The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  And then, without even thinking about it, Debra did a very brave thing. She choked down her panic and picked up a thick branch, and just as the boy gave a surprised little yelp, gave him such a blow as might have bashed his brains out, grabbed up the lifeless girl, and half dragging her, half carrying her, screaming for help, hauled her away from there, stumbling through the undergrowth and over one of the bridges, afraid to look back for fear they were chasing her and she’d lose heart and fall down and they’d both be killed.

  She was met at the edge of the camp by Ben and Wayne and Welford Oakes running her way, Ben with his shotgun, Hunk Rumpel just behind them in his white longjohns and carrying a rifle, Clara and Hazel and Ludie Belle in their bathrobes, everyone streaming out of cabins and the lodge and up from the camper parking lot, looking shocked and terrified. Clara swept her naked daughter into her arms, the child still stunned, wet eyes staring at nothing, mouth agape, her thin body oddly rigid like a stick figure, blood streaming down her sinewy thighs, her mother wrapping her bathrobe around her and hurrying her away. Debra’s knees gave way as soon as she was free of the girl, and they were all suddenly crowding around her, asking her questions, who was it and what happened, but she couldn’t think, she couldn’t speak, all the tensions of her ordeal were exploding out of her in uncontrollable sobbing, she could only point toward the creek, and several of the men ran off in that direction (and, yes, she who’d always opposed the arming of the camp hoped they would shoot all of them), and then she was throwing up. She was gathered up in hugs and prayers from where she’d fallen, one of the women saying someone should call Bernice to bring out some nerve medicine, Ludie Belle whispering in her ear that it was all right, just fling up, honey, it’ll do you a world, and guiding her toward her cabin, she should lie down a spell, she’ll fix her a cup of tea.

  She became aware then that someone else was wailing even louder than she was—it was Colin, running at full speed, round and round in wild circles in nothing but his underwear, yowling at the top of his lungs. At the door of the next cabin, Abner Baxter, the father of all those terrible boys, was scowling furiously at Colin as though it was all his fault and trying to push his youngest daughter back inside not to witness it. Darren and Billy Don tried to catch Colin, but he leapt right past them, and soon everyone was watching Colin or chasing him, and she herself had stopped her weeping. It was Hunk who finally collared him and lifted him up, his feet still churning, and brought him over to the cabin, where Darren and Billy Don and some of the women gathered to help restrain him and calm him down.

  Before they could get him inside, however, there was the sound of anguished howls rolling up from below and the men returned, Travers and Wayne carrying Young Abner Baxter under his armpits, the boy dressed only in girls’ panties with blood streaming down his face and hanging limp as a sack of butter from their grip, his toes dragging through the grass, but screaming in pain so at least he was still alive. They dumped him in front of Abner Baxter and Ben, who had a leather belt wrapped round his fist like tape, said, “Pack up your family and get out,” and Colin fell down and rolled around in the twitchy way he sometimes does and started howling along with the Baxter boy.

  “What’s all this about?” Abner Baxter demanded over the racket.

  “Ask your boy. You got thirty minutes or we’ll do your moving for you.”

  He bristled and his neck reddened and he seemed ready to burst into one of his self-righteous tantrums, but then he looked around at all the armed men and at his bawling near-naked son and his chest caved in and his head seemed to sink lower on his shoulders. “But where will we go?”

  “We don’t rightly care. Just pack and git. Now.”

  “Ain’t them letters writ there on his head?” someone asked.

  “Looks as how somebody was tryin’ to use his face for a notepad.”

  “Maybe it’s the mark of the beast,” someone whispers.

  “Don’t do nuthin rash, Wayne. Don’t go killin’ everbody.”

  “Ain’t fixin’ to, Ludie Belle. Only so long as these folks git trottin’.”

  And that was all of it she saw because the women bundled her and Colin, still yelping frantically and throwing himself recklessly about, into their cabin and closed the door on the outside world. The women managed to get Colin into his bed somehow and pin him down with his blankets, though he was still yowling. They steered Debra toward her own bedroom at the back, but she chose instead her nursing chair in the anteroom from which she could keep an eye on Colin. Glenda Oakes told him to stop fretting, it wasn’t real, it was all just play-acting, and she cuffed him lightly to stop the hysterics, surprising him into a momentary stillness and shocking Debra just a little. Glenda had some hard candy for him in her pocket. She told him it was magic candy and to suck on it for five minutes and everything would be hunkydory.

  There was no tea, so Ludie Belle made her a cup of instant coffee and then left for a while, but some of the others remained, crying and praying and talking to each other as if she and Colin weren’t there, speculating on what might have happened. When Ludie Belle came back, she said she’d gone to the office and phoned Bernice and also Mr. Suggs and told him to bring the sheriff and then called Duke L’Heureux and some of the others to come out right away, and she shooed the other women out (“Something’s on fire!” Glenda exclaimed, and Ludie Belle said, “Ain’t nuthin but a little bonnyfire,” shutting the door behind her) and closed the windows and tsk-tsked that Debra had let her coffee go cold. She said she should lock the door and get some private time, so as to recollect herself and settle the boy down. Before that could happen, Ben Wosznik stopped in still carrying his shotgun, to thank her and see how she was and to ask if there was anything she could tell him. She tried, but she still couldn’t speak. She only started crying again, and Ludie Belle said Sister Debra was still in a state of shock, that they should maybe wait until after Bernice got out here, and she asked him if Young Abner told him anything. Ben said that the boy was out cold when they found him and the only thing they could get out of him after they’d dipped him in the creek to bring him around was that it was his brother Nathan who cut him. “What was he doin’ with them bloomers on?” “I don’t know. Was it them motorcycle boys down there?” Ben asked, turning toward her, and, still crying, she nodded. “Carl Dean’s panel truck is parked out front and he ain’t nowhere around. Was he there too?” She was confused about this, but she nodded again, and Ludie Belle said Duke told her on the phone that Carl Dean was drinking last night at the motel with the bikers and left with them. Ben stood there slump-shouldered for a moment, shaking his old head, and then he and Ludie Belle left, Ludie Belle giving her a sympathetic hug and telling her not to worry about church this morning, everybody would understand.

  With everyone gone and the door locked, Colin, still trembling and whimpering softly around his jawbreaker, has crawled out of his bed and into her lap on the nursing chair. She holds him close and strokes his hair and tries to pray, but cannot summon the words for it, feeling more distant from God and Jesus than at any time since she first moved to the camp. Of course, she is grateful to have survived—it was a kind of miracle really, so it could be said her prayers have been answered. But why has she been obliged to witness such horror in the first place? She sees again the long knives, the snarling cruelty on their shadowy faces, hears the dismaying sounds behind her, the grunting, the sinister laughter, and finds that she is crying again. It was terrible, but there must be a reason. She has not always been a good Christian and has often been a doubter of the stories that get told, but that God is purposeful and that His purposes are loving she has never doubted. She sees it in the birds, the flowers, the way a tree grows, the way the stars are born and take their places. If God is not purposeful, then nothing means anything, and that is an unbearable thought. And if He is not merciful, then He is a kind of monster, and that would be like saying the sun is cold and bad is good. God is God and cannot escape his own self-definition. I am that
I am, He said so. Wesley taught her that. God, as he used to say, is not free, which is of course a very Presbyterian remark. From the Brunist point of view, God has a story to tell, but humans, through their actions, help him to write it. It’s mostly a happy story, but it has its gruesome side, and maybe she has been given a glimpse of that. The basic plot is all laid out and irreversible—it’s almost as though, in some other notion of time, it has already happened—but the details are obscure, only hinted at by prophecy, and the characters are interchangeable. One cannot choose to be among the communion of saints, but one can seek to be.

  In her old life, her frivolous empty-headed one, the Book of Revelation was an inconvenient and somewhat hateful tag-on to the gospel of love, one that never fit her view of things, but it surges through Brunism like the swollen creek through the camp. God and His living metaphors: let him who has eyes see. She is learning. Loose the four angels, He said. Actually, there were five of them this morning. The fifth angel in Revelation is the one given the key to the bottomless pit, isn’t that right? The one who bosses the other four and whose kingdom is full of darkness and pain? And there were more angels in the prophecy. More to come? Does this make any sense? Was God speaking to all of them through Elaine’s ordeal with Debra as His witness? She thinks of herself as an unlikely receptacle for prophetic knowledge, but the same could be said of Giovanni Bruno. She will read that book again and think about it and share her thoughts with the two boys, who are better at understanding such things than she.

  The shouting outside has died down. Deeper quieter voices have prevailed. The thought of leaving this cabin and facing the world again, even the little world of this camp, is almost unbearable, but she will have to do that. As for the larger world, it is beyond their reach, for they are penniless; what they have is this little cabin. Perhaps she will heat up some water and give Colin a soothing bath in the new washtub. Something worshipful to do in place of Sunday service. It would soothe her, too. Colin sighs tremulously or moans softly from time to time, but he has stopped shaking and may be asleep, and she has stopped crying, too. She has made a nest for him with her body, her broken-winged dove. Though he is cuddled up tight, gripping her breast as though to keep from falling, his thin white legs are asprawl, and she knows that they present an image not unlike that of Jesus being held by his mournful mother after His descent from the cross. Except that Colin, though as pale as the dead Jesus and not very well, is very much alive. He lets go of her breast now and takes her hand off his hip, where it had been resting, and slides it to his penis. He often sleeps this way when he crawls into her bed, his penis soft then, his underwear damp and sticky. It’s not exactly right, but it always makes him feel calmer and she thinks of it as a necessary sedative and a kind of therapy. This morning, though, his underwear is dry and his penis is stiff, like a wooden clothespin. She wraps her hand around it as he wraps his hand around hers. He makes sudden little jerking movements, gripping her fist, and then there is a hot warm flow—“Mother!” he whispers, “Oh! Mother! I love you!”—then sinks away, sound asleep, dead to the world. Debra, cupping his wet pouch protectively as a mother might her newborn’s tender little head, is crying again.

  BOOK III

  And when he had opened the third seal,

  I heard the third beast say, Come and see.

  And I beheld, and lo a black horse;

  and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

  And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say,

  A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny;

  and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

  —The Book of Revelation 6.5-4

  III.1

  Thursday 7 May – Sunday 24 May

  The King is in his counting house, but no money to be counted. The Wizards have it all. By magic? No, their magic couldn’t pull a coin out of your ear. Probably he just left the back door open. He can’t think of everything. The war is not going well. Treasure Mountain is under attack, its guardian dragon having wandered off in pursuit of succulent maidens. A serious error of judgment, but some things can’t be helped. The forest has fallen to the Cretins, the King’s counselors are bickering confusedly among themselves, and when the Jester, somewhat soused on the royal mead, remarks that the Castle has been caught out like a maiden with her drawbridges down, he is banished to the fields to practice his jokes on the sheep and share their mange and foot rot.

  As for the Jester’s daughter, the witless Goose Girl, she is slumped, desperately in need of a smoke, in the back row of the West Condon Township High School auditorium, scribbling idiocies in the notebook on her knees. This chilly spring day chances also to be (the world is suffocating in irony or else it’s the imbedded transgenerational odor of child sweat) Ascension Day, though probably few here other than the Catholic priest, the Lutheran preacher, and herself even know that. Because Tommy Cavanaugh has asked her to, Sally is attending the inaugural meeting of the New Opportunities for West Condon citizens committee, the very one (irony is lost on Tommy) that, thanks to his dear dad, has cost her dear dad his job and condemned him to the donkey stables at the Fort. So do me a favor, Sal… It was Tommy’s assignment to get the young people out to the meeting, and there are a lot of them in here—his old high school teammates and drinking buddies, all the stay-at-home losers, but especially Tommy’s fan club, his exes and wannabes, she of the bouncing tits among them. Tommy himself is back up at university, having had to drive there in a beat-up tangerine-colored Buick Special rented from Lem after his mom’s station wagon got nicked and wrecked over the weekend, so Sally is martyring herself unwitnessed, but she promised to send him her notes, and anyway it’s all mill-grist, is it not? See here how her restless plume flies blithely o’er the welcoming page. Her dad’s Chamber successor and new city manager (no one seems certain just how this has happened, least of all the mayor, who stares out upon the gathered citizenry from his marginalized seat at one end of the stage, his fat round face the very picture of bafflement; Sally makes a little cartoon sketch in her notebook: Simple Simon as a con artist) has just announced his first coup in office—he has interested a big-city consortium called the Roma Historical Society in the purchase and restoration of the derelict West Condon Hotel—and he has been duly applauded. Things are, on this day of Christ’s liftoff, looking up. That’s the message. The city manager is also the de facto chairman of this committee, and he goes on to describe in his crisp monotone all the legal actions they have taken against the illegal encampment of the cult at the edge of town, which is blamed for much that has gone wrong in recent times and which is now trying to steal the mine and its historic hill out from under their noses.

  Backdropped by a huge banner in the school colors that says “NOWC” and surrounded by his varsity squad of preachers and politicians, Tommy’s father assumes the podium to let it be known that if the city can acquire the Deepwater property, he will ask the state for funding for a new hospital to be built on it or else an industrial park or a state prison or some kind of recreational facility, maybe a monument to the fallen mine heroes, his very lack of a clear project (he asks the audience for their own ideas, setting off a general brouhaha) evidence that the hill is not his nor will it likely ever be.

  This is one tough ballgame, he says—but what he doesn’t say is that he is losing it. The Brunists already have detailed architectural plans for a big church up there—Billy Don has described them to Sally—with groundbreaking set for just a month from today, and apparently, thanks to mischievous Irene, they’re building it mostly with Cavanaugh family money. Which, Tommy says, has left his dad, also not an appreciator of irony, pretty fucking depressed.

  Now, as the citizenry argue noisily about how to use land they don’t own and never will (some want to reopen the mine itself—there’s a whole lot of coal down there still, they shout—all the mine structures have remained in place in hopes of its reopening, the city should take it over and run
it, it owes that much to the hardworking people who have made this town what it is today), she can see the dismay setting in on the man’s face like time-lapse aging, and he seems to be looking around for an exit just as she is. Somewhere she has written in one of her notebooks: It is the attempt to avoid fate which provokes the calamity. Now she opens her cogdiss page and writes: Calamity is the normal circumstance of the universe. Catastrophe creates.

  This page was opened after her meeting earlier this week with Reverend Konrad Dreyer of Trinity Lutheran, now sitting onstage with the other city fathers, smiling that sad patronizing smile that preachers bestow upon the damned. Sally was there to try to find out what it was about him that so baffled her parents and their Presbyterian friends. Without a minister, they’re obliged to go to church at Trinity Lutheran, which is damp and chilly and smells of mildewed hymnals, and that’s bad enough without having Connie Dreyer put them to sleep with his fustian monologues. You should only have to take a metaphysical once a year, as her father put it, twisting the cap off his after-church Sunday morning “spirituals.” Sally and the minister sat out on the church lawn where he’d been weeding dandelions and planting begonia and gladiolus bulbs alongside the broad front steps. He got out his pipe, meaning she was free to hit the cigarettes. Just to be provocative, she had worn her RELIGION IS MYTH-INFORMATION tee, even though it has a split seam under one armpit and wasn’t completely clean—to which he replied, acknowledging the line with a nod, Yes, I can see that. But a myth is not a lie, Sally. It’s a special kind of language used to symbolize certain realities beyond space and time. It is information. God’s a symbolist, you mean. No, on the contrary. Everything he is and does is just what it is and nothing else. You know: I am that I am. We earth-bound creatures use symbolism as one way of trying to understand God’s thought, which for Him is the same thing as His actions. For we and all we think and do and feel are only shadowy and scattered emanations of divine thought, action, and passion. Whereupon, when she asked about passion, he explained God’s love, quoting someone else to the effect that love, as experienced in eternity, is an incessant “dying to oneself” (she took a note, wondering if human love might not be something like that when it was really good), a prefiguring of which was provided by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, an act of divine love performed for us within the constraints of our own limited human perceptions of space and time, which are not those of infinity and eternity, but of mere extension and duration. He seemed so sure of himself. How did he know all that to be so? He gazed into his pipe bowl as though his thoughts were stored there, clamped the stem in his teeth, took a draw, then said: Well, Socrates would say by intuition, but for me it’s more a matter of faith. And faith in divine governance is just that: faith. Everything else, including church dogma or Biblical interpretation, is achieved by reason and so is susceptible to human error. But so is your first principle, Reverend Dreyer. No, it may be true or false—in this world we’ll never know—but it cannot be subject to error. He smiled. It is that it is.