Origin of the Brunists

by Robert Coover

  But then somebody came running up the Mount and he wasn’t in a tunic or taking off his dark garments of the earth and they saw it was Mr. Miller and Elaine felt a great terror because he seemed to be headed right for Marcella and everybody started screaming like crazy and Carl Dean ran away, left her all alone on the top of the Mount, ran to get Mr. Miller, and Elaine saw him hit him and everybody was hitting him and it was raining something awful and Marcella seemed to get right up and throw herself into the mud and Saint Stephen went tumbling down and Elaine was on her knees in the mud and bawling and calling for her Pa and terrified to be all alone and just then something hit her—whack! She spun, falling into the mud, scared to death, and she saw it was Junior Baxter. He was cold white in his tunic and his head seemed like on fire. He had a long greenish-white switch and he looked very serious. Nobody had ever switched her before, her Pa, her Ma, nobody. She looked around for her Ma, but everybody was over by Mr. Miller. “No!” she gasped.

  But Junior didn’t hit her again. He looked around on the ground, found another switch somebody had dropped—the little tree there was nothing but a barbed pole now. He handed it to her. Her heart was pounding like mad, and she could hardly hold onto that greasy thing, could hardly see through the tears and rain, could hardly hear him in the rain’s roar when he said, “Hit me!” His voice was soft, almost like a girl’s. He turned his wet white back to her. She stood up, her knees shaky, but suddenly she wasn’t afraid anymore, the conflicts were gone, the strange sense of sin she felt for not being within was lifted, and at last the moment was whole. She swatted him lightly. She still didn’t know quite what she was doing and she was still bawling, but the sky seemed brighter even though it was still raining pitchforks and it seemed like they were suddenly all alone in the world and she thought: It’s coming! Now! And Junior’s switch whistled and bit into her side. She cried out, but the pain was a joy, strangely a joy, and the rain was right and the lightning and the frenzy, and everything was right now: she swung, hard—crack! Under his wet red hair, he smiled a little. She closed her eyes. His whip stung her legs. She lashed his legs. He whipped her tummy. She swung at his face. Faster and faster they slashed away and now the blows fell all over, on her face and chest, down her back, they didn’t take turns, just gave and took with all their hearts, and she couldn’t even see him, never knew when she hit him, just felt him out there, felt everything at once, and maybe she was singing, or maybe she was screaming, but it was coming, she grew a giant and lashed the world to her heart and her Pa was smiling down and the world was on her back, she stretched out her arms and dug her nails into its flesh and the rain was in her face and mud in her mouth, but she could still see Junior somehow, looking down with that serious face, the switch in his hand, and he had blood around his eye and trickling from his mouth, his hair red in the gray sky, and she stretched her limbs, north south east and west, stretched to embrace it all: NOW!

  But when she looked again, Junior Baxter was on the ground and Carl Dean Palmers was on top of him, yelling that Junior’s Ma had just had a baby in front of everybody, though it turned out it really wasn’t a baby but a miscarriage, and he was hitting Junior with his fists, hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. And that was when it happened, when Elaine chose between love and sainthood: for one pitch-black moment she swooned away into the earth, to the very pit, then exploded up again into light, and the next thing she knew she was scratching and clawing Carl Dean, and screaming at him to stop, and when he did she fell down on top of Junior, all bloody and suffering, so Carl Dean couldn’t hit him again, and she screamed at Carl Dean to go away, go away! At first, she thought Carl Dean was going to cry, but then, instead, he sort of just went crazy. He called her what Junior had called her—he didn’t understand at all!—and right in front of her own Ma who had just come running up to say they had to get going because the Persecution was starting, and then, hollering like the Indians do in the movies, he went running right at all those policemen with their big white clubs. She never saw what happened because her Ma pulled her away, they had to run, they didn’t have time.

  Later, she learned that Carl Dean had been sent up to detention for six months to a year for nearly killing three policemen. She thought that was awful, yet she sometimes wondered if he wasn’t the closest he ever got to real salvation right at that moment. He never wrote to her because of course he didn’t know where she was. That suited her okay. She never saw Junior Baxter again either, but they wrote letters. Sometimes they talked in the letters about what happened that afternoon on the Mount of Redemption. They both agreed they had “grown up” that day and had taken the whole world into their hearts. In the days that followed, things got broken up again, and they lost the complete feeling, but to help them remember, they agreed to touch each sore place every night when they said their prayers. The last mark to go away was one he had made across her heart. He said he believed that was very significant, for it meant that her heart was God’s, and she agreed. They both looked forward to the real and final Coming of the Light when they’d all be together in absolute union again.

  Her Ma and his Pa also wrote letters, but not about the same things. Her Ma was worried, because Reverend Baxter kept insisting about having his own way on everything, and she thought maybe he tended to carry things too far sometimes. Like the baptism business, for instance, and some of the rules about the tunics. Her Ma liked to think of their Prophet as a great new spiritual force unleashed upon the world, a renovating force for all Christendom, she said, but it didn’t seem like Reverend Baxter even thought of himself as a Christian anymore, and he was more excited about the way the Prophet spit in the priest’s eye than in the way her Ma was helping the movement grow. Still, she went ahead and made him the Bishop of West Condon, mainly because nobody else was there anymore. Brother Willie Hall, who was supposed to be the Bishop, wasn’t able to stay on account of the Persecution, and so he and Sister Mabel became Traveling Missionaries for the movement. Elaine followed all this very closely, for she had a very strange feeling about something: she wondered if maybe she herself hadn’t come closer to Redemption that day on the Mount than her own Ma.

  One very sad thing happened the Day of Redemption: Sister Emma Clegg died of a stroke. She was a very holy woman and some said afterward that God had taken her away as a Sign of his keeping his Word. Nevertheless, it was a terrible shock for Brother Hiram, who was such a nice man and loved his wife so. At first, he was put in jail with all the other menfolk, but they let him right out again to take care of burying his wife, and they never came back to get him again. For a long time, he was very depressed, and he didn’t want even to think about making a new life. But her Ma, who had suffered so herself, had restored his spirit and made him get active again in the movement. He became the Bishop of Randolph Junction and, on that Sunday morning of the seventh of June, the day of the possible Midnight Coming—though by then nearly everybody was expecting it on the eighth of January, possibly next year, but more likely either seven or fourteen years from now—had married the widow Sister Betty Wilson, her Ma and her new Pa Ben standing as witnesses. As her Ma said at the little party after, it was a very poetical arrangement. A lot of people were there from all over the world, and most of them cried to think about it.

  They also found poor Mr. Himebaugh, who had disappeared the Night of the Sacrifice, starved to death. Her Ma didn’t find that at all poetical and, even though they made him a Martyr, she hardly ever talked about Mr. Himebaugh again. Colin Meredith wrote them from where they were keeping him that he was in continual communication with the spiritual world and would return to them one day with incredible revelations. Sister Mary Harlowe settled in Randolph Junction and kept coming to their meetings, because after all she was a First Follower and her husband was a Saint and Early Martyr, but it seemed like she was starting to get bitter and sometimes talked rudely to Elaine’s Ma. Sister Wanda Cravens never got bitter and she was always very active.

  Their Prophet was
excommunicated by the Romanists and put in chains, and his people prayed daily for his deliverance. Really, he and his Ma were put in institutions like poor Colin, but, as her own Ma said, it was the same thing, it was all a part of the Persecution, and, as everybody knew, the mental institutions were controlled by Jews and atheists and they tortured Christians. They prayed for him to return and lead them to Light and most people believed his appearance would coincide with the real and final Coming, which meant he probably wouldn’t turn up for another seven years anyway. They had to learn patience and readiness, her Ma always said. Her Ma, who had run into a lot of problems talking on the phone to people where the time and even the date were completely different, had even begun to wonder if her old Pa’s final message, now known as the Revelation to Saint Ely Collins, anyway that part regarding the “eighth of the month,” was not to be taken symbolically instead of literally. Elaine and Junior speculated about this in their letters and talked about what they would do that day that the Prophet appeared and they were all together again.

  And then one day in the middle of June, about a week after they waited for the Midnight Coming, Brother Bishop Hiram Clegg called a special meeting of all the Bishops who could come, about thirty of them by then, and he didn’t tell her Ma about it. Her Ma got terribly upset when she found out, because it looked for all the world like Brother Hiram was taking things into his own hands—and after all she’d done for him! She prayed to God and got guidance from Pa, and then she took Elaine and they stormed right into the middle of that meeting. Her Ma strode right down the aisle and was just about to raise the roof, when they all stood up and clapped and clapped.

  Bishop Clegg rapped a gavel and said: “Sister Clara, we have, ahem, convened here this here night to consider the future of this great movement, and we have determined that the world lies open before us and we have but begun. But to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead, we must put our house in working order. To this end, we have here gathered and here, by unanimous consent, resolved to name you, Sister Clara Collins-Wosznik, our Evangelical Leader and Organizer!” Her Ma was just stopped dead in her tracks and seemed to go white all over. “Our financial picture has, of course, ahem, not yet stabilized itself, for the core itself is smaller than the loose ends still to be tied up, so we must apologize for the modesty of our initial offer, but we do feel able at this time to, ah, to propose a commencing remuneration of seven thousand dollars a year and traveling expenses. If you could just see fit …” And poor Brother Hiram’s voice started to break because he saw how her Ma was taking it: her Ma just broke right down and cried, and Elaine cried, and then so did a lot of other folks.

  Then her Ma wiped her face with one of her old Pa’s big handkerchiefs and stepped up to the front and gave the most exciting speech Elaine had ever heard. She talked of their sacred goals and the race they had to run and how God’s Kingdom was not a gift to the indolent but the justifiable wages for honest hard work. “A body visited by Grace must live by Grace!” she cried, and Elaine felt a shudder run through her, tingling the place over her heart, and she started thinking about the next letter she would write to Junior Baxter. Her Ma told of all the converts and read letters from distant places and then: “God willing,” she shouted out, “we will go out and win the souls of the whole wide world!”

  Everybody stood up and clapped and cheered and cried and said she’d have to give that speech on television, surely no one could resist, and then Bishop Clegg led them all in fervent prayer. They had been calling themselves the Reformed Nazarene Followers of Giovanni Bruno, but that night they decided to go back to the name Mr. Miller had given them: the Brunists.

  Epilogue: Return

  The West Condon Tiger rose from the dead, pain the only sign of his continuance, for he was otherwise blind, deaf to all but a distant shriek, and abidingly transfixed. There was light, or seemed to be, more felt than seen. And down again: into the black bowels. Later: coruscations of terrible brilliance, an engulfing center-less agony. “Help!” Sounds of the rude world—or only a dream? Then, as the earth lazed through a few million revolutions, the pain passed, leaving only the light, figureless and unaimed, a medium merely: so it had come after all. And was he impressed? Not at all. Last thoughts: obscene blasphemies, social phalanx erected to the whole holy lot. Retributive passage then through epochs of black nebulae that twisted into shapes and masks of the grieving dead, scarred and supplicating: he sorrowed but could not reach them in their distress nor could they him in his. Unrepentant wrenched back to light, torture, somebody cried out, then dropped again to the dark company. Thus ages passed, in flickering succession. And what would he emerge? toward what new monster was his soul evolving? He tried to move—anything—assert his will—could not. Nailed fast to his torment, he stared out with blind eyes on the impossibility of the cosmos, and, staring, saw what looked like a cord with a button at the end. He tried reaching for it, realized for perhaps the billionth time in the course of his soul’s racked passage that he could move nothing at all. Nonetheless, from nowhere, from his renascent will maybe, an Angel of Light—the Angel of Light—appeared. “I thought I died,” he said and wondered who had stuffed his mouth with rocks. “How many years have I been here?” meaning light-years.

  “Some eighteen, twenty hours,” said Happy Bottom drily. “And how feels today the man who redeemed the world?”

  “A little while …” he said, but already he was tumbling, and there were great convulsions and mountains fell, burying his words. And again a little while …

  She came to him on the arid plain, a motion of dull white on dull white, defined by her shadows, by her shifting tunic folds, by the dark point of her head. How she moved he could not tell, if she did at all: their convergence seemed governed by some law irrelevant to willed motion. From his height he could see the smooth curve of her brow, the clasp in her loose brown hair. He sought for images there, but convulsions of pain shrank his vision. Heal me! She looked up and, smiling faintly, uncertainly, held his gaze. Now! he gasped. In her hands, she held a fading dandelion, which now she brought to her smiling lips. From his great bulge of pain hung his knees and feet, and between them he could see her upturned face. Oh damn it, Marcella! Let me in! Her smile faded, her grieving eyes drooped to the dying flower, her lowering head’s delicate rotation conducting the hairclasp between his toes. In it now he saw himself, crosshung, huge below, head soaring out of sight. She turned, receding. When next he perceived her, she was kneeling, not far away, scratching a hole in the hard dead clay to plant the dandelion. Was that blood? “Please! Oh God!” But, smiling, she was patting dust around the stem. Her tunic lay limp on her spine and haunches, darkened between her thighs. A pale foot’s sole showed itself below the hem: then suddenly shot out, the hem flew up—“No!.” he cried, squeezing shut his eyes. Something knocked against his cross: vibrations racked him and, screaming, he fell.

  It was night. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, one arm outstretched and the other folded but elevated, and both pinned to something or other. His neck ached from the weight that lay upon it, and he was unable to see lower than the tip of his enormous nose. He was breathing hard; screams echoed in his ears still, the wound in his fork screamed still. Nailed into it: a flower—but had it taken root? He was almost sure, but he’d heard of amputees who felt their fingers and toes, and so he couldn’t trust the testimony of his nerve ends.

  She came in then and said, “Well, the old cock crows again!”

  “You mean—?”

  “Does it hurt?” He heard water running, then felt the lid fly off it and a shriveling cold wrap it. Intact! “Shame to waste it,” Happy said, “but I don’t want any crowds forming outside your door.”

  He laughed around the rocks and muck. “You know, I thought I’d lost it,” he said.

  “You nearly did. You can thank that big horsey lady for holding back the hatchets.”

  “Who? Clara? No kidding!”

  “I guess she knew a good thing wh
en she saw it.”

  “Why didn’t those goddamn cops come?”

  “I don’t know,” Happy said flatly, a frown crossing her freckled face. “Maybe they knew a good thing when they saw it, too.”

  She helped him then to urinate, and though he felt like one long ravaged nerve, he was able to smile. “Take good care of it,” he whispered. “God gave the greater honor to the inferior part, let us not do less.” With a wink, she pierced his side with a needle, and the nerve coated over. He relaxed, and though he plunged once more toward darkness, he plunged now without dread; the nails in his palms were basketballs and his legs were lean and could run again. “I’ll be back!” he said, and, distantly, he thought he heard rewarding laughter.

  Judas sat in the garden, propped against the tuberous trunk of an ancient tree, and gazed wearily upon his companions. Most slept, scratching fitfully at the old itches. It would come to nothing, he knew, watching them. He fingered the moneybox. There was now almost nothing in it. Why had they trusted him with it? Because his pure hope belied their weaknesses. They trusted him because he included them all and needed none of them, but they feared him for what he wanted, and his were never the decisions made. The prophet brooded distantly. For days now, Judas had suffered the man’s wretched beseeching eyes. Judas knew what he wanted, knew that the man himself nor none of these could ever do it. Simon Peter, snoring, scratched one calloused foot on a tree trunk. One of the others seemed to be making running motions with his feet. A woman, too sleepy to shuffle away the prescribed distance, squatted to piss; someone protested, and she moved on. The fattening Passover moon illuminated their fragmented pathos. Judas stood. He looked up toward where the prophet knelt, saw that the man was watching him. He’d expected that, but felt a shudder just the same. He stared out on the hard dry hills, stared ahead at the days succeeding days, the endless wearisome motions, all prospects sickened to habit, stared out on the hopeless generative and digestive processes of unnumbered generations, and thought: Well, anyway, it’s something different. And he went down into the town.