci and Brevnik, they got out okay, though I gave them a royal chewing afterwards for jumping the goddamn gun. The other two who left was Cravens and Minicucci. They must have gone the wrong way.” He paused to consider them, then went on to describe enthusiastically exactly how they had used the ninth east air course, crossed over on the overcast to the New Main South air course, running into Abner Baxter’s section, and exited the mine about two and a half hours after the explosion.

  “What kind of guy is Baxter, by the way?” Miller asked. “I called him for a routine interview and he flapped into a rage on the wealth of the wicked and the sanctity of the poor, but refused to come down for an interview and wouldn’t let me quote him.”

  Bonali hesitated, bit down on his cigar. “To tell you the truth, Tiger, that guy’s been a pain in my ass since the day I was born. Nothing was ever enough for him. He and his buddies nearly wrecked the union movement through these parts. Every time we organized, he’d disorganize, and then holler at us for lack of guts. Stirred up a lot of bad feeling toward … toward our people, too. For awhile, i
t was like one union for Italians, one for Americans. And he made a lot of noise but he was scared of fighting himself and he always packed a gun. Guys got killed in those days, and it wasn’t only the scabs. Of course, I don’t need to tell you that, Tiger. Your Dad was a great guy. A buddy of mine got it, right in the brains, one of the toughest union men we ever had, and just about everybody knows it was Baxter shot him, but there was no way of proving it. Back then, we blamed it on the operators because we needed evidence against them, and we was afraid of busting up our own ranks, but everybody knew. Now he’s grown him a fat belly and has got religion and lets his steam off on the holy rollers. We brought our sections out together Thursday night, and this is just between you and me, but he wanted to drag Davis out of his office and lynch him. He’s a nut.”

  Miller asked him what he thought caused the blast.

  “Gas, Tiger. Only thing that can cause one like that. Damn mine is full of it.” Bonali squashed his cigar murderously into an ashtray, thick dark brows crossed into an angry frown. “Needed better control, better ventilation. All those abandoned workings up in fifteenth and sixteenth were full of caves, pumping out methane by the tankfuls. Should have either ventilated better in there, or closed it off. Spark off some motor, maybe even just the goddamn friction of one piece of machinery rubbing up against some other one—and then, there wasn’t any rock dust down in that firetrap, Tiger. It’s a wonder we didn’t all of us get killed.”

  “Barney said they’d passed all inspections.”

  “I don’t give a shit what Barney Davis says, there wasn’t any goddamn dusting done. Listen, sometimes those inspectors don’t even trouble their asses to come down into the mine. They just have them a big fancy dinner somewhere and lots of drinks with Davis and the rest of those bastards, and the next day they file their report, hell, I’ve seen it!”

  “Pretty serious charges, Vince.”

  “Yeah, and there’s ninety-seven dead buddies of mine to make then more serious, Tiger, including one of the greatest facebosses that mine ever saw.” A tear came to that strong man’s eye, and he brushed it away. “But, hell, don’t quote me, I’d never get another job in this country.”

  “Say, somebody said something about some horseplay in the washhouse Thursday night, something that had to do with Bruno.”

  Bonali flushed. “Well, there wasn’t nothing, it was—no, there wasn’t any horseplay.”

  Miller laughed. “Hell, I’m not running court, Vince. What I want to find out is about that poem.”

  “Oh, that.” Bonali grinned, shifted heavily in his chair. He rubbed his jaw with his hand, the little finger of which was missing. “Yeah. Bruno wrote a poem.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “The poem? Naw, I gave it back to him. What would I want with the goddamn thing? Poem about his Mother.” Bonali laughed loosely. “That silly bastard!”

  Rosalia brings Mama. The veil she wears to funerals she is wearing and her feet are compressed into the old black shoes too small for her. Sia fatta la vostra volontà. Stands so darkly singular, small hurt blemish in this sterile white. Tears glinting like prisms tumble out and wet with light her crinkly brown cheeks. “My boy!” she says to the nurses who enter. “My boy! my Chonny!” Her Mama, whom English frightens, is the only person to Marcella’s knowledge who has called Giovanni by the English equivalent of his name. Mumbles, rootlike fingers rattling the rosary. Curved light ekes out of radiators, bending perception. Adesso e nell’ ora della nostra morte. Marcella repeats the words. Giovanni, the tall boy whose shy protective love has brought her safely to womanhood, lies suspended in a mechanism of light and steel, generated by his own indecisive pulse. “My boy! povero Chonny!” The old black shoes melt into the marble floor. Boots, really, with hooks instead of holes for the laces. Brittle and black and cracked. Reflecting the white room, condensing it into a minute pattern of glitter deep in the hard black polish. Nonna’s shoes. Cosí sia. Her Mama thinks Giovanni is already dead.

  Shaved and lightly barbered, the Monday edition sandbagged with everything short of leftover Christmas carols and put to bed, Miller drove to the hospital. Over the phone, Lewis had told him Bruno was still in a coma, no change in his condition, but that Miller could speak this afternoon with the man’s sister if he wished. Bright cold day—prinked faintly with a widely scattered dazzle of frost crystals—chiseled the town’s usual tumble of casual boxes into planes of rare precision. He drove through these hard streets feeling himself peculiarly distinct, as though watching the processes of animation that slid him, white outlined cartoon figure, past the fixed drop of white outlined cartoon town. The speedgraphic lay, as always, on the seat beside him, but it was unlikely he would use it. Formulated questions, but images of her fragmented them. He was surprised to discover that his hands were sweating on the wheel.

  The hospital, usually a dead white inside, was today somehow blurred and hopeful, a contrast to the frozen clarity he had just driven through. Uncommonly, neither the blood of birth nor the knock of death jolted his mind this afternoon as he entered, but rather a flush of pleasure in visible human progress warmed him. We move on. Things can be better. There are goals.

  This bud of wellbeing was threatened momentarily by a near-encounter with Wesley Edwards, the Presbyterian minister, out dispensing his crinkly-smile consolations, but luckily Edwards didn’t see him, turned into somebody’s room. Actually, the man Edwards, while unimaginative and soft-souled, was no worse than the rest of the West Condoners—no, what rankled was his goddamn presumption. All his breed galled Miller, but especially the complacently doubtful types like Edwards—he blanked out this town’s small mind with his codified hand-me-down messages, and when you pushed him he would slyly hint he didn’t believe it himself, goddamn ethical parable or some crap of the sort. Well, you’re still the old fundamentalist at heart, Miller accused himself. Miller had noticed that Edwards, awkward among ailing men, spent most of his time giggling with the hospitalized women. They were prone and all but naked, yet safe, and so was he. Maybe the bastard got a buzz out of their bedpans. The thought made Miller smile, and it was this smile he carried into the third-floor convalescent lounge, where Marcella Bruno awaited him.

  He arrives, in crushed light, bringing with him the air of old storybooks, things wanted, things with a buried value in them. As a child, she watched him run, a man to her, though they called him a boy, a man with long legs and strong shoulders. He ran for them and was praised, he leapt and was loved. And now it is for her he comes smiling, a man to her still, long and strong, with something about him of forest greenness and church masonry and northern stars. They speak of her brother, of her family, he asks about her. A man to be praised, yes, a man to be loved.

  Back in, the cartoon town had fuzzed once more into lumpy solids, and the cartoon man was singing. A healing was happening. Sore, worn, he had found a young girl’s affection and had plunged in wholly. Where would it end? He didn’t care, he would see her again. The lumps glided recognizably by, and he found he hated them less. “You arrogant shit!” he said out loud, and laughed.

  Still high, he left the Chevy in the plant lot and went straight to Mick’s. Hadn’t had anything but Cokes and a doughnut. He found Lou Jones at the big round table near the bar, apparently into some story, and he thought of some Jones could be telling that put him ill at ease. With Jones were the hotelman Wally Fisher, the lawyer Ralph Himebaugh, and Maury Castle, who had a shoestore in town, three of Mick’s most dependable klatchers. Although Fisher had a coffeeshop and bar in his own hotel, he was always in here afternoons. “Two with onions, Mick, and a beer,” Miller said, and damn if it didn’t sound like a feast to him.

  Jones, disgruntled at having his story interrupted, leaned back and lit a cigar. The others cheered, reluctantly but sincerely, yesterday’s special edition, and exulted once more in the Father Jones escapade. Castle rattled tonight’s paper and read Miller’s “inexplicable lapse” box aloud for laughs, then Wally Fisher rumb
led, “So, come on, Father, tell us what the sonuvabitch did.”

  “Lou was just describing one of the gentlemen at your newspaper,” Himebaugh said by way of explanation. His quaint precision tinkled discordantly in the dark plain bar. “He has a rather, shall we say, individual manner of demonstrating his passions.”

  Castle heehawed.

  “Who’s that?” asked Miller.

  “Carl,” said Jones.

  The pressman. Miller grinned. “I should have guessed. Schwartz is the world’s most disturbed cocksman. What now?” Mick passed a glass of beer over the counter and Castle slid it across the formica tabletop to Miller. It was well after lunchtime, and the place was quiet. Only the sizzle of hamburgers in the yard-square kitchen off the bar. Mick had the television on as always, but the volume was off. Grand gestures of a bigmouthed guy pushing deodorant.

  Jones drank off his beer, nodded at Mick for another. “Says he was worldweary after his unusual Sunday labors yesterday, so to restore the spirit he toted body and soul over to Waterton to Mrs. Dooley’s. He meets with this—”

  “Mrs. Dobie’s,” interrupted Miller. “You can see how often Jones gets over there!”

  Jones didn’t share in the laughter, chose to relight his cigar instead. His eyelids slowly drooped the table to silence. “He meets with this pigeon he has in the past plucked, and he flaps over to bicker with her the tariff. But this birdie is grounded. Very down in the beak. Just slopping up a drink or two, she says. Carl inquires what can the matter be, and she informs him tearily she has lost a brother in the mine accident.” Miller glanced up, winced inwardly. That bitter breath again. Had to be her. “She has decided she is gonna take a week off from the ranch, fly the scene, try to forget. She’s sniffling blowsily, and Carl is afraid she’s gonna break into some noisy lament and ruin his whole fucking night. He scans the club, but the others are all paired, have eggs aplenty.”

  “You would think they would do less business on such a night,” Himebaugh interposed softly, but they ignored him.