Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  “Any inspector ever been down in this mine, they’ve bragged on the place looking like the inside of a goddamn hospital, Vince.”

  “Which room, Davis? I take it you mean the morgue.”

  The deeper they got, the blacker it got, the whitewashed timbers coated with soot and coke, the rock dust all but nonexistent—in Miller’s mind, as surely in most, the issue was settled, regardless of Davis’ rhetoric. The black walls sucked up the light from their lamps. Drip of water. Distant thump. Crickety-crick sound: scamper of rats maybe.

  “… gob, rails, ties, props are piled too close to the track here, don’t you see?”

  “All your stoppings has got blowed out by the violence, and so your air doesn’t …”

  “… a spray stuff that helps some, but it don’t kill it all. Finally, you just gotta throw up and go on back to …”

  “… as how they was apt to blow up the cable. You couldn’t hardly possibly see nothing, Professor, the machinery neither.”

  “And, man, when my buddy seen all that shit flying around out there, why he commenced to plug her and put the brakes on, but …”

  And then he was standing on the spot, before he understood properly where they were, that they had arrived at what was objectively referred to as “the ignition area.” Some contended for another room where drills lay with cap screws missing, while Davis and Osborne snorted at the electric arc theorists by drawing lines of force, declaring for ignition by cigarettes found alongside Clemens and Rosselli. Bonali, a little puffed up from his victories on the walk here, ridiculed: “You can’t light a fire with cigarettes, Davis.” But the absence of matches or lighter did not impress the inspectors. The former could have been consumed by the explosion, the latter picked up during rescue—or perhaps might still be in a dead man’s hands … it was doubtful anyone had checked.

  What did impress the inspectors was that work had been going on in a squeezing area. An unnerving blue cap now crowned the yellow flame in the safety lamp. “Who declared this room safe?” a visiting UMW man asked angrily, and there were no answers, Osborne the night mine manager sneaking out of earshot, although Barney Davis did protest that the methane was normally vented out of the area, but since the disaster this section was now largely short-circuited. Besides, this face wasn’t being worked; Rosselli and Clemens must have slipped back here for the smoke, against orders. Nevertheless, most agreed: the area should have been sealed off. Miller followed the lead of others and put his ear to the face: soft buzz like a fine bubbling.

  And here, in this tight black pit, which was crushed and shaken down, damp and dusty at once, in a gloomy intangible nimbus of CH4, his legs cramped from kneeling, ducking, spine pinched, the air dead and stagnant, among furtive black faces mostly alien and isolate, Tiger Miller suffered for one febrile moment the leap and joy and glory of the state basketball championships—bright flash of meaning, a possible faith in a possible thing: that they could win! and there were globes of white light and wide-open space and a thundering excitement, a fast responsive body, patterns that worked, challenge, rescue, always a resolution, redemptions tested and proved in the scoring columns … a grace on him. Standing straight, he knocked his helmet against the roof: drums rolled funereally, blunt reminder, from the insensate earth, of the real.

  “But the evidence?”

  “Well, we first notice for soot and coke, Tiger, burnt fibers, paper, for polished surfaces. Here, you see how this rib has got rounded off? Well, that’s by coarse pieces flying by, and you can tell the direction plain enough.”

  Coarse pieces of Oxford Clemens.

  “And then, now look at this: see how the dust is streamlined here? The front side of this post is like sandblasted and then little eddy currents travel to the rear here—see?—and leave them little dust deposits. Way these here mines is cut up, the forces they go ever which way. But when you come on a point where all the forces go away from it in ever direction, why, you know something went off here.”

  From this point, Oxford Clemens traveled off in ever which direction. They raked up the pieces and deposited them in a rubber bag. The bag was light and they guessed it was a little man. But the fingerprint expert identified the remains as not one but two persons, both once sizable. Clemens and Rosselli, like ultimate lovers cellularly conjoined, descended as one to their common grave.

  “And look here, Tiger. You see how the materials here on the floor is all different sizes? Well, it makes sense, don’t it, that the coarser stuff is gonna get dropped first by the forces. And then it goes until you reach the dust point, and that is what is called sizing the materials. So, that’s the way you can tell how the flame and forces traversed along here….”

  Expansion and white light, a thundering excitement: did Ox go out in a hot dream of the gilded past? It hardly mattered. Out was out. Miller chose not to size the materials too finely. He was giddy enough down here as it was. Kept feeling like he was walking around on a litter of human fatty tissue.

  She heard them as a child, a voiced flutter of angels at her bedstead. Marcella, frail and often ill, watched for them, and they sustained her. But a hatred in the house frightened them away. Growing, she rediscovered them at the altar and in nature. No longer words, but whole sensations were what they brought her. An indivisibility to life, an essential sympathy: then, everything mattered. Giovanni heard them too. In truth, perhaps they were his, not hers. Of age, she lost them, seeking them. They fled from being understood. “It is grasped whole, Marcella, but never learned.” Thus, with tenderness and patience, Eleanor leads her back to her abandoned voices.

  Voices. Out of mouths, over phone cables, on the streets, in his office, out of letters, from other papers, over the teletype. Day in, day out, they battered at Miller’s eyes and ears, throbbed convulsively through him, emerged at his fingertips as the West Condon Chronicle. Births and deaths. The forecast of snow, low pressure, high pressure, the unseasonable seasonable cold warm rainy dry front over front … process revealed. Twelfth Street under repair. Rotary’s district governor visits, is “favorably impressed.” Six or eight pages twenty inches deep by eight times wide, 960 to 1,280 column inches, upwards of 50,000 words of space, a decent novel, six days a week. Miller filled them up. Threats of war. Bingo at St. Stephen’s. Burglary in a supermarket. Cuts, heads, ads, syndicated features rescued him daily, but only from crisis, not from thrall. Afflictions, ball games, comic strips, and drunken drivers. The endless reiteration of sundered instants, grounded in the subject’s abject nature. He wanted to stop it, but once you turned it on, there was no turning it off. Grocers’ specials and Sunday services. Assassinations. High school prom. That’s where Miller’s January went. He didn’t want to see it go, but the next thing he knew, it was gone.

  Always tomorrow’s deadline: but he no longer wished to lose today. Goddamn Clemens and his cigarette! The mine disaster had touched off something latently restless in him, and now he could not be satisfied. Miller felt rotten, edgy all the time. Snapped at Annie, wrote wearily, fell sullen at Mick’s. His stomach rumbled and burned and his gut softened and sank. But he had no time to think. The fleeting whimsy became a recurrent wish: he wanted to stop it. Should never have invented the written word. Kept folly hopelessly alive.

  Hopelessly alive: epigraph of the day.

  And as for folly, goddamn it, he hadn’t learned a thing. It took him a week to discover the classified ads Jones had planted, nearly on top of each other, in the Chronicle, and by then he was the last in town to do so:

  FOUND: Lady’s wool cap. Intimate circumstances. Inquire in person to Chronicle editor.

  LOST : One husband and one wool cap, same night. Reward for cap. Box “Woolly.”

  They called him “the widow-warmer” in Mick’s and asked him if he’d collected yet the reward of the woolly box. He reminded them that, as St. James had said, the consoling of widows in their affliction was the stamp of a religion that was pure and undefiled, and, since he was the only one in the Christi
an crowd who had ever bothered to read the Good Old Book, no one knew enough to append: “and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

  Stained and stung, daily abused, Miller sought relief—even a redemption of sorts—in the company of Marcella Bruno. At first, in the days following the disaster, he saw her almost daily on one pretense or another, almost always in connection with her brother. No problem that, for Bruno himself was news, nationally as well as locally: his escape story, white bird vision, precarious health, prolonged comeback, even his peculiar taciturnity. Miller’s own interest in the man soon dissipated: what he saw there was the browbeaten child turned egocentered adult psychopath, now upstaging it with his sudden splash of glory—a waste of time. But he made good copy, and Miller sold some of it nationally. With Marcella, it was another story. For one thing, she flattered the hell out of him, the way she looked at him. And there was a grace about everything she did, laughed, walked, turned. Bright, too. And she was beautiful. Coming or going, she caught a man’s eye.

  But, finally, there was something that got between them. She lacked her brother’s laconic self-exaltation—open innocence was in fact the quality that best described her—but shared with him the old fiction of the universe as a closed and well-made circle. It ran deep in her, colored every phrase, and he began to hesitate in the pursuit of his obvious advantage: how did she in fact see him and what did she expect? There could be consequences he didn’t want. And he stopped being flattered by her affection when he realized how much she admired her nut of a brother. Understandable, of course: she was born into a family already centered around him, and all she had done all her life had been one way or another related to him. And there was the weight of racial habit, the deep-rooted Italian family traditions, especially those of the beleaguered immigrant families. Nevertheless, she was old enough to judge him rightly. Roman Catholic, too, but as with all mystics, a mild disdain for the establishment, and Miller had seen Giovanni go somehow cold and angry whenever Father Baglione, the local priest, showed up. No, mainly it was her child’s view of the plenum—until she accepted it as the mad scatter it was, they could never get beyond banalities and sex play. Did he want to get beyond? Apparently, though it surprised him, he did.

  So, though caution braked his assault, he nevertheless kept the phone lines open, when with her did not reject and maybe even emboldened her long glances, and somehow felt certain that, sooner or later, they’d share a couch, whatever the circumstances of it might be. She, in turn, supposed his continuing interest in her brother, gave him status reports on his health, and talked of the people who came to see him. A recently arrived veterinarian named Wylie Norton and his schoolteacher wife were the most frequent visitors. Miller gathered that the Norton woman was a practicing medium of some sort, an automatist and old-fashioned sibyl. He had met the woman and found her harmless. More dramatic were the regular visitations of the Widow Collins and some of her Church of the Nazarene friends. These openly emotional but eminently practical people made an odd contrast with the introverted Catholic Bruno, though he welcomed them. It was mainly the accident of the work relationship between Collins and Bruno in the mine that now conjoined them. Collins, Miller learned, had accepted Bruno as his buddy out of Christian charity toward the rejected misfit, and maybe a little bit out of wonderment at rejection itself. Seeking sainthood, Reverend Ely Collins had probably been surprised that he had had it so easy. Collins, to be popular, must surely have touched more than once on the never-dead chiliastic expectations of the lower-class Christians, and so the violence of his death, the ambiguity of his final message, the singular rescue of his buddy, and, above all, the odd coincidence—if it was that, and it surely was not—of the white bird vision he shared with Bruno, now made these people—especially the suddenly widowed—wonder if something disastrous, perhaps worldwide in scope, might not be in the air. Their immediate fear, apparently, was the eighth of February. Their speculations amused Miller—who himself at age thirteen had read Revelations and never quite got over it—so he printed everything he thought might help them along, might seem relevant to them, amateur space theories, enigmatic Biblical texts, filler tripe on peculiar practices and inexplicable happenings elsewhere, as well as everything they wished to give him. Once the emotions had settled down and the widows themselves had established new affairs or found mind-busying work, their eccentric interests of the moment would be forgotten, of course. Which, in its way, was too bad. As games went, it was a game, and there was some promise in it.

  Games were what kept Miller going. Games, and the pacifying of mind and organs. Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier. And so it was that, on his way out of the hospital on a Sunday night, first day of the runt month and the day before Giovanni Bruno was due to be sent home, gamester Tiger Miller, not a wee bit agitated in the fork after a quarter of an hour with Marcella, used his wanton freedom to reject impulsively an old precept about bedding down with the locals and picked up a nurse at the doorway, took her home with him. He had noticed her the night of the rescue, sandy-haired Tucker City girl, now more or less of West Condon, family a mixture of immigrant Englishmen and East Europeans, he learned, bright-eyed and quick to banter. Mainly it was her long slim waist and plump butt that had drawn and kept his eye; privately, he called her Happy Bottom, and, in bed later, she laughed gaily when he told her. What was something so great as this doing in West Condon? Only a fool would stop to ask.

  3

  They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God! They have provoked me to anger with their vanities!

  Abner Baxter paced the front room fretfully Sunday evening, waiting for Sarah to get the children dressed for the family’s evening worship. His knuckled white fist belted the desktop, slapped at the open Bible, thumped into the back of an easy chair. “Strive thou, O God, with them that strive with me!” he whispered hoarsely. He paused before a large reproduction of the great bearded Peter, standing over the convulsing Sapphira, enemy of another day. White with righteous indignation, quivering with holy rage, swollen with the power of the Lord, the mighty Peter in one volcanic gesture had shown the true glory of God. “Why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” asked the caption.

  Well, Sister Clara Collins’ “eighth of the month” heresy had harrowed them all, but Abner restrained his wrath, biding his time. He preached in the church on the faith of Enoch and Noah, Abraham and Moses, and let them read what they would into it. Time would do her in. But for now, she still had most of them with her, prideful and perverse as her foolish message was, and his duty to the Lord was to remain steadfast in the faith and wait for the woman’s inexorable fall.

  Not that she’d challenged his right to the pulpit—it was rather that she didn’t seem to care about it. She attended his services, but seemed detached. Even in prayer, down on her knees before him, there was an arrogant willfulness about her that seemed to lift her above the others. And it was at her Wednesday Evening Circle where she most sorely vexed him. Their prophet and master in the Sunday pulpit, he was nothing at her Evening Circle. There, even that spineless chinless little fool Willie Hall had the presumption to contradict and interrupt him. Abner had counted on his wife Sarah assuming the leadership of the Circle, but once again that wretched woman had proven more burden than blessing to him. He’d upbraided her unmercifully for her faithless trepidation, but she only cowered and whimpered and begged that he forgive her.

  And now tomorrow, the grand and triumphant homecoming for Mr. Giovanni Bruno! What a mockery! What an outrage! Why, even his own people knew him to be mad—how could Clara be such an imbecile? If she could only have seen that silly man, held naked and blubbering while his fe
llow Romanist Bonali read that poem—! No, she’d been blinded by her grief, had given in to her selfish whimsy, and only shock and punishment could now bring her once more to the true path. And this was Abner’s task. He cracked his palm with a razor strop, gazed up once more at Peter.

  There was a knock: he ordered them to enter. Sarah and Francis came first, the others trailing reluctantly. And tomorrow there would be hosannas and dollars strewn like palm branches: the irony of it stuck in Abner’s flesh like cruel barbs. I, too, was saved! “Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in,” he cried aloud, and his family shrunk before him, “and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out!”

  Bruno’s big homecoming was Ted Cavanaugh’s idea. There was a national—even international—focus on the man, why not put it to the whole town’s service? Already, Bruno had emerged as something of a town hero, a symbol of the community’s own struggle to survive, so why not make the most of it? True, as a hero, he was a little short on style maybe, but this town was long accustomed to making do with less than the best.

  So Cavanaugh had talked to the Rotarians at their regular luncheon meeting, called the Chamber board together, conferred with Mayor Mort Whimple. They’d set 2 February as the date, since that was the anniversary of the town’s incorporation, even though Doc Lewis had said that might be pushing it a bit. A special statewide relief-fund drive for all the families of miners lost in the disaster had already been launched, and now Whimple had agreed to double the effort, enlarging especially on Bruno’s needs. Ted had got at the Jaycees through an employee at his bank and to the BPW and Eastern Star through his wife. His son Tommy had activated the youngsters at the high school, especially those of Hi-Y, Job’s Daughters, the Lettermen’s Club, and the like. Alderman Joe Altoviti had carried the project for Ted into the Knights of Columbus, Lombard Society, and the Eagles; Burt Robbins and Jim Elliott had worked on the Elks and the Legion; and Cavanaugh’s minister Reverend Wesley Edwards had involved the West Condon Ministerial Association. The Catholic priest was, as usual, more grudging, but he agreed to appear on the scene at least. Father Baglione was an old Italian whose loyalty to Rome, as much racial and provincial as organizational and pious, so outweighed any local considerations that he was really still a foreigner here. Didn’t even speak good English. Cavanaugh had been trying for years to get him promoted or some damn thing, get a young American fellow in here in his place.