Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  The mayor found he wasn’t the only one walking. It was like a damned parade. Some cars were locked up and standing square in the middle of traffic. Both lanes were full, so nothing could leave the mine if it wanted to. The farther he walked, the madder he got. At the end of it, he found Monk Wallace all by himself. “Where’s Romano and Willie?”

  “I dunno, Mort,” said the cop. “Probably sitting at the other end of that shit.”

  Whimple noticed Justin Miller, the Chronicle editor, shinnied halfway up the goddamn watertower shooting photographs of the jam. Oh man! Mayor Muffs It. Historic Mess Muddles Mayor. “I’ll go get a buncha guys to help.”

  The air course was not a straight track; the four men kept running into falls, would have to backtrack, sometimes as much as a hundred or hundred fifty feet, locate another course, and travel down that one as far as they could before they struck another fall. No markings, no light, air laden with a torpid calm that argued with their own urgency—they kept flashing into stupid arguments about which way they were going, got confused, swore at each other. Strelchuk didn’t mind the blood or the thigh stub so much now, but carrying Ely Collins was hard work, and old Pontormo refused to help, said he’d wrenched his shoulder when the thing went off. “We better loosen the tourniquet again,” Juliano gasped, and Mike didn’t argue. They set him down, not so gently as at first. Didn’t matter. He was completely out. Strelchuk felt for Collins’ pulse: still there.

  “He ain’t gonna make it.” Juliano sighed, breath husky.

  Strelchuk knew what was on Juliano’s mind. It was on his mind, too. But they wrapped the corners of the batticecloth around their wrists again, hefted the old man up between them, and started off. “Come on, Pontormo!” Strelchuk cracked through his teeth. “We’re getting goddamn tired of always waiting around for you!”

  * * *

  By the washhouse, Mayor Whimple found three men and sent them back to help Wallace. The grounds were swarming with miners, women, kids. In the offices, he commandeered the phone and called the state highway police and the National Guard. Took him nearly a quarter of an hour just to get the operator. When he swore at her, he could hear her break down and cry. He told her he was sorry and to relax, but no matter what to keep this line open at all times. In the Iamphouse, he borrowed lights to guide the traffic. They told him about a hundred guys had come up already, so there were less than two hundred down there now. Pop Hendricks showed him the board full of tags. Most of the ones who had come up were waiting to go back down on rescue crews. One group was going down bareface now. Another hundred from the day shift had shown up. They said that mine rescue teams from five or six towns around were on the way, but they’d never make it through the traffic on time. One ambulance had arrived, beating the pack, bringing a doctor and some nurses. Then a Salvation Army woman in a uniform that reeked of mothballs got his ear and complained that they had a tent set up and food was on the way, but it was stalled somewhere in the jam. Miller’s assistant, Lou Jones, overheard a nurse tell him that the hospital panel bringing bandages and medications had not arrived, and the guy nodded significantly, asked him what he was doing about it. Whimple felt like telling that fat snoop to go to hell, he didn’t like him anyway because Jones always called him Pimple, but instead he replied, “Everything we can.”

  They inched. And finally they stopped. Between gospel songs and Andre Kostelanetz, the radio told them there had been 307 men on the night shift and that the cause and extent of the disaster were unknown. Angela Bonali prayed fervently, counting on her fingers. The others in the car respected her private ceremony; they talked only to each other.

  Then two woman ran past them, panting like horses. Angie recognized the girl, Elaine Collins from her freshman class at high school. Angie jumped out of the car, called out: “Elaine!” But the girl, whether she heard or not, did not turn around. Then, for the first time, it occurred to Angie that her Daddy might not be dead after all, that he might yet be saved. But she had to hurry. Ahead of her, the two women set the pace, but it was tempered by the longer distance they had had to cover. Angie could still pass them. She had to, to save her Daddy. She broke into a dead run.

  While men heaped oxygen tanks, timber, shovels, and canvas alongside the cages, mine supervisor Barney Davis led the first crew down. Night mine manager Dave Osborne, two firebosses, and miners Pete Chigi, Sal Ferrero, Ben Wosznik, and Carlo Juliano. Juliano and Wosznik had brothers on the night shift, Ferrero was Angelo Moroni’s brother-in-law, and Big Pete Chigi was an old standby in emergencies. Pressed soaked rags against their faces. They had to get fresh air into the hit workings.

  Mario Juliano said he thought he saw another light flick off a near wall. Strelchuk said that carrying the old preacher was turning him batty, referring of course to the birds. It was a trick the bounce of lights often played, but nobody ever expected an old vet like Ely Collins would ever be bugged by it. Juliano swore he’d seen it. And then, a couple minutes later, they all three saw it: a pair of headlamps bobbing toward them in the dark. Didn’t realize how dusty it was until they saw what was between them and those lights. “Hey!” they cried out. “Hey! Who’s there?” They lowered Collins and ran to meet the two coming. It was Lee Cravens and his triprider Pooch Minicucci. Jesus, was Mike glad to see those guys!

  “Where you’uns headed?” Lee asked, soft Southern slide tilting his voice, though he was a West Condoner by birth. Little guy, angular, goodnatured, but not the brightest lad in the county.

  “We thought we’d try to reach the old number one portal, or otherwise go south to the fifteenth and take Old Main out,” Strelchuk explained. It began crowding in on him then that these guys were coming from the way they were going.

  “Ain’t no good thetaway,” said Lee, whipping his lamp momentarily back over his shoulder, then pausing to spit through his teeth. “We jist come from there. All fulla gas and we seen they was a lotta flame down toward the fifteenth. Doors all busted out and guys dead. Me’n Pooch is lucky even to be here.”

  “It was a wough sonuvabitch,” confirmed Pooch.

  “Well, we can’t go back neither,” said Mario Juliano. “It’s all caved in back there, and the gas is washing in in buckets.”

  “It musta wipped out the whole mine!” whined Pooch.

  “Where’s the rest of your outfit?” Juliano asked. “Bonali and the other guys?”

  “I dunno,” said Cravens. “They was foolin’ around. I don’t reckon they made it.”

  “If you damn bastards have only hurried!” Pontormo cried bitterly, and then he calmed down and said, “Well, it don’ make no difference.”

  They led Cravens and Minicucci back to show them Ely Collins, and explained how they had lopped the leg and all. Cravens was pretty upset by it. He examined Collins’ leg carefully, eased the tourniquet, fussed with the bratticecloth. “I know you done what you could,” he said, as though apologizing.

  “There wasn’t nothing else to do,” Strelchuk said. “I didn’t want to leave him back there.”

  “No, you done good,” Cravens said softly. Seemed like he might be crying a little.

  Air blast at the door into the main air course was so stiff, they had to shove and tug each other through it. Like crossing some terrible threshold. Even Tub Puller needed help. But from there on, they knew, it was a coast home. Cokie Duncan even thought his knobbed rheumatic knees felt better. Bonali informed him with mock sarcasm that there never was anything wrong with them, all they had needed all along was exercise.

  Old Red Baxter, gravelly voice rumbling acidly out of his deep belly, agitated in the old style, waxing blistery on the lousy mine management, the absentee swindlers in the East who fattened themselves on the flesh of the workers, and that criminal Barney Davis—Baxter said they ought to march out in a body and straight into the offices, grab the first one of them they found, if it was that traitor Davis so much the better, and lynch the devil. Jowls atrernble, long red hair curling under the back of his helmet, small eyes
lit with wrath. Antiquated fans, no dust down, not one piece of equipment that might not set the mine off, worse lighting and stupider timbering than they had thirty years ago.

  Excited the young boys, and one of them even came on a piece of rope, threw it over his shoulder, but Duncan knew Baxter’s wind was nothing but gobpile oratory that blew feeble in the cleaner air topside. Anyway, Duncan hated the hot-eyed bastard since the day a quarter of a century ago, during the IWW riots, when Baxter punched his ribs with a rifle barrel and tried to make him kiss the ass of an old mule. In later years, Baxter tended to muddle his old political vocabulary with the saints-and-demons gloss of the local holy rollers, but the message was still fermented in the same tortured bowels. Duncan was glad when Bonali, cool for once, brought them down off that angry mountain by changing the topic to how they should celebrate getting out.

  As Barney Davis and his rescue crew pushed deeper, they ran into worse damage and bad air. Where they could, they closed the blown-open airlock doors, adjusted the regulators. But they were bareface and it was getting too much for them. Ben Wosznik was getting sick. So they brought out the first two bodies they found. One was Lawson, the other looked like Moroni; check his battery number when they got him topside, if it was still readable. Both were burnt black and had suffered from impact.

  The five men sat there around Ely Collins feeling pretty rotten. “Well, boys, I guess that’s about it,” Mike said. He felt very weak and tired. He thought about just stretching out there and dropping off, forget the whole fucking mess. Several times already he had thought it might only be a nightmare, and now the idea crept into him again. The sleepier he got, the more convinced he became that he was in the process of waking up.

  Collins came to long enough to ask them if they had burlap up. “Yeah,” said Lee Cravens, standing, “we gotta string us up a brattice, boys. Keep the bad air from gittin’ to us an hour or two anyways, and maybe somebody’ll git through by then.”

  The project enlivened them. They hunted around, found burlap, nailed it up on the timbers. They began taking turns burning their headlamps. They guessed they had between forty and fifty more battery hours among them, using one at a time, and that was ten times what they supposed they’d need. They sat around Collins as though sheltering him, or maybe it was they who were seeking shelter. He was awake more of the time now and was feeling the pain more. Strelchuk gave him all the aspirin he had, and the other boys chipped theirs in, too. Collins recognized Cravens now, and he asked Lee to help him sing religious songs to keep his mind off the leg.

  Angela Bonali arrived alone, breathless, surprised to find so many she knew. She had never caught up with Elaine Collins and her mother. The closer she had got, the faster they had seemed to run. Now her chest hurt, and a troubling lonesome fear gnawed at her. People asked her about her Dad. She didn’t know. They didn’t know. She walked among the intent people, under strings of yellow lights. Her brother Charlie was there, acting bored and chewing a toothpick, but worry told on him because he couldn’t keep still. Snapped his fingers like always, but there was no rhythm in it.

  Then her Daddy’s friend Mr. Ferrero came out of the mine, his black face crying, and Angie started to cry, and he came and told them that Uncle Ange was dead, that they had just brought his body up. Angela had been named for her Daddy’s other friend, Angelo Moroni, and she had always called him Uncle Ange, though he wasn’t an uncle. They always kidded her he looked more like her father than her own Daddy did, and until recently she had supposed his paternity reasonable and had half believed it. Uncle Ange’s sister was Mr. Ferrero’s wife.

  Charlie came up and asked about their Dad, “the old man,” he called him, and Angie saw that Charlie had started to cry too. Mr. Ferrero didn’t know, but he said he believed he must be okay. Angie believed so, too. Uncle Ange had died, so she could keep her real Daddy. It made sense. There was food and coffee arriving at the Salvation Army canteen now, and they all went there together to have a doughnut.

  They keep coming. Families, miners, officials, newsmen, police, civil defense, state cops, priests, Legion, Red Cross, television, psychiatric service. Fully equipped rescue teams now enter the mine methodically. Trucks arrive with oxygen tanks, stretchers, and tents. A bank president moves from group to group, bringing hope. At the city hospital, beds are cleared and nurses alerted. The West Condon radio station asks for and receives permission to stay on the air twenty-four hours a day. The high school gymnasium, still, is brightly floodlit. The electric scoreboard reads: WEST CONDON 14, VISITORS 11. Its clock is stopped. In a few hours, it will host a new activity: already the gym has been designated Temporary Morgue. The janitor, alone, spreads a tarpaulin on the floor.

  He heard them coming, and then they went away. Eddie Wilson stared down the dusty beam at his dead buddy Tommy. It was awful. God’s fist had closed on the mine-hive and shook it. God hated him. God loved Eddie’s bird dog, and Eddie always kicked it. Sometimes, right in the nuts. The more God hated, the more Eddie grieved, the more he loved. Won’t kick it again, won’t! A foot materialized between his eyes and dead Tommy’s stare. Hadn’t heard it coming. Almost scared him. It turned toward Tommy, then back to Eddie. Approached.

  “Hey, boys, come help! It’s Eddie Wilson! He’s still blinkin’!”

  —I once was lost, but now I am found,

  Was blind, but now I see!

  They slumped in a group and listened. Sometimes they dozed. Lee Cravens’ voice, gentle and musical as a girl’s, flattening the vowels with the insertion of nasal a’s, glissandoed over them like a fluttery shield against the tons of black earth above their heads. Underneath, in short punched squawks of raw sound, Ely Collins followed painfully the principal beat. Pontormo muttered something once about saving breath, but Cravens asked for whom was breath if not for God? and Ely said, “Amen.”

  Mike Strelchuk, who never attended church but always supposed he believed that something or somebody was out there, reacted ambivalently to the singing. It distracted him and gave him hope: they were connected by it somehow to the outside; on the other hand, there was something eerie about the way the sound floated off. They were pretty depressing songs, too, for the most part. He wished to suggest something more cheerful, but it was mainly for Collins’ benefit.

  “Lee!” Collins whispered, when Cravens paused. “Agin!”

  ‘Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear,

  And Grace my fear relieved—

  What about it? Mike asked himself. If I die, what’s going to happen to me? He had no clear idea. He had always joked a lot about being hellbound, but he had never really doubted that God would take care of him when his time came. But what did he mean, “take care”? And what was grace? Did he have it? Who got it and how? Was it fair some didn’t? He wished to hell something would happen to take his mind off it.

  —How precious did that Grace appear,

  The hour I first believed!

  And then Mike felt it coming. The grace. He didn’t know whether to resist it or not.

  Up they came. Jesus, it felt good! On top, the air was cold, about sixty degrees colder than the air they had been breathing in the mine, but it tasted sweeter than honey in their welcoming lungs. Wives, brothers, fathers, kids, mothers piled on them, and, as Duncan had foreseen, most of them scattered immediately. Baxter the plotter himself wandered off peaceably, noosed by his wife and five children. Well, by God, they had made it! Duncan, without family, felt so weak suddenly he had to sit down. Just sank to the ground. Somebody gave him a smoke.

  Beside him, standing, Bonali had just received his hysterical daughter. The kid was blubbering something about her Uncle Ange. Bonali’s boy swaggered up, apparently regretting his old man’s escape, and, around the cool stab of a toothpick that pricked out of his mouthful of flashy white teeth, dropped the tidings that Angelo Moroni had been killed. Sal Ferrero, smeared with soot, came up and confirmed it, half in tears, he and Bonali embracing like women. Bonali told his daughter to hurry i
n and inform her Mom that he was okay, and that she should go stay with Angelo’s wife tonight. “Mom’ll be at the church,” Bonali said. He gave the girl his handkerchief and she ran off, emptying her excited tears into it, made awkward by the big word she bore. The boy had already disappeared without another nod between him and his old man.

  Bonali said to come on. Duncan stubbed out the butt, stood cautiously, unlocking his sore knees, and followed his faceboss to the Salvation Army canteen. They located Lucci and Brevnik there, munching apples. Bonali showed he was glad to see them, but gave them hell for losing their heads and bolting the section. They looked pretty sheepish but tried to cover by saying they were going back down soon on rescue crews. Bonali asked them where Cravens and Minicucci were, but they didn’t know, they had come out alone.

  Outside the canteen, Bonali discovered Cravens’ wife, Wanda. First time Duncan had met her, frail and weary type with nothing between the bones. She said there was still no word.

  Seven men more are retrieved, but this time four live yet: Martini, Wilson, Sicano, Cooley. Wives gather, cluck and weep. Two white ambulances receive them horizontally, under face cages that pump oxygen purely. It is all, really, that Sicano and Cooley, uninjured, require. Martini’s sleeve is empty below the elbow. Wilson’s spine is wrecked. He revives briefly. Does he recognize his wife’s quivering smile? It is hard to tell. He cannot move and can barely speak. “Dog,” he says. And then: “Ely.” With that, he loses consciousness once more. The dead, meanwhile, Catter, Wosznik, and Harlowe, join Lawson and Moroni inside a hastily thrown-up tent—already dubbed “the basket”—where they are officially identified and tagged by a company representative, union man, and the company doctor.

  The ambulance doors snap shut, the drivers leap behind the wheels. Red fists on top wheeling and sirens howling, the two carriers ark down the mine road toward town. Traffic is still in a snarl in spite of an army of angry bellowing cops, but the appearance of the ambulances breathes an urgency that works miracles. Now people ditch their cars without even being asked: peeling quickly like playing cards into the cuts on each side of the road. But not quickly enough for Eddie Wilson.