The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  Reverend Baxter turns back, frowning at his wife in consternation. Where, he wants to know, are their two remaining children? She starts to cry. She doesn’t know. Young Abner, Brother Darren explains, asked permission to go check on the safety of the camp now that it is emptied out except for a mobile home or two. Young Abner said he thought he heard the sound of motorcycles in that direction and Brother Darren proposed they send a team, but Young Abner was well-armed and insisted he could handle it on his own and would be back shortly. Brother Darren hasn’t seen Amanda, but her brother was watching over her, and she might have followed him there. A further prayer is offered up for the safety of Young Abner Baxter and his sister, and another for the protection of the Wilderness Camp, where many here on the hillside will now be living, should this day be succeeded by another.

  And where is Amanda Baxter? Far from the Mount of Redemption, sitting in her panties astride a motorcycle behind a biker known only as X outside the blazing West Condon Church of the Nazarene, and smiling her sweet winsome smile. “Hey, that’s my sister,” Kid Rivers says, pulling off his black stocking mask to give his face some air. He has just arrived from the hospital, leaving Hacker’s team after finishing off Old Man Suggs and blowing up the ambulance, Hacker and the others meanwhile on their way now to leave the Wrath’s signature at a couple of fat-cat churches. “She’s mental, man.”

  “Yeah, well, X is mental. So what?” Sick says, speaking for his silent buddy. Both of them look dangerously spaced out.

  “Why is she only in her underwear?”

  “How we found her. Said she lived somewhere around here and was looking for her clothes.”

  “That was five years ago.” The Kid doesn’t like it and may have to take care of X when all this is over, but on the other hand, it can’t be worse than living with the old man. He asks his sister where the others are and she only smiles dippily and points. The church camp, maybe. Or the hill. Probably why they’ve had such an easy run so far. His old man’s moves have sucked everybody out there. Perfect. All falling into place, like it was meant to be. When the news about the Wrath gets to them, they’ll be heading back in, but it has given them an extra minute or two. He raises a fist of gratitude to the Big One. Bells are ringing somewhere. Sirens off in the distance. Fire truck heading out toward the power plant. The bad guys are always dumb and do the wrong thing. He and Houndawg exchange quick notes on the hospital and the high school. Army trucks! Cool. And now his old man’s church going up in flames.

  Chopper rattling overhead. Doesn’t look army. News creeps, probably. Trying to hang on to history when it’s already too late. Could be a complication, though, when they try to get out of here. “Shall I take that whirlybird out?” Houndawg asks.

  “Yeah. But not yet. There are more. Wait till we get downtown and they start flocking. Easier to shoot into a bevy than hit a single bird.” Something old Roy Coates used to say. Coates will be browned off about his kid. He’s a good hunter. Don’t want to get within his shooting range. Kid Rivers glances at his sister (should he tell her something? maybe, but he doesn’t know what) and at his stopwatch, pulls his mask back on. “We got less than twelve minutes. Deacon should be at the Baptists by now. It’s big and brick and has a lot of steps. They may need help. See you at city hall.”

  But Deacon’s team is not at the Baptist church and there’s no sign they’ve been here. Rifle fire explodes from the doorway and The Phantom takes a glancing hit off the taillight mount—he rockets away from there. Word must be getting around. Those bells are banging away in Dagotown like a fire alarm. Catholic church bells. Where Deac was headed next. He’s in trouble. The Kid heads that way, but through back streets, head down, expecting to be shot at. He reaches the asphalt basketball courts and parking lot behind the church. A guy jumps out of a car with a gun in his hand and The Kid shoots him, the shot drowned out by the headachy bells. He’s not dead. And then he is dead. The Kid busts a window, crawls into the basement, his jaw clenched under his stocking mask, but he’s grinning, too. He could fly if he wanted to.

  In Mick’s, Burt Robbins is venting his anger against the racket of the bells. While on the city council he got an ordinance passed forbidding the ringing of church bells except on Sundays. The Catholics were the main abusers. Rang them every day at dawn, noon, sundown. He stopped that. Toot sweet. Can’t have a goddamned immigrant minority moving in and imposing their way of life on everyone else. He makes a few snarling remarks on the theme that affect none of Mick’s customers, but ignore the fact that Mick himself is a Catholic, potato-famine Irish on his mother’s side, who knows what bastardy on the other. Mick says it sounds more like something’s wrong. Church bells aren’t rung like that. Burt’s lip curls in disdain. From the floor Jim Elliott can be heard crooning “The Balls of St. Mary.”

  Then Earl Goforth, who owns the skating rink and bowling alley and has a face grotesquely chewed up from the last war, comes rushing in and growls through the side of his mouth, “What do you make of this?” He is carrying a transistor radio, but the signal is so staticky nothing can be understood.

  “What I make of it, Earl, is you need a fucking new radio,” Robbins says with customary bonhomie.

  “No, I just heard. It’s a station from over in the next county. It comes in better out on the street.” He holds the radio up to the one half-ear he has left; the other is just a button. “They say our power plant was blowed up. The phone exchange, too. People killt.”

  “I told you it wasn’t my fault,” Mick says in his squeaky voice.

  “Also, there’s something about the hospital and the National Guard, but I couldn’t get it.”

  “National Guard!”

  “It’s them!” Robbins says in a voice that sounds like anger but is more likely fear. “They’re still here! Lock the doors, Mick, don’t let anybody in! And stay away from the windows!”

  Vince Bonali and Sal Ferrero, gloomily shooting the shit on Vince’s front porch not far from where the bells are ringing, also remark on them, wonder if they should wander over and see what’s going on. Somebody getting married? But Sal’s wife has the Ferrero car, needing it for the hospital, and Charlie has Vince’s old wreck out at the mine hill—he takes it now without even asking—and that’s excuse enough to stay where they are. It was raining when they first sat down here. The lights were on, the phone worked, and their coffee was hot. Now, except for the rain stopping, all that’s changed for the worse. Their mood, though, has not; it couldn’t. They’ve been sitting here, screened by the dripping of the clogged and rusted-out gutters, talking about the hard times they’ve been through, which are only getting harder. About this fucked-up town and those murderous lunatics out at the church camp, who have brought all this misery down on them. About the true religion, which is about all they’ve got and which should be of more help than it is, and about women they’ve known who have grown old, pals too, many dead, and how distant all that seems. Conversations they’ve had many times before. About all that’s different this morning is the news about Sal’s father-in-law, Nazario Moroni, who died last night in the hospital, not unexpectedly. Not the easiest guy to get on with; Ange had difficulties with his old man. Gabriela did, too. But in mean times, he was a guy you could count on, and Vince had always somewhat modeled his own life as a union man on old Nazario. Gabriela had to stop by the First National this morning to ask for a loan to pay for her father’s funeral; if they turn her down the only hope left to avoid a pauper’s grave is the mine union, which is in tatters. They gave Dave Osborne a big sendoff and he didn’t even have the guts to see it out to the end; cranky old Nonno Moroni was worth ten Dave Osbornes, but except for a couple of senile old farts at the Hog no one will even notice he’s gone. Several times already Sal has sighed and said he’d better get back and tend his chickens, they’re all that’s keeping them from starving, and he does so again, and Vince remembers to thank him again for the eggs and coffee he brought this morning and takes another sip from the cold cup. Sal
says much as they love the Piccolotti salomeats, they’re reduced nowadays to eating cheap breakfast sausage bought directly from a backyard pig farmer—who knows what’s ground up in it, but they haven’t got sick yet—and Vince says he couldn’t even afford that. Sal actually stubs out his cigarette and gets to his feet and stretches and then Vince does too and says he’ll walk Sal partway, wander past the church and see what all the bell-ringing is about.

  By the time Gabriela Ferrero and her sister-in-law, Concetta Moroni, reach the hospital, senior staff have arrived and put some order to the chaos. The destroyed ambulance is still smoldering, there have been casualties, and the front lobby has been heavily damaged, but they have restored emergency power by way of the standby hospital generator and have cordoned off the building. Gabriela and Concetta have been told to go home or wait indefinitely in the parking lot or the basement canteen. The staff has secured two floors for receiving casualties, dispensed calmatives to the traumatized nurses, set up volunteer guards at the entrances, and they have moved quickly through the hospital to reassure patients in their darkened rooms, many of whom are terrified by everything they’ve heard, while others only complain about the television being off and ask them to please fix it or else give them a reduction in their bill.

  The fire department, with its crew of four, stopped by the hospital on the way back from the power station (they brought in two bodies and three injured workers), but after a quick dousing of the blazing ambulance, they have gone on to the high school to deal with the fires and carnage at the basketball gym, serving now as both fire engine and ambulance. They used this gym after the mine disaster as a temporary morgue. It’s one again. Governor Nolan Kirkpatrick, visiting what’s left of the decimated National Guard unit, confers with school officials, looking like a man who has just learned he is suffering from a fatal illness. He has had the young officer in charge call up reinforcements and more state police on his orders and send an official plea for help to the federal government, which he always denigrates in his election campaigns. Now he commandeers some yellow school buses parked for the summer over near the football field, ordering the remaining troops out to the mine hill in some of them and sending the others to the county airport to meet the new Guardsmen being flown in. Fire Chief Mort Whimple picks up three more firefighters from among the troops, but he is beginning to feel the hopelessness of his task. The high school fire is not yet under control, he can see smoke rising from other locations in the town—can smell it in the air—and the water pressure is rapidly dwindling. On his way here, he saw flooding in the streets. Thought it was just from the rain until he saw all the open hydrants.

  Much as Baptiste loathes the Catholic Church and disbelieves all its teachings, he still could not stop himself from genuflecting as he entered (Deacon laughed at him), laden with his grave tidings. He has paused in the narthex to peer in on what awaits him while Deacon and Spider clamber silently up into the choir loft to cover him, Thaxton standing guard out front on his motorcycle. The Kid’s carefully mapped plans are ticking along like clockwork. It’ll all be over before anyone knows what’s happening. The nave looks empty, though there is a disturbing fragrance of incense, a banging of bells. Baptiste is not unfamiliar with the Kid’s vision of a Holy War. He was raised Catholic in an illiterate dirt-poor Acadiana family, and he was first taught about the violent way the world would end by a mad French priest who wore a haircloth and shaved his head and went barefoot in all weather. When Baptiste was nine years old, the priest, after first scaring the pants off him with his fiery description of the Last Judgment—Dies Irae!—then fucked him, telling him it was the sacred route to eternal life and salvation from the horrors of hell, praying feverishly all the time he humped away, and making Baptiste pray, too, adding that his tears were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. This path to salvation was not a short one. It lasted almost four years before Baptiste, consumed by hatred of the stinking priest and inspired by a folktale his grand-père had told him, reached between his legs with a knife and did a little mid-fuck creative gelding. He told the priest his screams were holy and he should not be ashamed of them. Last time he was in a church, until now. His grand-père, Pépé Jules, was an old-time Bayou fiddler who spoke no English and taught him all the best Cajun swearwords, most of them as used against priests and nuns. Pépé Jules also fucked him. Called it making family music. Baptiste never liked it, but he never hated him for it, because there was no praying, just singing and laughing. Pépé bought him his first whore and his first motorcycle, on which Baptiste ran errands for him, learning the neige trade. When Pépé Jules died one night in a tavern knife fight, Baptiste hit the road and hasn’t looked back since. Mostly lonely years, but he is finding a home now with the Wrath, who treat him with a respect he has not known before. He glances at his stopwatch and then, crossing himself again, pushes on into the aromatic church, moving quickly, intending to place the strapped packets of dynamite under the covered altar, but an ugly baggy-eyed priest rises up from behind it with a rifle, and before he can draw a gun or light the fuse, brings Baptiste to his knees with a shot in the gut. More shots ring out from the loft above him and the priest crumples. Without warning (where the hell is Thaxton?), the church is suddenly swarming with locals. Baptiste lurches to his feet, but meaty types barking in some kind of wop wrestle him to the floor and pound his head against it as if trying to crack it open. Can’t reach the batons. Just inches away. Baptiste needs help. He’s not going to get it.

  The man above him in the Presbyterian pulpit, who says he is Jesus and looks and talks like Jesus and for whom young Reverend Joshua J. Jenkins has no other name, is explaining that the end of the world is not an event but a kind of knowledge, and has therefore already happened, at least for those in the know; and those who are not in the know are living in sin, are they not, for ignorance is itself sinful. Whether he is addressing Joshua or the anxious woman in the silky peach-colored gown who has come tiptoeing in or someone else altogether is not clear. Earlier, when introducing himself, the man said he was often spoken of as the Incarnation of the Word, an expression that has fascinated and solaced Joshua in the sense of the Word being the design in the mind of the Architect of the Universe, that Word made flesh at one transcendental moment in history, a concept grandly profound and nobly expressed, but Jesus, this person calling himself that, a madman probably, said that it was, as they say in the fairytales, just so, and that that word he incarnated was Oblivion. “Or sometimes Desolation, the Abyss, Vanity—there are synonyms.” Said with the most unnerving of blissful smiles, marred only by the strange startled eyes, as if someone else were staring out through them.

  This is not the interview experience Joshua had anticipated, that for which he has prepared by carefully reviewing church dogma and history, by assembling a vast array of Biblical and philosophical quotations as well as his own personal meditations, by outlining several possible inaugural sermons, and by attiring himself in this suffocating corduroy suit. Nor is he certain which mode of discourse he’s now in. It is like that of dreams, but it is not that of dreams—unless he is still on that bus, and he does not think he is. It feels like a mode more in tune with all those Sunday school songs that have been running through his head all morning. Now it is the man’s proposal that they all proceed out to some hill, one occupied—if the woman’s opinion, frantically stated, is correct—by dangerous crazy people. “We shall take Mr. Joshua J. Jenkins with us,” he says. “He is the grandson of a king. He will protect us. Come! Follow me!”

  “But I can’t!” the lady says. Her sorrowful gaze reminds Joshua of portraits of the Virgin, cradling the head of her crucified Son. “My condition!” She tightens the gown over the little bulge in her midriff in demonstration that she is expecting. Young Reverend Jenkins is not accustomed to such intimacies; his gaze flies to the ceiling then drops to his new shoes. But is Jesus…? he is wondering with alarm. Has he…? Well, of course, he is not Jesus. Is he? “Please don’t go!” the lady
pleads. “We could—we could go use the bath in the manse again?”

  Whereupon Jesus pats her in a shockingly familiar way and says, “I have no choice, beautiful lady. I am who I am. Take courage! I will return again unto you, as is said. Come then, Mr. Jenkins,” he adds, stepping down from the podium and taking his arm. “Off we go! Just a closer walk with me!”

  “I was just… I was just humming that!”

  “Of course you were. Let us set forth now to sow our tidings, short of wholly glad though they be!”

  At the car (church bells are ringing somewhere, like a movie soundtrack), Joshua’s companion pushes him in, slams the door, and hops into the driver’s seat. He pulls his gown up over his bony knees and reaches for the key miraculously waiting in the ignition. By now, Joshua has not the faintest idea who the man is or if he is just a man. He cannot really believe he is Jesus Christ—that’s absurd—but at the same time he finds it wondrous that a man of the first century knows how to drive this contemporary machine, a skill Joshua himself has not yet mastered. As though reading his thoughts, Jesus—or his impersonator—says: “If God had been the big deal they say He was, I could have ridden into Jerusalem in one of these instead of on a damned donkey! Right?”

  They are about to pull out when four motorcyclists, three men and a woman, roar up in front of the church. Two of the men go running inside, then come running out again. As they watch in amazement, they are discovered. “Down!” Jesus commands and hauls him roughly below the dashboard. Bullets smash through the windshield. There is a loud crack like a thunderclap and fragments of glass strike the car, followed by louder thumps. “It is not Being that is ineffable,” Jesus remarks, uncorking a bottle he has conjured from under the driver’s seat and taking a long thirsty drink before offering it to Joshua, who can only shake his head helplessly, “but Becoming.”