Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  Miller could hear, from the living room, guns and horses’ hoofs, tinny shouts of mock anger, soul-legend of the nation, and then the clanging voice of an announcer telling where good tobaccos come from. It was probably permitted to smoke out here, and he’d forgot. Marcella was cleaning off the table. He asked her softly what Eleanor had meant by “completing the circle.”

  Marcella thought a moment, then said, “Well, there were six of us before, not counting Giovanni, and we were all supposed to bring somebody tonight. But Mrs. Wilson’s guest couldn’t come because of the bad weather or something.” She smiled up at him, returned to stacking plates. He started to help, but she shook her head, nodded toward the bedroom. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she said.

  She carried the plates into the kitchen, and Miller took advantage of his momentary solitude to enjoy a prolonged unobserved regard of the easy cadence of her hips. Where Happy Bottom pinched in at the waist, bulged tremulously in the buttocks, Marcella tapered finely, arched firmly. There was a conscious challenge, a proud taunting thrust to Happy Bottom’s stagy shamble; Marcella swung loose-limbed and light of heart, stunning but chaste. Difference between a hurdy-gurdy and a pipe’s soft capriccio. But he liked both.

  He was the last but for Marcella into the bedroom. Wylie Norton eased the door shut behind him. It was 10:45. Eleanor Norton posed priestesslike at the foot of Bruno’s bed. Bruno sat as he had sat before, staring out straight in front of him, and thus, as she had planned it, at Mrs. Norton; his dark scooped-out eyes, though, now seemed blank and unseeing. Worn out probably. The others gathered around his bed: Wylie, Clara, young Meredith, the Halls, Betty Wilson. Marcella entered quietly. She touched Giovanni’s head, measured some medicine in a teaspoon, offered it to her brother, who accepted it without expression. Carl Dean Palmers and Elaine Collins hung back slightly, she in shyness, he as if hesitant to commit himself. Himebaugh, still carrying the coffee, tiptoed over beside Miller. He was breathing rapidly, abjectly terrified. The cup rattled on its saucer. His eyes blinked with a kind of nervous tic. “Wh-what for God’s sake is it?” he rasped.

  “Relax,” Miller whispered. “Watch and see.” He nodded toward Eleanor Norton.

  Mrs. Norton now lifted her slender arms slowly before her, a kind of benediction, as it were. He understood well enough her task: she had called this thing and was under pressure to produce; if she didn’t, she’d likely lose the mace. “Hark ye to the White Bird!” she commanded, shattering the silence and causing some to start. Himebaugh caught his breath sharply. “Giovanni Bruno! The One to Come!” The widows and Mrs. Hall whispered mewing amens. “We look to the east! We look to the west! The feet tug downward, but the spirit soars!” She had a fine voice, strong and clear. “A firmness is forthcoming! A cosmic repose! Hark ye! We avoid the illusory to seek wisdom with love! For a time, we know, is to come, and the soul will swim in the vast and empty sea of enlightenment!” Betty Wilson had begun to whimper softly. Elaine and Carl Dean had joined the group at the bed. Slowly, Himebaugh edged away from Miller’s side toward the others. “So hark ye, hark ye to the White Bird of wisdom and grace!” At this familiar angelus all the Nazarenes, in Pavlovian response, amenned. “From out of the abyss of darkness, lead us to light!”

  Colin Meredith caught his breath. He opened his mouth as though to speak, but nothing came out. Instead, it was Clara Collins who cried out, “Hear us, oh God!”

  “In the name of Christ Jesus!” added Willie Hall as though reciting, apparently emboldened by Clara’s cry. “As it says—”

  “Hark ye to the White Bird!” Eleanor demanded, her voice pitched up a notch.

  Clara, undaunted, or maybe ignorant of the other woman’s meaning, opened her mouth to speak again, but just then Giovanni Bruno lifted one hand and brought a sudden hush down on all of them. They waited. “The tomb …” he said, and it was weird how the sound emerged as though forged in some inner and deeply resonant cavity, then heaved whole through his open but utterly passive mouth, “… is its message!” Hand down.

  Message, tomb: all eyes turned on Clara Collins. “Oh God!” she screamed, thrusting high her husband’s note. “The Day of the Lord is at hand!”

  Betty Wilson bubbled into tears, plumped to her waddy knees, commenced to pray wildly. Eleanor Norton had paled, seemed confused, unbelieving: betrayed. Wylie watched her. Himebaugh, beside himself with panic, shrank back, found Miller’s side.

  “I say, the day of salvation is upon us!”

  “Yes, Lord!” chorused Willie Hall. His wife sank apprehensively to Betty Wilson’s side, and Elaine Collins knelt dutifully behind them. They chanted amens and their voices rose, and now the boys joined in.

  “We must walk with God and believe!” cried Clara. “We must listen always to the white bird in our hearts! Abide in grace! The Son of God, He is comin’! We will stand—”

  “Caution!” cried Eleanor Norton with tremendous power.

  Even though he’d been expecting it, having realized that Clara was quoting her husband’s message and was now nearing the controversial phrase about the eighth of the month, nevertheless, like everyone else, Miller started. Clara stood transfixed before the other woman’s intensity. Betty Wilson began to whimper again, and Clara shushed her. Silence, troubled and fearful, settled, out of which the heavy breathing emerged like an invisible animal. Miller, seeking concealment, too tall to stand alone in the room without notice, found a corner chair and edged back into it. Himebaugh stood marooned in the room’s middle. The poor sonuvabitch, Miller knew how he felt and supposed he could rescue him, but was having too goddamned good a time to want to break the spell. Jesus! Lou Jones should be here! He’d love it!

  “Mrs. Norton,” said Clara submissively, almost tenderly, “lead us to light!”

  Eleanor turned stiffly to the chair at the foot of the bed, slowly sat down upon it. Wylie watched, frowning worriedly. No one talked. All looked on. Mrs. Norton stretched her arms forward. She placed her hands on the table, palms down, thumbs touching, fingers spread apart. She stared, breathless, at the opposite wall, and for several tense minutes nothing happened. Then, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, her lips began to move. There was no sound except for a little hissing noise that came from them. Then it stopped. Her lips closed. Her eyes widened as though focusing on some extreme distance. The candlelight beamed off her gold medallion like a tiny sun trembling there on her dark dress. Her mouth fell open and a strange almost masculine voice emerged. Her lips closed down around the sound, almost a gargling, and produced:

  “Hark ye to the new voice among ye!”

  The invisible animal gasped. Eyes turned. Himebaugh came into focus. Miller leaned forward in his chair, pressing his cheeks into the palms of his hands, his hands in a kind of prayer position. A laugh leaped in his diaphragm, but he was now Ralph’s backdrop, the eyes on Ralph saw him, so he managed to keep his face poker-stiff. Himebaugh, the poor fucker, literally shook. His body seemed to shrink, his clothes to bag. His cup tinkled in its saucer. Eleanor Norton collapsed on the tabletop. A great act, but—Miller glanced quickly at the other faces—was he the only one who knew she had failed? Wylie stepped over, patted his wife’s hands. He knelt beside her, looked back over his shoulder at Himebaugh. Marcella stood, pressed against the wall at the head of her brother’s bed. Now, for the first time, she saw Miller again, and as though in imitation of him, she brought her hands together before her face. Her eyes sparkled … goddamn it, were there tears?

  “I came,” said Himebaugh suddenly, his precisely mannered voice now half growl, half squeak, “if you must know”—he swallowed—“in fear of … of the destroyer!”

  “Oh dear Jesus!” wailed Clara Collins, and dropped like a brick to her knobby knees: kawhump! Again the Nazarenes took over. Christ, they were irrepressible! Miller had to admit, though, that Himebaugh had, under the circumstances, performed well.

  Eleanor Norton came around, opened her eyes, appeared lost. “Mrs. Collins!” she appealed, st
umbling over to her. “Come! Tell me what happened!” She led the widow to the dining room, apparently eager to learn, but effectively—at last—breaking up the revival meeting. The two boys began to argue quietly, Wylie engaged Willie Hall in talk, and with these distractions the rest of the Nazarenes lost their zeal. Soon the room was full of chatter and motion again, and Miller felt free to leave his lair.

  He slipped quietly from group to group. Everyone had his own opinion about the meaning of events. Wylie Norton seemed upset, but Miller couldn’t pin him down on anything. Norton was a heavy sad-eyed fellow with glasses on the end of his nose, so suppressed and polite a voice one had to lean far forward to understand him. Willie Hall quoted the Bible irrelevantly, seemed to have seen nothing that happened, proved to be little more than a desensitized loudspeaker, emitting endless textual nonsense from his self-enclosed inner world. Miller guessed that nothing in the world would really surprise the man.

  Mrs. Norton returned, sought written explication from Domiron, but finally gave it up when few attended her. Himebaugh shrank to a corner and stared at Bruno. Miller wondered at the message, socalled, with which Bruno had so dramatically torched the meeting. The tomb is its message. Meaningless, yet loaded. He remembered that tomb was probably the word that rhymed with womb in Bruno’s lost poem, Bonali had finally remembered that much. Had Bruno really had Ely Collins’ deathnote in mind, though, as everyone assumed? Miller doubted the guy even understood there was such a note, wondered if he even grasped the brute fact of Collins’ death. Then, what was he getting at? If the guy were rational, he might have been responding to the night’s question: What is the meaning of “the coming of light?” with the answer: Death; or: Christ’s resurrection. But was Giovanni Bruno in any sense rational? Miller frankly thought not, not from what he’d seen so far. No, the more likely explanation was that he had heard something more or less like that from Mrs. Norton, or from others here tonight, and had produced his own abbreviated paraphrase. Miller decided he would spend some time with Mrs. Norton’s logs as soon as possible.

  The two widows discussed Bruno’s grace with Mabel Hall. Clara insisted that God was indeed speaking through him—“The Spirit has took on flesh!”—and the others, though eyeing him uneasily, had to agree: it all seemed to fit, just like Ely had said. Colin Meredith was sniffling, his long-lashed eyes damp and reddened, and Carl Dean Palmers seemed irritated with him, looked embarrassed when Miller passed by. He ducked his head from the others and whispered, “I don’t see it, Mr. Miller. They’re making a lot outa nothing.”

  Restlessness grew, more shifting between groups. Something unimaginable was to have happened by midnight, and now only some twenty minutes or so remained. Miller joined Marcella near her brother, but before he could ask her, she asked him. He said he didn’t know, didn’t know what to make of it. Eleanor Norton sat studying her logbook. Miller supposed she was preparing now to find the buffer message to explain why the undefined event did not occur, or how it did take place but was not properly grasped by all.

  Marcella, beside him, spooned more medicine into her brother. Miller’s main wish now was to have another moment alone with her before the night’s program was over. He watched her bent back, fascinated by the narrowness of the white blouse on her shoulders and the single starched pleat, now opening down her back as though to smile. He felt he was at the brink of some fundamental change, and, strangely enough, he welcomed the sensation. Bruno himself was obviously exhausted. His long high-domed face, gleaming with a clammy perspiration, sagged, and he slumped lower and lower into the pillows. A feverish glow still lit his eyes, but his day was just about done. As Marcella leaned back to cap the medicine bottle, the curve of her hip bumped Miller’s thigh: she looked up, smiled.

  Footsteps!

  All started, stood, stiffened. Anxious glances, eyes agog. Short breaths. Frowns. Was this it?

  “Mama,” Marcella explained. “She’s come down to turn off the television.”

  Everyone relaxed some. Miller longed for a smoke. Soon. He considered that it was curious Bruno’s parents did not participate here. Just too old, probably. Carl Dean sighed, an undisguised protest—and then the whole house was rent with a terrible throaty scream!

  For a moment, in group terror, no one moved.

  Then, almost simultaneously, Miller and Marcella turned and ran for the door, then on through the dining room to the front room. In confusion and with frightened shouts, the others stumbled and clattered behind.

  The living room was dark, as before, but for the television screen. There, a man on a dark horse pulled a kerchief up over his mouth, turned to his two companions and said, “There he comes!” Emilia Bruno whined insanely. Stiff upright in his armchair in front of the television sat Antonio Bruno. He was dead.

  Lights came on. People cried, “What is it?” Miller heard himself explaining it. It was Clara Collins who first lost control. She fell in a kind of sobbing fit to the floor, calling out her dead husband’s name. Elaine started bawling. Others cried then, kept shouting, hurrying in, hurrying out. Marcella, in tears, ran back to her brother’s room. Miller trailed a short distance behind, arrived to find her weeping quietly on the edge of the bed. “Go with Mama,” Giovanni whispered, his plain voice altogether unlike that which had uttered the message. His eyes were perhaps a little wider awake, but otherwise he was the same as before.

  Miller stood unobtrusively in the shadows by the door. Marcella passed him on the way out, but didn’t see him through her tears. Bruno stared at nothing. Was he smiling? In the dining room, Carl Dean was stammering, “If, if, why, if this d-don’t beat all!” Colin said, “I told you so! I told you so, Carl Dean!” They were both very white. On a chair, Betty Wilson slumped waddily. “Oh my God!” she whimpered softly. “I didn’t think it’d be like this!”

  Ralph Himebaugh and the Nortons stood in the dining room on the other side of the table from Miller. He could still hear Emilia Bruno and Clara Collins keeping it up in the living room, and it looked like the Halls were in there, too. Eleanor Norton held her small face in her hands, gazed upward toward the cut-glass chandelier. For some reason, people all turned toward her. Well, had she not, by calling this meeting tonight, prophesied its denouement?

  Marcella, her face streaked with tears, but outwardly calm and protective, led her old mother out of the front room, started toward the stairs in the kitchen with her, paused. The Halls, holding each other up, stumbled in, she weeping, he talking to himself.

  After a long while, Eleanor lowered her hands. “Death as a sign,” she said gravely, her voice breaking, seeming very old, “can mean only one thing.” She hesitated, as though afraid to continue. A small sob caught in her chest. “The end of the world!”

  “Oh no!” cried Himebaugh. “I—I thought so! I knew it! It’s what I thought all the time! It’s why I came!”

  Clara Collins stood, shaken, big square-jawed face wet with tears, hair snarled, heavy mouth agape, in the living room doorway. “Yes!” she gasped. “The eighth of the month!”

  Well, not the eighth, of course. Elan, Domiron, the One to Come, and time itself soon took care of that. But the course was set. And Tiger Miller had his game.

  10

  With the storm that hit West Condon the first part of March blew in the first distinct rumors that Deepwater Number Nine was going to be closed down. As soon as the rumors started circulating, Vince Bonali knew, goddamn it, he wanted to go back down. If you were born to be a coalminer, there was no point in fighting fate. A kind of anxious humor swept around town. Everybody made a big joke about how bad the air was up on top and how when they took baths these days they felt like they were wasting water. And then on Monday, the second, old Sal Ferrero slipped on the ice in front of his house and broke his arm, and that got everybody cracking how they wanted to get back down in the goddamn mine where it was safe.

  So, as soon as the roads were cleared, Vince drove around to a few of the mines in neighboring counties. He put in his
chit with the offices, looked up relatives, chewed over the situation with union bosses, but it was anything but encouraging. Got an earful of sympathy, of course, but he found a helluva lot of other guys out of work, just like himself. Bad as it was, though, he discovered that at least a half dozen guys from Number Nine had got on at other mines: goddamn it, he had started too late! Too late!

  All day, the old car lapped up the long stretches of greasy asphalt, and all for nothing. Passed a lot of strip mines along the way, whited over with snow, and they depressed him all the more. Not only fucked up the countryside, but they meant fewer jobs, too, and jobs he didn’t know how to handle. And now all this talk about gasification of coal beds—he swore and slapped the steering wheel. “Come on, God! Get me outa this one!” he said out loud. Vince had always imagined God as a tough dark old bastard who lived a good ways off, but had a long rubbery arm, spoke street Italian, gave the sonsa-bitches their due, and for some inexplicable reason had a peculiar fondness for Vince. His vision hadn’t changed much, except he was beginning to suspect God maybe had come to lump him in with the sonsabitches.

  Talking to God made him recollect the joke or something he’d been hearing around town about the end of the world or an invasion from Mars or some goddamn calamity due up next weekend. Boy! what was the matter with this town? As far as he could make out, it had something to do with that nut Bruno again, or maybe it was just that everybody assumed it. Well, that just went to show what a smart cookie that Father Baglione was. Bonali had never given the old priest too much credit, but a couple months ago when all the old gossips at the church had wanted to canonize the guy because of his so-called visitation, the old man had just chewed his cigar and kept his peace. From what Etta had found out, it wasn’t long before these same old women were getting shunted out of Bruno’s hospital room and told, in effect, to go to hell. And now the end of the world! Man, what next? Well, what the hell, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea at that—might be a relief to have done with this moronic business once and for all. He laughed at the idea of the world going up in a puff of smoke. Then he remembered he wasn’t ready, saw again the unblinking stare of Pooch Minicucci’s old lady. Sunday, for sure, he was going to keep his resolution and tag along with Angie and Etta to Mass, get himself on the right team again.