The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  By the time the lights come on again and the phones finally work, Bernice’s account of recent history has taken a more nightmarish turn. For one thing, she has blamed the need for candles on the Baxters’ use of Leviathan to drink up all the power, putting the whole world, and certainly West Condon, at their mercy, and as she is rather proud of this development, she continues to use candles long after it is necessary. The candles, moreover, cast wavery shadows around the bedroom which she characterizes as demonical spirits, pointing them out to Mr. Suggs in a harsh frightened whisper—“Over there! in that corner!”— knowing he can’t bend his neck to look, can only glimpse the flickering light and dark. Sometimes she even frightens herself. She has introduced into the motorcycle gang the oldest Baxter boy, the one with the Mark of the Beast on his forehead whom everybody astigmatizes, and, remembering something that blond boy once said about the Horsemen of the Acropalypse. she has given them all individual motorcycle colors and specific woes and plagues to distribute. What they all did to Clara’s poor daughter has now become a legend of horrific proportions that continues to happen night after night, as if it were some eternal punishment in Hell. She has even brought back the middle Baxter boy, the one who got blown up: “They took his head off but now he’s riding round with that gruesome thing tucked under his arm, still yelping curses out its bloody lips and demanding everbody what to do! I wouldn’t of believed it myself if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes!” She told how Sheriff Puller was seducted into his car by the naked Baxter girl and handcuffed to the steering wheel and how the biker boys set his car afire, and how they stuffed an innocent boy in the trunk as extra fuel. Mr. Suggs seemed very upset by this story, so when he asked the pointed question if Sheriff Puller was alive or dead, she said he was alive but he was so melted down to his blackened bones you wouldn’t hardly recognize him. She looks into Mr. Suggs’ heavy-lidded eyes, and sometimes she sees seething anger there and sometimes confusion and sometimes even fear. As Holofernes in his drunken stupor might have felt looking up at sober sword-bearing Judith, or Sisera foggily seeing Jael enter with her hammer and tent stakes.

  Of course, Bernice has no such tools, nor would she likely be treated as a national heroine, as those women were, if she had them and used them as they did. There are, true, the subtler weapons of her own profession—the feeding routines, the medications—but Mr. Suggs is being monitored constantly by Maudie and the doctors, and they would not appreciate any creative tamperings with his regime, nor would it feel the right thing to do. For she is not Judith or Jael, she is only Bernice Filbert, LPN, of West Condon, the kindly long-suffering public servant and at heart a good person intent only on helping others, even Mr. Suggs, whose own life is a great burden to him and to her, and who fails to appreciate all that she has done for him. He could have blinked out at least one thank you. It is a harsh world, governed at least partly by malevolent forces, not all visible, and Bernice has only her nursing skills and her faith with which to defend herself. And her stories. Which are not always understood by others, though they are her chief remedy against the desolation. She is reminded of something Ludie Belle once said about her prayer meeting confessions: that by being partly true and partly made up, they were more true than if they had been completely true, because the plain truth hides a lot of things.

  By coincidence, as she is thinking about this, the telephone rings in the kitchen, and it is Ludie Belle herself calling from out east somewhere, almost as though by thinking about her Bernice has conjured her up, the sort of coincidence that happens often in Bernice’s life. And they both have so much to tell each other! Right off, Bernice asks about Clara and Elaine and all the others, where did they go, she looked everywhere for them and was scared they’d all been kidnapped, and Ludie Belle tells her how—for Clara’s sake, and little Elaine’s—they took off before all the troubles. They agreed on a meeting place near the state line, and they were waiting there for Cecil and Corinne and Hovis and Uriah and Billy Don to catch up, but somebody noticed the bumper stickers they’d forgot to remove, and they all got arrested. Ludie Belle was able to convince them that those stickers got pasted on without their acknowledge while they were passing through from out west, and she showed them Clara and Elaine in their sickbeds and said they were rushing them to a hospital in the east where specialist doctors were waiting for them, and the police got nervous not to have somebody die on them and let them go, provided they immediately crossed the state line. But that made them miss the others and she still doesn’t know what happened to them but supposes the three fellows are back home by now and the Applebys and their bees are probably off chasing the pollens. Bernice says she hasn’t seen the Applebys, but she’s sorry to say that the two West Virginia coalminers were apparently blown up on the Mount of Redemption, though there’s not much remains of them to tell for sure, and as for Billy Don Tebbett, he got murdered by Young Abner Baxter. Ludie Belle lets out a little cry and says she is wholly destroyed by this news, for Billy Don was one of her favorites, and she asks for all the details and Bernice provides her with all she knows, and then some.

  Ludie Belle in turn tells her that her Wayne and the Halls are doing fine and have been telling their stories to the Eastern churches, and Elaine seems to have resigned to accept the baby she is carrying and isn’t trying to kill herself or it anymore, “though I did ketch her a-swoppin’ her belly with a flyswat as like to get the baby customed to what’s in store for it, but, come grass, Clara’s grandchild should be safely borned.” Bernice wants to say that she hopes it will be completely human, but decides better of it for it might bring bad luck. Ludie Belle goes on to say she hopes Clara is still around for that occasion, for the poor woman is calamitously ill with a cancer in her chest that has mettasted to other places and there is not much confidence. Bernice says this is the worst news she has heard since all these troubles began but that, somehow, she already knew it. She is thinking about what she told Mr. Suggs about Clara’s strange coma, and she worries that her stories might be invading the world. “I guess I had some apperhension.” At least out here, Ludie Belle says, Clara is well cared for. “They give her a lotta reception and dote upon her like the saint she is.” Bernice urges her to sprinkle some miracle water on Clara every day, but Ludie Belle says she has used it all up and that Bernice should send her some more. Ludie Belle likes to wear a drop of Bernice’s water behind her ear like perfume, because she believes it might help her hear what people are thinking.

  Ludie Belle has been following all the news on the car radio and now TV, plus what all the brothers and sisters in the Eastern churches have been able to fill in, but it’s like news from the sky and she needs to get it from on the ground, so Bernice tells her all about how when she was out at the Mount looking for everybody she had a forenotion about Mr. Suggs being in trouble and raced off to the hospital just in time to hide him from the motorbikers who were coming after him, and how she has been privately caring for him ever since. “I am now receiving a special salary from the government.”

  “The government?”

  “I can’t say no more.”

  In fact, Mr. Thornton has been true to his word and he has got the wicked banker’s lawsuit thrown out and she has been able to catch up her mortgage. When she received the statement, she multiplied the remaining amount due by ten to see what she would receive if Mr. Suggs were to expire that day, and it was quite thrilling, but he isn’t likely to pass away for some time yet. When Maudie was last here, she noticed that Mr. Suggs had lost some weight and musculature, and Bernice acknowledged that he was getting easier to turn because there was less of him, but Maudie said this was normal, she shouldn’t worry, Mr. Suggs could live on for years and he might even get better. Meaning more and more of the principle will be paid off and the final sum will be smaller. Something to think about, and she has been thinking about it. She goes on now to tell Ludie Belle how the Baxter motorbikers went roaring through town blowing up everything and shooting everybody and setting t
he whole town on fire. “That’s when the heliocopter fell and Linda Catter got sent to glory along with all those other poor people in the bank, and the one they say was Carl Dean Palmers got rocketed clean off the hotel roof.”

  “I got a inkle a all that on the tellyvision replays later on. They kept showin’ that red injun’s execution for days after. He didn’t look a dot like Carl Dean.”

  “Well, them evil sorts, Ludie Belle, they don’t always keep to their same shape. Meanwhile, out at the Mount of Redemption, they was all this killing going on. I nearly got squashed when that crazy backhoe come somersaulting down at me, like something from straight outa the Book a Relevations—you must of seen that!”

  “I thought you was at the hospital.”

  “I was, but by happen-chance they had a TV on at the nurse’s station and I seen what was happening and knew I was needed out there, so while we was waiting for a ambulance to move Mr. Suggs, I went running out to help. If you look close, you can see me off to the left scrambling on all fours towards that ravine out there, just as that back-hoe goes wheels up.”

  “Well, you’re a better person than me, Bernice. Me, I see trouble like that a-comin’, I’m hikin’ my skirts’n skedaddlin’ the other way at full pelt. Which is what we done, and why you’re there and I’m here. I did hear on the news young Darren got hisself arrested, so what’s become a Colin?”

  “I think he must of run away or they took him in. He wasn’t at the camp.”

  “The camp? I thought it got burnt down and closed off.”

  “Well, it did get seriously delapidated by that murdrous biker gang, but—I gotta swear you to secrecy, Ludie Belle, cause if it was to get out, more lives’d be in desprit danger—but people are still living out there. That mad Glenda woman and her passel of wild orphan kids, them audacious Blaurocks, and a whole bunch of poor people who come looking for redemption, women mostly whose husbands are in jail or worse. A lot of them was badly wounded, and I have had to doctor them on the sly. The camp is haunted by them two murdered adulterers and who knows how many other homeless spirits, and Glenda she says she seen the murderer hisself hanging round back under the burnt trees like he still had more work to do, though Glenda herself is suspected of those murders and of bewitching Hazel’s husband and binding him up in a hollow tree. Old Hunk Rumpel, he died fighting off the bikers and got his throat slit like you butcher a pig, but he don’t seem the haunting kind. Them two little Cravens kids who got bombed by the heliocopters, though, are probly still looking for their mother.”

  “Wanda’s younguns? You don’t mean little Davey?”

  “Him and his sister. Glenda has the rest of them. Wanda she got kidnapped, or else she was raptured. They’s different opinions.”

  “Little Davey! The sadness is just about more’n I can sustain. The most thing I recollect about little Davey is that pearl a snot always a-glistenin’ on his upper lip. Like a kinder jewel a innocence. Lordy! I feel half-haunted myself!”

  “The new sickbay is gone, so the Meeting Hall has been set up for bedding the wounded. It’s all burnt out inside and they’s a bad charred smell, but at least it’s still standing. So is that old upright pianner, though it’d probly crumble to ash if you touched it. Looks like made of coal. When I passed it by, I heard sounds coming from it, but nothing like music, not real music—more like the strings were whimpering and falling gainst each other. It made me think of what you said about that old player pianner in that place you was once in employment, how it seemed habitated, not by the dead so much, but by their miseries and their lost gaieties, and I thought, this old pianner, it is lamentating about when everbody was here and praying together and was full of hope and happiness and now see what it has come to.”

  “‘The Lamentatin’ Pianner,’ it sounds like a Duke’n Patti Jo song. You should oughter tell ’em the story, maybe you’ll get famous like they are.”

  “Patti Jo and Duke? They’re famous?”

  “Sure, where you been? That song about the little girl who was overloved by her own daddy has been toppa the charts since they first let it out, and right behind it is a song about a crazy cowboy shootin’ up a jukebox and a unusual cemetery lovesong which has something of the Prophet’s dead sister in it. And they got other big hits, too. They’re the hottest thing in country since Hank Williams died. They even been on Grand Ole Opry.”

  “I guess I missed all that. We don’t have a radio station here no more.” Ludie Belle asks her about the things hanging on the fireplace because Clara was asking about her husband Ely’s final message, and Bernice says all that got burnt up, nothing left but ashes, and while she’s telling her that, she hears someone at the front door. Maudie bringing that venal feeding apparatus, or else the exercise people. Maudie was complaining that Mr. Suggs did not seem to be digesting his food properly and was losing weight. “Come on in!” she hollers out, covering the mouthpiece. “I’ll be there in just a breath!” She hears the screen door slap and turns back to Ludie Belle. “I have to go, Ludie Belle, the theropests is here. But call again soon! They’s tons more to tell!”

  In the bedroom, she pulls up short. It is not Maudie. It is the Antichrist. The one in female form. Right here in her own house. Wearing a T-shirt that says IT’S THE SADNESS. Face on face to Mr. Suggs, staring hard, like she means to suck his hidden story out of him. Or to snatch his soul like she did to that old lady out on the Mount that day. Bernice feels like she has just been struck in the heart and she can’t move a muscle.

  “Hi, Mrs. Filbert. I’m Sally Elliott. You may know my folks. Isn’t this Mr. Suggs, the man who was bankrolling the cult?”

  “It’s not a cult,” Bernice says icily with what whispery breath she has left, meeting the Dark One’s challenge. It’s almost as though she—or he (which is it?)—is changing shape before her very eyes. “It’s a church.”

  “Sorry. I meant to say church. But I’m not here about that. I really hate to bother you, Mrs. Filbert, but there aren’t many people left around here still alive and not in jail who can help. I have already talked with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Franny Baxter and Mrs. Coates—who said to thank you if I saw you, by the way, for helping to get the charges against her boy reduced. She says there’s even some hope now of getting him released altogether on compassionate grounds. I gather that’s your doing.”

  “Well, yes, I know some people.” Bernice has not heard this news, having lost touch with Thelma after she moved back in with her mother. It eases somewhat her anxiety. Her power is being acknowledged. She is able to take a deep breath, wondering if this has been a disarming tactic by the Dark One or if this is really just only a girl.

  “You’ve done a good thing, Mrs. Filbert. There’s too much hysteria out there right now. It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it.”

  “Dangerous? Just only stories?”

  “Most dangerous things there are.”

  “Do you mean…? Can they, you know, kill somebody?”

  “Sure they can. What’s the toll now from all this madness? You might say story has killed them all.” The girl glances down at Mr. Suggs. He is in his alert phase and is taking all this in, wagging his finger for attention, but the girl ignores him, turns away. “But the story I’m interested in, Mrs. Filbert, is how Billy Don Tebbett died.”

  “Young Abner Baxter shot him.”

  “That’s what they say. Did you see it?”

  “No, but everbody knows.”

  “He told the police when they arrested him that he didn’t do it, and I also have my doubts.”

  “How do you know what he told the police?”

  “I was there at the camp. I heard him.”

  “Well, maybe it was you done it, then.”

  “Billy Don was my friend. I was hiding. Someone was shooting at me. I think it was Junior Baxter himself.”

  “Well, then…”

  “But Billy Don was already dead. Had been for some time, I think. Lo
oked like he’d been shot by someone up close. So many guns. Could have been anyone, I suppose. But, tell me, Mrs. Filbert, did Darren Rector ever carry a gun?”

  “No, he wouldn’t touch one. Wouldn’t even do guard duty on that account.”

  The girl pauses to think about this, staring down at Mr. Suggs again. “What if there were an afterlife and that was what it was like?” she says, more to herself than to Bernice. “A kind of unending nightmare. And you can’t die, not even if you want to…” Bernice feels a shiver run up her spine. Because she has thought this, too, or something near it. It’s like the girl, who probably isn’t a girl after all, is reading her mind. “Do you think Mr. Suggs would know anything helpful?”

  “He’s had a bad stroke. He can’t talk. Probly can’t think neither.”

  Mr. Suggs is wagging his finger vigorously and the girl sees this. “Do you hear me, Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “Is your name Yankee Doodle?” He wags his finger. “That’s usually a sign for saying no.”

  “No, he’s just trying to wave at you and say goodbye because your questions is confounding him.” The anxiety is back. The sense of imminent danger. A demonic presence.

  “Is your name Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “I think I’m getting somewhere. Are you being well cared for, Mr. Suggs?”

  He wags his finger urgently and Bernice, gathering up her courage for this may be the last thing she does in life, interposes herself between the two of them and orders the fiendish intruder out of the house. “Now!” she screams, and she crosses herself in the Romanist way to further shield herself against the Evil One. “Or I’ll call the police!”

  When she has gone, vanishing as if she were never there, Bernice turns on her patient, her heart pounding. His ingratitude! Not well cared for? She feels utterly betrayed—after all she has done for him! But the secret’s out. Scary’s not enough. It has to be something worse than scary. And fast! “You shouldn’t of done that, Mr. Suggs. What you got is you got me and you shouldn’t do nothing to make me mad. Up to now I been nice to you, telling you the truth, most of the time, but not all of it. I still haven’t told you, for example, that Clara and all them have turned the church camp into a casino full of wicked women. That’s right. I was afraid you wouldn’t like that, so I was holding back. Nothing you can do about it. Your money’s all gone. That fat lawyer with the slicked-down hair has took it all. You won’t see him no more. He don’t need you now. You are a pauper, Mr. Suggs, and you will get buried thataway.” Maudie will be here soon. She prepares a hypodermic. “You’ve not paid your taxes, so the banker, he’s got your coalmine now. They say he’s struck oil, worth zillions, but it’s his, not yours. He’s laughing at you all over town.” She thinks of her new stories like tent stakes driven into the brain. Rebecca at the well: tying her visitors down and pouring buckets of water down their throats. She stabs the needle into his belly. “And Ben Wosznik? Well, he run off with another woman, a half-nekkid young thing who can sing a mite, and now they’re out in the bars singing dirty songs, and it has just broke Clara up and she has took to drink…”