Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  And then a little man stood up, staring above and beyond them, and Hiram’s heart began to race, and Sister Clara cried out, “Brother Willie Hall!”

  “As it says in the Gospel,” Brother Willie cried out, and there was a wave of shouting, “the Gospel of Matthew,” and another wave, yet more impassioned, “the fifth chapter and the fourteenth verse,” and now there were cries addressing Brother Willie and asking that he teach them the truth, which, of course, he had every intention of doing, “‘Ye are the light of the world!’” and the cries mounted and the tears began to flow, “‘And a city set on a hill cannot be hid!’”

  “No, it cannot be hid!” cried a lady, and then they prayed in earnest, they sang in earnest, they wept in joy.

  And Sister Clara Collins rose tall and she said, “We go, we go to that Mount of Redemption,” and how her voice rang! “we go not to die, but to act!” And oh! how they exulted! and oh! how their hearts leapt with a common hope! and oh! how the halleluiahs were sounded! “The Kingdom is ours! It awaits us! It awaits us on the Mount of Redemption! We have but to act! We have but to go! But to go and to receive it!” Oh! it was tremendous! it was electric! it was glorious!

  O the Sons of Light are marching to the Mount where it is said

  We shall find our true Redemption from this world of woe and dread,

  We shall see the cities crumble and the earth give up its dead,

  For the end of time has come!

  So come and march with us to Glory!

  Oh, come and march with us to Glory!

  Yes, come and march with us to Glory!

  For the end of time has come!

  And so, loading up with box suppers, they headed for their automobiles. On the morrow, of course, they would march out there barefoot, but tonight’s pilgrimage was primarily to familiarize the new people, and the cars, they reasoned, would permit them a quick removal in the event the enemy—any enemy—should appear. Tomorrow they faced persecutions, suffering, perhaps even death. Tonight they wished only for peace, desiring not to push God’s hand. The following strategy was decided upon. A guard would be posted throughout the supper, and, at the first sight of approaching car lights on the mine road, they would adjourn instantly to their autos. West Condoners, most familiar with the route, would lead the escape, forming a caravan and keeping their own lights extinguished until the last possible moment, in an effort to speed by their persecutors before these latter realized what was taking place.

  It was really incredibly beautiful out on the Mount, one felt indeed quite in the palm of God’s gentle hand, a dark sky above but clear, the tipple of old Number Nine silhouetted against it, a glorious taste of burgeoning spring in the night air. They built a large bonfire, there sang songs familiar to them all from campmeetings and evangelistic outings, heard important declarations of faith from many of the newcomers. “Oh, I thank God I am here tonight! I thank God my Mommy and Daddy were Christian people! I thank God I am ready!” As they sang, a kind of nostalgia swept over them and it astonished them all to discover, as if for the first time, the true power, the inspiration, the profound significance of their songs’ collective message. Someone had had the foresight to bring marshmallows, which the children roasted in the flames of their fire, and their innocent gaiety soothed the grownups’ fears: yes, surely, to such belongeth the kingdom of God. Giovanni Bruno, who, Hiram was told, may have perished in the disaster that shook the very earth beneath their feet, and might now be inhabited by a superior spirit, thus accounting further for his fragile taciturnity, never participated directly with them, though he passed among them freely, now smiling approvingly, now nodding solemnly, now raising his hand in a sort of benediction.

  Standing out there on the hill, Hiram was not ignorant of, nor did he shy from, the recognition of the sensual excitation that accompanied the spiritual one: the cool night breeze around their all but unprotected loins, the descriptive folds of the tunics, the inciting fragrance, and the strangeness—and, when one passed before the fire, his body was as though revealed to those behind him. And yet, though perhaps it enhanced the fervor of their songs and prayers, there was a total chastity, not merely of action but of thought, pervading them all. The human body, after all, was an instrument of lust, but it was also—could also be—must always be!—a divinely created instrument of grace, consecrated to the Lord’s service, beautiful in all its parts, when all its parts were subservient to piety and prudence. The body of a woman of sin, even when perfectly proportioned, was a hideous abomination, a repulsive and malformed tool of evil—yet these women now silhouetted against the flames, though sunken like Mrs. Norton or gauntly bold and athletic like Clara Collins, though wizened like Mrs. Bruno or inflated like his dear Emma or Sister Betty Wilson, possessed bodies which, by their modesty and their holiness, were consummately beautiful.

  Besides the old songs, they sang many new ones written by Brother Ben Wosznik, including his exultant “White Bird” ballad, that, perhaps more than any other single thing, most immediately conjoined them all to this common cause:

  On a cold and wintry eighth of January,

  Ninety-eight men entered into the mine,

  Only one of these returned to tell the story

  Of that disaster that struck—

  “Lights!” cried the lookout. “Lights on the mine road!”

  They gasped, panicked, flew in a mad scurry back toward their cars. They knew not this enemy and what a man knows not, he fears unreasonably. People cried without cause. Clara stood on the hill and shouted to all of them their instructions. Ben, at the foot, shepherded each into cars, and it was most confusing. Hiram and Emma were somehow separated, Hiram’s own car filling up with complete strangers, and just before pulling the door to, he heard the lookout cry, “They’s fifteen or twenty cars of ’em!” Hiram watched the fire being extinguished, a little guilty that he had run so frantically.

  And then it began. Darkly, the procession eased away from the Mount of Redemption and turned toward West Condon, toward that advancing column, and there was no choice but to fall into place quickly, else be left behind, indefensible victims. They drove in rather rapidly, a little too rapidly, Hiram thought, for he observed there was a deep ditch to either side of them, and for one dark fear-stained moment he saw it all as stupid, insane, a blind and foolish covenant with whimsey, what had brought him—?

  Then he saw the lights ahead and he thought of nothing at all but the immediate danger, the car in front of him, the ditch to his right. Yes, indeed, there were many of them; these advancing lights guided them. And then there were their own lights and, his heart leaping to his throat, he threw his on, lights everywhere, and suddenly …

  But how did it happen? If all of it seemed a dream, how much more so this jolting dizzying moment! If all a whirl, this was its violent vortex! Hiram remembered something of the later return: the thick flow of their great procession through that little town, the congregation of automobiles jammed in all directions around the Bruno home. Of that night, there remained scattered images, the vigil, the weeping, the mournful making of tunics and tunics and tunics. There were public confessions and old enmities were dissolved in prayer and awe. No one slept. There was that profoundly moving incident of the gold medallion, when, just before dawn, the hysteria abating and their great task upon them, the deeply grieving lady Mrs. Eleanor Norton—had she not been a spiritual mother to the girl?—stood, approached, in a walk more of death than life, Sister Clara Collins, and, wordlessly, hung that medallion around Clara’s neck. Whereupon they embraced and wept like schoolgirls, and all who saw wept too.

  But the Sacrifice itself: where was he? when was it? who was there with him? what did he do? what did they do? He could never remember. Only split-second, almost motionless pictures remained. He saw her body hurtling by. But could it have been she? No, given the position of his car when he stopped, the position of the girl where they found her, it was quite impossible. Yet, he was sure of it: he saw her body hurtling by. T
here was another picture: lights askew, beamed in all directions. This terrified him. It was too bright, too harsh, too anarchical, too resplendent. Cars wrecked, in ditches, piled into each other—the grill of his own was smashed, his knee banged up, but he never recalled the crash, never remembered stopping, did not feel for hours his damaged knee, though afterwards it plagued him to his dying day: he recalled only the deranged play of lights and the moaning. Another picture, but this one was at the end: the girl’s body in the back seat of a car. Her right arm hung off the seat, her left lay pinched between her body and the back of the seat, her eyes open. He could never forget this, because he had helped put her there—where had he found the strength? it seemed incredible to him after!—and could have rearranged her, closed her eyelids, but did not. They were a good while untangling that heaped disarray of autos and the girl was slight, had bled much. By the time they entered her into her house, she had rigidified in that peculiar position, and so remained those intense hours that immediately followed.

  And, finally, there was his picture of the girl herself, Marcella Bruno, lying, face up, in the ditch: lovely, yet wasted, drawn, so small! so helpless! Her face was serene, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted, but her small body, enshrouded in its white tunic with the brown embroidery, was grotesquely twisted … one of her feet seemed even to point the wrong way. There was, he was sure, talk of rushing her to a hospital or of calling an ambulance: in such a situation, there was always such talk, and perhaps he himself even made a similar suggestion. And he seemed to remember the fear expressed that if she were turned over to any authority, even a doctor, she would be unable to join them on the Mount and thus could conceivably forfeit her eternal salvation. Though all of this may only have been recreated in later conversations (the fear of authority in some form or other was there, certainly, for Hiram himself knew a great anxiety). Anyway, this did happen: the girl’s eyes opened suddenly and her lips parted as though to speak. All leaned forward—he himself must have been quite close—but instead of a sound, all that emerged was a bright red bubble of blood that ballooned, burst, and dribbled down her cheeks. These things Hiram Clegg—who was to become Bishop Clegg of Randolph Junction, the first President of the International Council of Brunist Bishops, the man to nominate Mrs. Clara Collins as their first Evangelical Leader and Organizer, and who would be, some years later, the Bishop of the State of Florida—carried away from that humbling experience: the body hurtling by, the mad play of lights, Dr. Wylie Norton’s plump knees in the cinders, the bubble of blood, the girl in the back seat of a car.

  Perhaps other occurrences of note transpired. Some seemed to remember a luminous white bird, perched high above them on a telephone cable. Others spoke in later years of a heart-shaped bloodstain on the breast of Marcella’s tunic, just where the circle and cross were. Many vouched that a priest had passed among them, solemn and ashen. There were those who recalled that the prophet dipped his fingers in the blood of his sister and therewith marked his forehead with a small dark cross, and some believed he so marked all those present. Hiram, it was true, did find blood on his forehead after, and so he was never in a position to deny this account. Yet if it occurred, he had wholly forgot it. The most persistent legend in later years—and the only one which Hiram knew to be false—was that the girl, in the last throes of death, had pointed to the heavens, and then, miraculously, maintained this gesture forever after. This death in the ditch, the Sacrifice, became in the years that followed a popular theme for religious art, and the painters never failed to exploit this legend of the heavenward gesture, never failed to omit the bubble of blood. Which was, of course, as it should be.

  Part I: The White Bird

  Do not fear what you are about to suffer.

  —REVELATION TO JOHN 2:10

  1

  Clouds have massed, doming in the small world of West Condon. The patches of old snow, crusted black with soot in full daylight, now appear to whiten as the sky dulls toward evening. The temperature descends. Slag smoke sours the air. Only eight days since the new year began, but the vague hope its advent traditionally engenders has already gone stale. It is true, there are births, deaths, injuries, rumors, jokes, matings, and conflicts as usual, but a wearisome monotony seems to inform even the best and worst of them.

  Schools exhale the young. Not yet convinced they care to take on the hard work of the world, most of them gather and disperse around pool tables and pinball machines, in drugstores and down at the bus station, or simply on corners. Basketball games are got up in schoolyards and back alleys. The members of the high school varsity work out briefly in the gym, then go home to rest up for tonight’s game. Superboys wing cold-fingered through trees in the cause of justice while, below, slingshot wars are waged. Little girls play house or give injections to ailing dolls, while their older sisters pop gum, slam doors, gossip, suck at milkshakes, or merely sit in wonder at the odd age upon them. Gangs of youngsters fall upon the luckless eccentrics, those with big ears or short pants or restless egos, and sullen hates are nursed. Rebellious cigarette butts are lit, lipped, flicked, ground under heel.

  Out at Deepwater No. 9 Coalmine, the day shift rise up out of the workings by the cagefuls, jostle like tough but tired ballplayers into the showers. Some will go to homes, some to hunt or talk about it, some to fill taverns, some to card tables; many will go to the night’s ball game against Tucker City. In town, the night shift severally eat, dress, bitch, wisecrack, wait for cars or warm up their own. A certain apprehension pesters them, but it’s a nightly commonplace. Some joke to cover it, others complain sourly about wages or the contents of their lunchbuckets.

  On Main Street, shops close and soon highballs will be poured at kitchen sinks, cards dealt at the Elks or the Country Club. Business is in its usual post-Christmas slump. Inventories are underway. Taxes must be figured. Dull stuff. Time gets on, seems to run and drag at the same time. People put their minds on supper and the ball game, and talk, talk about anything, talk and listen to talk. Religion, sex, politics, toothpastes, food, movie stars and prizefighters. Fishing, horoscopes, women’s clothes, automobiles, human nature. Circles and squares, whores, virgins, wives, daughters, time and money. Boredom and good times. Putting on weight, going steady, cancer, evolution, parents, the good old days, Jesus, baseball trades. Sadists, saints, and eating places. Tick talk tick talk. Smoking cures. The job, better jobs, how dumb the kids are, television, coalmining, the hit parade. Indigestion cures. Jews, Arabs, Communists, Negroes, colleges. Impotence cures. The Holy Spirit. The state tournament, filters, West Condon, West Condoners—mostly that: West Condoners, what’s wrong with them, what dumb things they’ve done, what they’ve been talking about, what’s wrong with the way they talk, who’s putting out, jokes they’ve told, why they’re not happy, what’s wrong with their homelife.

  Some of the talk, though not the best of it, gets into the town newspaper, the West Condon Chronicle, which now young carriers fold and pack militantly into canvas bags, soon to fan out over the community on bikes on their nightly delivery of the word, dreaming as they throw that they are aces of the Cardinal staff. Up front, publisher and editor Justin Miller, himself an ex-carrier, cradles the telephone, pivots wearily in his swivel chair, stares out the window, unwashed in fourteen years, on the leaden parking lot. It is scabby with dead weeds, gray ice patches. On the other side of the lot: colorless hind-side of the West Condon Hotel. His assistant, Lou Jones, hammers out copy for tomorrow at the other desk. He’d ask Jones to cover tonight’s basketball game, but he knows Jones resents assignments that have anything to do with adolescents. Doris the waitress emerges from the rear door of the hotel coffeshop with slops, empties them into the incinerator, pauses there a moment to pick her nose. Miller wonders why Fisher, the old guy who runs the hotel, manages to find only these blighted moldering dogs to work for him.

  Behind the window of an old gray weatherbowed house in the town’s cheap housing development district, a former buddy and high scho
ol basketball teammate of Miller’s, Oxford Clemens, stands staring out. Children in the dirt street outside push their game of kick-the-can into the gathering dark, shrieking full-grown obscenities in shrill glee. Clemens yawns, scratches his crotch, chances to be looking when the streetlight goes on, grins at it. He turns and reaches for a pair of pants heaped up on a chair. There is a large rip in the seat of his jockey shorts; the khaki pants are war surplus, limp and long unlaundered. At 5:12, one hundred thirty-eight minutes before game time, a blowzy postwar Buick dappled with rust rattles up in front of the old place, sounds its deep-throated Model T horn. Oxford Clemens shambles out, buttoning a yellow silk shirt up against the skin, carrying a leather jacket and his bucket. He piles in back with Tub Puller, who is snoring. “Evenin’, ladies,” Clemens greets as he pulls the door to. Pooch Minicucci who is driving says nothing, but Angelo Moroni, Clemens’ faceboss at the mine, turns around and says, “Hey, Ferd, is that the only fucking shirt you got?” Clemens grins faintly, lets it go.

  The short drive out to Deepwater No. 9 is dominated by Moroni who talks without cease. The subject matter is getting out of the mine, getting out of West Condon, getting out of this whole useless life, and getting into women. Oxford works his long arms into his leather jacket, accidentally jostling Tub Puller. Puller lashes out irritably with his stubby right arm, slams Clemens in the chest. Puller is an airdox shotfirer by trade, has a body and face the immensity and consistency of an iceboxful of bread dough, says next to nothing all day long. Moroni is a short muscular man with a cocky round face, wideset eyes that turn down smilingly at the corners, short upper lip, broad nose, and twenty-seven years in the mines. He wears a hat on the side of his head and has a habit of tipping it down toward his nose when having a drink or playing pinochle with his buddy Vince Bonali, or talking to women. Minicucci is thin, with a ridged Roman nose. He has a speech defect so that he cannot pronounce his “r’s” and in the mine he is a triprider. Clemens is a timberman, tall with tousled yellow hair and narrow bloodshot eyes. At this moment he is coughing, a smoker’s airy wheeze, doubled forward. “You cocksucker, Puller!” he rasps gamely through his teeth, leaning back. Puller unceremoniously whacks him again, squinting all the while out the window into the night, clearly disgusted to be awake. That’s what a man gets who’s born to be Ferd the Turd. Clemens lights a smoke. He’s used to it, but that doesn’t cheer him.