Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  The photos were of Elaine, of Harold as a boy and in his uniform, and of her folks at different times. One was a newspaper clipping of her Pa preaching at a campmeeting near Wilmer. He had received the call only a few years back, a little while after Harold got killed, but he had quickly become a great revivalist, for his talk was always simple and direct and powerful with conviction. If they heard him once, they always came back. He stood tall and calm and his clear steady voice spoke assuredly of salvation from our sins through Christ Jesus; in every sermon, he always said, “Grace is not something you die to get, it’s something you get to live!” Almost every Sunday for over four years now he had been preaching and baptizing at the Church of the Nazarene here in West Condon, where her Ma had become leader of the Evening Circle. Elaine liked it when her Pa preached, because it was the one occasion that placed her among people without fear. He was there and she was his. Especially the tented campmeetings she liked.

  Tucker City made a basket, and the score was tied. The crowd, in response, made a strange kind of animal noise—maybe the announcer had cupped his hand over the microphone. Elaine kept the volume low. Below, in the basement, her Ma sang revival hymns while she ran the washing machine.

  Duncan was glad when Bonali returned and took over again. He was hoarse from shouting, and though he didn’t have the goddamnedest notion what he had said, it had somehow worked, because after Brevnik, Lucci, Cravens, and Minicucci, nobody else had split off. Bonali was pissed to get the news about these four, but he wasted no time getting the show on the road. They took the intake air course but ran into smoke and dust, had to get back on the return air course. Against the rulebooks, but there was nothing they could do. They considered bratticing off, but then the air got better. They came across a little wooden propeller that told them the vent system was on again.

  Masque: Exchange of roles as Blacks fade to enact static counterparts to Reds now bearing down in interstitched configurations. Red One crosses meridian, confronts tableau of Blacks, slows, signals placement: Red Two to his left, Red Three to center, Red Four and Five to the corners. Blacks dance lightly, buttocks oriented to netted eye. Red Three slaps thigh, shouts, and Black Three leaps, slashes meaninglessly at empty space. Chants instruct. Red One holds, weighs forward, keeping the pendular (down the corridor he comes) scissoring of Red Three in the corner of his eye, juts young jaw, hoots; cued, Black One strikes, misses, as Red One withdraws. Black One flails, presses: Red One, laughing, delivers out to Red Two. Red Two (and through the double doors into the auditorium like a bird bursting from its cage in alarm) dissembles a return to Red One, but it is Red Three, momentarily stationary on a central black cross intersecting a black circle, who receives (then down the aisle in flying leaps batting wildly against obstacles) off the gleaming floorboards. He shams bounce to Red Four in the right corner, drawing Black Three out of the circle toward the foil, and then, alone and lit on his varnished disc, assumes his role: the Hook. A semi circling sweep, chasse, fade (and white shirt aflutter leaps the rail to alight on the hardwood floor), stretch—but circle breaks as Black Two and Three puncture its rim in assault. Collision (past the players and pallid up to the scorekeeper’s table). Whistle. Roar. Buzzer, unexpectedly prolonged.

  The throbbing paeans of the crowd within, seined but not trapped by the auditorium’s drafty walls, washed over the old Dodge in the parking lot like surf, gathering ascendancy over the Randolph Junction radio station which had begun to fade and grow fuzzy. For Angie Bonali, the shouting was both exotic and paternal, a distant tidal bath of freedom, and a proximate refuge if she needed it. …

  I been gatherin’ flowers from the hillside,

  To wreathe around your (ground?),

  But you’ve (fade) (baby, I’m knockin’ on your …)

  (The flowers?) have all withered down …

  As they, chests heaving, leaned apart, she gazed up past his dark head, burred and ridged like a goat’s, to the tattered roof of the old car. Under the tatters, in daylight, there was rust; now, behind them, there seemed only cosmic space. She closed her eyes. A width, less than three inches, of damp fragile nylon was all that kept his fingers out, and even now threatened to become less her buckler than his gauntlet. “It’s nearly eight,” she guessed, gasped. “Don’t you think we’d better—better go—see the game?’’

  He sighed and gazed, pleasantly pained, down at her lips, full and appealing, as she knew, and now slightly bruised. Their psi plunged shut once more, her fist snarling eagerly in his cropped hair, his pawing savagely in her bared thighs, butting her body against the spiny fish that wriggled and plunged in his lap …

  (fade in) … were in bloom,

  I shot and killt my darlin’

  (static) be my doom (all of God’s children

  seem to gather there) to wreathe around your …

  “Please!” she sobbed.

  “Angie!” he pleaded, freed his own hand a moment to tug hers down across his chest. She buried her face in his shirt, her hand at the buckle without strength. “Oh hell!” he snapped, and flicked her skirt down over her thighs.

  She whirled away, sat up, stared out the fogged-up windows. “What is it!” Her heart pounded with the discovery of real place around her. The people were streaming out of the auditorium.

  “What’s going on?” he asked irritably, hand clinging to her knee in rote strategy.

  “Is the game over?” She couldn’t get her breath.

  “Can’t be,” he said. “It just started.” He flipped the radio dial, looking for the West Condon station.

  The crowd, protoplasmic, flooded through the double doors and inundated the parking lot. Lamps on poles and swerving car lights made the onrushing mass seem translucent, unbodied. As individuals, nearing, emerged from it, Angie rolled down the window and called out, “What is it?”

  “Number Nine blew up!”

  The radio crashed on, piercing her breast. “We repeat: All persons other than doctors, nurses, and members of mine rescue teams are urged to remain in their homes. Bulletins will be—”

  “Hey! You got room?”

  “Sure!” shouted the boy with Angie. “Get in!”

  Angie slumped forward to let the three squeeze past her into the back seat. Her bruised lips against her knuckles cried sin! as her father’s loved presence invaded the Dodge.

  “Hey, Angie! Was your Dad on tonight?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, but she was already crying. Oh, Daddy! I’m sorry!

  Parked at the outer edge of the lot, the advantage was all theirs, but even then they soon found themselves bumper to bumper on the old road out to the coalmine.

  The three men jerryrigged a stretcher with brattice canvas and hustled Ely Collins into it. They’d been too long about it. The gas was so dense now, it felt like their goddamn clothes were floating free from their bodies. Strelchuk remembered Bruno, didn’t see him anywhere. “Hey Bruno!” he shouted, but got no answer.

  “Come on, goddamn you, Strelchuk!” Jinx Pontormo cried, so nervous his old Italian voice squeaked like a boy’s. “I have enough of your jackass games!”

  “Bruno, we’re going!” Mike called, but they were already on the move as he said it, Pontormo leading, fat round shoulders hulled forward in an anxious charge on the void ahead, Strelchuk and Juliano bearing the old mechanic on the cloth between them. With his buddy Collins nailed to the earth and maybe dying, Bruno had cut out to save his own skin—if he got in a hole, he goddamn well deserved it. “Jerk must have gone on,” Strelchuk muttered, covering his vague sense of guilt.

  She felt, as in dreams, to be running without gaining ground, willing acts she could not perform. Iron to its metal stand. Plug out. Around the far thrust of the ironing board. Through the wilderness of looming chairs, stirring pamphlets, whipped laundry. Past the pleading eyes stuck on the walls. Over cracked linoleum to the wooden basement stairs. Down half of them, knees feathery. “Ma!” Basement was lit hollowly by unsmoked bulbs. Her Ma was singing and di
dn’t hear her. “Ma!” The washer churned like someone choking. “Mal”

  Her Ma glanced up from the machine, thrust another armload in, and walked over to the stairs. “Cain’t hear nothing with that machine going,” she explained. Her arms were scabbed with suds.

  “It’s the mine, Ma!” Elaine said. She didn’t know how to act. She feared what might happen when her Ma knew. “It’s blowed up, Ma! I jist heard it on the radio!”

  But all her Ma said was, “Git your coat, child,” and turned back to unplug the washer. “And don’t fergit your boots!” she called back over her shoulder. But later, as they ran along together toward the Deepwater road, Elaine saw it was her Ma who forgot hers.

  Like ravens fly the black messages. By radio, by telephone, by word of mouth. Over and through the night streets of the wooden town. Flitting, fluttering, faster than flight. Crisp January night, but none notice. Out hatless into the streets to ask, to answer, to confirm each other’s hearsay. Women shriek and neighbors vulture over them, press them back into shingled houses with solicitous quiverings. Three hundred are dead. They all escaped. God will save the good. All the good men died. Flapping. Flustering. Telephones choke up. Please get off the line! This is an emergency! Below the tangled branches of the gaunt winter elms, coatless they run, confirm each other’s presence. No one remains alone. Lights burn multifoldly, doors gape and slap. Radios fill living rooms and kitchens, leak into charged streets, guide cars. The road to the mine is jammed. A policeman tries to turn them back, but now they approach in a double column and there is no route back. Everything stops. All cars hear the heatless music, the urgent appeals, but nothing yet is known. Down roll windows and again the ravens flit.

  After supper, Eleanor Norton had performed her usual exercises but received no messages. Wylie was out on a house call. She curled up on the living room sofa to wait for him, catch up on some back readings in the Phaedrus myth. She heard noises in the street but was so absorbed in her reading that she barely registered them. “He would like to fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.” But the noises persisted. They entered and scratched their alarums on her emptying page, scraped on the nerve ends of her living tomb. She looked about her, put the book down, stepped out on the front porch. The temperature had dropped and the hard chill had a dampness to it. Cars were roaring and rumbling out of driveways. Everyone was out in the street, shouting at one another. Something about a shift. The noise of radios at full volume crackled into the restive street. The mine had exploded! Hundreds were dead or trapped!

  Trembling, Eleanor groped behind her for the front door, fearful for one freezing moment it might not even be there, spun herself back into the house, pressed the door shut behind her. Even there, her shoulders to the door, the street havoc reached her, menacing. The radio! She turned it on. Boyish voice, taut and urgent. It was true! She felt weak, adrift, beset with a terrifying thought from some dark and uncleansed corner … betrayal! She had not been told! Oh no! no! she cried over and over, striking blows at her suddenly willful ego, a misunderstanding, must be! She turned on all the lights in the house, then took her journals to the kitchen. One essence! she cried, but was not reassured.

  Strelchuk, taking the rear grip, had Collins in front of him, and each time his ducking headlamp grazed the stretcher, he was shaken afresh by the pulled gray face, scratched and sooted, of the old preacher, by the gaunt stretched knuckles of his fists and the white plastic gleam of brutalized thigh. Collins murmured ceaselessly, and stared moronically into the darkness behind Mike’s shoulder. That darkness, hot, rubbery, breathed like a ravening mouth on Mike’s back, and each time Collins’ awed face leaped up in front of him to stare at it, it damn near swallowed Mike up. Although he could almost touch Juliano’s broad young back ahead, and though Pontormo was no more than another four or five feet beyond, still the beams of their headlamps, licking ahead into the tunneled dark, seemed to spring them forward suddenly, leaving Strelchuk stranded, alone with the mutilated Collins, too far behind ever to catch up.

  Strelchuk knew he was close to breaking, and he knew, too, that if he broke, they would go on without him. He tried to force his thoughts topside. But each attempt struck on a face that pitched him down in the mine again. Old Joe Castiglione literally spitted. And Tuck Filbert, that good old guy! Jesus! Lem and his Dad would take it rough. They had been trying for months to get Tuck to quit. And Strelchuk’s own buddy Bill Lawson: what had happened out there in the main haulageway? Not minutes before, he had clapped old Bill on the shoulders, and now—

  Suddenly Collins said, “Wait, boys!” and Strelchuk started so violently he nearly lost his grip on the stretcher. His hands were awash with sweat.

  “What did you say, Preach?” he asked, his voice strangled and raw. Realized he was getting winded, too.

  “Smoke, Mike. Dust.”

  “Yeah, I know, Preach. But nothing we can do.”

  “Mike …” He was trying like hell to say something.

  As Strelchuk dragged, Juliano and Pontormo spun on him irritably, their lamps batting fiercely into his eyes. “What the Jesus you waiting for now?” Pontormo demanded.

  “If you don’t like it, Pontormo, take a grip,” snapped Juliano.

  “It’s Preach,” Mike said weakly.

  “So what?” growled Pontormo, and turned to move on.

  “What is it, Ely?” Juliano asked. They eased him to the ground to rest their shoulders.

  “Intake air,” Collins whispered.

  “Hell, he’s right!” said Juliano. “Where’s our damn heads? We ought to be in the intake air course!”

  So they located a trapdoor into the north air course, and, sure as hell, the air seemed cleaner, not much, but some—enough any way to lift the sodden weight of nameless fear off Strelchuk’s shoulders. “Thanks, Preach,” he said.

  Vince Bonali kept his crew talking to make the long walk out seem shorter. For Duncan’s sake, and Duncan knew it and loved the sonuvabitch for it, Bonali called frequent halts. They sprawled around, drank water from their buckets, and Duncan took the weight off his swollen miner’s knees. They pushed forward, rested, pushed, rested, Bonali quarterbacking. It was going to be a long tough night, but, to keep cool, Duncan drew imaginary poker hands. When he felt threatened, he drew a pair of aces in the hole, with a loner showing, and goosed the ante with a frigid bluff, making old Lou Jones squint his beebee eyes. About a mile on, they crossed paths with Abner Baxter’s section, and that loosened them all up some. They numbered forty now, including Tub Puller, the biggest bastard in the mine, and they figured not much could stand between them and topside that they couldn’t push over.

  The mayor of West Condon, pinned in traffic, fumed. All the way from the ball game he had cursed his cops and tried to believe the jam would work itself out. But they were stopped dead. In front of him, a carload of kids raised hell. Had half a mind to haul them out of there and throw them all in the jug. But he recognized one of them as Tommy Cavanaugh, the banker’s son, so he got out and slogged up to them. Ground was frozen, but the heavy traffic had warmed the dirt on the road to mud. He batted the window with a pudgy knuckle, and the kid driving was about to give him the finger when Tommy’s broad ball-playing hand swatted the guy on the back of the head and stretched over the seat to roll down the window. “H’lo, Mayor!” Tommy said.

  “Tommy, would you do me a favor and drive my car the rest of the way out? I’m going on ahead to see what’s holding up the circus.”

  “Sure, Mr. Whimple!” Tommy pushed out, still wearing his basketball suit and sweatshirt. A girl followed him. Goddamn, that’s all he’d need now. Mayor Pimps for Banker’s Boy. He didn’t tell them not to, though.