Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  In the front seat of the Chevy he found Wanda Cravens’ woolly cap, authenticating his folly. He pushed it into one of his trenchcoat pockets. Word was out and the mine road was alive with traffic. Fog gone, Miller pushed the Chevy up to ninety and stayed in the left lane. Twice, other cars lurched out in front of him to pass creepers, and, braking, he nearly spun to the ditch. He swore, lay on the horn, and gunned past them when they ducked sheepishly back in line. He was past caring.

  He swung into the yard, parked in the restricted area, leaped out, speedgraphic in hand, locked the car. Checked his pockets, on the run, for film, notebooks, pencils, felt the woolly cap there. Grisly vision of Wanda Cravens throwing herself, sobbing, into his arms in front of all the popping shutters, haggard husband, fresh from the pits, staring incredulously on. Miller supposed Jones would be up at the Salvation Army tent, but didn’t want to face the man cold. Maybe it was all over. He paused to get a photo or two as he crossed the yard—gray sooty day: perfect tone—and exchanged words with those who waved or called out to him. He learned: Not there yet, but hope was gone. They had driven pipes through to the different rooms behind the fall, and had got no response. Miller calmed, photographed. Children keeping vigil. The dark stoic mother of a boy named Rosselli whose first night it had been to work in the mine. Tuck Filbert’s old father, refusing to give up hope, fighting to get on every rescue crew. He saw Wanda Cravens. She seemed undone by the news: in spite of the renewed attention given her, she had faded back into the baggy cotton print and run-down loafers. He stayed clear.

  Circling wide to avoid her, Miller came across a prayer meeting. A clique of West Condon Nazarenes, powered by a squat ebullient man with thick red-maned head, and including several women widowed overnight, had seized the temporary Red Cross shelter pitched near the portal for the miners’ families, and from it now issued hymned plaints, remorseful cries, and bristling execrations upon the community’s sinful damned. Miller floated experimentally at their outer edge, but sensed his presence bedeviling them; even those who knew him seemed to resent his curiosity, or, at best, stared back at him apathetically. The jowly man leading them, he learned, was Abner Baxter, a faceboss who had led his section out Thursday night standing up. Though men prayed among them, most of his group were women, pale lumpy sorts with sacklike bodies draped blackly, kneeling in cinders and ashes. Baxter lacked eloquence and subtlety, but he had a compact bullying style of his own and a volcanic delivery. “Serve the Lord with fear!” he cried. “With trembling kiss his feet!” Their prayers defined the disaster as a judgment upon West Condon and a trial for God’s faithful. What massed them up and charged them, apparently, was the expectation that Ely Collins—their man of tested faith—would emerge with messages, and it was with no small awe that they now awaited him. Miller knew of Collins. A seasoned mechanic within the mine, he was a locally celebrated evangelist without. He’d run the guy’s photo a few times. Mrs. Collins was not among the group, he learned, but her daughter was: a plain gangly girl—pubescent gangliness—named Elaine. She wouldn’t speak to him. Then Baxter suddenly interrupted the meeting, roared at Miller to kneel with them or be damned. Miller rose and, holding Baxter’s raging gaze, slowly lifted the speedgraphic before his face and popped a photo, exiting casually before Baxter could get his wind back.

  He saw Jones bulge out of the Salvation Army canteen up to his left, hulking face expressionless except for the eyes, falling away with their familiar as-though-pained squint. Miller waved; Jones nodded. Miller stopped to shake a miner’s hand, wish him luck, offer a smoke—and caught sight of something off to his right. Stared a moment, strangely moved, then thought to get a photo.

  Up at the canteen, Jones stood waiting, looking like a great stone Buddha that had just stood up for the first time in eighteen thousand years and felt like hell for doing so. “What do you think?” Jones asked. “Gonna put the old bitch to work tonight?” Jones had a professional greed for special editions.

  “Maybe. If something happens.” Miller, feeling guilt for having turned out so late, meant that remark to imply coming any sooner would have been a waste of time. “I’ve alerted Carl and the boys, put Annie to the task of digging up what bios she can on the six.”

  Jones grunted, sipped coffee, thin brows arching up away from the brown heat. “We’ll know soon. Chigi’s team is down there. Is twenty-five bucks okay?”

  “For what?” Miller’s mind was on doughnuts and coffee and the girl he’d seen. He reached in his trenchcoat pocket for a pack of smokes, absently pulled the woolly cap out instead. Looked at it, blanched, stuffed it back.

  Jones, fighting back a grin, drank down his coffee, spat out the last mouthful, crushed the paper cup in his squabby hand and pitched it at a scrap barrel, missing it by a yard. “I offered it to Chigi for a firsthand story, if there’s one worth telling.”

  “Sure, cheap at twice the price.” Miller lit a cigarette, dropped the match to his feet, stood on it. “Who’s the girl with the shawl?”

  “The one you been taking pictures off?” Jones shook his head and sighed, grinned. “Hang tight.” He padded a few yards away, hands rammed into his broad misshapen topcoat, conferred briefly with a miner, padded back. “The name is Bruno. She had a brother on this shift. One of the rubber bag cases the FBI had to identify. But, apparently, she doesn’t buy it.”

  “Bruno,” Miller repeated mechanically. He stared off toward where the girl stood, darkly turned into herself, yet somehow radiant, some distance away from anyone else, a young girl, probably not much more than nineteen or twenty, under an olive-colored shawl—well, not a shawl, of course: a blanket.

  The watertower—“DEEP” is what she reads of the familiar eponym—beats its silvery breast against the lightening sky like a proud but headless colossus. The cast of the sky is constant, immaculate, innocent of any raincloud blemishes: sober homochrome white, except for the singular phosphorescent eye of the sun, a cutout cemented to this side of the sky. It is a soft sky, a papyrus sky, on which, at this moment, a single black bird, a crow, inscribes silent indecipherable messages, erasing them as he goes, flapping his ragged wings in an occasional fury of punctuation. Thin efforts of gray soot struggle upwards from dying slag heaps—the earth striving to keep back light—but they disappear into the vastness of the arching overwhite. The infinite absorbing the finite, and, mercifully, without ridicule. Below: all is gray. The color of: transition. Marcella watches the woman running toward her, clutching her broad skirts with one hand, waving wildly the other, watches the multitude of expanding faces pivot toward her as though a button has been pressed, watches the sudden crushing mass against the portal, watches them fall back as the door swings open, watches the woman gasp for breath—yes! how she wishes to tell! “It’s your brother!” the woman cries when she is able. “Yes, I know,” says Marcella.

  Big Pete Chigi emerged, blinking, trailing a smoky dust, ahead of the stretcher and let fall the bolt: “Bruno. We were too late for the others.”

  Bodies mashed at the portal. No one seemed to understand. “Who is it?” they cried. “How many?”

  Miller, in the press, held the speedgraphic high over his head, sighted by guess, caught the prostrate figure of Giovanni Bruno being carried out, Father Baglione, the Catholic priest, coal-smudged and helmeted, following. Mine supervisor Barney Davis. The company doctor.

  “Collins?” they cried.

  “Juliano?”

  “Dead. Dead. Dead,” said the exiting miners.

  Miller saw a white face amid the blackened: Jones. Good man! Saw Chigi turn aside, glance over at Miller, then slip away with Jones. Bruno! Not even on the list!

  Bruno! Miller changed film over his head, pivoted just in time to see the girl, her head still covered, standing isolated and as though unaware, about thirty feet away. Miller elbowed free of the mob, sighted hastily, but just as he fired, a Salvation Army woman thrust her broad ass in the way. He cursed aloud, sidestepped toward the waiting ambulance. They were easing Br
uno into it. The girl started forward and he raised his hand.

  “Pardon me, miss!” he said, and punched the shutter, just as the blanket settled to her narrow shoulders. He reloaded and said, “My name is—”

  “I already know it, Mr. Miller.”

  “Can you—?”

  “I’ll be at the hospital with my brother.” She spoke briefly with the ambulance driver, and he jumped out to clear a way for her. Inside, in the back, Giovanni Bruno stretched unconscious. Father Baglione and a couple miners had crowded in. The miners clambered out, let the girl replace them. And they were gone. Miller had forgot to get a second photo.

  Someone jostled him hard, nearly knocked the camera from his hand, and a voice said, “I seen Tuck, Paw!” Miller lifted the speedgraphic steadily, focused, recorded the tall silent grief of the two men, Lem Filbert and his Dad, both in miner’s clothes though both had left the mines, both with damp black faces.

  Miller got Barney Davis aside, asked about Bruno.

  “I don’t know, Miller. We found him knocked out, up on a ledge, away from the others. Like they didn’t know he was there or something.”

  “What shape is he in?”

  “Terrible. Should be dead of afterdamp like the others.” Davis eased off his helmet. His burry white hair was black from just above the ears down. Miller offered him a cigarette, lit it for him. Davis had a way of gazing off like a movie hero contemplating the sunset as the curtain falls.

  “What do you figure?”

  “Luck.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They’d been dead awhile.” Davis gazed off.

  “You going to reopen, Barney?”

  “Can’t say. Probably. Haven’t thought about that yet.” He flicked his smoke’s ash with one finger nervously. “Oh, by the way, you seen any of the Collins people out here?”

  “His daughter.” Miller glanced around, spied the Nazarene group at prayer, but Elaine was not among them. “Looks like she’s gone.”

  Davis stuffed his fingers into his shirt pocket, came out with a small scrap of paper. “I picked something up down there. Maybe you’d like to deliver it.” He handed it to Miller. “Found it by Ely Collins’ hand. One of Collins’ legs was gone, apparently something had fell on it and broke it off. Looked like he’d been dead for some time.”

  Miller read the scrap, pocketed it, smiled. “Thanks, Barney, that’s great.” Took a couple informal shots of Davis.

  “Fair shake on the coverage, Miller.”

  “Sure, Barney. As always.” Davis meant the company was not to be blamed for the disaster and he was not to be blamed for the delay in reaching the trapped men, but Miller played no sides, took favors like Collins’ note in stride and let the chips drop. “Come by the office tomorrow or Tuesday, we’ll have a talk.”

  Davis nodded and gazed off.

  On the way back to the Chevy, Miller was stopped by the correspondent from UP, just arriving. “Hey, there, Scoop!” he shouted, virtually in Miller’s ear. “Jesus! What’s up, buddy? I just heard—” His eyes were red-rimmed, still baggy with sleep. Cigarette trembled in his fingers. Miller knew just how he felt.

  “Brought one up alive, just took him to the hospital.”

  “Yeah, shit, I know that, Chief. But who was it?”

  “Guy named … guy named Lou Jones.”

  “Lou Jones? Where’ve I heard that—?”

  “Out here probably. You maybe met his wife, fat old—”

  “Oh yeah! I know the one! Big fat one. They had some kids or something, didn’t they?”

  “Eight, I think. No, nine. I’m not sure. Better say nine.”

  “Yeah! Nine! Great! Jesus, these fucking mining families, eh? What’s their address?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re at the hospital. Press conference first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Not till tomorrow.”

  “Right. Jones is in sick shape.”

  “I’ll bet. I couldn’t live through a conference now anyway.” He laughed and, because he was expected to, Miller joined him. Miller turned to go, but the UP rep grabbed his arm. “Hey, wait, Chief! I forgot! Was he conscious?”

  “Who—Jones? Hell, no!”

  “Jesus, thanks, scooper! You don’t know how I appreciate it!” He pounded Miller cheerily on the back, turned to run back to his car. Miller had seen the portable phone hookup in it.

  “Hey! Hold on!” Miller called. The slap on the back had pissed him off. The UP guy braked, swung around, staggering like a wounded pigeon. “I forgot to mention that Jones was apparently reading his prayerbook when he fell unconscious. They found it beside him when—”

  “Oh yeah? Hey, shit! That’s a helluva great angle! Thanks, Chief! Come on over to the town flophouse tonight, I’ll buy a round!” And he ran off at full gallop toward his car.

  Gray trees wail flying by, cars blink. Inside the ambulance, all is white, preamble to the race’s object. Only her brother is black, his long gentle fingers black, his fragile eyelids black, his distant breath comes: blackly. His face is spattered with dried blood. Whose—? Then West Condon bursts upon them with a thump and a scream. Out the back window, she sees a small scrap of white paper lifted in the wake of the ambulance—suspended, it flies away from them and turns a corner. Does it fly still? It is impossible to know.

  Big Pete was standing like a mountain, still in greasy work denims, still reeking of underground sweat, just inside the door of the Chronicle, when Miller arrived. Miller greeted him warmly, shook his thick hand. Jones bumped through the swinging door from the back shop, lit with one of his uncommon smiles. Changed his whole goddamn face. “Four columns,” he announced.

  “Terrific!” Miller said. He asked fat Annie, who bulked by her frontoffice desk like an obedient recruit, to make out a check for twenty-five dollars to Chigi, and, waiting for it, made an impatient moment’s small talk with the man. Enormous guy with black curly hair and big Mediterranean eyes, his face minstrel-black with coal soot, and when he blinked, as he just did, his eyelids looked starkly white. The digging out of mashed and rotting bodies made most men sick, but Chigi was a stoic down there and much admired for it.

  As soon as he had left, Miller hurried to the back, found Jones there, standing over the linotypist’s shoulder. Miller scanned the opening lines of the story in a hot galley that sat on a stone about four feet away, counted the galleys already set, gave Carl and John makeup instructions. Carl’s fat back protested with shouldered silence. “No paper next Saturday,” Miller said. “Long weekend.” Carl, enlivened, commenced a round of whore stories, and his hands woke.

  Miller, en route to the newsroom, pulled a Coke from the machine, dumped his exposed film in the darkroom. Driving himself now. Front page forming up. No time to ready the photos. Just as well: need them during the collapse next couple days. Put Annie on getting sandwiches and beer sent over from Mick’s, setting up distribution of the Extra. She had already obtained notes on Bruno and his family, following Jones’ arrival with the news, and her information on the other six was longwinded but useful. Good goddamn girl, he had to admit it.

  Jones wheezed in and together they worked out a front-page layout. Jones dug up a pile of old cuts, including a couple Miller had shot down in No. 9 about two months ago that they hadn’t used yet, and wrote up a rough summary of Big Pete’s version of the rescue for Miller to polish. Decided to banner it with MIRACLE IN WEST CONDON just to wow the homefolks. Jones seemed to be carrying his belly a foot lower than usual, so Miller told him he could do the rest alone; a moment later, the jobroom sofa received Jones’ hulk with a sigh that was no doubt meant to strike envy into the benefactor’s heart—Jones never took a favor with grace.

  Miller called the hospital, learned from Dr. Lewis that Bruno, in a coma, was still hanging on, but that complications, as expected, had set in. In short: “critical.” Read Annie’s notes. Parents born in Italy, old man a retired coalminer. Five children, two sons killed in the mines and a daught
er dead of diphtheria, Giovanni and Marcella remaining. Marcella. He printed the letters on his desk blotter, lit a cigarette, and stared down at them. Marcella Bruno. Agreeable images roamed randomly through his forebrain. Eyelids weighted. He smoked. She knew his name. Turns—Christ! Blinked at his watch: nearly two! Attacked the old Underwood. Cursed, typed, cursed. Stubbed out smokes, lit new ones. Food came. Slowly, the bog of his mind hardened and the way became easier. On the jobroom sofa, Jones snored.

  When she calls, Rosalia from next door answers. Marcella hears threats and intermittent gunfire. Rosalia says Mama is in bed and resting peacefully after praying at the church all day. Papa watches the television like usual. “I got plenty company here and don’ worry about nothing.” Sure, she knows all about Papa, she has changed him once already, no trouble. More gunfire. “He don’ even know they’s been a accident, child.”

  On his way to the Collins house, Miller kept the car radio on to make sure they announced his special and the pickup points. Heard it three times on the short run. Most of their musical library inapt for the funereal occasion, they apparently appreciated anything out there that would eat up time. He found the Collins place, sturdy old yellow frame, broad porch bellying out, big trees in the yard.

  He was met at the door by the girl Elaine. Miller introduced himself, asked if he could speak with her mother. The girl was reluctant, but finally pushed the screen door open for him. Her eyes looked clawed and her hair hung loose. Inside, there was a stale vegetable scent that reminded him of his carrier days, those wrecked Saturday mornings when he had to collect for the week’s newspapers, had to step inside cabbage houses and choke while the wide housecoated women searched absently for their purses and fifteen cents and old men in undershirts scratched their beards and glared. While Elaine went for her mother, Miller roamed the room. Not much choice, for the furniture was buried under stacks of laundry. A sentimental religiosity prevailed: evangelist pamphlets, dimestore plaques, cheap Biblical prints. A gold star tokened a war death, and from the pictures Miller gathered it was an only son.