The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  But that explained some things. Why they were burying the body at the camp, Ben has no idea, though, since they may have been lying in wait for Junior and Elaine, it might have been a two-birds-with-one-stone thing. The sheriff found a stolen station wagon later that morning over near the mine—apparently they’d taken the brake off and rolled it down the hill—and it was likely they used it to haul the body here. Made less noise than their motorcycles, too. Accounts for their quick getaway when he and the others rushed down there. Ben doesn’t have much to go on, but he supposes from Mrs. Edwards’ story that the burying must have happened near where he found the flowery drawers. The grave’s probably not too deep, something they dug in a hurry. The trowel he has brought along should be enough. He’s fearful of unearthing a decomposing body, only hoping she’s right and it’s just an animal. But where to start? Everything looks wet and settled, the ground back here in the trees covered with bushes and dead leaves. Could take him weeks, and even then he might miss it. Then he sees it. An area blanketed with dead maple leaves. But under an oak tree. He carefully clears the wet leaves away and finds the patch of disturbed earth where nothing new is growing yet, slightly sunken. About the size of Rocky’s grave, too small for a grown person. A child? A severed head? The thought of digging up such a thing sends a shudder down his spine. Maybe he should turn this over to Sheriff Puller, he thinks, even as he begins to drive his trowel into the wet soil. But what he finds is not a child. Not a body at all. It all begins to make sense. He remembers now the rumors going round before they left. But why here? Because no one would think to look here. Which means they most likely didn’t know Junior and Elaine would turn up, not wanting anyone to know they’d been here. It also means they’re planning to come back. He could report it, but it would throw suspicion on him and the camp, might draw state and federal authorities to the area. They never said anything to any outsiders about the rape, wanting to protect Elaine, so there’d be a lot of explaining to do. They’d want to pin the theft on somebody, and the bikers aren’t around, and they know he and the others have been seen over there around the mine buildings, not to mention the gatherings of all of them on the hill. Which weren’t themselves completely legal, as he understands it from all the disputation. There are people who mean them harm and want to be rid of them and they could use this as an excuse. But he can’t leave it where it is. What if they came back? It weighs too much to move any distance. He’d need help and that would mean telling somebody, and he doesn’t want to do that. Not yet. It’s hard work with nothing but a trowel, but he can shift it far enough that it won’t be easy to find.

  When he has done that and refilled and covered up the old place like it was before, he heads back to the house trailer. It’s late in the day. The trailer’s empty. Clara and Elaine are gone. He sees Mabel Hall through the kitchenette window hurrying over from her caravan looking fretful. His chest tightening, he steps outside to meet her.

  I have not been a good mother. This is the despairing thought that Clara, seated beside her daughter’s hospital bed, is thinking. I have not paid enough attention. Though it is to herself she speaks, praying the while for guidance and forgiveness, she hopes Ely is listening. She does not feel him nearby, has not for some time now, but she believes he must be, for Elaine’s sake if not her own. They both need him now. Clara has given herself heart and soul to her church mission, which she has always thought of as Ely’s mission, too, and Elaine’s as well, her task to guide her daughter, hand in hand, toward redemption, the end so near upon them. But there was always so much to do, Elaine’s hand was not in hers too much of the time—how much of her devotion to this sacred calling, she wonders, has been worldly pride and vanity?—and now see here, her emaciated child, broken, embittered, lost, her hands shackled, her nose violated by the tube that, seemingly against her will, is keeping her alive. Often during the past few weeks, watching her daughter’s frightening decline, beset by doubt and weariness, Clara has thought she should ask someone else to take over. Hiram maybe. Or her new director of National Media, the bishop of the Eastern Seaboard. She even had a word with him about it. Did Jesus’ mother, cradling her son’s ravaged body, suffer the same doubts, the same regrets? What, at such a moment, does one care about the salvation of the world? She wishes she still had that little porcelain statue of Mary with her bleeding heart on her breast that Elaine gave her. It would speak to her now.

  Purity of heart. Something Ely once said in a sermon, asking God he be granted it, and this has been her prayer as well and is now. What Ely meant by it was doing one thing in life and doing it right. It should be a grand thing and a noble thing and a holy thing, but one thing. It’s what true devotion is. On the road out east, between one church and another, she talked about it with Ben. He said he couldn’t define purity, but he knew how it felt. When they moved here to the camp they had it. Often, before that, in the early years, out on the road, too. But it was gone now. It’s still gone.

  Bernice lifted her spectacles and took only one look at Elaine back at the trailer and said they had to get her to the hospital. Now. That child is dying. Ben was nowhere to be found. They rushed here in Bernice’s car, Elaine too feeble to resist. The doctor, too, was alarmed. The nurses took measures: emergency measures that Clara should perhaps have disallowed, but she was confused, ashamed, frightened, exhausted herself, the doctor taking note of that, asking questions, personal questions that she brushed aside or answered only in part, growing angry, then apologizing for that, trying not to break into tears, her daughter needing her strength, having so little of her own.

  Her worst failing: Elaine has suffered so, and she has not known how to console her.

  They left the camp, went east ostensibly to visit the churches there, sing and preach in them and bring the news, but primarily for Elaine’s sake, to distance her from the scene of her ordeal, spend more time together, attempt a healing. Though it was good to get back on the road again, good for her and Ben, Elaine remained tucked darkly into herself, refusing to speak, eating almost nothing. It just takes time, Clara supposed. Time and love. The movement, she saw, was strong and healthy. There were large, enthusiastic crowds wherever they went, and they even thought about settling out there, turning the Wilderness Camp over to those folks still living here. Maybe trying to build this administrative center was a mistake, for them at least; they were missionaries, not office workers. That’s how they were thinking. But word got around about Elaine wasting away and people began to get curious. They started comparing her to Marcella, only a legend to them, but a saintly one, and they wanted to see her, to pray in her company and to hear what she had to say. She had nothing to say, but that seemed to fascinate them all the more. Sick people turned up, asking to be cured. It got to be a little like a traveling freak show, which is how Ben put it one day in anger, chasing a crowd of them away from their house trailer, and they decided to return to the camp, fearful of the effect it might have on Elaine but not knowing where else to go. Besides, there was the Temple of Light cornerstone laying ceremony coming up; people would not understand why she who had brought all this about was not here. Even Ely, though mostly absent, seemed to be insisting on her return. The cornerstone was his tombstone, after all. But the trip back was long and Elaine, now refusing to leave her bed, worsened by the hour, as if the camp, as they drew nearer to it, were drawing the lifeblood out of her.

  Ben arrives. He brings a chair over and sits beside her and takes her hand and asks clumsily how the girl is. He can see how she is. “How is it that something so good and holy can turn so bad?” he asks, not of her, just of the room. Of God. “I don’t hardly know what to do,” he says. And then he starts to cry. And she starts to cry. And they sit there for a while, two old people, weeping.

  “Boy, this little lady kin sure flap, rare back’n cut down on a ballad! Jist give her a buncha words’n git outa the way! ‘The Trailer Camp Blues!’ So new it ain’t hardly got notes yet and ye heerd it here first in the ole Blue Moon,
hottest spot the back side a Nashville! ‘Lost her name in a poker game!’ But she ain’t lost hers! Patti Jo Glover, folks, that’s whom she am! That’s right, give her a big hand, lemme hear it! I love her! And hey, ifn y’ain’t lovin’, y’ain’t livin’! Am I right? So kiss a face there! Go ahead! Won’t do ye no more harm’n a fever blister! And dontcha leave now, ya big sissies, hang in there to the end, cuz we got another big clump a Sattiday night honkytonk, hankypanky, hoedowns’n heartbreak a-comin’ your way soon’s we wet the whustle…

  “That was beautiful, sweet thing! Y’really crunched it! Done me proud!”

  “Well, I wish I could sing, Duke, and not only hoot and yip. Funny how you can make something just about bearable by only singing about it. And this one’s kinda comical like I guess my life was, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Thanks for that. And thanks for the beer, too.”

  “Thank the feller who runs this flophouse. The beers’re on him, and whatall else we hanker after. It’s the big crowds we been pullin’ in since we teamed up. Folks is comin’ from all over the acreage. Kitchen’s hummin’ and the bar cain’t stock in enough. Him and me we had a talk, and he’s uppin’ our wages, too. You ain’t singin’ fer free no more. And Will Henry says he knows a feller runs a record company who might wanta come fer a listen.”

  “Oh…”

  “Whatsamatter, little darlin? Thought that’d set y’dancin’. Sumthin gotcha feelin’ blue?”

  “I’m happier than I ever been in my life, Duke. I’m so happy it sometimes makes me sad. But, well, I don’t know, it just feels so unreal. You know. Life out at the camp, kneel down to Jesus, hooray for poverty, the end of the world and all that, and then us here in the Moon drinking beer and talking honkytonk careers. I’m sorta lost and I don’t know if Marcella knows what to make of it neither.”

  “She been talkin’ to ye?”

  “Well, sure, in her way, most all the time. She’s worried about all the problems out there, the way things are breaking up and turning quarrelsome, and about whether the little Collins girl is gonna live or die and just what’s apt to happen tomorrow out on the mine hill, after all that young Darren has done to fever up anticipations and what with the troubles the Baxter people been causing, who knows what they may do next, but maybe that’s just me worrying and she’s worrying on account of I’m worrying.”

  “That’s a most entertainin’ notion, Patti Jo. A worried mind inside a worried mind. Ifn I knowed how t’write it in a song, I surely would.”

  “What I can’t figure out is exactly why I’m here. Marcella must of drawed me back because she wants something, something to help her find peace, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “She was your best pal, Patti Jo. Her family’s all gone. You’re what-all she’s got now.”

  “You mean, she just wanted my company? She’s not that selfish. Wasn’t when I knew her anyhow. And anyway we were kinda keeping company already before I come back. Has to be more than that.”

  “Well, she mighta only wanted you to have a sweeter life than you been livin’.”

  “I thought of that. And I think it’s partly true. It don’t seem a complete accident you and me met up. But that’s got done, and she still don’t want to let me go. For one thing, I think I have to stay now till the Collins girl gets better, and the way she is, that may never happen. Bernice says she’s real bad off, and Mabel is almost afraid to look at her cards. And it’s like if I go, she’ll surely die. I had a dream last night about her and Marcella. They were in a playground, playing like Marcella and me used to do. Jacks and stuff. And then Elaine was in a swing and Marcella was pushing her. She kept going higher and higher and I could see if she went any higher she’d tip over and fall out. I was scared and I ran over and asked Marcella to please stop. She opened her mouth but nothing came out, she could only shake her head. She was as scared as I was, but she kept pushing like she couldn’t stop herself. I knew she wanted me to help, but I couldn’t. It was like my arms weighed a ton. I woke up all in a sweat, tied up in the sheets. I probably cried out and I was afraid I mighta waked you up, but you were sawing them off. Softly, though. It was kinda more like humming.”

  “I was probly conjurin’ up a new song. Wisht I coulda wrote it down.”

  “You were laying on your stomach. Light from the parking lot was making your butt glow in the dark. It was beautiful. And a solace to me. I leaned over and kissed it for luck.”

  “That musta been when I got the rhyme. I don’t recollect what it was rhymin’ with, but the answer was Patti Jo.”

  “It helped me get back to sleep again. But now I keep seeing Marcella’s face when she turned to stare at me. Like she’s right in front of me. Her little gold cross on a chain around her neck, glittering in the sun. Her ears sticking out a little. The scared begging look in her eyes. Her mouth open, trying to talk. And Elaine way up above us, about to come falling down.”

  “Now, that’s sumthin t’ponder. Not jist a fallen angel, but havin’ one land on ye like a frigerator. Near as bad as gittin’ stars in your eyes. Well, when you’re low or feelin’ fearful, honey, you jist keep smoochin’ my butt, and I guarantee things’ll turn up rosy!”

  “It might help if I knew where she was resting. One thing I wanted to do right off when I got here was go put some flowers on her grave. But no one seems to know where it is. I went down to city hall and told them I was a friend of the family, a distant relative, but they said there wasn’t much of that family left and they had no idea where anybody was. They kept eyeing me in a funny way, but finally said I should go ask Monsignor Baglione at the Catholic church. Father Bags has been here forever, a disgusting old priest with an unwashed old man stink about him. He still doesn’t speak much English and my Italian is mostly cusswords, but I was able to tell him directly who I was and why I was looking, figuring he was obliged not to tell anyone. He didn’t know where she was buried neither, only that she’d been excommunicated and so wasn’t in San Luca, and said I should ask down at city hall.”

  “They’s some folks out to the church camp reckon she got dreckly transported.”

  “Took the body and left the voice behind, you mean? I’ve still got enough R. C. in me to find those rapturing ideas too much like something outa kids’ comicbooks.”

  “Y’know, they’s a gent sometimes comes in I could ask. Five-by-five squinty-eyed feller with a fat nose and a buncha chins, you may a seen him. He’s the fire chief now, but he useta be the mayor some years back, so all that mighta probly happened on his watch. He mostly only turns up midweek when they’s not so many people, usually with some wore-out ole bag or another. Got no idea what he does with ’em. On dead nights, when he’s on his lonesome, he sometimes buys me a drink at the bar and gits t’talkin’ in his sad comical way. I’ll tell him a friend’s inquirin’ but I won’t say who. An ole boyfriend or sumthin. But fer now, dear lady, the herd’s a-gittin’ restless. Time t’crank up another round.”

  “Okay. At least we don’t have to do ‘White Dove’ anymore. Looks like that bird’s kicked the bucket.”

  “No, them two kids’re here. I seen ’em. He’s drivin a sporty cherry-colored ragtop now. But they don’t have time fer warmups no more. It’s jist straight inta the dugout’n play ball!”

  “Time for ‘Baby, Let’s Play House,’ you mean.”

  “Or jist ‘A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.’ But you got me in a lovin’ mood, Patti Jo. My butt’s not customed to such tensions and it’s still jist a-tinglin’ like a little kid suffrin’ first love. Let’s do Hank’s ‘Baby, We’re Really in Love.’”

  “‘I Love You So Much It Hurts.’”

  “‘I’m Losin’ My Mind over You.’”

  “‘Lovesick Blues.’ I really love to hear you yodel that one.”

  “Cuz it’s bubblin’ up from the heart, little darlin’. Or from some-wheres in that genral neighborhood. You call ’em as we go. We’ll close with the house theme’n let that rainbo-ho-ho turn the clouds away!”<
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  Stealthily, they enter the camp just after midnight. Ten of them. On the blind side, near the Field of Transcendence, as he taught her to call it. Now that of his suffering, his mutilation. His Field of Affliction. He is the one who knows the routes in and out of the camp in the dark and is their leader. His father is not here, he is Abner Baxter. There are armed guards—he has warned them about that—but they are armed, too. They carry warning whistles that sound like owl hoots in case something goes wrong. It was how he and the girl called to each other. She who is nameless now. Who makes him sick for what happened to her. Angry. She didn’t even try to stop them. It was like she wanted it to happen. The weather has been wet and drizzly the past couple of days. He can feel the damp working its way into his sneakers and socks, creeping up his pantlegs. But it provides a better cover for them. Sounds are dampened as well and the guards will be under shelter somewhere.

  Their own encampment was a target last night. Each attack by old man Suggs’ raiders has been more savage than the one before and last night’s could have been bloody. His father had moved them defiantly onto the forbidden campground and many others had joined them. From town, from other campsites, from Chestnut Hills, Randolph Junction. Ready for whatever. Martyrdom maybe. But when a tip about the upcoming raid reached them, Young Abner suggested that they abandon the field for a few hours, hide their vehicles, return after the danger had passed. He had read about something like this in a Bible story. A tactic for a smaller force to frustrate an attack by a larger force without losing any ground. His father, his dander up, preferred a head-on collision, but the majority sided with Young Abner, and so they all melted away into the woods around. It worked. As soon as the raiders had given up and gone home, they were back and setting up camp again. There will be reprisals and there will not always be advance warnings, but last night was a kind of victory for them. And for him. Just desserts for the adversity he’s been through.