Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  He woke repeating this, correcting the last word to “transubstantiation,” and, opening his eyes, found himself vis-à-vis Happy’s magic Bottom, a scant six inches from his nose. She stood at the edge of the bed, his robe half on, lighting a cigarette. He leaned forward, nipped one cheek with his teeth.

  She squeaked, dropping the smoke, then twitched like a mare flicking a fly. “I’ve been standing here for three hours waiting for you to do that,” she complained, covering it up now with the robe and stooping for the cigarette.

  “The cross in the circle,” he mused, singsonging it to a tune that seemed to be running through his mind.

  “How’s that?”

  “The cross in the circle.” He turned her backside toward the full-length mirror on the back of the door, lifted the robe. “The circle,” he indicated, swooping his hand through an oval whose extremities were the small of her back and the back of her knees.

  “That’s an egg,” she corrected.

  “And the cross.” He started between the knees and plowed up through the vertical that would have ended at the sacroiliac, had she not got ticklish where the thigh-wrinkle crossbeam cut across it.

  “That’s not a cross, either,” she said. “That’s a highway intersection.”

  He laughed and pulled her toward him, but she resisted. She looked toward the television, and he guessed what was eating her. He fell back, pretending indifference. “What time is it?”

  “About two,” she replied. “There they are again.” She turned up the volume and left without smiling. Phony fussing noises in the kitchen.

  Miller sat up and pulled on his shorts, listening to the announcer recast once more the story of the goddamn Brunists and their march to the Mount of Redemption. In the background: the thumping strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which accounted for certain parts of dreams now coming to mind. He felt groggy from having slept too long and too hard, and he wondered what he and Happy could do this afternoon to get away from this thing altogether. Unlike the little old lady, he didn’t even want to watch it on television. Room seemed dark—must be cloudy out. He smiled, thinking of the night just past, and turned toward the set to watch the Brunists advancing toward him, tunics aflutter and banners high. Looked to be Locust, about the 1500 block. The street-level angle of the camera prevented him from seeing any but the front rank, but they seemed to have grown some. What woke him up was seeing Abner Baxter: there he was, he and Ben Wosznik flanking the lean prophet at the very front of the tramping column, both carrying banners. “Hey!” he said out loud, and then the next thing he saw was Marcella’s body on a kind of stretcher.

  “… Of the prophet. We still have no definite explanation of her death. Members of the cult with whom we have spoken insist only that she met her death through an act of divine providence, but refuse to release further details.” Cut from Marcella to Ben Wosznik in a living room. Miller couldn’t believe it. His heart pounded. Ben said, “Well, now, I don’t think it’s proper for me to say. I will say that it seemed as though her tragic passing from this life, just so short a time before God’s Coming, before the Coming of Light, why, it did strike all of us like a message from above, not a punishment so much as an act of mercy, a kind of sacrifice, you might almost say, which brung to pass that a lot of good people who weren’t getting along suddenly found that their fights was foolish, and against the Will of God.” Miller crouched, in his shorts, gripping his T-shirt, before the set.

  Announcer: “Excuse me, Mr. Wosznik, but do you mean to say that she met her death by some sort of sacrificial ritu—” Wosznik: “No, I don’t mean nothing like that! What kinda stories are you boys trying to scare up?” Announcer: “Why has no one been permitted to examine her?” But now it was Clara Collins who replied: “Well, we got a doctor with us. He done what he could, and now his word is good enough for us. We’re takin’ her with us to the Mount of Redemption so’s she can be received bodily unto the Lord, there to be raised from the dead. We ain’t takin’ no chances, deliverin’ her over to the powers of darkness.” Announcer: “Do you mean to say that you expect her to be brought back from the dead?” Clara: “Of course, I do. Don’t you believe in the resurrection of the dead?” Cut to procession. Tremendous crowd, all right. Far as you could see.

  Not knowing when he’d begun, Miller now was nearly dressed, frantically buttoning his shirt, stuffing his feet into shoes.

  Announcer: “Earlier today, Mr. Mortimer Whimple, mayor of the city of West Condon, issued a brief statement in which he deplored the Brunist aggression against several West Condon churches this morning and the consequent increase in violence and hysteria, but discounted a persistent rumor that the girl might have been ceremoniously sacrificed or might have offered herself up in self-immolation, observing …” Whimple: “We understand it was some kind of accident. Maybe a fall or something. I think it’s all too easy to jump to wild conclusions. You gotta remember that her health had got, ah, pretty precarious by going such a long time without eating, and, ah, there are none of the usual signs of violence like you might expect in a, a sacrifice, let me say.” He looked shrunken and persecuted. Announcer: “Mr. Mayor, has any official autopsy been conducted or ordered?” Whimple (hesitating): “Uh, no comment.” Another voice: “Mr. Mayor, are any arrests in connection with her death being contemplated?” Whimple: “Not now.” Announcer (while Whimple talked silently on the screen to reporters): “We learned about an hour ago through sources close to the mayor, however, that the governor is being kept in touch by telephone with the situation as it develops, and that elements of the state police force have been dispatched and are now on their way to West Condon.” View of the Brunists, sound of their marching hymn in the background. Nearing the edge of town. “We return you to the network program now in progress.”

  Miller looked up from tying his shoes, saw Happy Bottom in the doorway. “Get your clothes on! Let’s get going!”

  “I think I’ll take a shower,” she said. “I’ll come out later.”

  “We just had three showers,” he argued, but he saw she was near to tears, or her equivalent of them which was a kind of bleak wintry absence of all anima.

  Announcer’s voice broke through the network program again with a sudden bulletin, accompanied by a newsclip of the Brunists standing on a hill—already!—but this hill was rocky and unfamiliar. Didn’t recognize any of the cultists either. Good reason: they turned out to be a group in Beirut, where, the announcer explained, night had already fallen and the end of the world was expected momentarily. Quick bulletins then of similar groups gathering in Germany, in Great Britain, in Rhodesia, Greece, Australia, Peru, Canada, and all over the United States. In Guatemala, a popular astrologist who had rightly predicted the end of the last war and the deaths of three world leaders now claimed to have verified Bruno’s prediction of the Parousia, and was at this moment leading twenty-seven fat Catholic ladies, including the President’s sister—all shown from the elephantine rump in the newsclip—up the side of the volcano Acatenango. Cut to Eleanor Norton reading heaps upon heaps of telegrams in the Bruno living room from people who said they were either on the way to West Condon, or were organizing similar marches to hills or mountains in their vicinity. Interview with the Arizona invalid-hitchhiker, who had made it. Cut to a film of a small Cessna arriving at the county airport, its two occupants emerging dressed in Brunist tunics. Back to Eleanor and more telegrams, many of them requesting that she repeat all details over the television networks, which she willingly did. “We wish to emphasize that the exact … content of the Coming of Light is not known, what precisely it will be or how it will … take place. We do know that, whatever shape it takes, it will take place today, barring of course unforeseen obstacles caused by the powers of darkness. We are also reasonably convinced that it must take place here, in West Condon, on the Mount of Redemption, to where God, Domiron, all the higher forces of the universe, and our prophet Giovanni Bruno, the One to Come, have directed us to march. This d
oes not … does not mean it will not occur simultaneously elsewhere, and we encourage all of you, elsewhere in the world, too distant to be able to reach us here … that all of you follow to the best of your abilities your own inspiration and sources. Those of you near enough to come, we urge you to do so, being unable to certify that this … this event will indeed occur in any other given place, but assured for those reasons I have so often repeated that it must surely occur at least at this Mount … this Mount over the Deepwater Coalmine.”

  Clara Collins came on, a sudden dynamic contrast: “Yessir, we are very excited! This sudden response around the world to our message, or messages jist like ours, why, it certainly is another sign we’re on the right track. You cain’t say it’s jist coincidence. And you cain’t say we done any missionary work. It’s jist spontaneous-like, and I believe all this activity, all this here zeal for the Lord, well, it jist has got to mean something!”

  Announcer: “When exactly, Mrs. Collins, do you anticipate the, eh, the end of the world?”

  Clara: “Well, we don’t rightly know, but if you’re worryin’ about it like you better be, then I’d say to you you’d better come along with us right now, on account of it’s apt to happen jist any moment!” Back to the network.

  He wasn’t able to catch them by car after all. Crowds blocked the way. People milled in every street. Mostly strangers. Lot of cars with out-of-state licenses. He parked as near to the back edge of town as he could, took up the speedgraphic, set out in a light jog. He decided to cut across the acreage that the city had just bought for purposes of luring industry. Hoped to cut the parade off. The lope over those untended fields was not easy: irregular, high with dried grass and shrubs that bit and clutched at his ankles, lot of junk to trip him up. He saw the crowds, though, just swelling out onto the mine road from the edge of town. Helicopter circling overhead, no doubt photographing his lone gallop crosscountry toward the Brunists: lost lamb returning to the fold, or messenger with the Word. Sky beyond the helicopter was gray with fat ripe clouds.

  He angled more sharply so as to get ahead of the advancing masses. Out in front: several cars, many of them with tripods and other equipment strapped on top. Big TV outfit rolled along in front, followed by an enormous crowd that just didn’t seem to end. A kind of flood at that: the Brunists bubbling down the road like a spread of white foam, and at the edges, like dark scum, the welter of the curious, the doubters, the hecklers, the indignant. He aimed toward a grove of trees, saw that if his wind lasted he’d make it before the Brunists with a couple minutes to spare. The helicopter came roaring down over his head and onto the Brunists, there to hover like a great speckled insect.

  His wind lasted, but barely. He staggered up against one of the trees, gasping, pulled out a smoke. His side ached, one ankle hurt. He tucked the camera between his knees, lit up, then sighted the camera on the road in front of him, just as a couple cars shot by.

  “Real scene,” somebody said behind him.

  Miller looked around, noticed for the first time that he shared the grove with three or four other cameramen. The guy who had addressed him had come up from behind, now stood looking over Miller’s shoulder. Young kid. Shaggy. Cocky.

  “Did you catch the rumpus this morning at the R.C. place?”

  “Guess I missed that,” Miller said, still panting.

  “Apocalyptic,” the kid said. “Laid into altars with mining picks, swiped a lot of stuff.”

  Miller could see the front ranks now: Giovanni Bruno, gaunt, lugging what did indeed look like a coal pick, head held high, hair flowing, legs kicking out vigorously against the restraint of the tunic, narrow bony feet, bare, beating down the hard ruts of the road; on either side of him, Abner Baxter and Ben Wosznik, singing lustily and bearing the two banners, a German police dog trotting at Wosznik’s heels.

  The photographer unwrapped a red pack of gum, shoved about half of it in his mouth, offered Miller some. “No, thanks.” So, in went the rest.

  Behind the three men walked the Nortons, side by side, faces collapsed in grief and maybe a kind of horror, but their step measured and determined. On either side, more or less in single file, marched the women of West Condon, led by Clara Collins and Sarah Baxter. Mixing in and trailing back down the road: scores of East Condoners, no, hundreds! Some wielded torches, some silver candlesticks, part of the morning’s loot, no doubt. And, in the middle, borne on—

  “Now you won’t believe this,” the photographer said, working his jaws mightily around the gum, “but you see that little Seenyora Two Hung Lo? There in the middle with the little fat fella? Well, they both been to college.”

  “Is that so?” Miller was getting his breath back. He dropped his butt to his feet, ground it out, pulled out another.

  “Degrees and everything.” The kid lifted his camera, took a photo. Somehow, his doing that made the camera in Miller’s hand grow cold and heavy. The front ranks of the procession had pulled nearly abreast of them. “You wouldn’t think brainy types like that could get their asses in such a silly sling, now wouldja?”

  “Hard to figure.”

  “You said it, man.” The gum cracked and popped. Miller felt chills ripple through him, seeing the thing now clearly, jogging slightly, back and forth, back and forth, to the rhythm of their song. “Now that poor little piece of dead snatch they’re toting, that’s a different story.” On the shoulders of six men. Litter was what looked like a lawn chair, folded down flat. She was just no color at all. Something between the dull aluminum of the chair frame and the vapid gray of the darkening sky. Fresh white tunic, too big for her—a grotesquely ironic thought occurred to him, and, yes, it was probably true … they probably found that tunic in her closet, or a drawer, and thought … Her mouth gaped open, lips drawn dry; he licked his own self-consciously. One hand pointed rigidly heavenward, the other downward. Eyelids half-open over a filmy opaque surface. It was so unreal a thing, he could register no emotion except horror. Marcella! He shuddered, closed his eyes, opened them. “They say she died with her hand aimed up at the Old Man like that, and that was what made that redheaded bugger see the light.” Miller just couldn’t attach her to this brittle blue corpse that rocked on the road before him. The run here had weakened him, had made him sweat; now the sweat was cold as death on him and all his tendons were gone to rot. He leaned up against the tree to keep from buckling, flicked his cigarette into the ditch, lit a new one. Marcella. He saw her name on his desk blotter, heard her gay laughter, smelled her body on his, saw the intricate turn of a lightly tanned wrist, tasted the newness of her mouth. Marcella. Marcella Bruno. Was it something in her he had loved … or something in himself he had hated? He felt old. “Well, the word is she got banged by the guy who grinds out the local scandal sheet. He was a big cat in the club, but he cut out on them and got into her. She went off her nut and, so they say, finally knocked herself off. Now that’s pretty wild too, I admit, but that’s something I can understand.”

  “Where’d you hear all that?”

  “Oh, I dunno. You pick things up. You just drag in? There’s a couple lambent skin pix making the rounds at the flophouse that this wiseguy took of himself laying the meat to her. Big guy, about as tall as Papa Spook out there, but twice as wide.” The kid popped his gum, spat out the side of his mouth, photographed Marcella’s cadaver. “Gives you a weird feeling,” he said. “In one of the photos she’s just like that, one arm up, one down, looking scared. Like it was all planned.” Weird feeling.

  Behind the body marched alternate pallbearers, large numbers of out-of-towners among them. Willie Hall and a heavyset man dragged along a little red wagon, in which, huddled miserably, sat Emilia Bruno, ancient, dark, withered, looking very ill indeed, yellowish eyes cast upward toward where her daughter rocked above her. Some of the men carried large wooden crosses at least four feet tall, roughly hewn from tree branches. Miller saw three or four of them. Then came the young, a disordered, emotional, wildly singing lot, dozens of them, all sizes. The f
our Baxter redheads stood out. Carl Dean Palmers hopped backwards in front of them, leading them in their singing:

  “O the sons of light are marching since the coming of the dawn,

  Led by Giovanni Bruno and the voice of Domiron!

  We shall look upon God’s Glory after all the world is gone!

  For the end of time has come!

  So come and march with us to Glory!

  Oh, come and march with us to Glory!

  Yes, come and march with us to Glory!

  For the end of time has come!”

  The helicopter lowered, cameras whirred and shutters clicked on all sides, the crowds trotted by, filling the ditches. The guys here in the grove with him folded up their gear, hiked it to their shoulders and set off, keeping pace with the procession, the vanguard of which was now virtually out of sight. The kid started to trail the others, turned around. “Hey, you coming?” He cocked his head, spat. “Say, man, you feeling okay?” Miller nodded, leaned away from the tree. Nothing to do but go on, see it out, find out what he could. “Got a little too much last night, hunh?” The kid, thank God, didn’t wait for an answer.

  There must have been at least three or four hundred tunicked followers in the procession, it was strung out for nearly a quarter of a mile. Others joined in, some wrapped in sheets, some merely in streetclothes, all barefoot. Behind the caravan were cars and trucks as far as the eye could see. A rumble in the sky. The singing broke off. Everyone looked up. A kind of moan or mumble rippled through the crowd, Brunists and spectators alike. Slowly, unevenly, the singing resumed:

  “O the sons of light are marching to the Mount where it is said

  We shall find our true Redemption from this world of woe and dread,

  We shall see the cities crumble and the earth give up its dead,