The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  He knows he’s gone red again. She’s trying to provoke him and he should probably get up and leave, but the sundae is like the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten and he can’t help but linger over it. The sort of thing he has had to do without while traveling unpaid with the Brunists. If he or Darren need money for anything—new jeans or a pair of shoes—they have to ask Clara for it; no way they could ever ask for ice cream money, though Sister Ludie Belle sometimes buys tubs of commercial ice cream for the Sunday camp meals. Sally, watching him, says, “Hey, Billy Don. Would you like another?” He stares down into his empty bowl. He wants to say no thank you, but Satan (maybe she really is the devil incarnate like Darren says) has him by the whats-its and he can’t.

  And it’s not just the sundae. Sally mostly makes fun of him, he knows that, but he likes to be around her and he finds himself confessing things to her he’d never tell anyone else. All his doubts, for example. How he still prays every day but feels more and more like he’s just talking to himself, as if his involvement with the Brunists has cut him off from God and Jesus (“Well, there’s something to be said for them, then,” Sally said). How he wanted to get on that bus with the kids from Florida—they were a lot more fun than the crowd at the camp, and just as Christian—but how hard it would be to let down Darren and Sister Clara and Brother Ben. About how he woke up one night and Darren was touching him and how it scared him but he let it happen. In fact, maybe that was the scariest part. He didn’t know what else to do until it occurred to him he could just roll over. The next day Darren told him about a dream he’d had about a beautiful woman who turned into Mabel Hall when he touched her and he wondered if it was some kind of omen. Billy Don believed him and didn’t believe him at the same time. Mostly he didn’t believe him, and it made him wonder about the wet dreams he’d had recently, though he didn’t tell Sally that part.

  And now these obsessions with words and numbers. When he told Sally about Darren’s code charts and “sacred calendars” at their first meeting here last week, Sally said, “Numbers always have these weird magical properties—but it depends on where you start counting from, right? To add a millennium, you first have to locate zero and one.” “I think we have worked all that out,” he said with a smile, and she smiled right back at him and said, “I think we have not,” and she told him about all the different calendars through history and how there have been thousands of prophets of apocalypse and all of them obviously wrong, the first being Jesus himself. “Well, Jesus was a special case,” he said, “because Jesus didn’t die. As for all the others, we can learn from them, and where they failed we can get it right.” But a seed of doubt had been planted and he knew she could hear it in his voice. When she shook her head sadly and said, “Oh, Billy Don,” he felt like he wanted to hug her and be hugged by her, and he worried then that he was succumbing to evil, and he wondered if he should just stand up and walk away as fast as he could.

  It has been especially hard for him not to stand up for Darren. Becoming his friend was a turning point in Billy Don’s life. He was morally adrift until then, confused, more interested in baseball than religion and in the opposite sex more than either. He ended up in Bible college because it was cheap and said to be easy and full of friendly girls. And because he needed to get on the wagon and stay there. He and Darren met in a New Testament seminar taught by an old fellow with soft dewlaps and a soft brain who dug at his scalp while lecturing as if trying to dip his fingers in it, and they started meeting outside of class for coffee or lemonade and boiled peanuts. Darren introduced him to the scarier side of religion—what it was all about, really—and opened his eyes to the underlying patterns of things, which are not really hidden so much as just not visible on the surface. Billy Don was always good at puzzles—Darren said it was a gift from God and at the heart of his calling (he’d not even thought about having a calling)—and Darren proposed some new ones of a seriousness beyond anything he had imagined before. Darren was the smartest and most intense person he had ever met, and when Billy Don was around him, he felt connected to the world—not just the world, the universe—in a way he had never known. But now, well, he’s not so sure.

  Today, when he brought up the Sibylline Oracles and how they prophesied the birth of Jesus, thinking to impress her, she only looked pained and told him they were a well-known sixth century fraud. Could this be true? “Such a desperate human thing,” she said, “to look for mysteries where there are none.” She often says things like that and it both thrills him and dismays him. That she treats him so seriously; that she mocks him so. But he likes to hear her laugh, so bold and free. He’s never heard a girl laugh quite like that, and he sometimes plays the fool for the simple reward of it. Now he has been telling her more of the Marcella legends, about the heart-shaped bloodstain on her tunic, about how when she died she pointed to Heaven and kept that pose all the next day (the belief of many being that she was raptured straight to Heaven), about the white bird that flew overhead and some said right out of her mouth, and the crosses of blood that appeared on people’s foreheads after. “Raptured? But there was a body. What happened to it?”

  “No one knows.”

  “Well, it all sounds like a lotta phony baloney to me,” she says, shaking her head and lighting up again.

  “Yeah, that’s sorta what Pach’ said, too.”

  “Patch?”

  “Carl Dean Palmers. He’s one of the original twelve First Followers. He just turned up over the weekend. Drove in in an old beat-up van.”

  “Oh, right. Ugly Palmers. What we called him in high school. Poor boy, he was. A knobby-headed toad with acne all the way to his knees and a raging temper. How does he look now?”

  “Okay. He’s got a beard. Seems cool.”

  “I thought he ended up in the penitentiary.”

  “He did. He’s out now He picked up his new name in prison. When we filled him in about Marcella, he said he was there that night, and all that was, well, he used a bad word, but, like you said, baloney.”

  Sally leans across the table and whispers conspiratorially, “What was the bad word, Billy D?” There’s an embarrassed pause and he knows he has an idiotic grin on his face. “Bullshit…?” He nods. “So,” she exclaims, leaning back, “Ugly Palmers said it was all bullshit. Good for him!” She raises her empty sundae bowl as if in a toast. “Bullshit!”

  “Well, maybe,” he says, trying not to look at the guy behind the soda fountain, “except for the part about her pointing to Heaven. You can see that even in the news photos.”

  “Hmm. You’re right. I do remember something like that. Her arm sticking up like a petrified blue twig. I was so grossed out I could hardly register the details. At the time, I figured it must have been some kind of trick, but, really, I didn’t want to look. I was pretty squeamish back then.”

  “There’s a famous painting of her in a church in Florida, lying in the ditch, pointing to Heaven like that.”

  “With a blue arm?”

  “No, she’s very—”

  “What’s it based on? The painter’s fancy, I suppose, like all the hokum Jesus paintings. I bet no one even took a photograph while she was in the ditch.”

  “Well, no…not in the ditch exactly…” Perhaps the whole conversation this afternoon has been aimed at this moment. There is something more he has wanted to share with Sally and he hasn’t known how to bring it up, and now here it is. It’s as if she knew just the question to ask. He reaches into his book bag and brings out the photos. He’s brought two of them—before and after shots, so to speak. “These were taken just before she died. In the first one there, you can see her hand is pointing up just like—”

  “Hey! Look at the gorgeous ass on that stud!” She runs her finger over it, grinning broadly. This might not have been the best idea. People’s heads are turning. “Who is that? Oh right! I know! The newspaper guy. Miller. I heard my dad talking about these photos back at the time. And that’s her, hunh? The voice in the ditch. Poor thing. S
he’s cute. Except in this other one she looks absolutely terrified. She’s clutching that choker around her neck like the guy’s about to strangle her. Or maybe he’s going to beat her with that newspaper. Do you suppose these photos have anything to do with her being out there on the mine road that night?” She thinks about that for a moment. “Sure they do.”

  “That might be a kind of simple way of looking at it,” he says softly, recalling Darren’s words. “God is not a ladies’ romance novelist.”

  “No, you’re right there. He works more in the horror genre. Do you love God, Billy Don?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “If I thought he was really there, I’d hate him.”

  “Wow. Just like Darren says. You really are evil.”

  Sally grins and winks at him, stubbing out her cigarette, and he doesn’t know if it’s the wink of the devil or just a mischievous girl trying to be funny. “I wonder who took these photos. Do you suppose the jerk set up a camera at his back and took them himself?”

  “Maybe. But we think it could be some sort of mysterious…you know…”

  “God as a pornographer? Funny. I wouldn’t be surprised. But tell me, Billy Don,” she says, leaning across the table again in her bright orange T-shirt with the soft things floating in it and lowering her voice at last, “do these photos turn you on?”

  “Well, sure. A little.” He knows he’s red to the roots (what a question!), but the conversation has come around to where in his fanta sies he’s always imagined it would, and he can tell she’s pretty excited herself. He’d like to ask her how she feels about them, but he doesn’t know how. He can only grin stupidly and read her shirt again.

  “What does your friend think of them?”

  “Darren? He says he feels as if he is staring upon the face of evil.”

  The expression on Sally’s face is hard to read at first. It’s like amazement, disbelief, expectation—but then she bursts into a whooping peal of laughter, nearly falls off her chair. Everybody in the drugstore is staring at them now and he knows he should hide the photos, but he can’t move. “The face of evil!” she cries. “That’s beautiful!”

  “I think he meant, you know, the cruelty and—”

  “He’s not talking about the girl, I assume,” she gasps, in and around her laughter.

  “No—”

  “What other face is there, Billy Don?”

  When he stares blankly at her, she points to it. Oh. That’s really embarrassing. It is funny, though, and he finds himself giggling in a hiccuppy sort of way. The guy behind the soda fountain is craning his neck to try to see the photos. Hastily, he slips them back into his book bag.

  “Listen, Billy D,” Sally says. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “Hey, listen to this one!” the Elliott girl calls out from behind an overgrown chokeberry thicket, putting Darren’s teeth on edge, her very presence a desecration here. “‘Buck Noone: Coalminer. Gone Below to Work One Last Shift.’”

  “That’s great,” says Billy Don, grinning his clownish mustachioed grin. “But come here. Something really weird.” The girl has twisted wildflowers into her snarly hair and is wearing an orange T-shirt with what looks like the Star of Bethlehem on it (black on orange, the devil’s colors) and a two-edged slogan that could mean the birth of Christ connects you to God, but probably means that Christianity is lethal. “This headstone broke in half. See what it says.”

  “‘A Broken Heart Lies Here.’ Wow! That one wins the black ribbon! Except…” She kicks at a whiskey bottle and a couple of crushed beercans in the weeds nearby. “Probably not God’s joke, but some drunk’s. Party place.”

  The two of them are so engaged in their ghoulish amusements that they have forgotten the reason they are here. No matter. They will not find what they are looking for. Even did it exist, it would not appear before their blinded eyes. For this people’s heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.

  Darren does not feel he has come here of his own accord. He has been brought here, whether by some demonic force or by the will of God, he cannot be sure, but mindful of the messages he has been discovering of late, he too, though uninterested in the pointless search of his two companions, has looked and listened carefully, read the stony messages, watched for suggestive patterns in the arrangement of the tombs, especially here in this old municipal cemetery from early in the century, when the town was young. It was not far from the center when first laid out, but the town, instead of embracing it, grew the other way, almost as if in fear or revulsion, and over time other cemeteries of a more contemporary and sterile sort (they have visited them) were created while this one sank into its woodsy surroundings and was largely forgotten, its graves untended. “You Will Be In Our Hearts Forever,” says a particularly melancholy gravestone lying in cracked ruin on its back, buried in weeds and dark green with moss, the deceased’s name obliterated by the weather or else broken away. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher. Who did not know Jesus.

  When Darren discovered both the photos and the car gone, he was seized by a convulsive rage, which may have been a holy rage, though it didn’t feel like it. He felt personally betrayed and his eyes filled with tears. If Billy Don has shown that evil girl those photos, what else has he shown and told her? He had been working on his investigations into what he was calling “paranormal manifestations at the site of the first martyrdom” and additional esoteric implications in the patterns of text and number in other recordings and documents, such as “The Revelation to Reverend Ely Collins,” and in his careful cut-and-splice isolation of the fragments from the ditch he had struck on something new and startling: the word “two” before “week” (so perhaps it was “weeks”). Did that mean the voice was suggesting that the critical date might not be June the seventh, but July the twenty-sixth? He had dashed out in search of Billy Don to get his opinion and out in the main square had run into Mrs. Blaurock, who told him she’d just spoken with Billy Don on his way over to the parking lot. She’d grabbed his arm in her big meaty fist and said, “There’s a lotta people here think you boys’re on to something. God bless you, son. You keep doing your good work.” Their car was gone. He’d feared the worst. The missing photos had confirmed it.

  It was all he could do to stop himself from exploding into a tantrum when a giddy, excited Billy Don returned to tell him the Elliott girl would be taking them on a tour of the town cemeteries in search of Marcella Bruno’s grave. When he confronted Billy Don with his treacherous deception (his voice was trembling, he couldn’t help it), Billy Don only blushed and grinned sheepishly and asked if he was going with them or not? No, he snapped. Certainly not. It was completely stupid—even if they found a grave marker with her name on it, they could not know whose the buried body was, or even if there was one—and it could be dangerous. He begged Billy Don not to go, but when Billy Don left, he left with him, in part to protect his deluded friend but mostly because he could not seem to stop himself.

  They started in what the other two believed was the most likely place, the San Luca Catholic cemetery, and they did find the parents’ grave with its small “Riposa In Pace” headstone, together with three other Bruno children buried close by—two boys just out of their teens and an unborn baby girl—but no sign of Giovanni or Marcella. Of course, they were probably excommunicated by then and not allowed in here. That was the girl’s judgment, but just the same, they scoured the cemetery grave by grave, Billy Don squatting down to read the names and numbers, the Elliott girl sometimes taking notes. The place felt alien to Darren, full of open-armed Virgin Marys and tearful angels, and he did not believe he would learn anything here, so he trailed along behind the others, keeping a wary eye on the irreverent girl and on the other visitors wandering about, mostly old women wearing headscarves. In case anyone asked, they were presumably college friends of hers, working on a history project, but if they were found out, the consequences could be serious.

  He did
pause for a moment in front of a square blocky tombstone for two brothers who died apparently at the same time in 1931, an accident or something. There were two carved miners’ helmets on top and a strange Italian inscription that read “Quello Che Siete Fummo, Quello Che Siamo Sarete.” “Siete” might be “seven” and “fummo” “smoke,” he thought, but he had no clue at all about “sarete” or “siamo.” The helmets had lamps on them, just like the one Clara often uses for baptism ceremonies, and the four numbers of the year, he realized, added up to fourteen, twice “siete.” Could “sarete” be some kind of tunic or something? The Elliott girl saw him studying it and came over to read the inscription over his shoulder, blowing her obnoxious “fummo” past his ear. “What’s a ‘sarete’?” he asked. Barked, really. He was finding it hard to be civil. “Well, my Italian is pretty lousy, but I think it’s all a play on the ‘to be’ verb. Something like, ‘What you are we were and what we are you’ll be.’ Couple of guys who wanted everyone to know we’re all in the same club.” He felt stupid and angry. He began walking toward the gate and eventually they followed, laughing at some private joke.

  They went on to the Woodlawn, Our Savior, South Baptist Memorial (in which they recognized the names of several of the coal miners killed in the Deepwater accident, including Ben Wosznik’s brother), and West Condon Municipal cemeteries, all out beyond the edge of town on one side or the other. In one of them the Elliott girl asked them about her aunt Debra. Had Darren any intention of replying to the girl’s question (he had not), he would have said that she is a committed leader within the movement and one of its most selfless benefactors (this was mostly true), serenely (less true) awaiting God’s next interaction with human history. He might also have told her that it was Colin, in a clearly visionary moment, who had recognized her as an emissary of the forces of evil—he mistakenly called her the Antichrist, though everyone knew what he meant—at the time of her brazen infiltration of the gathering last week on the Mount of Redemption. Colin, though desperately unstable, is a special sort of genius, attuned to vibrations beyond the ken of others in the way that certain high-pitched frequencies could be heard by dogs but not by the human ear, and Darren always listens carefully to everything he says. Billy Don did answer the girl and what he said was that Mrs. Edwards is “kind of upset” about all the new people in the camp and about having to give up her cabin and that she spends most of her time now down in the vegetable garden with Colin and Mrs. Dunlevy.