The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  At the hospital, she found the doors blocked off by outsiders issuing commands in nervous high-pitched voices, but after she showed them her nursing credentials, they let her in. Near the entrance: an ambulance, still smoking, that looked like it had had a bad accident from the inside out. Which, it turned out, is what had happened, though it was no accident. Blood on the shattered windshield, and blood and wreckage in the reception area, too. A violent devastation. She couldn’t help but be put in mind of all the End Times talk of recent weeks, talk she had a habit of not listening to, and she wondered, just for a moment, if she might regret having left the hill. Later, she learned about her friend Francesca and all the other unfortunate people who were in there when it happened. Two of them were dead and Francesca and a patient who came in with an earache were in intensive care. She describes this horrific scene for Mr. Suggs while feeding him a bite of soft-boiled egg, recounting her passage as if it were still blowing up as she went running through. She found her friend Maudie, the head nurse, on the second floor, dashing about among all the patients being wheeled in. Maudie told her about the bikers’ attack and how they asked for Mr. Suggs’ room and how, thinking fast, she sent them into the room of an old Italian man who had died overnight and that’s who they shot so many times that, as Maudie said, “There ain’t face enough left to name him by.” Bernice tells Mr. Suggs how she got a young doctor to help her whisk him out of his bed and hide him in the nurses’ restroom, even as they could hear Mr. Suggs’ name being shouted out and the boots of the motorbikers clattering up the steps. “That poor nice doctor. He didn’t make it.” She describes the bullets smashing right through the restroom door and walls (Maudie showed her the holes and the pockmarks on the inside) and zinging around their heads. She started to say that they were helped, not by a doctor, but by one of God’s angels. For that, though it certainly probably didn’t actually happen, is what it feels like when she thinks about it, but she’s not sure what Mr. Suggs understands about spiritual beings; he’s only a man, after all, and a businessman at that.

  Clearly it was time to move Mr. Suggs to a safer place and that’s what Maudie thought, too, and besides, as the doctors said, if she was willing to take responsibility it would free up a badly needed bed, and they would be grateful for that. She had to wait for one of the out-of-town ambulances to find time to help her, so meantime she helped care for the injured, cutting away clothing and washing the wounds, giving pain injections and tetanus shots, hooking up transfusions, doing whatever Maudie and the doctors asked her to do. She even assisted a surgeon in taking a bullet out of a young woman’s sitter. She had hoped to sprinkle some of her miracle water on Francesca, but the poor lady was in the operating room and she couldn’t go in there. Caring for Mr. Suggs would be hard work, as Maudie warned her, for there isn’t much the man can do for himself. Though he can swallow a morsel of food now, he can’t do much chewing, so she’ll need to mash everything up. The hospital will provide a catering and laundry service that Mr. Suggs can pay for. Theropests, too, who will visit at least three times each week as soon as the present crisis is over, and Maudie promised to drop by regularly. She doesn’t tell Mr. Suggs any of this now. She only says he is being cared for by a team of the nation’s top professionals who have been sworn to secrecy as to his whereabouts because those assassins are still on the loose.

  Finally, two young men came to help her, though they didn’t really know what they were doing and their ambulance wasn’t one, just a rattly old station wagon with the back seats taken out, but something better than nothing. Mr. Suggs was not easy to shift, a heavy and lifeless old thing, and the two young fellows nearly collapsed under the bulk of him. On their car radio, she could hear that things were turning darksome out on the mine hill, and she was thankful that God had guided her away from there. At home, she treated Lem’s bed with a spray Maudie said was for killing chinches and whatever other hate-fuls might have got in there since the last laundering, and the two young men managed, grunting and snorting, to roll him into it and onto the towels she spread there, and she thanked them and gave them her blessing. Mr. Suggs was restless in the spirit after all this upheaval and making bubbly groaning noises with his eyes half rolled back, so, though it’s maybe not the best thing for a stroke victim, after the ambulance had left, she injected him with a little something to relax him and guarantee him (and her) a night’s sleep, she being completely beat down after the long and tempestuous day. “What’s happening is they’s a war on out there, Mr. Suggs,” she says now in response to his laboriously eye-blinked question. “It’s maybe just only a murderous feud, but most reckon it’s a full-blowed Holy War, God and Americans against Satan and the humanits and everbody else, and famous Christian patriots like yourself are spang in the middle of it. Them killers, they knew who you was. They was calling out your name, and they pert nigh got you, but you got strong and reliable friends, Mr. Suggs, and I am one of them. We will not let them carry out their evil machineries.”

  In the afternoon, after Mr. Suggs has dropped off and she has washed and diapered him—he looks set for a long doze, and even if he does wake up, he’s not going anywhere—Bernice returns to the hospital, which is still mostly frenzy and turmoil like yesterday, relatives having got in to add to the pandemonium. There are crowds of people on the grounds outside and she later learns they are mostly people from out of town, come to witness in person what they have seen on TV. Some of them take her picture as she enters the hospital, so she walks erectly with measured steps, a sister of mercy with work to do. The hospital staff is desperately stretched, many of the volunteers having faded away or been called back to their own hospitals. They are running out of things like bandages and linens and rubber gloves, and they’re so tired it’s easy to make mistakes, like forgetting people parked on gurneys or getting the medicines mixed up, so after she has gathered up the extra things she needs for Mr. Suggs, she helps out as best she can. She is glad to be here and to be useful and, above all, to be around human beings with whom she can have a normal mouth-and-ears conversation without having to worry about her spelling. There may have been hundreds of people killed and injured, she learns, worse than any mine disaster around here ever, most of the bodies now out in the hospital parking lot under the autopsy tent or else already in funeral homes. The hospital is chock full of shot and injured persons, and she is sorely needed.

  One who has not made it through the night is her friend Francesca, the hospital receptionist. Bernice wonders if she might have saved her with her miracle healing water had they let her in, but she was so severely injured they say it’s a blessing she didn’t survive. It was Francesca who first told Bernice about the miracle water. She had an aunt, she said, who was suffering from a cyst so bad she couldn’t sit down and she dipped her fingers in holy water and touched the place where the cyst was and it disappeared. It has also been known to cure rheumatic fever, dropsy, and psoriasis, and can sometimes remove warts. Bernice learned that this magic water was kept in a big stone bowl at the entrance of the Catholic church and it was free, so, though she had never stepped foot in there, she put on a long black dress like the old Italian widows wear and covered her head and snuck in and stole a little medicine bottle of it. It didn’t take her wart away, but it did seem to help her heartburn when she touched her chest over her esophagus with it. When she went back for more, she was caught by the old priest who wanted to know what she was doing. She told him she was a poor widowed nurse who was thinking of converting to the Catholic religion and asked him to teach her, and he grunted and grumpily agreed. And thus, like many of her Bible heroines, she infiltrated the tents of the adversary and learned something of their ways. The first thing Bernice learned was that she was dipping the fingers of her wrong hand, which was what had given her away to the priest and was probably one reason the water wasn’t working as well as it should. The second thing was that there was a faucet not far away marked HOLY WATER and she could take all she wanted, though for it to be more than
only plain water she had to become a Catholic and learn certain incantations, which were the secret of its magical effects, so she continued with her lessons. She told the priest she had a strong belief in angels and devils and felt like they were all around her all the time (omitting any mention of the ghosts, fairies, demons, talking objects and creatures, and dream spirits who also populate her world). She might have carried her deception right up to the final baptism, but the old priest wearied of her and turned her over to a dotty old orange-haired Italian lady with bad breath, so she filled up two milk bottles from the faucet and left with what knowledge she had and did not return.

  That old priest got thoroughly shot up when he tried to stop the motorcycle gang from blowing up the Catholic church, but he is pulling through. His people are saying it’s a miracle. Maybe he went heavy on the water. They are showing the wreckage inside his church on the television at the nurses’ station, along with other scenes from yesterday, and Bernice can see over the crowd clustered there that truly awful things happened, including a crazy scene of a backhoe gone berserk, barreling down a hill right over people like the Biblical Behemoth she has seen in pictures. West Condon is famous again and everyone all over the world is talking about it, but not in a flattering way. Watching all that cruel uproar, Bernice feels a headache coming on and takes the vial of miracle water out of her medicine bag and dabs her forehead and the back of her neck with it. When Maudie passes by, she asks her if she thinks people should be looking at such dreadful events, and Maudie says at least it keeps them out from underfoot.

  Outside Roy Coates’ hospital room, she finds his wife Thelma sitting on a chair, looking off into the distance with her usual doleful expression. Thelma says that Roy got shot and stomped on and their son Aaron has been arrested and they’re coming to take Roy away to the prison hospital as soon as he’s fit to be moved. She’s afraid for both of them because they are talking about murder, like with Abner and Junior Baxter. “Mostly they arrested the men and let the women go,” she says. Bernice says she missed all that because of Mr. Suggs, and Thelma says, “Well, you was smart to do so, Bernice, and I dearly wisht I could say the same. I hear tell you got him to home now.”

  “They was trying to kill him here.”

  “That’s what Maudie says. She’s a good soul, Maudie, even if she is a Babtist.” Thelma tells her in her flat sad monotone that the Cox boy got killed, and that brave McDaniel fellow and Franny Baxter’s new husband—“She’s a widder now, and she ain’t even hardly married yet!”—and also Mildred Gray. “When the police started up the hill and them Eye-talians started down from the top, Ezra was hollering out his holy curses on them all, and Mildred she said, ‘It’s okay, Ezra, I’ll go take care of it,’ and she left his wheelchair and picked up a gun from the ground and started walking up toward the Eye-talians with this spooky smile on her face, and they all shot her at once, like they was at the carnival, shooting at one a them tin rabbits on a pull-chain. Meantimes, the church camp it caught on fire just like that boy Darren foresaid it would, and Abner he prophesied it, too, so I guess it was a thing ordained. When I seen the smoke, I was afeerd for Clara who had stayed back with Mabel and some a them, but either they got out in time or more likely they was taken prisoner. That’s what they’re saying. Them army heliocopters fired a lotta rockets into the camp on accounta they thought they seen some bikers over there, but so far as I hear tell only one biker got killt and he was maybe probably already dead, but two of Wanda’s little ones got bombed on. The governor tried to blame that on the biker boys, but Maudie says it was them heliocopters of his done it. They searched all over but couldn’t find Wanda. I’m sure I seen her up on the Mount just before everything turned so bad, but then she just plain disappeared.”

  “Maybe she was already dead and that was her ghost.”

  Thelma nods bleakly. “Nor else she got raptured suddenly, though she don’t seem the likeliest choice. They arrested Junior Baxter over to the camp. They say he killt some people, I don’t know who. The Baxters, they are in a ruinous state. Two boys run off and into deadly mischief, at least one of them dead and his head gone missing, the oldest boy in jail and Abner right in there with him, and little Amanda kidnapped and made to do wicked things—some say they witnessed her bare nekkid on the back of a motorbike and others say they seen even worse things. Poor Sarah, she is a lost soul, she don’t even know what’s happening, though I do hear Franny and Tessie has took her in, so that’s a blessing. And our church, you know, the one in town, it also got burnt down, clean to the ground.”

  “I heard. I must of seen it just before.”

  “You was over there?”

  “Just passing by on the way here.” Driving in from the mine yesterday morning, Bernice spied the little Baxter girl walking on the side of the road in the last of the drizzle in her black dress, no raincoat or umbrella, so she pulled over and offered her a ride. The girl is simple, and perhaps she was lost. No, she said, her dress was too hot, and now it was all wet. She wanted to go home and change. Home? She only smiled like she always does. It might have been more proper to take her back to her mother, she was not a child to be left alone anywhere, but on the car radio they were reporting that the power was out in the town of West Condon and the phones as well and it might be sabotage. If that was so, the road behind her was going to fill up with people rushing back, so her best option was to take advantage of her head start and get on into town. She decided to drop Amanda off at the Church of the Nazarene, hoping there was someone there who could take care of her. On her car radio they were reporting trouble at the hospital and the high school, so it made her trip in all the more urgent. She told Amanda to stay there and she’d pick her up later, not knowing the trouble she was dropping the poor child into.

  “Also Lucy Smith was in the bank when it blowed up and she is dead or nearly,” Thelma says, continuing her drear litany. “And Linda Catter is passed on and they say they killt the barber, too.” Thelma’s voice has risen as though she is about to cry. And then she does cry. “Ain’t nobody left in town to cut your hair,” she wails. She gulps and wipes her nose and turns her teary gaze away. “God never does nothing wrong, Bernice,” she says, the words catching in her throat, “and He always does the right thing. He’s always loving, fair, honest’n pure, like the preachers say. He knows everthing and He’s more powerful than anything else or anybody who’s ever lived nor never’s gonna live. I believe that. I got to. But sometimes, when things happen, it’s all so hard to take in. Our brains is just too puny. And the question is”—she’s sobbing now—“why didn’t He make them bigger?”

  “I know, Mr. Suggs, that there is some things you can’t remember. When the Devil shot you with his ray gun, he was trying to melt your brains, and he come near to doing that, but your brains is strong and they did not give up and they will not give up. And meantime we got all the best doctors in the world working on an anecdote against them rays. At the Fourth of July parade—you was there, but you probably don’t recollect this, not now, but some day it will come back to you—the governor called you a patriarch of the people just like Abraham and said that you was one of the country’s greatest Christians and bravest patriots, and he would not let Satan have his fiendish way with you, and that is why he put the secret service in charge of protecting and rehabitating you. And, oh yes, did I tell you? The governor he is a Brunist now. He is a believer. Because of how brave and dignified you were, he come to realize you must be on to something important, so he confessed his sins, or a bunch of them anyways, right there on Main Street, and Clara herself baptized him. And Ben Wosznick, he took time out from defending the camp against all them hosts of ungodly Baxterites and sung a nice song about you. About how Mr. Suggs filled all them thugs fulla slugs and got lotsa hugs.” She has worked hard on this, but Mr. Suggs looks skeptical and has one finger up as though to wag it. “Course it’s not one of his best songs.”

  “Well, the governor’s not stupid,” is what Maudie said yesterda
y. “He can see which way the wind is breaking.” After all Bernice’s help at the hospital, Maudie wanted to have a coffee with her before she went back home to Mr. Suggs to thank her for all she’d done. “You made a big difference this afternoon, Bernice, and we are all beholden to you,” she said, and Bernice said she was just as beholden to Maudie for saving Mr. Suggs’ life. According to Maudie, that things got so out of control was at least partly the governor’s fault for not acting sooner and then for overreacting in careless and arrogant ways, but TV news was exposing all that and he was backing down from his highhat ways and, thanks to the negotiations of the smart young city manager, Mr. Minicozzi, was beginning to come across with the disaster relief funds needed for the town’s recovery. Mr. Minicozzi is in charge of West Condon, Maudie explained, because the mayor ran off with the city payroll. “They don’t know where that bandit is and nor the money neither, but at least they caught his dopey sidekick, who thought he was on his way to Brazil, but didn’t even have a passport, nor know what one was.” They reminisced over lost friends like Francesca and poor brave Mr. Beeker and the beautician Linda Catter and the kindly pharmacist Doc Foley, who Maudie said was almost like part of the family. “Dr. Lewis, he is just desolated,” she said, and Bernice thought about that old Bible word and how it fit so many things. Maudie also talked about Mr. McDaniel, who, Bernice learned, was the man in the runaway backhoe. He was an occasional Cornerstone Baptist like Maudie and Maudie said she took a fancy to him when he first turned up in town to work for Mr. Suggs, mainly because of his handsome black beard. “But then I noticed he never ever smiled, not even when he shook hands with the preacher or someone showed him their baby, and I figured there was a dark streak in him that could spoil things just when they might get interesting.” Bernice is sorry he or anyone else got killed, but it means he can’t turn up at Mr. Suggs’ bedside and contradict her account of things, an account in which he can also now play a bigger part. A sign God still has his eye on her and on her needs.