The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  “Soon as we seen you, Jesus,” says the enormous woman fallen at his feet (“Rise with my blessing, my daughter,” he told her, but she said it didn’t seem right), “we run right over. We didn’t wanta get left behind. It was Mattie spotted you from up on Inspiration Point, the little sweetheart should oughta be made a saint. I couldn’t find my husband, but you can just reach out and bring him here. Isaiah is a righteous man and should not miss out. It wouldn’t be fair. You know, like how you say anyone who follows you has got to throw off everything and live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field? Well, he done that, Lord, I done that. These four children here they done that. You got six bona fide flat-broke disciples right off, Master, ready to go where you go.” The three little ones have accepted his invitation to rise and are now circling him curiously, eyeing with suspicion the woman huddled behind him. “There was a whole bunch of us waiting for you up here a coupla months ago. We were dead sure you were coming then—we prayed like all blazes—but we musta got the date wrong. Forgive us for that, Lord. Those two college boys try hard, but they don’t quite have it.”

  “Remember the parable of the self-righteous train engineer,” he says, “for whom the timetable was his holy bible and as a consequence of his faith in it he ended up in a notorious wreck.”

  “I didn’t know you had trains in your time, Lord.”

  “My time is all time.”

  “Let’s see if it’s really him, Mom,” the older boy says. “I’m gonna fall in the ditch. If he’s really Jesus, he’ll save me.” The boy stands stiffly at the lip and tips over, yowls when he hits bottom. “See? See?” he wails. Then his brother starts to cry too, and that sets off the baby.

  “I had no intention of stopping you in your brazen foolishness, young man,” Jesus says, having to shout over the racket. “For as it is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, or me either. Take it as a lesson learned.”

  “You heard Jesus, Mattie, get your little heinie out of there and stop your bawling or I’ll box your ears so hard you won’t hear for a week! You too, Markie. Look how you’ve got Johnnie going! Shut up now or we won’t let you fly to Heaven with us!”

  “Mom, he’s not wearing any underpants!”

  “Luke, you come out from under there. That’s trespassing and you can go to hell for that!”

  It is in his tradition to suffer little children, but there would seem to be exceptions. “If Jesus is God, Mom, shouldn’t he have the biggest one?”

  “Luke, I ain’t telling you one more time! We been waiting all our life to get raptured, praying so hard our knees is half ruint, and I ain’t gonna let you go and spoil it!” She drops the squalling baby and bounds forward on all fours, reaches under, and drags the girl out—dirty pink-slippered foot first—and then she has to grab the one called Markie, who wants his turn, and that one starts up again. The little girl hangs on to his ankles with both hands as her mother pulls and were it not for the woman behind him, he would be taking what in this unholy age in which he has landed is called a pratfall; he knows such things because he is all-knowing, but it’s true, he has been slow yet again to appreciate the risks in mixing with the salt of the earth. “Forgive her her trespasses, Lord. She’s a bit wild but—let go, Luke!—she was born that way, so it must be God’s will.” She pries the child’s fingers away and he is free at last, though he has lost his sandal.

  “I think it’s curtain time,” the woman behind his shoulder whispers anxiously.

  “So, c’mon. Let’s get going, Lord. Can’t hardly wait to get there. Some folks didn’t expect you until after the tribulation began, but I was always a pre-trib dispensationalist, except sometimes when it seemed like the tribulation had already started up, and then I was more like a mid-trib believer. But I was never a post-trib believer—you can ask anyone. I always said it would be like this. And I know everything about the four horsemen and the seven seals and seven trumpets and seven bowls and the abomination of desolation. Just ask me. Those other sinners back there, they didn’t believe me when I hollered out you were over here, so it looks like we’re all the holy remnant you got left.”

  “The perfect candidates, my daughter, given the fusty nature of the Heavenly Kingdom, so called,” he says, speaking inside her own metaphors. The unmaking of those metaphors is at the very heart of his new mission. But they can be undone, he knows in his omniscience, only from within. “It would be interesting to see what your daughter made of the angels if she got inside their choir robes. But I’m afraid the time is not now. There is more yet to happen.” He would like now to simply fly away, as the song goes, to vanish suddenly and reappear elsewhere—in the studio, for example—but he has received no favors from above nor does he expect any. Instead, they will have to step behind the backhoes as though into the wings and slip away down the hill behind them. “I must leave you now. But I shall return after a certain time. You must deliver that message to your fellow believers. Go forth, my daughter, and prophesy. Go! Go with my blessing!” It’s a hard pitch and a tough house, but it works. He and the woman make their exit when all their backs are turned so that when they look back from the truck, they will be gone as if they never were.

  The truth is, most of Priscilla’s dances are improvisations, their design appreciated only after they have been performed. Because that’s what life is. You visit your minister in his office for counseling and the next thing you’re dancing the Second Coming with Christ Jesus, and suddenly a little self-enclosed pirouette en dedans becomes a grand jeté. You have to stay fit and supple and open to the unexpected. They haven’t got around to the temptation of Christ today as they’d intended, and now they’ll just have to skip past that. Her plan for the morrow, has been all week, is to create an erotic celebration of the summer solstice (the summer solstice is erotic), a “Dance of the Wedding of Heaven and Earth,” with its story of the victory of sun and light over darkness and death while haunted by the simultaneous birth of the Lord of Darkness, and not coincidentally Jesus’ cousin John, followed by the descent toward the winter solstice. At which time her own child is due—a little lord of light—and everything starts up all over again. All this she has meant to script in, while turning the studio into a kind of symbolic forest, celebrating the unconscious, mother womb of dance itself, with Wesley and Jesus each playing their parts, their art their very artlessness. But now with the events of the day, she is having to make adjustments. What they do tonight will be a kind of rehearsal for tomorrow, but she will call it the “Dance of the Transfiguration” in recognition of Jesus’ rise to the surface (but where did Wesley go? she has to admit she already misses him, the dear befuddled man), focusing on the element of radiance—“And his face did shine as the sun” is the text she has chosen—something transfiguration shares with the fires and fairy dances of midsummer. They will anoint their bodies with fragrant oils and use special gels on the spots and dance, after adagio preparations, to the summer storm of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. She hopes only that she’s up for it. The day has taken something out of her.

  Before returning to the studio they stopped at the shopping center on the highway to pick up some chop suey, Jesus complaining that he’s had enough carryout pizza for an eternity—why can’t those damned Romans leave him alone? She has never mastered the Dance of the Culinary Artist unfortunately, leaving most of that up to Ralph; she’s too easily distracted, never getting past the burnt frying pan jig. Her contributions to the church Christmas bake sales have always been packaged doughnuts topped with pancake syrup and sprinkled with red and green colored sugar. And there aren’t many carryout choices in West Condon; in fact, there’s only one. They weren’t dressed for a shopping trip, but she pulled on her car raincoat and dashed in to place their order, Jesus waiting back in the parking lot, shouting after her to ask for extra chow mein noodles. When she returned to the car he was gone. Can’t leave him alone for a minute. She found him preaching to some lounging beer-drinking teenagers who laughed and made rude rema
rks as she led him away, but they can go to hell and almost certainly will.

  She finds her appetite has vanished, the very smell of the chop suey making her somewhat nauseous, but nothing wasted, Jesus is ravished and eats both portions himself. The day’s adventures have enlivened him. She had hoped he might be ready to go into retreat for a while, forty days and forty nights, for example, but he is already making big plans, reminding her that she told him his time is tomorrow. I think I was mistaken, she said, but he has paid no heed. Shedding Wesley has given him a new boldness; he is brusquer, more impatient, more demanding, but also more exciting, and a more eager and appreciative dance partner. Wesley was always polite and never took her for granted, but because of his natural diffidence, he often had to be coaxed into the more experimental aspects of the dance, Jesus urging him on from within. Now Wesley is gone as if molted (she has a serpent in her transfiguration dance, too, it’s one of her best movements, and it tumbles neatly into the succulent uroboros position), and the dances are freer and more direct, but she will miss the playful complexities of their old ménage à trois. Jesus, spooning up the last of the chop suey, announces that tomorrow they will revisit Main Street and pass through city hall and walk the various neighborhoods, and he will bring his message to the swimming pool and playing fields and address the foursomes at the country club, and on Sunday they will visit all the churches, that the preachers and their flocks might look directly upon the subject of their hypocritical prattle. Dear Christ, she wonders with a shudder, how will I get through all that?

  He looks up and grins around a mouthful of crunchy chow mein noodles, rice and bean sprouts ornamenting his beard, and asks: “Were you speaking to me, dear lady?”

  “Oh dear. Was I speaking out loud? I am so confused and exhausted. And I think I may be about to throw up.”

  When the woman described her “Dance of the Incarnation” this morning as one of her most abstract (something is happening you can’t quite see) and least abstract (flesh is flesh), she was closer to the mark than she knew, for this paradoxical coincidence of opposites is the very essence of the Incarnation, a moment when the unimaginable ineffable supposedly coincides with its material expression. Videlicet, yours truly—he smiles at himself in a mirror and picks some grains of rice out of his beard. The creator identifies with his creation even as he simultaneously transcends all creation, becoming both part and whole at the same time, a mathematical conundrum. Whimsical amusements of the millennia of theological charlatans who have imbedded themselves in this preacher whose poor carapace he occupies, leaving him with this riddling residue. They also came up with the notion of learned ignorance, which is a kind of unlearning, and there is something to be said for it, if taken seriously and starting with that ruinously falsified history which is the Bible.

  Can the Son of God and/or the Son of Man (another teasing conundrum) feel guilt? Yes, he can and does. The bizarrely fanciful apocalyptic delusions suffered by those no doubt well-intentioned but hopelessly benighted followers of his over in the church camp and indeed around the world are largely his own contribution to world history. Such vengeful bloodthirsty ideas had been around for a good while before he came along, but he made them his own, and because of his rhetorical and teacherly talents (yes, he had a certain charisma, he acknowledges, posing magisterially before the mirror, then softening his gaze to a loving, protective and understanding one and reaching out with open hands) and not least his exemplary intransigence, he got others around him to buy in to his claim that the much-prophesied establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth was not only imminent but had already begun to happen and he was the guy with the inside track. Many alive here will see the day and will not have to die, he’d said. Follow me and you’ll make the cut. Where did he get such megalomaniacal ideas? Well, they were in the air, but mainly it was the Baptist, wrongly said to be his cousin, who led him to it. Seduced him with his crazed evangel. Gave him the tools, the lingo, sent him off to round up a gang of his own. They were harsh times. He was pretty desperate. Everyone was desperate. If life were to be bearable, something had to happen. It did, but not what he’d foretold. No matter, people will believe anything. Enter mad Paul, the unscrupulous evangelist scribblers, the Patmos wild man, the remote muddle-headed church fathers (so called) plus a few ruthless tyrants and you’ve got a powerhouse world religion. And then down through the centuries: generations of other desperate people like those church campers out there, borrowing the spiel for equally fatuous end-times reruns of their own. All his fault.

  The truth is you’re a fraud.

  I know it, but as my jailer once asked, or is said to have asked: What is truth? Anyway, if I’m a fraud, then, as all those coincidence-of-opposites philosophasters would say, I am therefore all the more genuine.

  At least you never said anything about your own Second Coming.

  Never occurred to me. Somebody else thought up that—“Wait a minute. Who is this?”

  After her thin retch (nothing since breakfast, really), Prissy gargles and rinses and, aware that she may have left the studio door unlocked, hastens back, grabbing up Ralph’s brandy bottle on the way and getting hit by his rage gun again. She stumbles (Ralph has been so surly of late; maybe it was a mistake to repaint the back window where he had scratched the peephole), picks herself up and hurries on, fearful Jesus might be on the loose again. He is not. He is standing before the mirror, hands on hips, looking put off with himself. “Why?” he asks, and answers himself: “Because you’re too slow. That’s why.”

  “No, no,” she gasps, “I came back as quickly as I could!”

  “I have a mission to fulfill! It is time for the Lord to act! If I’d waited for you, we’d be stuck in here until next Christmas!”

  “Christmas?” She’s confused. What is he talking about? “That’s the other end of the year.”

  “Exactly.” His reflection looks up at her, seeing her there as if for the first time. “Ah. Are you still here?”

  “Who,” she asks in a voice she almost cannot hear herself, “were you talking to?”

  He shrugs, glares at himself. “Shut up,” he says. “I’ll handle this.”

  “I only meant—”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Are you…are you still Jesus?”

  “Of course I am,” he snaps. “Who else would I be?” He is glaring at her as he was glaring at himself.

  “But then…you were…is it Wesley?”

  “Maybe.” He belches, shrugs. “Probably it’s just the chop suey.”

  Prissy feels a great sense of relief and joy. Her abdominal muscles relax and she allows the changes taking place there to proceed. They are a family again.

  III.7

  Saturday 20 June

  Midsummer at cock-crow. The day that the earth hesitates in its nervous wobble, begins to tilt the other way again. The day, as they say, that the sun stands still. For lovers of the night it is the worst time of year, for there is so little of it. Few are up to greet so untimely a dawn. The night-duty police officer is. End of Bo’s working day. Dee and Monk and Louie will be here soon, and he’ll be able to go home and get some Z-time, Bo Bosticker’s Zs being a town legend. He has been sleeping beside the phone all night, but that doesn’t count. The garage owner Lem Filbert is another, greeting the rising sun fiercely, angrily, tools in hand, cursing his lazy mechanic in the same manner that he greets, at more or less the same hour, the midwinter dark. He is working on the Cavanaugh kid’s topless fire-engine red fuck-machine, eager to get it done not only because the boy has been badgering him, but because he’ll pay his bill when the job’s complete, as too damned few in this town do. Guido Mello puts up with a lot of shit working for Filbert, including ten-hour shifts, but he’s an old union man from his coalmining days and he won’t start until his shift starts at 7:30, and Filbert, an ex-miner himself, has to respect that, no matter how it pisses him off. Not that Guido can sleep in; his kids wake him as kids do parents all over town
and countryside, up with the sun, the little heathens, then cranky all day. And if it’s not the kids, it’s the TV, the telephone, alarm clocks, flushing toilets, banging doors, or just the light pressing in through drawn shades. For prodigal son Georgie Lucci, emerging unwillingly from a sick stupor on the firehouse floor (didn’t quite make it to the mattress), it’s his hangover that forces him into some kind of consciousness, or else its contrary. For Sheriff Tub Puller it’s a nagging toothache, for Hovis out at the church camp his “rheumatiz,” for Lucy Smith the need to fix breakfast for her early-rising husband Calvin and her squabbling offspring. Calvin is headed to the roadside Baxter encampment this morning ahead of his deputy sheriff duties to see how poor Abner is getting on and to let him know that the police officer who beat him up has been suspended. She has never seen Calvin so mad about something. The banker’s wife, having risen before her husband and snuck off to the bathroom on her own, is not sure now she can make it back. Maybe she can just sit here until the home care nurse turns up. She crosses herself, hoping that, under the circumstances, it is not disrespectful. The ex-coalminer Salvatore Ferrero is awakened just as in the old days by what his mammina called il canto del gallo. Some of his neighbors are probably awakened by it, too, less nostalgically. They objected bluntly—“No fucking chickens, Sal!”—when he set up his backyard coops a few years ago to help his family through the rough times after the mine closing, but he has provided each of them with the occasional chicken and sack of eggs and they have grown accustomed to the reek. A rooster is crowing at the Brunist Wilderness Camp, too, displacing the hoots of the resident owls on this day that somewhere in the world is the Day of the Owl and thought of as somewhat sinister. The camp chickens are cared for by Hunk Rumpel and Wanda Cravens, layers mostly for the communal breakfasts, though the cull of cocks and unproductive hens brings meat to the table, too. The little ones always love to watch Hunk kill chickens, which he does by grabbing their heads and whipping them round and round in a great flutter of feathers until the necks snap off and the headless birds flop and stagger comically about the chicken yard. No one likes to pluck the things, though; the task in rough sketch usually falls to Wanda, designated chief chicken plucker, with Ludie Belle Shawcross and the other ladies cleaning up after her. The coops are kept downwind of the trailer park, out in what used to be deep left field of the old softball field, far enough away not to be a nuisance unless there’s an unexpected easterly, but near enough to hear the cock’s morning fanfare.