The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  The days are lengthening and the sun is probably still shining on Inspiration Point above them, but twilight has already settled on this little grove down here in the valley behind the lodge, oddly making the dogwood flowers seem to glow, and Elaine, standing under them, seems to glow as well. How beautiful she is in this strange pale light. Now he’s the one staring and she’s the one to look away. He can feel Junior Baxter’s seething fury off to one side, but it means nothing to him. She’s here and he’s here. That’s all that matters. On his way from lunch to the work site, Ben saw him craning about and said, “I s’pose you’re looking for Elaine. She ain’t feeling all that sociable today. Be careful, son. I think your coming here has gave her a fright. She’ll be at the prayer meeting tonight. You’ll see her there.” All afternoon he has been plotting out what he’d say to her when they finally met, how he loves her, needs her, or else how he just wants to be friends again, have someone to talk to, whatever seems most likely to work, but all that has vanished from his head, and he knows it will all happen without a word or it won’t happen at all.

  There is apparently something sacred about the tree, which is why they are meeting here. The two country singers do a song about it. “All who see it will think of Me / Nailed to a cross from a dogwood tree…” The easy familiar singing mellows Pach’ out (it was right to come here), and when they follow that with a singalong version of “In the Garden,” he joins in. Old campfire standby. And the joy we share as we tarry there (he is watching Elaine, who is not singing; her head is down and she looks thin and fragile and he longs to gather her into his arms and take care of her), none other has ever known…

  “Now, my son, the Lord be with thee, and prosper thou, and build the house of the Lord thy God, as he hath said of thee.” This is Wayne Shawcross reading from the Old Testament, somewhat laboriously, his finger tracing the lines in the dim light, about somebody building a church. Could be referring to building the camp, but, after the news today, it’s the tabernacle idea that has them buzzing. “Moreover there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and workers of stone and timber, and all manner of cunning men for ever manner of work.” Sure. Cunning. Count me in. Wayne plows on in his wooden monotone: “Arise therefore, and build ye the sanctuary of the Lord God, to bring the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and the holy vessels of God, into the house that is to be built to the name of the Lord.” There are a lot of amens and praise Gods now, people are getting excited, even though they probably don’t know what arks and vessels Wayne is talking about. Elaine’s head is up, a kind of startled expression on her face, but she is not joining in. A woman with a glass eye and gold tooth is watching her, head cocked, as if trying to decipher the expression. “The Lord hath chosen thee to build a house for the sanctuary: be strong, and do it!”

  As Wayne looks up from his reading, pocketing his spectacles, the amens raining down, Elaine’s mother steps into the ruckus and in her sharp clear voice starts to spell out what she calls the glad tidings about acquiring the Deepwater mining property and what that means to them. She gets about two lines out. “And I heerd a great voice outa Heaven saying, behold!” That’s little Willie Hall interrupting. Can’t hold him back, never could. “The tabernacle a God is with men, and he will dwell with ’em and they shall be his people, and God hisself shall be with ’em and be their God! Ay-men! Revelation 21:3!” People are shouting at him, goading him on. Clara can’t get a word in edgewise. It’s already turning into another one of those nights, just like old times, though now Pach’ feels more like a self-conscious tourist. “Tell it like it is, Brother Willie!” “Let ’em bring me up onto thy holy hill,” he cries, pointing, his big ears standing out like signal flags, “and to thy tabernacle! Psalms 43:3!” Abner Baxter raises his fist to speak, evidently keen to unload a few verses of his own, but the two singers take it as a cue to do another number: “The Sons of Light Are Marching.” The song they sang on the march out to the hill that terrible morning. Pach’ led the parade, walking backwards, bellowing at the top of his lungs so they could hear him all the way to the back. Hammering the ruts and gravel of the mine road with his bare feet as though to say goodbye to both road and feet. Must have hurt. Doesn’t remember. Remembers Elaine marching right there at the front, watching him, almost desperately, singing with him in her timid little voice, the dead body they were carrying in the folded lawnchair rocking along above and behind her like a kind of canopy, the Prophet’s gaga mother beside her being pulled over the bumps in a little red wagon, helicopters rattling in the sky overhead, photographers and newsmen and the curious trailing along beside them, the whole mad procession watched by state troopers in black uniforms and white visored helmets. “O the sons of light are marching since the coming of the dawn,” Pach’ sings now, joining in. “Led by Giovanni Bruno and the voice of Domiron!” But he’s the only one who does it that way. The others sing: “Led by Giovanni Bruno, we shall go marching on!” So Domiron’s out. The rest of Mrs. Norton’s contributions as well, probably. He decides to shut up until he gets the whole picture. “So come and march with us to Glory!” Their own battle hymn. Not a song to tamp down the emotions, but it brings a certain order to them, makes them less dangerous, even as it stirs them up. Somehow it’s the rhymes that do that, like little fasteners. Buttons. “For the end of time has come!”

  When the song is over, Duke and his woman wave their goodbyes. “Peace!” Duke says. Pach’ wants to leave with them, needs a beer, relief from all this shit, but he can’t, wouldn’t look right, and he still has hopes of connecting with Elaine. Runny-nosed Davey Cravens comes over and stands beside him, takes his hand. “You’re my friend,” he says, looking up at him. Big Hunk Rumpel, Mrs. Cravens’ current man, rumbles forward in his split tunic and takes Davey up by the scruff. “It’s okay,” Pach’ says, but Hunk just turns away and hauls the kid on up the path toward the lodge, the boy yelping and bawling all the way. Hunk never seems to say much, but at work today he took to Pach’ right away and Pach’ felt adopted by him. Respect of strength for strength. The old prison code. Maybe Hunk’s done time too. Seeing what just happened to Davey, Hunk is not much improvement on the old man Pach’ got stuck with, but he’s someone you might want to have in your corner when things get tough.

  Before Mrs. Collins can pick up where she got cut off, Abner Baxter starts up a rant of his own, like he’s been threatening to do all along. He doesn’t say so, but his Bible quotes seem to equate the temple idea with idol worship. That’s how Pach’ reads them anyway, and the look on Clara’s face suggests it’s how she reads them too. Elaine watches her mother with some alarm, her hand at her mouth, her shoulders hunched, while Baxter rails against pride and vanity and speaks up for the poor. “And therefore I command you, saith the Lord, thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land!” He is getting a lot of shouted amens and some people start clapping in rhythm to all his “thy’s.” This probably has something to do with how their money is to be spent. It came up at lunch, too. People who want a place to stay, not another church. Pach’ can only watch. He’s on the other side of the world from these people now. Baxter turns toward his constituents, raising both arms. He is angry about the use of sheriff’s troops to clear the tents off the Mount of Redemption and sealing it off and he thunderously says so. Pach’ only wishes he could go take Elaine’s hand and lead her out of here.

  Who comes to take his hand, walking over in front of everyone, is Baxter’s daughter, Amanda. She presses up beside him and says she wants to be his friend, too. In this half-light they may not notice how red his face is, must be, and how his acne’s flaring up. He looks around in the sudden silence for help. He’s afraid Elaine might get the wrong idea. Certainly Amanda’s father seems to have got the wrong idea; he’s sputtering and his face is puffed up like he’s about to have a fit, his stupid son boiling up beside him. Luckily, the other Baxter girl, the older frumpy one, quietly takes charge. “She’s kinda simple,” she mutt
ers by way of apology, and leads the girl away, and Pach’ thanks her. All these crazy kids. Pach’ is beginning to feel like the Pied Piper. Of course, people didn’t like the Pied Piper either, did they?

  Elaine puts her arms around him and hugs him close. She tells him tearfully how much she loves him, how she’s missed him. Don’t ever leave me again, Carl Dean. She calls him Carl Dean? Probably. Pach’ doesn’t seem right. She’s such a tender fragile person, she can’t even imagine savage Indians. When he slides his hand down to hold her little bottom, she doesn’t complain. She presses closer to him and releases a little gasp, a kind of sob. He can feel her tummy pushing against him. “I love you, Elaine,” he whispers, and she trembles and grips him tightly as the sweet night closes down around them. He tugs gently at her bottom to rub her tummy against his hard-on. He desperately wants her to take it in her mouth. But would she, could she? No, but Sissy does, lapping lovingly at it with his little puppy tongue. Pach’ is somewhat alarmed by this, and he pauses to worry about it. He spent a lot of time and spunk jerking off in prison, but otherwise he stayed clean. Except for little Sissy, as they called him. Her. Sissy was more girl than guy and the men called him “she” and “her,” and eventually Pach’ did, too, but never in ridicule. Sissy had a little dick and it got hard like a pencil stub when he was excited, but he was curvy and cuddly with innocent blue eyes and puckery lips and a snow-white bottom, soft and round as a girl’s. “Sissy” was for “Sister,” both as in family and in nun: he liked to dress up like one, using prison blankets. Even the screws thought this was funny, and several of them were probably serviced by Sissy in that costume. He was in for drugs and as an accessory to murder, a murder committed by his boyfriend, whom he then tried to hide. His boyfriend died in a drug-crazed shootout with the cops, and Sissy was taken in. And one sad and lonely night when Pach’ could not stop thinking about Elaine, Sissy took him in his mouth and he let him do that. Sissy said he’d never seen one that big and it almost frightened him. Eventually he had Sissy in other ways, too, but always while thinking about Elaine. And now, lying in the back of his van only yards away from her (he has been unable to take his gaze away from the lighted windows of their trailer, even though the blinds are pulled) and humping his pillow while fantasizing about her, it is Sissy who has taken her place. That’s weird, and he doesn’t think he likes it. Sissy eventually got a tattoo of a little heart with a large Indian arrow through it and the words CRAZY APACHE—not over his heart, but on his little white left cheek, otherwise without a blemish. Sissy cried when Pach’ left prison and Pach’ felt bad, too. Poor little Sissy. Oh, what the hell. Out of affection, Pach’ lets him finish up.

  The first time he blew his wad it was like an accident and he didn’t know what was happening. He thought he’d been visited by angels. His old lady, who was not otherwise very religious, had a thing about angels and other supernatural creatures, and he was still pretty susceptible to all that. He sometimes thought he heard angels in his room, flying around like bats. Maybe they were bats. When he started getting serious about Christianity at the Baptist Church, it felt like growing up, and he looked down on his superstitious mother after that, though actually all he’d done was stop believing in Rudolph while sticking with Santa Claus. Then along came Mrs. Norton, who introduced him to Santa’s big daddy Domiron off in some other dimension, therewith offering him access to possibilities beyond his pathetic fucked-up smalltown life and making him feel like some kind of privileged highbrow. He finally got rid of all that crap in prison. Reading the Bible helped. One of the few books you could have in stir. He decided to plow straight through it, beginning to end. He read first with a certain awe (this has been the book for twenty centuries!), then with increasing irritation (who wrote this stupid thing?), finally with disgust and anger. A total swindle. Blaming God for writing it is a fucking sacrilege. Got interested in troublemakers instead. Which was just about anybody who got anything done. Jesus, for example, the wildass bastard. Before checking out, he got a pep talk in his cell from the prison chaplain, who interrupted him while he was saying goodbye to Sissy, and he let the bastard have it. “Jesus was all right,” he said, “but Christ sucks.” When the chaplain left, shaking his head, Sissy started giggling and bawling hysterically at the same time and told him he was completely crazy. His Crazy Apache.

  Should he open another beer? He shouldn’t. Only half a six-pack left and no easy way to get more. Not much money for buying it even if he should break out of this place for a time, and as long as he helps out here with the building, no way to earn more. He has at least been well fed. Wayne Shawcross and Ludie Belle invited him to stop by their house trailer after the prayer meeting for something extra to eat. She’s in charge of the camp kitchen and has a well-stocked fridge. She probably keeps a bottle somewhere, too, but he didn’t want to ask. Not yet. Same with telling them about Elaine. They are good people, and he wanted to talk with them straight out about his feelings—they’d seen what he did after the prayer meeting—and he even thought he might show them his tattoo, but when they asked him what he was doing here, he told them what he’d told Elaine’s mother. Which is also true. He has been lonely. And both of them seem like pretty serious believers, Wayne especially, so he has to be careful.

  The lights have gone out in the Collins trailer, which looms imperiously over him, aglow in the light of the full moon. In his imagination she sleeps in her Brunist tunic. The one she was wearing on Easter night all those years ago. When he thinks of her, that cotton fabric is what his fingers feel. Tonight, when the prayer meeting ended, he got up his nerve and walked over to her, his hands in his pockets, to say hello. It was an awkward moment with everyone watching and he knew his acne was flaring up. When he was actually in front of her, he couldn’t think of what to say. He found it difficult to look into her eyes, but when he dropped his eyes, there was her body draped in the thin tunic, and that confused him all the more. Finally he just nodded and said, “Hi, it’s me.” Elaine only stared at him as if he’d just threatened to kill her, and without saying a word, left immediately with her mother. Well, he thought, at least she didn’t tell him to go away. It’s only his first day. He can be patient. Meanwhile, he has opened another beer. It’s Easter night, the moon’s filling up the sky, and they’re in his car again. She’s trembling, but she has been through this before, and is ready now. “Stay the fuck out of this,” he says to Sissy. “Go take a walk and don’t come back until I blink the lights.”

  II.3

  Sunday 26 April – Wednesday 29 April

  “Come on, Billy Don, how can you not hear it? It’s right there, clear as a bell!”

  “Well, that bell is just not ringing for me.” Yet again, for the umpteenth time, Brother Abner Baxter says: “…cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” “Honest, Darren, all I hear is a kind of hissing sound.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But it’s not anybody saying anything. It’s just a kind of noise. Might even be part of how Reverend Baxter is saying ‘darkness.’”

  “No, it comes after, Billy Don. It’s her! I’m telling you!”

  “Maybe you got better ears than me.”

  “Maybe I have.” Sometimes Billy Don seems plain stupid. “But there’s more! Listen!”

  Listen! That’s the whispered word Darren hears behind the powerful bass tones of the preacher: Listen! It is she. He knows it. The voice in the ditch. Marcella. They both have trouble saying her name. It is as though she has passed beyond the nominal, is mysteriously just “she.” Less than she. Or more. An aura. The displaced voice of the mystical figure pointing to Heaven in the painting in Reverend Clegg’s Florida church. A voice in pain. The recording, dated and catalogued, as are all their tapes, is the one from a week ago down at the foot of the mine hill during the arrival on the Day of the Sacrifice of Reverend Baxter and his family. Billy Don was holding the microphone, his own flat, ugly voice blocking out the others until Darren shushed him (maybe that’s the s
ound Darren keeps hearing, Billy Don thinks: his own shushing). “Do ye likewise, my friends, while there is still time for your souls to be saved!” Abner Baxter is urging on the tape. There’s a tiny pause between “friends” and “while,” and Darren backs it up and plays it again. “Do you hear it, Billy Don?”

  “Sure. Reverend Baxter wants everybody to put on the armor of light.”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Pay attention!” He plays it again, growing impatient with Billy Don. He’s doing this on purpose. It’s that evil girl. She’s corrupting his soul. “Between those two words, that girl’s voice, saying ‘to me.’ It’s just a whisper, but you can’t miss it!”

  “Yeah, okay, I hear it now.” On the table between them is a blurry photograph of all the people on the mine road taken from the top of the hill, Darren having appropriated the dead woman’s box camera before anyone noticed. The old lady’s lens had been amateurishly aimed toward the sun and Darren presumably sees a ghostly presence in the consequent flare of light. “But why do you think it’s a girl’s voice? It’s most likely one of those old women standing around, but you can’t hear her except when Reverend Baxter stops to catch his breath.”

  “No, listen again. No one at the camp has a weird breathy voice like that. No one alive, anyway.”

  “‘Do ye likewise, my friends…’ (…to me…) ‘while there is…’”

  Okay, it’s there. But so what? Ever since they met, Billy Don has shared Darren’s scientific quest for eschatological truth, and he was just as curious as Darren was when Patti Jo said she could hear the dead girl speaking to her from the ditch that day, but Darren is losing him on this one. Darren has played and replayed these mine road tapes all week, hoping he might have picked up her voice, pressing on long after Billy Don had given up. At the Sunday service this morning, after Brother John P. Suggs had confirmed for everybody the final acquisition of the Mount of Redemption and the anonymous gift that will make possible the building of their temple on it, setting off a burst of rapturous praise-giving, Patti Jo got up with her friend Duke to lead everyone in singing “Higher Ground,” and Billy Don, humming along in his tuneless fashion, found himself thinking about the way Patti Jo said she communicated with Marcella’s spirit. “Marcella doesn’t use words exactly. It’s more like she’s just thinking and I can sort of sense what she’s thinking. I know that sounds weird, but it feels completely natural.” So nothing really said, just a kind of shared thereness, and if that’s so, he wondered, watching Patti Jo’s breasts bob about under her white blouse (when they interviewed her, the poor woman had a lot of sad stories to tell—she’s had a tough life and it shows on her face—but she still has a lot of bounce and it’s fun to watch her sing), why did Darren think they would hear a voice when she didn’t? We’re not all mediums, Darren said. If it’s important, like Patti Jo says the voice says it is, then the spirit has to get through however it can.