“But the end, Mabel,” Lucy insists, “is it coming?”
Mabel turns up another card, places it upper right. “It is not certain, but it is probable,” she says.
“Is it still April nineteenth?”
Mabel stares, her eyes running over the exposed cards. “I don’t know, but, yes, I think so,” she replies at last. “Here’s a five … black. Perhaps: a black hand …” A pause while they catch their breaths and glance at one another. Mary Harlowe is pale. “… And the number … the number … seven.”
“What does it mean?” Mary asks.
Mabel, not replying, turns up another card, places it just below the last one. “A reunion,” she says. “Perhaps to discuss the controversy.” Another card. “A distant place.”
“The hill!” Thelma whispers.
Mabel nods. “It can be,” she says.
Betty steals a glance at Sister Wanda Cravens. She is very young and slender with a cute freckly face, and Betty loses heart. Of course, she is too young and too thin and she is silly and fickle, but will Ben see that?
Mabel turns up a new card and catches her breath sharply. They all stare at it. “The Judgment!” she whispers, and one ringed finger points to Gabriel and three naked people: a fat lady with oversized breasts, a thin lady showing her bare behind, and an elderly man praying. Fascinated by the card, Betty barely hears the rest, only scattered phrases reaching her: “… ordeal … will subjected to wisdom and prudence … evil men … victory over opposition … false friends …” and so on. Trump twenty. Judgment. God has spoken.
“Who are the false friends?” Mary Harlowe asks. She would.
Mabel hesitates. “A dark man.” She glances up at Betty who withers. Of course, all the men Betty can think of are dark, except maybe the Meredith boy. And Abner, who is no friend in the first place. But, still, a cruel doubt has stabbed her, hurt her deeply, and inwardly she grows faint. “And perhaps a child,” continues Mabel, eyes flicking over the cards. “And a married woman.”
After the session, one of the best they have ever had, when the others have left, Mabel reminds Betty that Wanda Cravens has three small children and Mary Harlowe five, no obstacle perhaps to a beast of lust, but hardly attractive to a man of honor. Betty thanks her, weeping gratefully, and, as the rain lets up momentarily, leaves, her joy renewed.
12
West Condon came alive as Miller walked through it. First day of spring and, on impulse, he’d decided to leave the Chevy at home, walk to the Chronicle. Still needed the trenchcoat, but he wore it open. Women appeared to sweep porches, men laughed foolishly from autos, children ran and shouted. Bicycles bounced down off porches. He heard the whump-whump of a basketball bouncing on cinders. The cool rains of the last couple days had sunk a fragrance into the soil that the sudden vernal sun this Saturday morning exploited gaudily. Who would think some here saw an end to it all?
The new time springs forth! Sun splintering through the windowfrost sprays the truth of the new evangel upon her bed. She stretches, feels old constraints squeeze out her sinews to run fingering down her arms and out into oblivion. Make way for light!
Downtown, people opening their shops hailed him. He took off his trenchcoat, carried it over his shoulder. West Condon showing its best face, momentary denial of the gloomy omens. Exchanges of witless banter, easy laughter. Maury Castle, rolling out the awning of his shoestore, made a dig about widows and orgies. Miller only laughed and told him he’d better join up quick if he wanted to get a little of that grace. Castle heehawed.
The worst of it was still in front of him, but he felt ready for it. Admittedly, it was pretty harrying, and now that the cult had become a more or less public phenomenon, there was more to keep an eye on than merely the little group itself, and that pushed him all the more, but as long as they didn’t move the date up on him again, he felt he could make it to the end. Or close enough anyway, for what he wanted out of it. The cult itself had not grown much since Miller’s first night—an ex-coalminer named Ben Wosznik and two or three more disaster widows—but its force had. The town was now awake to them, and the members themselves felt this awakening. There was always a tension as they faced out of the Bruno house, and even their own homes now sometimes seemed alien to them.
The Nazarene preacher Abner Baxter, made jealous it would seem by the loss of some of his own congregation, had been the first to make the cult public by his open denunciation of it. Squat red-maned head butted forward, copy rolled up in his freckled fist like a truncheon, he had invaded Miller’s office one afternoon, accompanied by two of his flock—introduced to Miller as Mr. Roy Coates and Mr. Ezra Gray—to deliver a formal handwritten repudiation of the “false prophet Giovanni Bruno” and the “sorcerers and impostors” who surrounded him. His thunderings on apostasy and women—“Women they gotta keep silence in the churches! they ain’t permitted to speak out, like the law says! Anything they need to know, Mr. Miller, let them ask their menfolk!”—had made it clear he saw Sister Clara as the real marplot behind the heresy. He had raged there in the darkening office to the clacking rhythm of the wireservice teletypes and the distant thump of old Hilda the press, his stubby legs set martially apart, his two lieutenants now conciliatory, now indignant, now sinister, now apologetic. If Miller had been tempted to drop the project, it was Baxter who removed the temptations. Even Jones, watching on deadpan from his desk, had had to admit he was impressed. The office girl Annie Pompa, moonface blanched to a pale olive, had stood stunned in the doorway, staring at this exhibition as though at green-skinned monsters from outer space, had squeaked in fright as the three men had wheeled suddenly—in mid-damnation, as it were—to bulk out past her. In a half-faint behind her desk afterwards, plump hand pressed into the sponge of her bosom, she had been voiceless, able only to shake her fat head fearfully, as though to affirm that the world was, in truth, in danger.
The heady spring weather today whetted Miller’s appetite for baseball and golf, for the feel of damp grass as he knuckled a ball and tee into the earth or fielded a bunt, for different places he’d been on different spring openings, even for West Condon in the spring, but the old West Condon with track meets and pickups and late evening ball games, tennis and Indian rubber, picnics, bonfires, furtive assaults under burred blankets that scratched agitatingly on the uncalloused flesh—whetted, in short, his underappetite, and, truth to tell, he was hungry enough. Here, the cult had robbed him utterly. At Bruno’s house, neither he nor Marcella were left alone five minutes now. As their chief scribe, his presence was required at all times and at every break he got set upon by one or another of the factions, each seeking to convince him of their own peculiar point of view. All knew it without understanding what they knew: he was the only one present without convictions.
As for Happy Bottom, well, she was impatient and surely she tempted him, but he just didn’t have the time free. Trouble with that girl was that the act was no five-minute project with her, it was an epoch. Sometimes it almost seemed to him there was something suicidal about her leap into bed: a hot mole. Not that she looked like one—nor sounded like one: her Judgments gave him as much pleasure as he got these days. Still, he wasn’t able to make a whole kingdom of a mattress, and that was the kind of circle she seemed to chart for him. And, what was more to the point maybe, he wanted to stop lying to Marcella. Her total ingenuous belief in him gave him a kind of responsibility he hadn’t had before: didn’t especially want it, but he couldn’t help but recognize it. Commitment was a real thing to her, solid as a door, specific as a threshold, and so, unavoidably, had become so for him as well. He knew that weaning her away from the cult and her brother would not be easy, but he meant to try, and he knew the consequences of success, knew and accepted them. In fact, goddamn it, they even appealed to him.
She skips, singing, to the bathroom, peeling off her pajamas, shedding old skins. Everything new, everything clean, and, for the day, a bright yellow frock with the rustle of spring in it. Rebirth! Water splashe
s in the tub, exciting her, sunlight splashes on the floor. And then, just as she’s stepping into the tub, Mr. Himebaugh walks in, looking ill—“Oh, I’m sorry, dear!” he says. “That’s all right,” she smiles, ducking down into the tub, and he leaves.
Father Jones sat, fat polyp, alone on a stool in the hotel coffeeshop, belly butting the bar, before him an oval platter stained with egg yolk and dusted with toast crumbs. Jones sometimes ate as many as eight fried eggs in a morning. Miller flung his hat onto a wall hook, took a stool one removed from Jones to give the man elbow room, and they exchanged dry grunts of recognition. “Pecan waffles, Doris,” Miller said to the woman who wandered blearily behind the counter. She poured a cup of coffee, bopped the counter with it before bringing it to abrupt rest in front of him, thrust a grubby hand into the pecan jug, which still contained the crumpled cigarette package Miller had thrown there five days ago.
Cup at mouth, hat tipped back, eyes asquint, Jones said, “Lucky you happened in just now. Strange as it must seem, I was just contemplating as how, now that we’ve copped all the goddamn prizes being passed out this season, you’d probably be anxious to give your old Dad here a fortnight off. See, my poor old Mother is ailing, and—”
“Jones, don’t kid me, you never had a mother,” said Miller, pouring the coffee in the saucer back into the cup and sheeting the saucer with a paper napkin. “I will say, though, your appetite sure seems to have gone to pot from all the overwork.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Whoo! I feel awful.” Jones sagged.
“How many eggs did he eat this morning, Doris?”
“Same as always,” she said and poured stringy batter on the waffle iron, rained upon it broken pecans. “All we had.”
Miller laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal. But give me just four or five weeks more. Until this Bruno thing is over.”
“What? Haven’t you laid that chick yet?”
“Jones, that gang is full of women, and I can only handle one at a time,” Miller said, as Doris, dropping the lid of the waffle iron, turned a puffy eye on them. The lid lifted, batter bagged out and dribbled, turned hard. “In fact, you can help me out if you’ve got a couple minutes free tonight.”
Jones lit a cigar, grunted interrogatively.
“I haven’t been able to get good pictures of the group yet, but tonight may be a good time. They’re going to meet out at that little rise next to Deepwater Number Nine. You know it?”
“Yeah. Cunt Hill.”
“What! Are you serious?”
“Somebody told me when we were out there for the disaster.”
“But how did it get a name like that?”
“Looks like one. The east, or belly, slope is gradual, and there’s even a slight abdominal dip before the last pubic rise—Stretch out there on the bar, Doris, and lemme show—”
“Not me,” grumbled Doris. “My slope ain’t gradual,” and she slapped her belly, making them laugh.
“Then, on the west side,” Jones continued, “it drops off sharply into a grove of trees at the edge of the mine buildings. But it only really got its name, I understand, when the company for some goddamn reason cut a clearing in the middle of all that vegetation, went digging for something or other, and left an incredible gash right in the old alveolus of love!”
“Right in the old olive-oilus of love!” exclaimed Doris. “What the hell is that?” She left them, shaking her head, to continue her mindless wandering behind the counter, smudging a clean glass here, dropping bread on the floor there.
“This fissure is now the repository of used condums, thrown there, it is said, in the belief that such oblations prolong the potency of the communicant.”
“Jones, you’re kidding!”
“There is, in fact, a sizable orifice in the crack, driven no doubt by some wag with an electric drill and a compressed air hose, though many in the heat of a drunken brawl have claimed to be the Man Who Deflowered Cunt Hill.”
Marcella, fresh from the bath and into the frock, flies gaily down the steps. Flagstones of sun lie bright in the living room garden. Out! out with the sackcloth! let the new day in! Marcella sings swings leaps skips whirls through the musty old house, heaves open the windows, brings the green air in, brings smiles to the faces of Elan and Rahim, huddled over writings at the kitchen table. It is spring! And she is in love! And then, from outside, a bird’s liquid laughter sends wildflowers shivering up her spine, and out she dances to drench herself in the hot and holy sun!
Passing through the hotel lobby on his way to the plant, Miller ran into Wally Fisher and the Chamber secretary Jim Elliott. Elliott wanted to talk about the industrial brochure and the new West Condon Common Sense Committee being set up. Miller agreed to print the brochure at cost and help with the layouts, listened noncommittally to the Common Sense idea. He had bet Cavanaugh would get into this thing, was glad to see it finally happen, but wouldn’t be able to participate. Fisher, for his part, had a wild story about an out-of-town couple that had come through last night, registering as Mr. and Mrs. Washington; they had slipped out before dawn without paying, leaving deposits of shit all over the bed. “Some spring,” he said.
“Happy first day of spring!” Annie his office chief sang out as Miller pushed through the front door.
“Same to you, Annie!” he said, so boisterously that Annie started. They both laughed.
“Mr. Miller, the plaque came today, the award for the disaster special!” She was giddy with possession of it.
“Well, hang it up!” he smiled.
In the newsroom, he plumped his hat on the spare chair beside his desk, tossed the trenchcoat over the back of it. Crossed to the teletype and snapped the switch. The carriage jumped as though goosed, bringing the room to with its familiar clacking thumping heartbeat. Thing he liked. In his morning mail, besides the award plaque, he found another black-bordered Last Judgment communication from the lady Black Hand:
The Devil, to no one’s surprise, turned out to be a woman. She roamed the tight streets of West Condon during the drawnout Judgment proceedings, servicing weak souls. Mother, complained the Supreme Judge, you are depopulating heaven! Your paradoxes drive me nuts, she responded with a dry scoffing cackle, and gave her skirts a kick.
• • •
Seven thousand philosophy professors were assembled simultaneously and told that if they could produce one truth among them, they would all be pardoned. The seven thousand consulted for seven days. At the end of that time, they presented their candidate, who, standing before his Judge, said: God is just. This philosopher was immediately sent to heaven to demonstrate the stupidity of his statement, and the remaining 6,999 were consumed by Holy Wrath.
• • •
A poet, seeking favors at the Judgment, composed a brilliant ode to Divine Justice, and presented it. It was so enthusiastically received that the poet was proclaimed Judge of the Day and granted Supreme Authority for twenty-four hours. So ingenuous and sweet-natured was the fellow, however, that he unhesitatingly absolved everyone who appeared before him. God finally had to call an end to the poet’s franchise for fear of being laughed at…
He shouldn’t go out there, just fog up the vision, but he’d promised yesterday. He’d better go. He would. Picked up the phone, dialed the hospital. Though it was what he lived by, he regretted the one-track specificity of all action, of all choice, what time made you do when you came to a fork in the path … or two forks at once. Eleanor Norton’s seven aspects were the thing, by God! While he waited, he hummed “Just As I Am,” an old revival tune, and doodled on his desk blotter. He noticed that all the doodles lately looked alike: M’s. Since his own name had never fascinated him that much, they could only stand for one thing. Some were peaked and shaded heavily, gone over and over until they looked like a flock of shaggy black birds in flight in a green sky. Others were rounded like two hillocks, or like one hill cleft, insignia of all three feminine distinctions at once. As if something were lacking still, some of the M’s had even been encl
osed in a circle. “And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,” he sang into the phone, “O Lamb of God, I come! I come!”
Marcella, digging in the dewed earth by the old apple tree, sings revival songs of her own make. She punches open the gaily colored seed packages. Thirty days! The sun is gloriously hot on her spring-frocked back. He comes!
After loading up the hooks with wirecopy, Miller took the panel out to the hospital. Stalled at every stopsign, clanked even on new asphalt. Old rusty-smelling wreck. One year old. Stopped for gas at the station where Lem Filbert worked, asked him if he was keeping in shape. Filbert played a creaky shortstop on their semipro team. The guy grinned broadly, then sighed, spat. “Ahh, shit, I’m gittin’ too fuckin’ old, Tiger.”
“Yeah, we all are. Where’s all the young talent?”
Filbert’s grin faded. “They’re smart. They’re all gittin’ outa this deathtrap before it’s too fuckin’ late.”
“Is that Mello in there working on that Ford?”
“Yep, he’s one a the fuckin’ lucky ones. Come on a coupla weeks ago. Been at least fifty fuckin’ guys by here lookin’ for a job.” The valve on the gas hose burped shut. Filbert squirted enough more in to round the charge off, hung up the hose, capped the gastank, spat again. “Gonna be a lotta fuckin’ holes in the lineup this year,” he said flatly, and stared off.
Origin of the Brunists Page 30
