The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Here in the old city cemetery, where there does indeed appear to be a patch of graves marked only by rotting wooden crosses with obscure markings on them, the kind of place unwanted bodies might once have been dumped, Darren has found many small signs of possible relevance: several gravestones with encircled hands pointing to Heaven on them; somber quotations from the Book of Revelation; a flying bird, probably a dove, also in a circle on the tombstone of a woman named White; a carved bleeding heart on a broken stone obelisk (“The face of evil!” the wicked girl exclaimed, pointing at the heart, and for some inane reason the two of them fell all over themselves in hysterical giggling); several number combinations of seven and fourteen; and a dizzying quantity of letters, words and names lying about like the answers to a lost crossword puzzle. He feels he is drawing close to something but has not yet found it.

  It was not easy getting in here. The Elliott girl knew where it was, but even so, it was hard to find, the paths overgrown, the cemetery itself hidden behind trees, brush, and bramble. She said there was an easier way in, but it was more public, the graveyard being only a hundred yards or so from one of the country club golf course fairways, and indeed they have come across a few gashed golfballs. It was while crawling through the thickest part on the way in, blackberry bushes snagging at his chinos, the sky overhead darkening, broodingly overcast, that Darren suddenly knew that he’d come to the place to which he’d been so mysteriously drawn, and he began to forgive the girl in the way that one feels inclined to forgive the Antichrist for doing what he has to do to bring on the Last Days. Until she said, “It’s been a long afternoon, guys. Time for a pee. Ladies this way, gents that.” Billy Don happily stepped behind a tree and relieved himself noisily into the dead leaves, but Darren left them in disgust and pushed on into the old graveyard on his own.

  Billy Don now comes on a rectangular hole in the ground and he and the girl both assume it is an open grave, one that was either robbed or never filled. “Spooky!” Billy Don says, and in truth there is something unsettling about it, but Darren knows it is not what he is looking for, or what is looking for him. More like a kind of prefatory signal. It occurs to him that God’s purpose in taking or hiding Marcella’s body was to stimulate the very search he is undertaking, and that this insight itself is a kind of preparation. “Do you think it might have been hers?” Billy Don asks with a hushed voice.

  “Just as likely it was dug by drunken kids on a graveyard dare,” the girl says dismissively, but she seems nervous, too, and lights up another cigarette. “You know, who can spend the night sleeping in an open grave? It’s so overgrown, I think this one must have been dug or disturbed a long time ago.”

  “Well, five years is a pretty long time…”

  While the other two poke around in the hole like the disrespectful predators that they are, Darren moves among the gray stones as through a book with scattered half-erased pages, searching out the graveyard’s hidden corners. The earth is soft underfoot, rising and dipping slightly (there is probably a webwork of old abandoned mines below and one day all of this could be completely swallowed up), the tombstones tipping and leaning in odd directions, many of them broken or fallen. The roots of maturing trees have reached into the graves themselves and upended their markers and no doubt stirred their bones. Darren is not disheartened by these reminders of time’s ravages and the brevity of the human span. On the contrary, he finds the place unspeakably beautiful in its humble abandon and knows that God would find it so too, loving its buried denizens in a way not possible in those manicured grassy fields of grand self-congratulating monuments. He is happy he has come here.

  And then, suddenly, there it is. Behind several small half-sunken footstones set in a kind of semicircle like boundary markers (like footlights, he is thinking, at the edge of a stage): a lone grave with a tilting stone and the name Gabriel J. Brown. Gabriel: the Annunciation angel. J. Brown: Giovanni Bruno. Died: age 33. Christ’s age. The Prophet’s own age on the Day of Redemption, and maybe the year he was killed, too. On the stone: the Brunist symbol of a cross in a circle. And an ominous warning: “Awake! Believe! Repent! Thy bones as mine are only lent!” He realizes the other two have gathered behind him. “Look at the date,” he says. He is calm now, free from fear or loathing.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “No, Billy Don. I mean the day.” There is a distant rumble of ominous thunder.

  “Six, seven. Ah. Wow. June the seventh.”

  He feels the devilish girl shrink away. Was that a hissing sound?

  II.4

  Friday 1 May

  I don’t feel like I’ve come to the right place. How did you end up here?

  “I don’t know. It just seemed to happen.” They are passing down West Condon’s dark dripping Main Street with its facing rows of squat one- and two-story brick buildings staring sullenly at one another across a patched and repatched blacktopped street as if in chagrin or regret. Some are boarded up, others gaudily SALE-signed, the signs tattered with age. The rain has let up and there are breaks in the clouds, but there are still distant rumbles. It is Friday, a shopping day, and May Day on top of it, and there may be action out at the highway shopping centers, but nothing is happening here. The streets are empty but for a scatter of old rusted-out clunkers and muddy pickups looking as though they simply broke down where parked a decade or so ago, and were left to sit as monuments to ruin. The only shop doing any apparent business is a package liquor store down a side street. “A challenging ministry.”

  You can say that again. This place exudes sin like sweat. Those wet bricks stink with it, the gutters are running with it. Smell it? Like old socks. A seed of evildoers. These poor lost devils were shapen in iniquity, as the saying goes, and in sin did their mothers conceive them. What in my name are we doing out here?

  A shoe store clerk steps out for a curbside smoke as they pass by. They exchange nods. He looks down at Wesley’s shoes. “I was tired of being kept like a pet in a windowless cage,” Wesley says. “I wanted to see daylight.”

  “I know what you mean,” the shoe store clerk agrees gloomily, flicking his butt into the wet street, and Jesus says: I am the light of the world, son. What more do you need? “If you want to trade those old dogs in for some genuine vintage classics, come on in. I got a sale on. Whole damned store.”

  “Another time, thanks. Fresh air. I need fresh air.”

  “Suit yourself,” says the shoe store clerk. Jesus says nothing, but Wesley feels a little tremor in his solar plexus or thereabouts, as though Jesus might just have shrugged.

  Prissy seemed unusually excited and distracted this morning, and when she dashed off to do her shopping, she left the side door leading to the kitchen open, so he and his indwelling Christ just walked out. There was something very strange at first about the streets. As if they were not quite real. Eerie. It was raining lightly, but it was not the rain. Then it occurred to him. It was the daylight. The garage dance studio has only one window at the back, painted black, so there is not much difference in there between night and day, and he has somewhat lost his notion of diurnal time. Prissy sometimes brings him supper when he’s expecting breakfast. Also there are no mirrors out on the streets, at least not in the residential neighborhood, the shop windows that remain here on Main Street having dimly restored the studio’s ambience of replicative enclosure.

  The Chamber of Commerce office looks closed, last autumn’s high school football schedule still pasted up on its fly-specked window. A furniture and appliances store is offering its stock for rental as well as sale. Next to it, a bald-headed barber wearing a stained butcher’s apron sits in his own chair, thumbing through a tattered magazine. He glances up at Wesley, raises his eyebrows in inquiry, shakes his head, returns to his magazine. Prissy cuts his hair now, shaping it, as she says, to suit his new image as a prophet. It is longer, he has sideburns now, and he has not shaved for a few days.

  There is a bus pulled in at the corner station, which doubles as a juv
enile hangout with its soda fountain and pinball machines. No one is getting on or off the bus, which is headed west according to the destination announced at the top of the front window. He has not told Jesus where he is going. There are no secrets between them, so he has also not told himself. But now the cat is out of the bag. He is going to the bank to get some money to buy a bus ticket. He can feel Jesus’ sour complaints more than hear them. “You have told me to remember the old rule of the prophet,” he says. “And you just said this place is so full of sin it smells like dirty socks.” A bald guy in a bowtie leaving the bank—a member of his former congregation, best he can recall—seems about to object to that, then changes his mind, dances out of his way.

  Well, I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, and this is a good place for that.

  “There are sinners everywhere,” he reminds Jesus, pushing on into the bank. “If we stay here, we’re just going to get into trouble. Wouldn’t you like to hit the open road?”

  Nah. I like it here, Christ says. There are three women in the bank behind the counters. Knowing Christ’s preferences, he goes to the prettiest one. I think I’m in love.

  “In love—?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” the girl says, attempting a friendly smile, but flushing visibly as if he’s found her out. Well, he’s a prophet now. He probably has.

  “Pardon is granted, my child.” He returns her smile and hands her his checkbook. “I would like to make a withdrawal, please.” She takes his checkbook with trembling hands and goes to check the account. Jesus says: It was her “Dance of the Seven Veils” that really got to me. She said it was a kind of requiem for my poor cousin, and I was deeply moved. “Perhaps we can take her with us,” Wesley suggests, gazing at the young woman who has returned. She glances anxiously at the other women, who watch him now with big round eyes. Ah. Yes. There’s an idea. “How much is there, my dear? I think I’d like to take it all.”

  “There’s…there’s nothing in your account, Reverend Edwards. The account is closed.”

  “Closed? Closed?” he roars, and the women all jump an inch or so off the floor. The young woman serving them crosses herself, and, inside, Jesus winces. It might be a good idea to ask who has done this, he says. “You let me handle this!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Who has done this? Who has closed my account?”

  “I-I don’t know, sir.”

  “Where is the thieving iniquitous money changer who runs this unholy establishment?”

  “Who? You mean Mr. Cavanaugh? He’s not here today, Reverend Edwards! I’ll call the, uh, the assistant manager upstairs!”

  Look, you’ve frightened her. It might be wise…

  “No need to be frightened, my child. This is a mere business matter. Ha ha. Your soul is not in danger.” He has meant that as a mere lighthearted jest, but she looks more terrified than ever.

  “Charlie?” she is whispering loudly into the phone. “It’s Angie. Come quickly!”

  “Is Charlie the assistant manager?”

  “Yes, sir, he’ll—he’ll be down in a minute.”

  I just have this uneasy feeling we should be leaving. Well is he, you know, that hath found prudence, et cetera. “Perhaps, miss, we’ll come back another day.”

  Priscilla Parsons Tindle, returning from her highway shopping with a carload of flowers, decides to stop at the bank on her way through downtown to reprovision her depleted purse. She has amazing news for Wesley and she has decided to reveal it to him without words by way of a special May Day dance on a vast bed of flowers. Her May basket. She has chosen blooms with big velvety petals, which she plans to pluck and heap up in a great pile on the studio floor as a kind of aromatic nest, first dancing a vigorous bounding grand allegro dance of the joys of spring all around the studio to work up a good sticky perspiration, then plunging into the petals for the celebrative part of the dance, during which, now clothed only in sweet petals as if in full flower herself, she will, in effect, with movements she has been mentally choreographing on her drive, prophesy the extraordinary events of a few months hence. He may misunderstand her meaning and try to join her in the nest, but that’s all right too.

  She parks in front of Mrs. Catter’s beauty salon and walks back toward the bank, just as two policemen come jogging across the street, their hands at their holsters, and with a great banging of doors and loud shouts enter into it. She decides perhaps it is not the right moment and returns hastily to her car.

  I recognize the big one. The Roman legionnaire who speared me when I was nailed up and already dead and couldn’t defend myself.

  “He was a gum-chewer?”

  No, but he worked his jaws in ominous ways. We can’t let them get away with this. Do something.

  The legionnaire has tipped his police cap low over his brows and is cracking his knuckles restlessly as though itching to inflict grievous bodily harm. The police station—counter, chairs, telephones, clock on the wall, notices pinned up—is much like the bank, but darker and dirtier and without any pretty girls. Would his money be safer here? It would not.

  Oh oh. Get ready. I think we’re in for a scourging. That guy coming looks exactly like Pontius Pilate.

  Pontius Pilate introduces himself as Police Chief Romano. Romano! What did I tell you!

  Police Chief Romano asks why Reverend Edwards has been arrested, and the legionnaire snaps back in his hard blunt gum-popping way: “Public nuisance.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Scaring the pants off them girls in the bank,” says the legionnaire’s partner, releasing a gob of brown spit into a paper cup.

  “Nonsense. I was merely checking my bank account. It seems I have been robbed.”

  “Robbed?”

  “That’s right, Officer. My personal account has been emptied out and closed.”

  “Was this an individual account or a joint account?”

  “That hardly matters. It has been done without my knowledge or permission. The bank owes me an explanation, not to mention the missing money.”

  “Unh hunh.” Police Chief Romano, who looks like a man who has seen everything, closes his ledger and pulls on his nose and says, “Let him go, boys.” The legionnaire protests at that, smacking his fist in his palm, but the police chief says, “He’s harmless, Charlie. Only a bit batty. It’s his old lady has cleaned him out. Her and them people out at the church camp. You might say he’s got a point.”

  While driving home, Priscilla has been rehearsing her “push-push” sequence for the nest of flowers dance, hammering the steering wheel with her pelvis, and she realizes that the climax of her May Day performance will be quite exciting and almost certainly misunderstood by dear Wesley. And by Jesus, too, probably, whom (if that is not stretching a pronoun), in some odd way, she has also come to love, though she believes he will be quicker to grasp the portent of her dance and be more approving of it. His story really. But now what to do with the flowers? They might wilt in the car or in the house or studio, and moreover she wants to surprise Wesley tonight and really does not want to have to deal with Ralph’s tedious questions or even more tedious silence. She decides the best place for them is in the open air in the shade at the back of the studio under the blacked-out window, and all the better if it rains on them a bit, so she quickly improvises a little number she calls her “bundles of joy” dance, sweeping the precious blooms from the car to what she calls “backstage” in a series of little twirls and leaps that the neighbors will probably think of as quite loopy, though surely they are used to it by now.

  This is, was for years, has become again of late, Priscilla’s way. Life as dance else not life at all. It is her own special vision, her way of creating the beauty that life, left to do its own thing, so sadly lacks. In her professional years with Ralph, she preferred austere staging, harsh lighting, African percussion and Eastern wood and string instruments, and a minimum of costuming, finding even a body stocking too constrictive. Ralph was an elegant
partner, always there, supportive, given to understatement, which set off her own passionate exuberance, but somewhat passive, waiting always for her to take the lead. Their dances seemed often to end without resolution, more like questions, really. He did not understand climax; he was incapable of it. He was something like a self-contained tango partner, formal (he even dressed in black with a pleated white shirt; only in the studio would he wear less), taut with an inner tension, but ultimately predictable. Priscilla had always aimed at the unexpected, for life, she felt, was all too predictable, and it needed something out of the ordinary for it to be experienced at all. It was, in effect, her way of praying to what she preferred to call the Life Force rather than God, though she was a believing Christian like most people were, simply too preoccupied or unsuited to figure things out on her own and trusting the wisdom of those whose vocation it was—Wesley, for example, various astrologers and philosophers, her great-aunt when she was still alive—and Priscilla addressed the Life Force wherever and whenever she could. She had dishwashing dances and laundry and ironing dances and shopping for Ralph’s high-fiber breakfast cereals dances. Sometimes these were just spontaneous responses to the moment, a flash of sudden inspiration in a department store aisle or on a putting green, but she tried always to choreograph her dances, in retrospect when not possible before, choreography being her way of thinking about the world. Giving it, it being shapeless, shape. Being nameless, name.