Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  Why? The authoritative source withholds further comment.

  On his butt, rye beside. High as a bloated angel.

  Jones is goddamn glad to get out, says Jones. Upward and onward to the big city, man. Tips rye to that. Water Closet. Pull the chain.

  Opens briefcase, flips caressingly through photos. Hayseed bandy-legs in, Jones covers. Hayseed reposes bony hunkers at distant end, minds own matters, whatever they might horribly be. Jones re-eyes photos.

  Story: that fabled day of the boom’s lowering, the Brunist special. Jones is in darkroom just off job-room working up gore pix of car wreck. Enters heroic protagonist to jobroom, quiff in hand. Jones observes, unseen, through speedgraphic viewfinder and darkroom window. Little gift, touch here, touch there, big itch all around. Protagonist struggles with conversion-from-cult pitch which twitches quiff to drop drawers, switching protagonist’s premises the which can only lead to syllogistic fuck: beautiful beautiful beautiful! Jones nearly leaps ecstatic out to congratulate, but lovingly operates instead voyeuristic camera eye. Splendid prelim thrashing about very photogenic and then, little quiff delirious afloat on cloud of imminent glory sacrifice, protagonist suddenly stands off (human interest shot of deceived crotch pathetically petitioning) and resumes with unanticipated fury his from-cult brief, accenting phoniness self-delusion marriageneed and godmadness, all of it an exquisite torture, Jones the while seizing his own balls and jumping silently for joy—but then, instead of quashing the quiff, protagonist stands ladylike by as she jumps into rudiments of clothing and barefoot staggers out door, and then, and then, O farewell manly virtues! protagonist weeps. Ugh!

  Epilogue: Jones presents set of prints as Happy Easter Bunny oblation and receives compensatory walking papers. No goddamn sense of humor.

  Jones swigging rye in club car now resumes review, confers blue ribbon on one titled “Quiff Couching at Forty-five Degrees.” Hay seed passes on rubber legs, gawks, flushes. “Hey, them’s purty hot pitchers you got there, mister!”

  Jones belches wearily. “Three bucks apiece,” says he. “Thirty silver dimes.”

  7

  Easter Sunday, after dark. The phone rings. Eleanor Norton answers. “Yes?”

  “This is Jesus Christ calling.”

  She blanches and those watching blanch, too. These are the Last Days and even harassment must be taken for a sign, must be exploited for concealed meaning. “Why are you troubling us?”

  “I have an important message for you all.”

  “Why don’t you bring the message personally?” She tries to be stern, but her voice fails her.

  “Well, actually, that’s what I’m doing. To tell the truth, I am here in the room with you right now, but you can’t see me. My only means to cross the, uh, aspect barriers between us was by utilizing the electronic amplification system provided by this instrument you hold in your hand.”

  “Ah!” It is too reasonable to be denied. Hand covering the mouthpiece, she explains to the others, now crowding around, all, like her, dressed in white tunics. “But what … what is your message?”

  “We have waited too long. The publicity campaign being waged against us by our enemies is muddling up the frequencies. We cannot risk any further delays. We have decided the end, that is, the transition, must come tonight.”

  “Tonight!” she cries, her voice breaking with a squeak. She covers the mouthpiece. “He says the end is coming tonight!”

  Mary Harlowe, paling, to Mabel Hall: “You said it could be Easter!”

  Willie Hall: “As it says in the Good Book—”

  Jesus: “Can you make it out to the hill in twenty minutes?”

  “Yes!” Eleanor is already standing, waving at Wylie to get ready to go. She hears the sarcasm, knows it’s wrong, another horrid prank, yet doubts what she knows, for how can one be sure? And there is no time to think. “In twenty minutes!” she cries to them all, not covering, and there is a flurry of activity.

  “Uh, just one thing. You must rid yourselves of everything that belongs to this world or you won’t be light enough to pass through to the next. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes! Everything!”

  “Roger. No possessions, no clothes, no jewelry, nothing.”

  “No—!”

  “Eighteen minutes.” (Click.)

  She is frantic. She explains. Clara snorts. An argument ensues. Time passes. Even Wylie resists. But dare we take chances? Clara says flatly she isn’t going to go stand stark naked on that hill just on account of some telephone call and Elaine isn’t either. Carl Dean Palmers is strangely spotted with his acne-centered flush, but he refuses to support Eleanor. On the other hand, Ben Wosznik agrees they had better do it. They are grown-up people and common sense tells you you won’t be wearing clothes in Paradise anyhow, so why be embarrassed about it now? The widows pink and stammer, but seem to agree. Clara retorts she’s not embarrassed, she just doesn’t want to go put on a show for a townful of practical jokers.

  The phone rings again. “Yes?” Eleanor’s hand trembles.

  “Thirteen minutes.” (Click.)

  “Thirteen minutes!” she cries. “Giovanni Bruno! Hark ye!” He is excited, alert, fingers digging into the scruff of the old armchair. She is suddenly terrified at the realization that he will say yes, they must go, that something awry could break forever the fragile circuit, that she herself really does not believe—or was that his inner voice on the phone—?

  It rings again. Eleanor shies, watching Giovanni, and Clara jumps for it. “Hello, who is this?”

  “Ten minutes—”

  “Don’t hang up! Now listen, if you are who you say you are, and if you’re here in the room like you say you are, then you don’t need to dial our number to reach us. Even if I hang up on you, I shouldn’t be able to disconnect you, ain’t that so?”

  Eleanor is breathless with the brilliance of it, awed by Clara’s majestic calm.

  “Uh, the electronic mechanism is such that—”

  Clara plunges her fist down on the cradle, gazes around at all present, then lifts it. She listens, smiles. They all listen: the dial tone … burrrp … burrrp … burrrp. They relax. Clara is praised. But they decide anyway to visit the hill.

  Around town that night of Easter Sunday, April twelfth, the collective eye is on the hill. The great vernal celebration of the Risen Christ concluded, West Condon has no choice but to turn and face the week before them, the week of the Brunists, the prophesied end, the Mount of Redemption and of humiliation. For four straight days, the West Condon Chronicle has headlined the bizarre story. For four straight days, the city editor has exploited the event in special articles and photo features released to the world. As Vince Bonali put it, talking to his buddy Sal Ferrero one day: “History is like a big goddamn sea, Sal, and here we are, bobbing around on it, a buncha poor bastards who can’t swim, seasick, lost, unable to see past the next goddamn wave, not knowing where the hell it’s taking us if it takes us anywhere at all.” And so now, thanks to the city editor’s all-round betrayal, the leaky raft of West Condon rises on a crest, and if it cannot perceive, it is at least perceived. All the way from the Antipodes to the Balearics, Curaçao to Dahomey. Wirephotos, news stories, television and radio broadcasts, those tawdry flares that randomly light up pieces of that sea, burst now over West Condon, exposing it to all the Peeping Toms of Egypt and the Fijis, the Ganges and Hong Kong … indeed unto Zion. A month and a half ago, it was all about coalmines and violence and economics and death, and there was an innocence about it. Today it is faith and prophecy and cataclysm and conflict, and it is outrageous. Why did it happen here? How will it be stopped? Where will it end? Luckless mariners adrift, none can know.

  At Easter Sunday Evening Circle at the Church of the Nazarene, Lucy Smith is telling all the girls about the lovely new tunics the Brunists are wearing now and how the prophet’s sister has neither spoken nor eaten in four days. There are rumors of something unspeakable that might have transpired between her and Mr. Mil
ler, the newspaper editor, who has turned out to be the dark false friend that Mabel Hall found in her cards. President Sarah Baxter listens, as excited as the rest, yet oppressed by a terrible melancholy, hoping only that Abner is not listening in on them again. She feels so inadequate, is inadequate, and Abner has so reviled her for it. She liked Circle so much better when Sister Clara did everything, when she herself, like Sister Lucy now, was merely a belovèd anecdotist, free to have her tea leaves read by Mabel and to complain with the other girls about why the Circle wasn’t better than it was. Abner has grown so distant through this struggle, so austere, so crossgrained and vindictive, she feels quite desperately alone in the world with this new life stirring like a terrible condemnation in her aged womb. She cries every day. She just can’t help it. And Abner doesn’t care, he doesn’t even punish her for it. He just hates her.

  Thelma Coates tells them now about Sister Clara’s travels through the neighboring counties and how, if the world should still exist in some form or other after next Sunday (they all giggle nervously), Clara has been authorized by God Himself, she says, to carry His new word and appoint His new bishops, and, what is more, Mabel Hall believes that Brother Willie may become the bishop of all West Condon, which is very exciting news.

  Mildred Gray tells them how they are all selling everything they own and sharing the money as a single community, enjoying grand banquets and who knows what all, and how one night they all ate a whole leg of lamb apiece. Mr. Himebaugh, who is a very rich man, has given them all his money and is selling all his possessions and they say he is a true and living saint. Of course, she says, when it’s all over, they won’t have a stitch to their name. If they need one.

  Lucy Smith then informs them with very tight meaningful lips that, speaking of not having a stitch, under the tunics all they wear is their underwear, and Sister Thelma whispers that she has good reason to believe they don’t even wear that, but she won’t say more. Utterly without any reason whatsoever, then, Sarah Baxter starts to weep uncontrollably.

  Earlier in the evening, before the phonecall from the man who said he was Jesus Christ, Carl Dean Palmers has attended the Baptist Youth Group meeting. He used to be president of it and he is still very much looked up to. He is courageous in his questioning, and yet at the same time he is not conceited about being a senior and is not ashamed to believe, not ashamed to pray. Ashamed of Jesus! that dear Friend/On whom my hopes of heaven depend? Not Carl Dean! Tonight, as usual, Carl Dean has pressed the claims of his new affiliation. Reverend Cummins, who has always made it very difficult for him and has even threatened to bar him from attendance at the BYG meetings, was not there, so the eight kids who showed up were glad to listen to Carl Dean. “What have you got to lose?” he asked them. “You don’t even have to come until next Saturday, if you don’t want to, and you can all come together so you won’t feel alone. Listen, you got nothing to do next weekend anyhow. And what if it’s true? What if it really happens? You don’t want to miss out, do you?” They did not! And he reminded them how he was never one to get mixed up in anything crazy, was he? And he told them again how swell all the people were and how, if anybody in town just tried to get the least bit smart with them, they’d take care of them, and then he prayed out loud that they all find the grace in their hearts to be saved in this moment of trial, and with that they agreed to come. Saturday night. Carl Dean said he would get them all the materials they needed, and the girls promised to make the robes. They were very impressed and excited about the robes. He told them that there were many secrets they would learn, and, as a starter, he taught them the secret password and one of Mr. Wosznik’s new songs:

  March on! march on, ye Brunists!

  March on and fear no loss!

  March on beneath thy banner,

  The Circle and the Cross!

  In spite of all adversity,

  March out upon that mine!

  The Cross within the Circle

  Will make the vict’ry thine!

  March on! march on, ye Brunists!

  Forever shall we live!

  The Cross within the Circle

  Will us God’s Glory give!

  So know ye are the chosen,

  The gold among the dross!

  March on beneath thy banner,

  The Circle and the Cross!

  And now, marched to the Mount (from their cars at the foot of the hill), standing courageously atop their origins and confronting a hostile world, dressed in pure white tunics embroidered in brown and tied at the waist with brown rope, the Brunists sing around a small campfire.

  … Risk not your soul,

  it is precious indeed …

  Ben Wosznik, guitar strapped around his neck, wanders tall and melodic among them. How is it that this mournful and uneducated, yet strangely reassuring man can to one be a father, to another a son a brother and lover all in one? Such, one might suspect, are the sort of mysteries that lie at the heart of and propagate all faiths.

  … Sinners, hear me, when I say:

  Fall down on your knees and pray!

  Fearing not the Baxters, for no man with the truth fears, yet unwilling to evoke the Last Battles prematurely, they have left the car lights off, such that the lonely fire dramatizes the fragility of God’s spark in the world of men, and the holy glow that warms their hearts, as their bodies, which they soon will shed, grow cool.

  “Oh, Ben!” sighs the widow Betty Wilson. “It’s so lovely!”

  To that, amens are heard, and even that austere schoolteacher has two tears that gleam in the corners of her gray eyes.

  … I was a stranger there, intent upon my way,

  But when I saw the crowd, I had the urge to stay…

  By habit, and perhaps by instinct, they have always gathered near a small lone tree on the Mount, hardly more than a sprout, some distance from the grove of trees down near the mine that surely fathered it. The tree is like another member of their group, so familiar has it become: a promise and a shelter. Now, Dr. Wylie Norton, sitting as always at the edge of the group and nearer therefore to the tree than the others, chances to look up into its young branches and sees what looks like a kind of package up there. He stands, approaches it, peers more circumspectly, and, as he does so, the other members of the group watch him curiously.

  He reaches up, grasps something. “That’s odd,” he says softly. The others crowd around. He is holding what seems to be a sort of tag, tied by a string to a bulky object above. He adjusts the glasses on his nose, squints, reads: PULL ME. Rather, he lets go of it, gazes blankly at the others. “What should we do?” he whispers in his tiny voice.

  Ben Wosznik strides forward, takes a look at the tag, gives it a yank. There is a soft pop and then hundreds of white feathers cascade gently down upon their heads.

  “The White Bird!” cry several women at once.

  There is a rustling and whispering down in the grove of trees. The Brunists hastily stamp out the fire and flee to their cars. But before they do so, in spite of an inner certainty that this has been but another in the long succession of harrowing pranks, they gather up all the feathers.

  The white bird: image of light and grace and the Holy Spirit, signal, as Eleanor Norton learned upon asking the One to Come, of a new life, another age. Has so radical a wonder ever happened before? Have mortals before been invaded by beings from higher aspected spheres? Or, as a reasonable man might ask: have men, known to be basically so reasonable, ever before anticipated with such unreasonable assurance such unreasonable events, behaved with such unreasonable zeal to obtain such unreasonable ends? A thoughtful question, and the sort that a reasonable man like Mortimer Whimple, the much-harassed public servant of this quiet reasonable little community, might fairly ask. Or Theodore Cavanaugh, that most reasonable businessman, whose cornerstones for the great community are old-fashioned hard work, good will, and common sense. Or a fellow like Vincent Bonali, that good-willed hard worker of incomparable common sense, whose only request is the right to
earn a decent wage and live in peace with his fellow citizens. And so another man, until now thought to be reasonable, Justin Miller of the West Condon Chronicle, has presumed to answer them with wild tales (probably invented) of literally hundreds of white bird and Virgin Mary and other spectral visitations; of ecstatics who claimed to be the living incarnation of the Holy Ghost, marrying themselves to statues of the Holy Virgin, consummating it by the nearest available proxy, and substituting their own bathwater for the blood of Christ in the Eucharist; of a multitude of monks and minstrels with their own “messages from the tomb” that led thousands to their enraptured ends; of hermits who shook empires as resurrected kings; of well-to-do folks like you and me who took to whaling themselves with barbed whips and living in nude communion, the editor’s descriptions of which were rather excitingly graphic, and therefore probably obscene; of “third ages,” in short, at least five or ten times a century and literally dozens of times already in this one, the so-called modern or scientific age (the editor’s humorous and belittling references to messianic Marxism did at least seem reasonable to these reasonable West Condoners, if little else the editor wrote about did), with a conclusion on the Saturday before Easter to the general effect that all Christians were, in truth and by definition, as mad as March Hares, proving the editor to be, in the end, the most unreasonable man of all. Which probably explains and excuses the smashing of all the Chronicle windows on the night of Easter Sunday, the black cross swatched on the front door.

  In the confusion of escaping the Mount, Elaine Collins and her Ma have somehow got separated, and in Carl Dean’s car there are only she and Colin Meredith. By some agreement Elaine has not been privy to, Carl Dean stops for a moment on a side street just inside town and Colin gets out to take a walk. “We better go on,” Elaine says, feeling a little bit afraid in such dark circumstances with nothing but this thin tunic and her underwear on, and her Ma absent.

  “They won’t notice if we’re just a couple minutes late, Elaine. Anyhow, I got a big bunch of feathers, and we can say we stayed to pick up the last one.” Carl Dean’s arm slides past her neck and he grips her back kind of at the armpit. “We don’t never get any time alone together. Your Ma’s always watching.” The cloth of her tunic is such that there doesn’t seem to be anything between her back and his fidgety hand, and it keeps coming to her mind about Jesus asking them to stand on the Mount with their clothes all off, and how Carl Dean had looked at her that moment. “I—I just wanted to tell you, Elaine,” he stammers, “that, well, I think you’re just beautiful in your tunic.”