“What are you doing out here?” Her voice is flat, like it’s been ironed.
“Oh, I’m just trying to figure things out. What do you think is going to happen?”
“I dunno. Nothing probably.”
“You look pretty sad, Franny.”
“What’s it to you?”
“Oh, nothing, I guess. Sorry. But, hey, if you want to talk things out sometime, let me know.” She tears a blank page out of her notebook, writes her name and telephone number on it, and gives it to her, Franny accepting it with a dismissive shrug.
At the tent portal, she pauses to add a note. Life’s a story, she writes, and you either write it or get written. Accept somebody else’s story and you’re the written, not the writer. She smiles at that. That’s me, she thinks.
“Pardon me, my child. Could you please hand me my cane?” It’s the old lady sitting stiffly just outside the opening. Mrs. Mc-some-thing. On the Florida bus with those cute Jesus children. Sally shook her frail blue-veined hand on coming in here. “It seems to have fallen.”
“Sure. Are you all right?”
“All right? Well, for my age, I suppose I am.” There’s a mischievous knowing look on the old lady’s face. “That boy’s sweet on you, I do believe.”
“Maybe. But I think it’s only my soul he’s after.”
“You’ve been writing. Are you a writer?”
“Well, not yet. I want to be.”
“What sort of writer? Love stories? Whodunnits?”
“Sort of both, I guess. I mean, I want whatever I write to be about finding out about things, you know, the way a detective solves a case. And love, well, everything’s about love, isn’t it?”
The old lady smiles at this, showing a pretty good set of teeth, assuming they’re her own. Her skin is mottled, loose on her bones, her jaws are sinking inward, hands trembling slightly, but she’s still clear-eyed and sitting up primly, straight as an arrow. “Yes, it is. Even when ‘love’ means zero.”
Sally smiles back, imagining a tall trim debutante with bobbed auburn hair in white tennis clothes. A classic beauty. “I bet you were really something in your time,” she says. “You’re really something now.”
“I was a bit wild.”
“I’m a bit wild.”
“But then, after a while, it all became something else. I started playing bridge.”
“I don’t want to do that. I want to stay wild.”
“I think you probably will,” says the old lady, and blesses her with a sly wink. And then she sort of blanks out, her expression goes flat, her eyes dull. “Ma’am?” There’s a little windy sound. Oh my god. Time to go.
I.11
Sunday 19 April
The discovery of dear pious Harriet McCardle, sitting bolt upright in her folding chair just outside the food tent, staring down as if in judgment upon the multitudes gathered below her on the sunswept Mount of Redemption with eyes blinded by life’s cessation, augments the probability in the minds of many that there will indeed be no tomorrow. As Brunist First Follower Eleanor Norton, presently a professional Spiritual Therapist on the West Coast (she now refers to herself as Dr. E. Norton) and the author of Communing with Your Inner Voice and The Sayings of Domiron: Wisdom from the Seventh Aspect, once famously announced on what in Brunist church history is known as “The Night of the Sign”: “Death as a sign can mean only one thing: the end of the world!” A pronouncement absorbed by First Follower Mabel Hall (she was there in the Bruno house that night and heard it herself, saw the dead man in the living room) into her own systems of divination, which accounts for her solemn nods now to her friends on the hill who nod back.
Although Dr. Norton, seeking transcendence from all earthbound forms, is no longer an active Brunist or even a Christian and so is not present today on the Mount of Redemption, her influence on the early days of the movement was profound and has shaped the thinking of many here, not least her young acolyte and fellow First Follower, Colin Meredith, who, upon the discovery of the body, shrieked, “I saw her! I saw her! The Antichrist!” and, tearing wildly at his tunic, set off running at full gallop, pursued by his mother, all over the hillside. Since the Antichrist is generally presumed to be male, the boy was probably mistaken; perhaps he meant the Whore of Babylon, for the person he was referring to was the snarly haired young woman in the tattered trenchcoat (the Judas who betrayed them wore just such a garment!) who was the last person seen with Harriet McCardle when she was still alive and who then vanished as though she never was. A matter of concern to the church scribes, Darren Rector and Billy Don Tebbett, who were responsible for inviting her up and who now face intense questioning from their fellow believers. Was she wearing an inverted cross? Was that a picture of a writhing serpent on her T-shirt? Was it a T-shirt, or her very flesh? What was she writing? Did they notice any peculiar body odors? A burnt smell? Her figure was not particularly feminine—was she even really a “she?” They answer truthfully, describing her as, by outward appearance at least, a sensible Christian girl with a healthy curiosity, while at the same time acknowledging, while poor Colin goes clattering by, that, yes, the devil is a crafty dissembler, one cannot be too cautious, for they are serious open-minded students of redemptive history and are willing to consider all opinions and eventualities. Billy Don, for example, had watched her descend the hill until she reached the bottom, so she didn’t really “vanish,” not in his eyes, though he has to admit that what he witnessed may have been a diabolical phantasm since no one else shared in his witnessing.
On the original Night of the Sign, the Brunist Evangelical Leader and Organizer, Clara Collins, now Clara Collins-Wosznik, still distraught at the time over the recent loss in the mine accident of her husband Ely, was utterly undone by the sudden death of the Prophet’s aged father in front of the TV set, and she fell to the floor sobbing and praying in the manner of many of those in and around the food tent now. But this afternoon her emotions are held in check by a more practical concern. To wit: What is to be done with the remains? What might be the ordinary passing of an old woman elsewhere is an extraordinary event here on the Mount of Redemption today, open to a variety of unwelcome interpretations by the civil authorities. The church has, in the past, been maliciously and unjustifiably accused of bizarre Satanic practices, and it could be again. Had she been privy to the notebook entry of the Elliott girl (she does not think that child is the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, or any other otherworldly creature—just a spoiled unkempt brat with more book learning than is good for her) about a city set upon a slippery hill, she would have understood it as an almost literal expression of her present anxieties. Sister Clara is tempted at first to conceal the death and, as Brother Hiram suggests, to try and get the body back to the motel, somehow, to be discovered there under less problematic circumstances. But one glance down at the foot of the hill, where reporters and gawkers still mill about in threatening numbers, tells her this would be impossible, even dangerous. Nor, as it’s God’s will, would it be right. She and Hiram and Ben talk it over with Mr. John P. Suggs, and together with the mayor of Randolph Junction, they inform Sheriff Puller. The sheriff, conscious of possible crowd trouble, says that he will call an ambulance and have her removed, announcing simply, if asked (of course he will be asked) that she has fallen ill and is being taken to hospital. They will take her to the Randolph Junction municipal hospital, not the nearby one in West Condon, but he will not say so. He will arrange for the usual county coroner’s cause-of-death report and will not announce her passing until after the Brunists have safely left the hill. Or whatever, he adds, aware of the expectations of some. Meanwhile, they are to keep her out of sight and to turn off the public mourning and do something about that hysterical boy. The Randolph Junction mayor adds that, if her surviving husband agrees, she can be quietly buried in their city cemetery. “I am afraid,” says Brother Hiram, “that the gentleman’s youthful alacrity has abandoned him. He lacks the mental competence to understand even that she has died
. With your permission, as the official leader and pastor of this pilgrimage, I shall, with the assistance of a lawyer in my congregation, secure power of attorney and sign the necessary papers on his behalf.” And thus, thanks to her wise friends, a crisis is avoided.
Who is John Patrick Suggs, and what has led the wealthy coal baron and property developer, never known for his largesse, to become the Brunist movement’s chief benefactor? Well, his hatred of the local old-family power elite with whom he has been at war all his life, for one thing. The movement’s enemies are his enemies. For another: His view of redemption as a straightforward negotiation in the soul market. He is, as he thinks of it, buying into after-death shares. Does he believe that the End is imminent? It might best be said that, near the end of his own life and without heirs, he is betting on it. But above all, he is motivated by his loyalty to the late Reverend Ely Collins, who effected his conversion, and whose last prophetic message to the world as he lay dying in the scorched depths of the earth here below their feet launched this new evangelical movement. In his early days, Pat Suggs was known as a hard-living, hard-drinking, two-fisted hell-raiser. He has injured and known injury. Existence as a bruising contact sport: when young he lived such a life. Though his family traces its roots to Northern Ireland, he has always spoken of himself as an American patriot, a Calvinist, and a libertarian, and it was the Calvinist side of his nature that emerged as a consequence of a tent-meeting conversion upon hearing Ely Collins preach, he himself being the landlord of the field rented for the occasion. Though the pastor of a church with pentecostal tendencies, Collins himself was not an overtly emotional man, nor is John P. Suggs. Ely simply spoke from the heart and made good sense and Suggs felt an immediate rapport with the man and thought of him as wise and holy. He supported the Church of the Nazarene liberally while Ely was its minister, but loathed that smug hothead Abner Baxter who succeeded him after the mine disaster (he can see the man, standing not far off in his ill-fitting tunic, barefoot, glowering like the devil himself), a former communist labor organizer and unprincipled rabble rouser, a man who deserved to be shot for his radical anti-Americanism alone, and he abandoned that house of fools. He found no other church that suited him and eventually sought out the widow of Ely Collins who was, as he’d heard, carrying her husband’s torch and had important tidings to tell. Clara Collins is no Ely (she is a woman, to begin with), but she is honest and forthright and devoted to the memory of her husband and the movement his vision has fostered. Sometimes Ely seems almost to be speaking through her, and perhaps he is. John P. Suggs did not think he would like this fellow Wosznik, with whom she took up so soon after Ely’s death, but he has come to respect him, a simple man but arrow-straight, a true believer, hardworking, beholden to Ely Collins in the same manner as himself, and a valuable helpmeet to Ely’s widow in the task of spreading, on what may be the very eve of the Apocalypse, this urgent new gospel. As he gazes about upon the activity on the hill (that stupid boy has thankfully been collared and removed from view), he feels good about what he has done and knows that Ely would be pleased.
The town banker, arriving now at the foot of the mine hill with the West Condon mayor, the police chief and officers, the Chamber of Commerce secretary, his own bank lawyer and other official personnel and civic leaders, speaks of Pat Suggs, often his business adversary, as an own-bootstraps sort of fellow, ruthless, decisive, shrewd, frank, unfriendly, an aggressive loner who accumulates all he can while contributing nothing to the community he is exploiting, a man he opposes on just about all issues: his countryside-destroying strip mining, his divisive anti-unionism, his unorthodox banking and investment procedures, his inflammatory white supremacist rhetoric, his simplistic but vicious anti-communism, his militant Puritanism. The feelings are mutual. To John P. Suggs, Ted Cavanaugh is an immoral liberal humanist, a country-clubbing hypocrite who uses religion cynically as a power tool, a legalistic destroyer of basic civil liberties who makes the rules convenient to himself that others have to play by, an unrepentant sinner and unscrupulous manipulator and usurer—in short, a damned banker like all bankers. He associates the persecution of the Brunists with atheists, Jews, Romanists, lawyers, politicians, and humanists like the banker, and would have needed no further reason to take up the Brunists’ cause than to do battle with him, even were he not motivated by his faith.
What the banker has come now with his team of city authorities and legal advisors to announce, is that the city is purchasing the mine property, including this hill, and that all these people are therefore trespassing on private property. He presents various documents and demands that the sheriff ask everyone to leave. Immediately. The sheriff glances poker-faced at the sheaf of legal-sized documents while the strip mine operator produces documents of his own: a written permit from the sheriff’s office and a limited but binding two-day lease agreement from the absentee mine owners. The banker insists that, with the purchase, the circumstances have changed and the agreement is no longer valid, but John P. Suggs, whose own bid, unbeknownst to the banker, is also still on the table, only smiles icily, his thumbs hooked in his suspenders. He’d thought, from the astonishing earlier news, that the banker might have had an inexplicable change of heart, but he sees now that the reality is more amusing than that. The sheriff notes that he sees no deeds or purchase agreements amid the paperwork, and as the registry office is closed on Sunday, they will have to wait until tomorrow to present their case. Meanwhile, this is unincorporated county land under his jurisdiction. With a sneer aimed at the police chief, whom he regards as an ignorant foreigner, he suggests they not complicate his crowd control problems with their further presence, and some of his uniformed men arrive to back him up.
“What do you mean?” the outraged banker demands, jutting the jaw that intimidated a generation of state high school football players. There are news cameras focused on them now, and the crowds are pressing round, drawn here in hopes of a repeat of the entertaining events of five years ago. “If we don’t leave, you’re going to arrest us?” His demand is met by strategic silence.
“Well, I think this is absolutely ridiculous,” says the Chamber of Commerce secretary.
The West Condon chief of police, one of the more flourishing members of the extensive Romano clan, and the principal supporter on his meager salary (and whatever else comes along) of eleven of them, had never thought that this would work and said so before reluctantly agreeing to haul his sad ass out here, dragging all these others with him. Chief Romano is uncomfortable around overheated evangelical types, so arrogantly full of false certitude, every man his own prophet and pope, and he is fully aware of the racist anti-Catholic biases of the likes of Puller and Suggs and that vicious firebrand Baxter, desecrater of St. Stephen’s Church, who is standing off to one side and seems about to explode, damn his tormented soul. But, though he has no authority here, he had no choice. He likes to say that all the people of West Condon are his boss, but Dee knows from whose imperious hands comes his paycheck, and he knows the kinds of games they play, the cunning and meanness in their hearts. If truth be told, there’s not a person in their party here not deserving of imprisonment if not hanging, himself included. But what can you do? Life is a crap shoot. He had one throw and this is what he got. “There won’t be no arrests,” he says flatly, fixing his gaze not on the sheriff but on his troops. Who are not, he knows, completely legal. Tub Puller’s ambitious little warlord fantasies. The way Monk Wallace explained it to him down at the station, Puller is amassing this vigilante army and hoping for disturbances—even if he has to create them himself—that will justify this unit enough to draw state money to finance and arm it. For the present, the volunteers—no Italians among them—are not only unpaid, they even have to supply their own uniforms and weapons. In it for the action. They can’t arrest anybody, though of course neither can he. John P. Suggs catches his drift. “If you want to stay,” he says finally, “be our guests. Just don’t stir up trouble. Last time, you let a mess happen. People
got hurt. We’re not going to let one happen today.”
The West Condon mayor puffs out his fat cheeks and says in his booming voice, “We been told a woman was took to hospital. What’sa particulars?”
“She is Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” Puller says, consulting his notes.
“But what’s her problem?”
“Like I say, Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”
There are hoots from the crowd. “That ain’t what the man ast you, Tub baby,” yells one of them. The sheriff knows him. A scrawny loudmouth coalminer named Cheese Johnson who sometimes worked his shift in the sheriff’s own mining days, if what that ugly fuckoff did could be called work. The strip mine operator knows him as Chester K. Johnson, a ne’er-do-well whom he hired at one of his mines after Deepwater but who lasted only a week. Chief Romano as a drunken jawbox he has picked up off the street from time to time, a regular client in the free flophouse he runs at the city jail. The banker as the uncontrollable wiseass who horned in on his original Common Sense Committee and nearly wrecked it, beating up old Ben Wosznik in his own house. No one’s happy that he and his shiftless pals are here. “No more stonewallin’, my man,” Johnson shouts in his nasal twang. “The ole girl’s gone tits up, ain’t it so?”
Clara Collins is watching apprehensively from a discreet distance. It was just such trouble that thwarted their gathering here five years ago, when it seemed certain that the Rapture was really going to happen, and she is afraid something like it might ruin her plans today. She tells Ben and Wayne to go get on the public address system with some good old-time gospel singing. “Let’s loose the Holy Spirit on them and drown out all this ungodly bickering!”
Reverend Abner Baxter, seething with injured pride at having been excluded from all these exchanges and emboldened by the return today of some of his closest followers—including Jewell Cox and Roy Coates, standing beside him like stone pillars—now lets go his daughter’s hand and, striding toward the banker and his minions, cries out: “Enough of these puffed-up babblings! Your deceitful words are a loathsome abomination!” Is he referring to the banker or to all parties present? Let them read it as they will. “There is no truth in your mouth, your soul is destruction, your throat is an open sepulcher! Do you hear? Look around you! Your land has become a desolation and a waste and a curse, your town an unholy emptiness! Do you not see? You have brought this evil upon yourself through your own sinfulness, and your unlawful persecutions of the just, and now nothing shall never live here again!” Old boss Suggs is looking unhappy. Good. Let the old sinner have ears. “Even him who led us to the Coming of the Light through his foreknowledge of God ye have taken away and by evil hands have ye slain him! Ye are viler than the earth!” “Amen!” calls out Jewell Cox, and Roy and Roy’s boys and Ezra Gray and his own son, Young Abner, echo him, and others, too. It is spreading. The hillside is becoming his hillside, and the cameras are watching.
The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Page 28
