Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  Castiglione and Strelchuk let go their grip, Strelchuk grinning and brushing himself off, but Castiglione stands half crouching, facing Clemens. “You think you’re pretty fucking smart, Ferd, with that blade,” says Castiglione, edging toward him.

  Young Rosselli stands, pulls his pants up, buckles his belt. He moves over behind Castiglione.

  Clemens smiles. “Jist regulatin’ the odds, fatso. Anytime you wanna go it alone—”

  “Hey! What the fuck is going on here?” It is Angelo Moroni. All turn toward him except Clemens, who takes a sideways step to get the faceboss in the corner of his eye, while keeping his gaze locked warily on Lawson and Castiglione. There is a general relaxation. Moroni glances at the knife, at Rosselli, at Lawson, sizing things up. He has been in the mines for twenty-seven years. “Gimme that blade, Ferd,” he says quietly.

  Clemens flicks it shut, drops it in his own pocket, turns his back. “C’mon, Rosselli,” he says, and puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder to lead him south, toward the fifteenth.

  “Better get your face doctored, Bill,” Moroni is heard saying, and somebody lets a grumbling curse.

  Well, shit, Oxford thinks, Moroni is right. He’s got to get out of the mines. He’s not the kind of guy to break his back down here. Better get out as soon as he can, time is running out on him, and if he doesn’t make the move quick, he never will. Figures maybe he ought to get him a car one way or another and go out East or out West and take Dinah, and anybody ask him his name, goddamn it, he’ll tell them it’s Bill or Jack or Danny.

  He and Rosselli turn right out of New Main South into the fifteenth crosscut, then right again down the fifth north air course. At the sixth east stub entry, Rosselli sees the other men and starts to turn in, but Clemens nods: “C’mon.”

  They angle left a few feet, then right, huddle up behind a pillar of coal. A cutter lies like a long-dead animal up near the abandoned face. Falls betray a slow squeeze. It is 7:32. At the gym, the game has probably begun. Clemens’ fingers itch for the tip. He leans back on the pillar, pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. Rosselli grins. “Gee, Ox, I wanna thank you for helping me out back there. I was in a bad spot, and, well, shit, I—”

  Clemens shrugs it off, offers the pack to Rosselli. “Light up and fergit about it, buddy.”

  Rosselli hesitates, looks around, his headlamp slicing through the unfamiliar blackness, bringing timbers and tunnels and strange equipment into momentary view. He accepts a cigarette, fits it in his mouth. His lips are puffy, cracked, and there is blood, crusted with black dust, on his chin and right cheek. The mine is silent except for the distant scrape of machinery and voices, and what seems to be a sound nearby somewhat like that of bees.

  2

  There was light and

  post drill leaped smashed the

  turned over whole goddamn car kicking

  felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face, but then the second

  “Hank! Hank Harlowe! I cain’t see nothin’! Hank?”

  Vince Bonali knew what it was and knew they had to get out. He told Duncan to keep the boys from jumping the gun and went for the phone in

  saw it coming and crouched but it

  “Wet a rag there! Git it on your face!”

  seemed like it bounced right off the

  Red Baxter’s crew had hardly begun loading the first car when the power went off. Supposed the ventilator fan had stopped working, because the phone

  “Jesus! Jesus! Help me! Oh dear God!”

  came to still holding the shovel but his

  looked like a locomotive coming

  One of the firebosses was telling the night mine manager a story about a nun who sat on a crucifix, when the phone rang. “Wait a minute,” laughed the night mine manager, reaching for the phone, “I got a new one Lou Jones was telling about—Hello? Yeah, speaking.”

  The voice from the tenth east shop stretched up pinched and attenuated and leaked out into his ear a copper whine: “Ain’t no power down here, and they’s a lotta dust. Seems like the air ain’t movin’. Can you check the—?”

  “Okay, okay. Hang on.” The night mine manager leaned up from his desk and then again the phone

  Mike Strelchuk had just clapped his buddy old Bill Lawson on the shoulders, reminding him it was just a gag, forget it, but Bill was hopping sore and swore he’d even it up with Rosselli and that goddamn hillbilly. Bill had walked over toward where the green light marked the first-aid gear, the gash on his cheek looking pretty mean, and Strelchuk had turned into fourteenth west. He had bumped into old Ely Collins, the holy-roller preacher lately given to seeing white birds winging around down here, and together they’d got right of way into the working area. At the stub entry they had come on Collins’ useless buddy Giovanni Bruno, leaning up next to a pillar mindlessly scratching his ass. “Christ, go play with yourself somewheres else! We got work to do!” Mike had shouted, and had just taken a grip on Bruno’s elbow to jostle him along when all of a sudden it felt like his ears would burst, but he didn’t hear a thing. He still had a grip on Bruno’s bony elbow when the second one hit—hard. Floor seemed to heave, threw him off his feet, top crashed down, chunk batted off his helmet, face bit into the cinders. Still had ahold on something and he cried, “Bruno! Hey—you okay?” But Bruno didn’t answer. Strelchuk was scared maybe he had yanked the guy’s elbow off … or maybe what he held was now just a piece of a dead man. He switched his light back on, didn’t know how it got switched off, maybe it wasn’t on before, and aimed it down on Bruno. His goddamn face was white as the Virgin’s behind with feathery black streaks on his cheekbones, but his eyes were open and blinking—his mouth gaped, but nothing came out. Strelchuk hauled him to his feet, though they both had to crouch because the roof was down aslant. It was hotter and smokier than the griddles of hell.

  A ritual buzzer alerts the young athletes on the West Condon court and strikes a blurred roar from the two confronting masses of spectators. In a body, all stand. The mute patterns of run-pass-leap-thrust dissolve, congealing into two tight knots on either extremity of the court, each governed by a taut-faced dark-suited hierarch. Six young novices in black, breasts ablaze with the mark of their confession, discipline the brute roars into pulsing chants with soft loops of arm and skirt, while, at their backs, five acolytes of the invading persuasion pressed immodestly into sleek diabolic red, rattle talismans with red and white paper tails, seeking to neutralize the efficacy of the West Condon locomotive. Young peddlers circulate, selling condiments indiscriminately to all. A light oil of warm-up perspiration anoints the shoulders of the ten athletes chosen as they explode out of their respective rings to confront each other. Some of them cross themselves, some clap and cry oaths, others tweak their genitals.

  Eddie Wilson didn’t know what it was hit him. He still couldn’t think. He was overseas again and the earth was alive with powder going off and he was scared to die. Then he thought it was a plain fall. Pain was a small hot stab behind him, but he knew it was worse because he couldn’t move. Couldn’t even move a finger. He tried to cry out. Couldn’t make a sound. Did the others know what had happened to him? Where was his buddy Tommy? Didn’t they care? He felt as though he had shrunk, now sat bunched inside his skull. He wanted his wife Betty. He opened his eyes. His lamp arrowed a cloudy ray out into the darkness—the lights were out!

  Bonali had told them to stay put when he went for the phone, but with the power gone and the vent system off, air scorching with suspended dust that could flame up any second, the need for action grabbed at them. Duncan, left in charge, couldn’t hold it back, and they started to break away. Brevnik, choking with terror and screaming “It’s coming!” was the first to go, and Georgie Lucci followed on his heels. Pooch Minicucci couldn’t find his buddy Cravens and raced after Brevnik and Lucci, thinking he was getting left behind. “Lee! Lee!” he cried, and ran head on into a timber. He scrambled, screaming, to his feet, not knowing who or what was trying t
o kill him, sending Brevnik and Lucci off on a dead panicked run, and Lee Cravens, thinking Minicucci was hurt, went chasing after. By the time he had caught up with him, Lucci and Brevnik were gone. Back in fourteenth west, Duncan shouted but no one listened. He wanted to run too, but he stood in a swirl of beaconed dust as though rooted and shouted until his lungs ached.

  All Strelchuk could see was smoke. “Bruno!” he cried, “we gotta make a run for it, man!” But he heard some voice back of him and he hollered out, “Who is it?” There was topcoal and rock down everywhere, timbers smashed like matchsticks and rails twisted up, power gone, a roiling scummy dark—and then he saw old Joe Castiglione with a piece of timber stove clean through him and Tuck Filbert smack up against the roof, his head upsidedown staring down at him, his eyes open, and blood dribbling out his big square jaw. “My God! who is it?” Strelchuk screamed, the goddamn smoke clawing his lungs to shreds.

  “Here,” a wretched thin whisper said. “Collins.”

  And there he was, the poor goddamn bastard, his right leg pinned between the floor and a dislodged timber. “Preach! Jesus, man, you—but don’t worry none! We’ll get you out okay!” he cried. “It’s me, Strelchuk, buddy! We’ll make it!” But God Almighty, he didn’t know what he was going to do. Collins’ whole leg must have been no more than a quarter-inch thick from the knee down. Terror gripped Strelchuk and made him shake.

  Thrust up by a whistle burst, lifted by the taut jack of forced silence, the ball leans over its zenith, sinks briefly, then springs from a finger’s jar toward the Tucker City basket, into the hands of a black-jerseyed West Condoner. A roar. A bounce. A pass. Gyrating patterns as fingers trace spiraling fences around the black-trunked bodies. Drive. Retreat. Pass. Jump. Shot.

  Parked in an unlit corner of the lot outside the West Condon High School auditorium, the two received the Word:

  She is spreadin’ her wings for a journey,

  And is goin’ to journey by and by,

  And when the trumpet sounds in the mornin’,

  She will meet her dear Lord in the sky!

  They had switched the radio on to keep up with the ball game, underway not a hundred yards distant, but, waiting for the old coils to warm, had become distracted and failed to tune it in. Instead, American evangelist messages of love, death, and chiliasm, transmitted through the nose all the way over from Randolph Junction, leaked into the old Dodge and dribbled recklessly over their young Italian-Catholic lust. It reached their indrawn senses, now rendered in five ways tactile, as curtains of alien irrelevance, permissive because it constrained in the wrong inflections; the glow of the radio was a distant worm that warmed them….

  When He comes descendin’ from Heaven

  On the clouds that He writes in His Word,

  I’ll be joyful, preparin’ to meet Him

  On the wings of that Great Speckled Bird!

  Their bodies formed a convoluted “X,” the figure of a Greek psi, he seated, boy’s unchastised legs pushed forward under the dash, she curled across his lap and facing him. By thrust and retreat, they advanced their investigations: the circuit established by their mouths, his hand prowled into the rustle of her skirt and petticoat, while her hand rubbed and clawed his neck, proxy for the stalk wedged against her underhip; parting to breathe, they fell motionless, only their eyes pursuing the game, keeping it alive. Yet, though their hands and mouths pressed forward, toppling old resistances, dispersing ancestral phantoms, they had no clear idea of what the next inch would bring. If Angela Bonali’s defloration was to be the consummation, neither of them guessed it.

  For a long time, the smoke was so thick Eddie Wilson saw nothing else in the beam of his headlamp. He prayed into the radiant cloud for deliverance from despair. He tried to think of Brother Ely assuring him of his soul’s state of grace. He should have told Ferd Clemens he could use the dog. He didn’t mean to hunt this weekend. He prayed that he be saved from greed and covetousness. Then, slowly, grotesquely, a crushed human shape emerged on the floor at the ray’s end: Tommy Catter, his buddy, staring at him from under an overturned pit car. Tommy’s lamp was shattered. Eddie prayed that Tommy’s sins be forgiven and prayed for his own salvation, and, hoping only to see his wife Betty once more, closed his eyes.

  Strelchuk had thrust all his weight onto the timber that pinned Ely Collins’ leg, but there was no budging it. That idiot Bruno was in a state of shock and no good to him at all, and Strelchuk cursed him. Then somebody coughed, deep thick old man’s cough, not like Bruno, and Strelchuk spun: saw two headlamps wavering through the smoke! “Hey! Who is it? Strelchuk here! Who’s there?” Jesus, he was damn near screaming!

  “Juliano,” said one of the lamps, and the other, still gagging, said, “Jinx, Mike! What the goddamn is happened?”

  “This wasn’t no plain fall!” Mario Juliano said.

  “No, there was a shock before. Something went off.”

  And Jinx Pontormo cried, “Hey! We got to get the hell out of here!”

  “Wait!” Strelchuk shouted. Choking so he could hardly breathe. “What do we do with Collins? He’s pinned here by a timber!”

  “Listen, if we don’ get out of this merda,” shouted Jinx, “it ain’t going to matter none who is pinned and who ain’t!” He flashed his headlamp all around and said: “It seem to me like it thins out toward the west! Maybe we can get out by old Main!”

  “But we can’t leave Preach here!” Strelchuk yelled. He was miffed that Pontormo was making to leave him. “Come on, you two bastards give me a hand!”

  “All right, goddamn it!” snapped Mario Juliano. “Where the hell is he?” They went back and turned their lamps down on him. “Jesus Christ, he’s in a bad way!”

  Mario helped and they tried again to work the timber off Collins’ leg, but it couldn’t be done. It had all five hundred feet of mother earth piling down on it. Pontormo came and tried to help too, didn’t relish heading off by himself, the old man was scared, they were all scared.

  “Barney? This is Dave Osborne out at the mine. You better come out. I think the southeast section blew up.”

  The night mine manager, though pierced through with a dread that, oddly, made him want to giggle, reached out calmly, reached down calmly, brought them up, brought them out here.

  “Something awful has hit down here!”

  “I know. Little trouble. Come on up.” Told them how. But he didn’t tell them what. Didn’t want them to lose their goddamn heads.

  “Bonali here. Been trying to get you. What the hell has happened?”

  “Take your crew due north up Main, Vince. Due north. You hear? Bring them up the number two shaft.”

  “Jesus, Osborne, that’s over five miles!”

  Superintendent. Mine rescue crews. Sections north of the shaft. Radio station. Expanded, making the phone system one with his own, his messages throbbing through its channels with impulses of action. His mind mapped out the possibilities, and, as when a boy pulling the toy train switches, he synchronized the movements, then opened all the circuits.

  Collins was moaning something horrible. His face was black and cut from smashing into the cinders, and it was all screwed up with pain. His hands clenched dirt. He was praying. Then he twisted his neck and looked, white-eyeballed, up at Strelchuk, and he said in a fragile faraway old voice, “Mike! Git a ax!”

  Strelchuk gasped. Jesus, I can’t do it, Preach! he cried, but only to himself, and he went hobbling over the chunks of coal, banging his helmet on the broken roof, stumbling over the rails, and found his own hatchet just inside third north. He grabbed it up and came running back. Juliano and Pontormo had already started to move away, Bruno blindly following their lights. “Don’t you goddamn bastards go away and leave me!” he screamed, and he thought for God’s sake he was going to cry. They turned back, Pontormo swearing like a bishop, and Strelchuk said, “It’s the only thing. If we leave him, he’ll die. You and Bruno grab his arms and hold him so he don’t jump or get them in the way, Jinx. And, Mari
o, take a grip on his other leg there.” His voice was high and squawky; he didn’t recognize it himself.

  “It’s okay, boys,” Collins whispered up at them. “I kin take it.” And he took to praying again.

  Strelchuk lifted the ax in the air and thought: Jesus! what if I miss, I’ve never swung a goddamn ax much, what if I hit the wrong leg, or—?

  “Goddamn you, Mike!” Jinx screamed, losing control. “Quit messing around! This gas is knocking me out, man! We got to get us out of here!”

  And while he was screaming away like that, Strelchuk came down with the ax, caught the leg right where he aimed, true and clean, just below the knee, and the blood flew everywhere, and Juliano was crying like a goddamn baby, and Bruno, his face blood-sprayed, went dumb, mouth agape, and broke away in a silent fit, but the leg was still hooked on, they couldn’t get him free. Preach was still praying to beat hell and never even whimpered. Mike raised the ax again and drove down with all the goddamn strength he had, felt the bone this time, heard the crack, felt the sickening braking of the ax in tough tissue, and he turned and vomited. He was gagging and hacking and crying and the blood was everywhere, and still that goddamn leg was hooked on. Mario ripped away Collins’ pant leg, took the wedge he had in his pocket, pressed it up against Collins’ thigh. Strelchuk whipped off his leather belt and, using it as a tourniquet against the wedge, they stopped the heavy bleeding. Pontormo whined Italian. Strelchuk grabbed up the ax once more. His hands were greasy with blood and it was wet on his chest and face. He was afraid of missing or losing hold, and the shakes were rattling him, so he took short hacking strokes, and at last it broke off. They dragged him free. And Preacher Collins, that game old sonuvabitch, he was still praying.

  There was a comforting fullness about the room. Elaine Collins, listening to the high school basketball game while she ironed, wished to be there, yet knew she was always frightened outside this house, and once out would wish to be back. Out there, with the others, she would sit alone, persecuted by noises and events she did not understand, afraid of—she didn’t know what. She knew Hell by her Pa’s portrayals of it, but understood it by her own isolation and the fearful sense of disintegration she suffered out in public. Just as she understood God’s peace by this house, by this room with its rich and harmonious variety of loved objects. Braided rugs her Ma had made lay like large soft flagstones over the polished floor, and out of them stemmed warm masses of stuffed furniture, tables stacked with her Pa’s reading materials, lamps with opaque shades that showed white in the daytime and a mottled gold at night, two silver radiators that knocked and sighed, bookshelves hammered together by her Pa and painted oxblood brown to hold more of his small books and pamphlets and the family Bible, her Pa’s straw-backed rocker and her Ma’s footpedal Singer, baskets of clothing, and the ironing board where Elaine worked. The stuffed furniture, nubbed and musty, now served mainly to hold the stacks of laundry her Ma took in for the house money, though Elaine could remember when her older brother Harold, killed in the war, sprawled long-legged over it and struck softly at a banjo, singing popular religious tunes for her. On the ivory-papered walls hung last year’s calendar still, with Christmas circled in red. Also a plastic crucifix, photographs, a gold star, two plaster of Paris plaques that said He loveth the smallest sparrow and Prepare the Way of the Lord!, a small corner shelf bearing small glass knickknacks, a kind of certificate or award her Pa had received once from the mining company during the war, and a number of prints framed in black, including Jesus preaching to the multitudes, alone at prayer in Gethsemane, lying dead in his Ma’s arms after being lowered from the cross, and—surrounded by blue and white birds and standing on a cloud—ascending into Heaven. Most of the knickknacks on the shelf were gifts over the years from Elaine to her Ma. Missing was this year’s Christmas present, a small porcelain statue of Jesus’ Ma with a bright red heart on the outside of her breast. Her Ma had explained that it was mainly a Catholic statue, though it was very nice, so she kept it on her dresser in the bedroom, rather than out here where visitors might see it and misunderstand.