The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  She knew by then that it would be useless to question the historicity of the resurrection story or dispute the divine inspiration of the Bible or the prophecy of the Last Judgment and et cet, because he would just agree with her or say it could be so, we’re only human after all, and smile his benign smile, the smile he is casting now upon the auditorium, as though to say God’s love is flowing through him and he is sharing it with everyone. The smile of the terminally stoned upon the squares. So instead she asked him what he thought about the Brunists. Isn’t it curious that their religion only got going after what they’d prophesied didn’t happen? He saw through her instantly. You’re going to say the same thing was true of the beginnings of Christianity, he said, and it was her turn to smile. Well, it was, wasn’t it? Jesus told his disciples the end would come in their own lifetimes and it didn’t. He let everybody down, his little cult should have died, but look what happened. Isn’t that really weird? He nodded and said that it was and that there was now a quasi-scientific term for what causes that weird-ness. It’s called cognitive dissonance, which he explained as believing or wanting to believe two contradictory things at the same time, or acting or having to act in conflict with one’s beliefs, and suffering the mental discomfort of that. Trying to resolve these conflicts and ease the discomfort releases a lot of creative energy, for the mind is forced to look for new beliefs or somehow transform the old existing ones. In the case of predicting an event that doesn’t happen, for example, especially when you are publicly committed to it—when, not to seem a fool, you have to go on believing something that’s contrary to the evidence, as with the Brunists or, yes, the early Christians—the dissonance aroused is alleviated by making it come true after all, perhaps by redefining it or rescheduling it, or just by getting more people to believe in the original prediction. So now I know what you’re going to say, she said. If everything flows from God’s head, then He planted this mechanism to make things like Christianity happen, whether or not there even ever was a Jesus. The minister laughed and tapped the ashes out of his pipe. Yes, the Spirit of God, which is everywhere, working from within to influence human imaginations to produce Christ-like stories, symbolizing the truths of God, as a great teacher of mine once said. And if so, it means that something good can come even from the Brunists, in spite of their naïve confusions and most folks’ misgivings. Something intended by God—in effect, engineered by Him. And I will tell you something stranger, Sally. Studies have shown that the less the reward or the milder the punishment, the greater and firmer the change. When it’s more like a voluntary decision, it sticks more. Thus, the failure of Moses’ law tablets. He chuckled, pocketing his pipe. No wonder he had to break them: they were too extreme, too implacable, and didn’t work. The Jesus generation knew better. And the most important lesson of cognitive dissonance is that to suffer is to love. People end up loving what they willingly suffer for, whether or not it merits either love or suffering. They don’t want to suffer and so they have to find some sort of justification for having elected to do so. The more suffering we have chosen for ourselves, the greater the commitment to the changed beliefs that have led to the suffering and the greater the love toward the object of those beliefs.

  Her present suffering may be having a similar effect. Chasing Tommy is an amusing diversion from what is now her writing life (yes, she has made that choice—this am who she am, bring on the dissonance and fuck the consequences), but putting up with nights like this, having to listen to her benighted townsfolk rattle insanely on in a suffocating school auditorium, suffering an infinite boredom sinking into total stupor, and not for Tommy’s sake, as she likes to pretend, but merely for the sake of her futile pursuit of him, is ratcheting up that pursuit’s value and her love for its object. Sally does not believe Tommy will ever show any interest in her, but she has to believe, against all odds, he will, else all she’s putting herself through will have been for nothing—even if, on one level, she doesn’t even like him, finding him an insensitive, spoiled, jock-strapped, self-centered nitwit. But, somewhat in the abstract, he’s also beautiful and she loves him. Maybe all the more so since he took her to the brink five years ago, like the Brunists got taken on their stormy hill—and more or less at the same time—then dropped her. Another failed prophecy: They both thought it was going to happen and it didn’t. And won’t. But will. I believe. Such are her vain expectations and the punishments she must suffer in their anticipation. But there’s a limit. When Tommy’s father remarks that it is religion that holds this community together and asks the Catholic priest and the Methodist preacher to lead them all in prayer, she butts out.

  A few days later, over ice cream sundaes in the Tucker City drugstore, Sally tries to explain this new concept to Billy Don Tebbett, leaving out the spooky divine engineering bit—the principle being, if you can understand the mechanism, you can escape it—but Billy Don only pretends to listen. He did seem genuinely happy to see her again when they met outside on the street, grinning his flushed awkward grin while pulling self-consciously on his droopy mustaches and squeezing her hand when she offered it, but now he has withdrawn behind his sunglasses once more as if regretting that he has come here. They are regulars now and evoke amused glances whenever they enter; the people all go silent and look the other way, busying themselves with this or that, no doubt hoping to overhear something scandalous again, and it’s not in her nature to disappoint them. The fear of that may be what has made Billy Don apprehensive, or else it’s her Mark Twain tee, IF THERE IS A GOD HE IS A MALIGN THUG, which he’s staring at, though without the usual close-read. He’s probably aware of the actions being taken against the camp by the city, and maybe he associates her with them. She asks if something is the matter and he only shrugs and says they’ve been working harder than ever at the camp and seem to be getting less and less done, and then he looks away. Though this is more an evasion than an answer, she decides to use it, and with her notebook open to her cogdiss page, she says that hard work might be a way of avoiding having to think about anything else, and he looks into her eyes with at least one of his and agrees with a nod that it could be. But when she suggests it might also be a way of inducing or reinforcing belief—that work is a kind of suffering, and the more of it you devote to some cause or other, the more you start to believe in it, have to believe in it—he says, no, it wasn’t anything like that, it was just to prove they can carry on without Ben and Clara.

  “You mean Mrs. Collins has left the camp?”

  “Well, just for three or four weeks or so. Probably. She and Ben are on a, you know, like, tour of the East Coast churches or something. Ben’s going to sing.”

  He’s looking away again. Something’s bothering him; he’s not coming clean. He has made his methodical way down through his sundae, but the old voracity is not there. On a hunch, she says: “What I’m saying is, when you’re only thinking about something—religion, say—you can take it or leave it. But when you start doing something, or have to, especially where people can see you, you get hooked. That is, you hook yourself. Doing creates believing. You know? Almost like it is believing. Or when, for example, something bad happens…”

  “Something bad did happen.”

  “Oh yeah?” Heads turn in the silence, not to face them, but to position their ears. “Billy Don…?”

  “I can’t talk about it. I promised.”

  “Is it why Mrs. Collins and her husband left?” He doesn’t reply, just glances up at her then drops his head. Maybe they got into it with somebody and things went wrong and they just ducked out. Which would be a total disaster. But what could have gone wrong? She had all her closest people around her; any fights, she’d have won them. And Mrs. Collins didn’t seem like one to get caught out in any kind of scandal either. So something happened to her to make her leave. But she’s used to trouble and she didn’t look a quitter. You had the feeling she would have stood up against any…unless… “Did they take her daughter along when they left?” This time he doesn’t even
glance up at her. “Something happened to her daughter…oh no. Someone in the camp?”

  He shakes his head. “No,” he mutters, his head down, speaking so softly he almost cannot be heard. “It was those bikers. They…”

  “The bikers? What—? Oh my god, Billy Don! They…?”

  He nods and puts his finger to his lips, glancing uneasily around the drugstore. Nothing to be heard but the soft flutter of the ceiling fan overhead. “Your aunt was a real heroine,” he wheezes, his hand in front of his mouth, and clears his throat. “She heard something and went down there and fought them all off with a big branch.”

  “She did? Aunt Debra?”

  “But she’s not the same now. She seems mad about something all the time, or else just sad. She gets very demanding and at the same time she cries a lot. Nobody’s the same now.”

  “That’s an awful story, Billy Don! It’s horrible! Something has to be done!”

  “No, they don’t want anybody to know. You have to promise not to tell. They’re afraid people around here will take it the wrong way. You know, like we’re always getting accused of one sick thing or another. And the bikers have all left. One of them got killed. Sheriff Puller found his body and his wrecked bike out on the state road and he said they won’t be back.”

  “I heard about that. Some guy driving drunk without a helmet. But their motorcycles are really noisy. You can hear them a mile away. How did they reach the camp without everyone knowing?”

  “Well, it was very early, still dark. And they used a car.”

  “A car.” Aha. “Saturday. Or Sunday. A week ago,” she says. He looks up at her, surprised. “Friend of mine. His car was stolen that night. Later they found it trashed over by the mine.” She saw Tommy that day. He’d gone out to the motel car park and found it gone. He said it took him a while to grasp that it had been stolen; at first he thought he must have parked it somewhere else, given someone the keys. But he had the keys. He said this happened “after midnight” which she translated to “the next morning.”

  “And Pach’, he was there, too.”

  “Pach’?”

  “Carl Dean Palmers. I guess he was one of them—everybody said so, but he really fooled me. Duke and Patti Jo said he was getting drunk with the bikers in the motel bar the night before. He loved her, but she wouldn’t pay him any mind, so, I don’t know, maybe he just…”

  And so that, too. “My friend said he was supposed to meet Carl Dean that morning at the garage, but he got stood up. I guess after all that happened Ugly just took off.”

  “Well, not in his van he didn’t. That got left behind. People set it on fire.”

  “They burned his car?”

  “Everyone was pretty upset. Ben was the maddest I ever saw. He didn’t raise his voice. He just got his gun and started laying the law down. The sheriff came, too. And Mr. Suggs. Reverend Baxter and his family and most all his friends got kicked out.”

  “But what did they have to do with it?”

  “Well, two of the bikers are sons of his, and the other one was somehow mixed up in it too. They found him near-naked with his face all cut up. He was…”

  “Was what?”

  “Nothing.”

  He has set the spoon down. His hands are shaking. She reaches across the table to hold them for a minute. “Was what, Billy Don?” she whispers.

  “He was wearing her underpants. He’d…he’d taken them off her… when…”

  Cretin: 1779, from Fr. Alpine dialect crestin, “a dwarfed and deformed idiot,” from V.L. christianus, “a Christian,” a generic term for “anyone,” but often with a sense of “poor fellow.” The word Christian itself was not used in English until 1526. Good name for her Wizards in the woods. But the Castle is full of cretins, too. An internecine battle. Which in the time of knights and castles didn’t mean an internal struggle within a group. It meant simply murderous, fought to the death. Characterized by bloodshed and carnage, a great slaughter. The Castle and the Wizards aren’t there yet, but give them time.

  All history as the history of language. A pathology of sorts.

  Here’s one for Tommy. There’s an Australian myth in which the Primal Father swallows a lump of sago and shits it back unchanged, the turd then turning into a pig, which the Father names after himself. Look at me! I did this! The people hunt the shit-pig, which by now is confused with the Father, and the youngest son shoots and kills it. But then it’s resurrected for a time, God is great, and it goes around opening women’s pudenda and teaching people how to fuck. Who knows where the youngest son came from. Then the shit-pig dies again and people cut its flesh up and preserve it as “strong medicine.” Some places have strips of dried human flesh they say are relics of the pig-father’s body. Used for faith healing. No new religions, only heresies.

  And where were you when the Incarnation hit the fan?

  Humor does not displace the terror or hide it from us, but it deflects its immobilizing power. It says here.

  Billy Don’s story has left her shaken. She would like to do something about it, but she doesn’t know what. This is all she can do. Write stupidities to herself. It’s a kind of masturbation. Which, come to think of it, is a better idea. To be continued…

  Sally is sitting in an old-fashioned oak swivel chair in what was once, she’s been told, the West Condon Chronicle job room. Now it’s used mainly for storage, including the newspaper archives, mostly unsorted. The print shop itself, job press and all—all that remains of the West Condon publishing industry—has been moved into the former editorial offices, where there are windows. They look bleakly out on a broken asphalt parking lot and the ruined backside of the old hotel, but they look out. This room, lit only by a flickering fluorescent, is a win-dowless storehouse of dusty old typewriters and telephones and other nameless junk, stuffed filing cabinets, stacked unlabeled boxes, and piles and piles of moldering paper, including yellowing newspapers and dimming photographs, one small stack now her own. The very disorder has helped Sally find some of what she has been looking for, the breakdown of the filing system having obviously worsened near the end—and then, once out of hospital, the editor himself was soon gone without, apparently, looking back, so whatever was left in the closed front offices just got dumped in here, helter-skelter. Thus, the more random the confusion, the more likely she is to find material related to the events of those tumultuous final days, almost as though, after the damp fizzle of the grand finale, that tumult shrank back into these stacks and continues to roil them.

  Her medieval history class at college met early on Monday mornings, much to everyone’s disgust, so she chose this post-Pentecostal one for her visit to the old newspaper plant in pursuit of what she described to the funny little toothbrush-mustachioed guy running the print shop as “thesis research.” She remembers him vaguely as a teacher and some kind of coach at the high school. His current commission: a two-color mailbox stuffer outlining the goals of the New Opportunities for West Condon citizens committee, which he showed off proudly. He took her on a brief tour of the newspaper press and composing rooms at the back with their typesetting machines and antique flatbed press and soot-blackened windows and ancient Coke machine, the dusty concrete floor littered still with lead slugs (she pocketed one), then ushered her into this old job room, pulled on the lights from a dangling string, and clearing it of piled-up binders and ledgers, offered her the leather sofa. She said no—too quickly. She knows where she is. She’s not superstitious, but if she were, she would have said it feels haunted. This whole boneyard of a room does, but especially that sofa.

  The first thing she has come on in here is a large stack of the last issue of the paper. Last ever. April 18. The Saturday before the End. Monday didn’t happen here. History stopped, just like the cultists said it would. Huge two-line banner: WE SHALL GATHER AT THE MOUNT OF REDEMPTION! The Brunist evangel to be shipped to the world. It’s mostly a photo essay, as if it were by now all beyond words, or else the editor ran out of things to say. Her dad�
�s in one of the pictures, standing alongside Tommy’s father, some preachers, and Angela’s father, who was apparently something of a bigwig at the time in what was called the Common Sense Committee. NOWC père. Plus all the cultic stuff of prophecies and song lyrics and relics and doctrines, interviews, letters to the editor. Funny one from an old lady in her nineties who said she was getting a slip from the doctor to explain why she couldn’t make it out to the Mount and giving her phone number. If something started to happen, they could give her a call and she’d ring a taxi.