The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  “Right on,” she said over the reporter’s shoulder, and the boys smiled benignly.

  “The truth,” said the blond one, “is more like something that exists apart in the intellectual space shared by everyone, not something bottled up inside this or that individual. All voices have to be listened to closely in order to catch a whisper of God’s voice behind them.” Whisper. Nice.

  “The truth’s more like the air we share,” said the mustachioed one. “Not what you or I happen to have in our lungs at any moment. And like air, we can’t see truth, but we know it’s there and we can’t do without it.”

  She could see problems with that metaphor, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she waited until the reporters were out of the way, and then she said, “Hi. I’m Sally Elliott. You guys really know your stuff. I’m impressed.” She knew she had a genuine expression of angst on her face because of the cramps. “I don’t think I’m going to become a member or anything, but I’m really curious and I wondered if you could give me, like, a kind of guided tour and tell me what’s going on?”

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “Well, a Presbyterian.”

  “Really? Here in town? The minister’s wife is a member now.”

  “I know. Auntie Debra.” Not really her aunt, of course. Was that cheating?

  They looked at each other and nodded and introduced themselves and invited her up. Maybe her scruffiness helped. From what she could see under the tunics, or by those who lacked them, she fit right in. Probably a good thing she didn’t have the cameras, though. Billy Don, the taller one, said this was hallowed ground and she could only stay for thirty minutes, unless she wanted to confess and become a member. There was still time. They were watching her uneasily (behind Billy Don’s shades, she could see, one eye was askew), but they also seemed hopeful for a new adherent. Probably gave them status. Banking another soul.

  The tour didn’t take long. There wasn’t much to see, but that wasn’t the point. “Hallowed ground” was the point, and she its inquisitive intruder. When she asked, Darren and Billy Don explained that the lawn chair perched on the four waist-high roughhewn wooden crosses was like the one on which the dead girl (they said: “first martyr”) was laid out on the Day of Redemption. Others passed by, pointing at the sky. She remembered the thin bluish corpse, whipped by wind and rain, only the second dead body she had ever seen. But she had forgotten the lawn chair. Probably too freaked out to notice. On the day, even while she laughed with her friends, she worried the Brunists might be right and she’d get left behind. She could still think that way. She’d been poised for a sprint up the hill if things started to happen. At the same time, she was afraid of getting struck by lightning. Billy Don asked her if she’d like to stop and pray, and she said she would like to meditate for a moment, and she assumed a grave expression and stared down at the lawn chair and had a rather ghoulish thought about Sleeping Beauty.

  They walked her around behind the reception tent, as they called it, to the lone tree there, which had something to do with the invention of their new baptism ceremony with light instead of water. “It’s like a new covenant—not replacing the old, but transcending it in the way that light transcends water.” This ceremony awaited her if God granted her grace and understanding and she became a True Follower. They pointed to a large tent further up the hillside, whose open flaps revealed rows of folding chairs and said this could happen tonight if she were ready to confess her sins and give herself to Jesus. She asked more about this. Apparently there is a special “liturgical” flashlight they use just like the one from the first time. Or maybe it’s the same one. The tree had a frail shaggy martyred look of its own, gaunt, leafy but without real branches, a wounded pole. Not unlike that of their leader Giovanni Bruno, as she remembers him from the day and from photos of the day. She asked about him and learned that he is dead. Not, apparently, from natural causes. Unless all causes are God’s causes and therefore natural, she reminded them, hoping they didn’t hear the irony, and they nodded solemnly at that, and seemed to relax just a little. They pointed out the place down on the mine road where the girl was killed and the area just below them where the Powers of Darkness gathered with their ominous yellow schoolbuses. Where she herself had stood. Full of darkness, to be sure. By the time things really got hairy, though, the Powers had to do without her and her friends. They’d earlier started for the bingo tent to get out of the storm when they heard a lot of screaming in there and that scared the pants off them and they ran all the way home and had to watch the rest on television.

  Though some of the scowls she got suggested she was still oozing an aura of darkness, for the most part she was welcomed with smiles and praise-the-lord greetings, the two boys her ambassadors. The kids from Florida all gave her loving hugs, including the cute one (who, Sally was happy to note, had gapped front teeth and a lisp), and introduced her to others from their bus and people they’d come to know here. There were apparently over a dozen buses parked at the camp, and more down below here on the mine road. It was like being at a big school pep rally. On Homecoming weekend. She learned from the boys that the cult was now hundreds of times bigger than it had been. Something was happening. It was almost elbow to elbow up here. She met the radio announcer in the white cowboy togs, who was talking with a tall skinny dude with a guitar and his girlfriend about a gig at the station. She might have been part Mexican. When Sally asked her why she was here, she said she’d got called. Like someone called her on the phone. A lot of these people talked that way. Voices in their heads. In the wilderness of their heads. A dingbat with a rigid grimace and steely blue eyes under a peroxide blond toupee wandered past, trailed by admiring ladies in bouffants. He was lecturing them at full throttle on the meaning of the cross in the circle they were wearing on their tunics. Some numbers game involved, having to do with Christ’s thirty-three years. “And, yea, there was give them to each one a white robe,” he cried out. “Cause the spirit has took on flesh, a new day is come, brung by the White Bird, the Holy Spirit, and you are in it, my friends, a new day what will last to the end a the world!” There were people falling about in what her comparative religion textbooks used to call fits of divine madness, and other people strolling about with cups of coffee and beatific expressions, calmly watching the ecstatics as they might watch children playing in a sandbox. Weird. Tom and Sally at the Reality Border. “Do you guys ever do stuff like that?” she asked, and got only smiles in return, though Darren added, “God speaks with many voices.”

  That home care nurse in the beaded headband Tommy pointed out, his mom’s faith healer, looked alarmed when she spotted her, and hiding her head under her shawl which might have been made out of an old bedsheet, quickly vanished, as did Aunt Debra, who did not seem happy to see her. She caught only a glimpse of Colin Meredith before Aunt Debra whisked him out of sight. A wisp of a fellow, rigid smile on his face, thin silvery hairs hanging from his chin. His goggle eyes were darting everywhere, and when they lit on her, they flashed with panic. Which, on seeing his, she felt, too. When she asked, Billy Don said, “He’s a kind of visionary genius, like, and one of the first disciples and about the sincerest, most intense guy I’ve ever known. He almost vibrates like a live electric wire, you know? Sometimes it kind of drives him crazy, but he loves his mother very much and mostly does what she says, and she keeps him from going over the top.” Hmm. Something Sally’s mother didn’t tell her but hinted at: “The trouble with Debra…”

  After consulting with each other, the boys showed her roughly where the new Brunist tabernacle temple is going to be built and said in a secretive voice that the great news of the day was that they had just received a really fantastic gift, nearly enough to build the whole thing. They didn’t know where the money came from but supposed it was from their principal benefactor, Mr. John P. Suggs. He was pointed out to her. Not in a tunic. A burly big-skulled man in a gray suit and boots, plaid shirt, no tie, suspenders. He reminded her of the farmer who chased Peter Rabb
it in a picturebook she had. Or the nursery rhyme man in brown who tried to net the flying pig, dickery dickery dare. The horsey, strong-jawed woman in the tunic beside him, she learned, was their evangelical leader, Clara Collins. “A saint.” Sally had already noticed her. A bold lady, sure of herself. She didn’t walk, she strode, and wherever she went, there were people around her. Mr. Suggs had unscrolled a large sheet of paper and was showing it to her. Darren said it was architectural plans for the temple, which would be formally presented tonight at their evening prayer service and dedication ceremonies. She asked them if there wasn’t something paradoxical about building a new church when they were expecting the end of the world. Well, the Rapture could come any time, but they didn’t think it would happen for at least two years (“Me and Darren are working on that,” Billy Don said), and this gives them time to build a proper tabernacle wherein to receive the Lord, wherefrom to fly to Heaven. A kind of launch platform, as she later wrote in her notebook. A docking station.

  Though they’d told her that the main events in the meeting tent wouldn’t be starting until later in the afternoon, there was already a lot of preaching and singing going on all over the hillside, some of it broadcast over loudspeakers. That was to encourage anyone who wished to join them, Billy Don said, and he added that he sincerely hoped she would make such a decision. They accepted her thoughtful silence. These guys were easy. Clara Collins was a different story. When Sally was introduced to her, she asked bluntly, “Are you here as a believer, child?” “I am here as a seeker after truth, Mrs. Collins.” “Well, so are them reporters down there.” “No, ma’am. They only know their own truth and want you to confirm it. I don’t know the truth and am on a quest for it.” Got that right out of her medieval lit course. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, and in the resurrection of the body, and in the Bible as God’s holy word?” “I wish to believe, but I am full of doubts. I am trying to resolve those doubts.” “She’s the niece of Sister Debra, Sister Clara.” Clara gave her a stern look-over, gazing into her thicket of hair as though to search out there the demons who possessed her. “All right, child. But don’t abuse your welcome.”

  An invitation to leave. But she wasn’t feeling so great. She needed to sit down. The boys asked her if she’d eaten and she said she hadn’t, so they led her in here under a tent where they had tables of food set out, found a folding chair in a corner, and brought her a white-bread lunch-meat sandwich and a cream soda, and that helped. Sometimes, it’s true, it seems to her that she grasps or is embraced by a great cosmic mystery, and for a moment she enjoys a certain rapt serenity. But usually the mystery eludes her or it evolves into some familiar banality, like the cream soda burp she burped then, and it never comes close to happening when she’s bummed out with the blahs.

  A guy walks into the tent now wearing a chocolate Stetson and an unbelted white gown over jeans and dusty high-heeled boots. Looks like some kind of cowboy cross-dresser. Said to be a honcho politician and rich rancher from Wyoming and a bishop from there. She takes out her notebook again and commences a sketch. He grabs up half a sandwich, stuffs it whole into his jowls, and wallows it around in there like a chaw of tobacco. Suddenly, he topples over, knocking his hat off, and starts twitching and yelping out unintelligible noises, spewing half-chewed sandwich. When his tunic falls back, you can see that he’s wearing holstered pistols—he is a cowboy! A crowd gathers. A woman with one dead eye and a gold tooth claims to be able to translate his gibberish. She says the Prophet is inside him and speaking through him. The Prophet says: Prepare! Christ is coming! They all know this, but they gasp and cry out all the same. A whispered chant: Bru-no! Bru-no! Bru-no! All this ecstatic communion: how the fantasy of soul gets made. After a while, the gunslinger gets up, dribbling chewed bread, looking dazed. He doesn’t acknowledge those gathered around him. He straightens his tunic, brushes off his hat and leaves the tent. Singing ensues.

  The Great Myth of the Rapture. She’s sitting in it.

  Nothing more certain, said Darren solemnly. “The Second Coming of Jesus Christ, his literal physical return and all that means, is referred to 1845 times in the Bible.” She wrote the number down and factors it now just for fun. Three and five and one-two-three.

  Another thing Darren said. About the religious calling. She flips back a few pages: An invisible form calling out for substance. One is conscious of this summons and its attraction, without knowing what it is that is calling. Something he read somewhere probably. Now she writes: The writer’s vocation: An invisible form calling out for substance. One is conscious of this summons and its attraction, without knowing what it is that is calling. When she looks up Aunt Debra is standing there, frowning down at the notebook in her lap.

  “I’m surprised to see you here, Sally. I didn’t think you were a believer in much of anything anymore.”

  “You know me, Auntie Debra. I always have to know it all. How about yourself? I never thought of you as an evangelical sort.”

  “Well, I have changed.” Certainly she seems to have lost some weight. In fact, like her mom said, she’s looking pretty good. Settled into herself, at home in her tunic. Tanned and strong. But maybe not so soft and loving as before. More determined, somehow. In control. The opposite of what her dad says. He says Debra has blown all her money and her husband’s too, and she is shacked up with a crazy kid and is completely out of control. Fruitcake is his word for gross dysfunction. She’s a fruitcake. “These are good people who have suffered so much for their simple faith. I love them and have become one of them.”

  “But you seem so different from them, Auntie Debra. They’re all so—well—so emotional.”

  “I know. I resisted that at first. Afraid of direct communion with God. All buttoned up like a good Presbyterian. I’m past that now. For the first time, I feel like I really have a personal relationship with God and belong in His world and am at last living a truly meaningful life. Everything is suddenly so real!”

  “Well, that’s great, Auntie Debra. I mean, I guess it is. You’re sure looking good. But Mom says your husband has turned kind of weird.”

  “I was slow to wake up, Sally. He was always kind of weird. And he knows nothing at all about true religion. He’s a showoff without substance or faith or beauty. Like a strutting jay among meadowlarks.” Do jays strut? She knows nothing at all about birds. “But,” Aunt Debra adds, glancing skeptically at the tee and trenchcoat, into which she has hastily buried the notebook, “these people are very serious about their beliefs. You must be careful not to offend them.”

  “I am. But I have to be me. I saw that orphan boy before, Colin, is he…?”

  “I’m taking care of him. I’m establishing that halfway house for troubled young people out here I once told you about, and he’s like my first case. He’s hanging onto life by his fingernails, Sally. He’s been through a lot, more than you and I can even imagine, and I’m sort of keeping a grip on him, not letting him let go.”

  She wants to ask more about that, but Billy Don joins them, slouching up, hands in pockets. There’s a red patch on the side of his face where he’s been catnapping on it. “Are you staying?” he asks cheerfully.

  “I think she needs more time, Billy Don,” Debra says. “She was just leaving.”

  Well, she’s ready to go. The cramps have subsided, but she desperately requires a cigarette, and she has had about all of this holy mania she can take in one go.

  “Colin seems very frightened about something, Sister Debra. Darren’s talking to him, but he probably needs you.”

  “Oh dear.” She turns and gives Sally a brief but affectionate hug. “I love you, Sally. Come see me any time,” she says, and hurries away, holding up the hem of her tunic, slapping along in her sandals.

  “I better go help,” Billy Don says. “Do you want me to walk you down first…?”

  “No, downhill’s easy, Billy Don. Like sin. Who’s that mopey fat girl over there? I think I know her.”

  “That
’s Reverend Baxter’s daughter.”

  “Right. Baxter. Frances Baxter. I was in school with her.”

  “Listen, if you change your mind…” He takes her hand in both of his and gives her a deep gaze through his sunglasses, at least with one of his eyes.

  “Thanks, Billy Don. You never know. I may come out to the camp to see Auntie Debra and we can talk more about it.”

  “That’d be great.” He squeezes her hand tenderly and leaves, pausing at the tent opening to toss her a wave.

  Franny Baxter remains slumped in her chair when she passes, gazing up at her sullenly when she introduces herself. She’s already looking like an old lady, bloated at the belly, round-cheeked, bespectacled. “Hi, Franny. I’m Sally Elliott. I used to see you at WCHS. I was a year or two ahead of you, but I think we had a history class together.”