The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Littleface and his fellow outlaws are throwing together a supper out of things found in the Brunist camp kitchen fridge and cupboards. Some cold fried chicken, milk, apples, cookies and crackers—a feast. Nat has told them to help themselves to the food, but to leave everything else alone. “If we wanta camp out here a while, we gotta stay cool.” That makes sense like everything Nat says. He’s just a kid but smart as hell. Even skinny old Houndawg looks up to him. Littleface loves him, has his name tattooed in tiny Gothic over his left nipple near his Warrior Apostles tattoo, though Nat doesn’t know that. Religion is not a big deal for Littleface, but if Nat wants this scene, he wants it. He’s mad at something, so Littleface is mad, too. Nat’s old man is a preacher and Nat is a kind of preacher, too, but he doesn’t preach to anybody. No stupid church services—that’s for sissies, Nat says—no talk about sin, no praying. Nat just yells at who he calls the Big One from time to time, telling him what he thinks and what he’s going to do, and the rest of them tune in and sometimes shout at the Big One, too. Face’s pal Juice from Crusadeer days really gets into it, stomping around like he’s marching and hooting and hollering along with Nat. Nat showed Face his Classic Comics version of the Book of Revelation to give him some idea of what’s ahead. God and Jesus so damned mad they’re going to destroy fucking everything, and the Apostles, Nat says, are going to be God’s hit men. So all right, why not, let’s at it. Littleface’s old lady was an evangelical type, probably still is if she’s alive, so he’s heard the stories, but he never realized Jesus was such an awesome dude. He raises just one finger and the earth splits and swallows up all the howling and screeching sinners and then snaps shut on them again. Ker-splat! He speaks and the bodies of the enemies are ripped open and it’s hard not to get hit by the flying flesh and blood. It’s amazing! There’s guys on horses and, even as they go galloping along, their flesh dissolves and their eyes and tongues melt away, the horses, too, and they end up just hideous skeletons, falling apart. Stories his old lady never told him. His old man got shot up and is no more and is not missed. Littleface does miss his brother whom he used to ride with, but who’s in the federal lockup doing hard time and may never come out. Just as well. Lot of guys on the outside trying to kill him. His brother was a first-class gearhead and Littleface often argues with him when working on his bike. “Who ya talking to, Face,” Cubano asked him, “to your asshole?” “No, to yours, Spic. Unless that ugly thing is your face.” Nat is pressing his fingers to his temples: one of his headaches coming on. They usually hit him in the predawn hours, set him to howling like a wild animal. Can last for hours, days even. Why he says he doesn’t drink. Whiskey, anyway. One day, when Nat was twisted up with headache pain, they came on a goat tied to a tree. Nat walked up to it, slit its throat, and put his mouth to the spurting blood. Did he want them to drink it, too? Nat didn’t say, but Littleface and Juice took it as a dare and did. Houndawg chopped the head off and threw the body over his buckhorns and they left the area, and that night, after Houndawg and Cubano had skinned and cleaned the animal, they grilled it over an open fire. What was amazing was that Nat’s headache had gone away, and that set off a pattern of his killing animals and drinking their blood, and it seems to work. Littleface has a bottle of bourbon he lifted from a shopping center liquor store out on the highway, in spite of all the eyes on him (he bought a pack of cigs and a beer to cover his exit), and he shares it now with Juice and Cubano. Beats blood any day. Juice rides what Houndawg calls a garbage wagon, a bike pieced together from boneyard scraps and very heavily loaded with saddlebags, chrome, accessories, and as covered with pins, stickers, flags, and Jesus paintings as his body is with tattoos. His Juicebox. He can do anything with it, spin it on a dime, walk it on its back wheel, leap cars with it. One of the stickers on its back fender says: “Watch your ass! Jesus is coming and He is as mad as hell!” He likes to say that he wants to get raptured doing a ton down an endless highway. Juice was very impressed when Nat showed them the big photo of Bruno by the fireplace. They all were, even Houndawg. “Look at that fucking mine pick,” Juice said. “Cool, man! I want one a them.” And he swung his arms like scything a wheat field. “You knew that dude, Nat?” Nat nodded, studying the picture. “The Man,” he said. It was near lifesize and in the dim light it seemed to Littleface almost like the Man was alive and staring straight at them. Like something out of a horror movie. Go get them motherfuckers, he seemed to say. Like Jesus. Raise a finger and—zap! “Maybe they got some picks like that over at the mine,” Littleface says now, gnawing a chicken leg, and Juice lights up and says, “Hey!” Cubano, sitting on an upturned crate, is showing them a trick he can do of throwing an apple into the air and slicing it in two with his switchblade as it falls, when old lady Collins’ husband walks into the kitchen with his German shepherd. “What’re you boys doing here? They’s food over on the Mount.” “We don’t feel exactly welcome there,” Nat says. Nat, Littleface knows, has taken a natural unliking to this beardy hayseed, though he looks like one of the good guys in that Revelations comicbook. Of course, in Nat’s interpretation of that story, maybe the good guys are the bad guys. “We thought you wouldn’t give a care if we ate up some old leftovers.” “Well, I think it’s better if you stay with the rest of us.” He’s seen the bottle of whiskey and he doesn’t seem happy about it. Houndawg has called the dog over to him and is stroking him gently. “I do love dawgs,” he says with his usual easy drawl, taking a grip on the dog’s snout and peeling his lip back, “even old toothless ones. How d’ye call him?” “C’mere, Rocky,” Ben says. But Houndawg has a grip on Rocky’s collar in one hand, his open blade in the other. “Now just set still, Rocky. We’ll find ye sumthin soft t’gum.” Littleface realizes the man and his dog are all alone. Five to one, not much they couldn’t do. He can see that Nat, gripping his forehead, is thinking the same thing. “C’mon,” Nat says finally, rising with a fuck-you shrug. “Somebody here don’t smell so good, and it ain’t the dog. Let’s cut out.”

  I.9

  Sunday 19 April

  Two children enter the garden. God’s children. They have not chosen each other. God has chosen them, as He did the first stunned parents—whose initials they share, though they are not thinking about this. Nor are they thinking about parenting. It would make no sense. They are thinking about, not first things, but last things. Clad like forest ghosts, they step into the garden in the predawn dark, oblivious to its mysterious beauty, to say goodbye to this doomed human world, and to seek God’s grace in His eternal one to follow. She does not like this world and will be happy to see it go away. She wants it to end so that she might be with her father and brother again and be freed forever from timidity and bad teeth. She wants it to end right now, and she believes that this day that’s dawning might be when it happens. And if not, then very soon. Her father said so. Who is, as always, nearby. When she says the words, “Our Father which art in Heaven,” it is her father she sees up there. No beard. Tall and wise and smiling down at her with love in his heart. She talks to him every day, and she promises him she is coming as soon as she can. An eternity without him is the most terrible thing she can imagine. And a life without him is nearly as bad. She will be redeemed and will do all in her power to be sure of it. That is why she is here. Her mother does not understand, but her father will. The Bible has taught her the relation of pain and suffering to salvation, and in a moment of inspiration—long ago, when they were both still very young—he with whom she walks has shown her the path. It was all quite new and baffling, but his letters (he’s very smart) have explained things better.

  Although in truth (and, it might be said, as his own father might say, in weakness), he is more reluctant to let go of this world than she, her instructor does feel he has at last returned to the source of the most rapturous moment of his life (only recently has he learned the word “transcendence,” though not well enough yet to use it when he talks), and he is prepared to bear all consequences of its re-enactment. His own life, after all, ha
s been difficult and mostly unhappy, and he is ready to accept a better one if that is what happens next. He is less keen than she on spending the afterlife with his family, but at least his infidel brothers will not be there and the others can be somewhere else. It’s a big place. In fact, when he imagines it, he is all alone in glory with Jesus, standing side by side with Him over the fires of hell, punishing the wicked. Perhaps, because they are approaching sainthood together, she’ll be there too.

  It is she who has led them here. “I know a place nobody knows.” Whispered behind the tent last night on the Mount of Redemption. They have met at the dogwood tree (the white doves were already cooing in the eaves of the Meeting House) and slipped stealthily past the cabins down the hill to the banks of the creek and across the little bridge there into the woods, the brambles snatching at their tunics. They wore shoes and jeans to come here, but now in the small clearing they kick them off, punishing their bare shins and feet as they will soon punish the rest of themselves, protected only by their cotton tunics and a few thin underthings. They are fearfully excited, their hearts pounding madly in their chests—hers feels almost like it has escaped her chest and is leaping about on top, like the heart on the statue of Mother Mary she once gave her mother—but there is no lust in their beating hearts, certainly not in hers. Her father is watching, she will do nothing wrong in his eyes. The boy’s heart is perhaps not quite so pure. He has, for example, and for reasons not wholly religious and unbeknownst to her, stolen a pair of her panties; in fact, he is wearing them. But he too has his eye on the Eternal Kingdom, and if he has sinful feelings, well then they must be beaten out of him, and he needs her help for that. And to the extent that she excites him wrongfully, she too must be punished. There is no real love in their hearts for each other—nor for their own bodies (she hates hers), which must be chastised—but only for their souls, trapped within like caged birds, and for their Heavenly Father who must release them, receive them and clasp them to His bosom like all the preachers promise. They are each, for the other, a means to an end. The end.

  In the Bible story, the garden was the serpent’s own until the two people showed up. Naturally, the serpent was put out by their intrusion and he watched them closely and did all he could to get them expelled. These two children are also being watched. Not by a serpent, but by the minister’s fascinated wife, a shadowy figure lost in shadows back in the trees. This was her secret garden, she its keeper, and she knows it will soon be a secret and hers no longer—look, it is already no longer a secret—and she has been paying a kind of wistful farewell visit to it this morning. Her ritual morning pee in the woods. She is wearing a loose frock and a cardigan, not her tunic. That was left back in the cabin where her boy sleeps fitfully. He was overexcited by the emotional crowds on the hill and she had to bring him back to the camp to calm him down. It was not easy. She is worried about him. He cries a lot and is increasingly given to nightmares and childish behavior and is spending as much time in her bed now as his own, desperate for solace. Out in the gloom of the clearing, the boy is giving the girl something. What is it?

  “What is this thing?” the girl asks when he hands it to her, her voice barely audible in the damp dark. “My father’s razor strop. It was what he used in our evening family worship.” “Oh.” Her father used to have one too. It hung on a nail in the bathroom. It feels heavy in her hands. Too short. She’ll have to be too close. She’d rather have something like a switch, like the first time. There are plenty of them over there in the woods. Oh, the minister’s wife is thinking. This is not what she has expected. The boy holds something, too. What is it they mean to do? What the boy holds (the girl knows this, he has shown it to her) is her father’s old leather belt. The one she kept coiled up in her drawer and used sometimes on herself, feeling closer to her father when she did so. Though he never hit her, ever. Her own use of the belt was always a kind of practice; she never really got out of herself, but she has sometimes made herself quite dizzy and has hurt herself enough to cry. She does not ask how it came into the boy’s hands. “We should pray,” she says. She is a little frightened. She is alone in a dark field enclosed in a thick brambly forest, far from anyone who loves her, with a boy she hardly knows, who is bigger and heavier than she remembers, about to do something that, if it’s like the last time, is a kind of letting go, when anything might happen. She has seen people lose control of themselves in tent meetings and fall down and pitch about and babble in tongues—there were people out on the Mount like that yesterday—and sometimes something like that seems to happen to her mother. But it has never happened to her, not completely, except for that one day on the Mount of Redemption, the rain storming down. “Dear God,” the boy says. He has a soothing voice, but it doesn’t stop her trembling. She who is watching is trembling, too. “Help us to do what’s right. We only want to be with You. Forever and ever. Amen.” “Amen,” she whispers, and another whispers, “Amen.” “I want you to hit me first,” he says, also in a whisper. He’s scared too. The girl senses that. “No,” she says, “hit me first.” “Well. All right. But when it’s my turn, you have to promise to hit me hard.” “I will.” “Turn around.” “Why?” “It doesn’t hurt as much.” “I want it to hurt.” “I know. Me too. But first we have to get used to it.” “Okay,” she says, staring hard at him. His face has a mustache on it and isn’t a young boy’s anymore. “But don’t touch me!” “I won’t. And, no matter what, I want you to tell me when to stop.” “Okay. You too.” She turns her back and crosses her arms over her chest, squeezing the razor strop, bows her head. The keeper of the garden is somewhat horrified. Not only by what she realizes she is about to witness. But also by her own hand, snaking between her legs. “Help me, father,” the child whispers. “Help me be brave.” Somewhere, not far away, there is a flutter of awakened birds rising.