Ben asked them to come out early this morning and help strike the tents and clean up the camp after what the bikers did to it, but you can’t do everything, not when you have four excitable kids and a husband who can’t get off the can until noon. Dot understands the rednecks’ complaints—Isaiah is sometimes a nuisance to her, too. At least the camp has separate outdoor privies for ladies and gents, though she has trouble getting through the skinny wooden door. She and Isaiah like Ben better than Clara, who is a bit bossy for their taste, though she has a big church to run, so you have to give her credit, and both of them are two of the flat-out sincerest people she’s ever known. They believe. You can feel it in everything they say and do. It was what most drew her and Isaiah to them. But they’re both missing something, too, something that lets you know they are in touch with final things. They are, to put it plain, too down-to-earth. They are not possessed. That’s what this group is mostly, a lot of sincere dedicated people, full of conviction, but without much pentecostal fire. They can do things like build camps, but they can’t lift off. They’ve assembled a good team, though, with singers and preachers and bookkeepers, plenty of hard workers and even some prophets—those two boys don’t look much like prophets, but that’s probably what they are, and they’re smart as a whip. Or two whips. Dot always thought there must be a scientific way to get at this mystery-of-all-mysteries, God being the master scientist after all, and if anyone can puzzle out when the Rapture is like to strike, it’s those two, whatever might be their private ways. Dot looks forward to being interviewed by them as she figures she can set them straight on a few matters. That woman Mabel Hall seems like she’s on to something, too, though it’s not completely Christian. More gypsylike. Old Goldenthroat from Florida has a great gift of the tongue and can really wind up the faithful, but he is something of a smoothie, you can’t quite trust him. He was trying to do some faith healing out on the Mount yesterday but it was a complete washout. Isaiah has had better luck at that, and he can hardly string three intelligent words together. Still, old Hiram has gathered a real churchful around him and they pay their own way, so you can’t complain. As for the rich man Suggs, he is like a kind of Joseph of Arimathea, more just part of the background plot than a main actor. He won’t even wear the tunic. He might or might not get taken aboard when the Rapture happens.
The nearest thing to a man possessed she has seen is that short, jowly preacher, Abner Baxter. The women around him are pathetic and Young Abner is a spongy dimwit, but Abner Senior is full of beans; or, better said, full of fire. Holy fire. He knows the Bible forwards and backwards and has a voice that could knock down the walls of Jericho. His commie background is worrying to some, but it only shows he has always been on the side of the poor, even before his Christian conversion. He has raised some hard questions out there, questions that still need answering. Just why they are spending all that money on building a church, for example, when the end is coming anyway and there are needy persons who must be fed while they wait for it. He gets people’s backs up with his rage and bluster and his biker boys are an embarrassment (Dot understands wild kids, he shouldn’t be blamed for them), but he’s a man driven by his calling and someone you have to listen to. That’s what she and Isaiah think, and a lot of other people are thinking the same way.
Abner Baxter is also the one, even more than Ben and Clara, who seems most set on keeping Bruno in Brunism. His last conversion was a hard one and it has stuck. It’s the words of their Prophet that makes these people different, but they don’t all get it. Brunism is otherwise like a lot of the evangelical churches Dot and Isaiah have been members of: the Bible as the infallible word of God and its prophecies as future history, the creation of the world in a day by the hand of God, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ with direct access to Him through prayer, the fall and salvation of man through adult baptism following the repenting of sins, speaking in tongues, faith healing, all that sort of thing that no one can argue with, plus of course a focus on the Rapture, the Tribulation, the millennial reign of Christ, and the Final Judgment, all announced by God in the Bible, all imminent. What Bruno delivers is a step past that. He has announced a whole new era, betokened by baptism by light (Isaiah and Dot favor Abner Baxter’s reading of this as baptism by fire and have signed up for it), as though to say, this is it, it’s coming now, get ready. And he has opened up a new window onto exactly when and where it’s going to happen. You have to believe God is going to get some advance word out to the faithful, and that’s what seems to have happened here. It’s what the Mount of Redemption and all these dates they’ve been learning are all about and it’s why Dot and Isaiah have come here. Jesus may turn up any minute.
Just who or what Giovanni Bruno was is more of a mystery. A man of the people, yes, from a humble family, who fought his own priests as Jesus did his, and was martyred. Above all, a man filled with a messianic fever—you can see it in the eyes of the pictures of him. But it seems like the real father of this movement was Clara’s first husband. Ely Collins had the Holy Spirit in him, saw visions, converted a lot of these people, and was about to prophesy the end of the world, when he suddenly got killed in the mine as if the Antichrist were after him to shut him up. Before he died, though, he apparently passed the Spirit on, or God did, to his younger partner, who people said was like a son to him, so Johnny Brown, as many are calling him, wasn’t really Johnny Brown, or Giovanni Bruno either, but more like a living transmitter for the voice of Ely Collins, and through him, of the Almighty Himself. Some say, especially those around Abner Baxter, that their Prophet, whom they call simply Bruno—Bru-no—actually died in the mine, too, but that his body, which still had both legs, was allowed to stagger on long enough like a kind of holy zombie to carry Ely Collins’ spirit and message to the world. They say there was a bird did all this. Pretty weird, but Dot has known weirder and she likes the story. It adds up, and right now, it suits her.
It’s time to get ready to move out to the camp. They’ll be doing lunch out there in a couple of hours and there’s nothing to eat here, all the food they hauled back from the buffet yesterday having long since vanished, so they can’t be late. There will be crowds of hungry people; they’ll have to fight for a place at table. No problem. She’s good at that. The three kids have left the corner when she wasn’t looking and are probably out terrorizing the neighbors’ brats again. There aren’t many toys in this slummy neighborhood, but they have managed to break or steal just about every one there is, what can you do. There’s no tub out at the camp. She’ll have one last hot bath and then pop all four in her bathwater for a quick scrubdown before leaving. Maybe she can get Isaiah to take a bath, too, though he doesn’t often. She sniffs the air. Little Johnny’s filled his pants again. The kid eats like a horse and poops like one, too. At least, when they get raptured, praise the Lord, there’ll be no more dirty diapers.
While loading the food they have bought—for the second time—for today’s big farewell luncheon into the trunk of Mrs. Edwards’ car in the highway supermarket parking lot, the woman asks Clara if she’s aware that her daughter may be practicing some form of flagellation. Clara knows what the word means and what this is all about, but the question has caught her by surprise and she asks anyway, and the minister’s wife says it was the ancient religious practice of being whipped or whipping oneself as a purification rite. Clara has read about it and heard preachers preach about it. Punishment of the flesh as the corrupt prison of the spirit, the imitation of Christ’s own sufferings, the flogging He took from Pontius Pilate, and so on, a kind of extreme penance. Sometimes not just to purge one’s own sins, but those of the entire world. But she is skeptical. For the poor, Ely used to say, life is penance enough; we don’t need to heap more pain on it. And there’s something downright unhealthy about it. It’s supposed to be an act of humility, a rejection of the body, but it’s mostly just the opposite. And it can be something nastier. Ludie Belle Shawcross has stories. “How do you know about this?” she asks.
>
“Well, you asked me to speak with her and…”
“Yesterday morning Ben seen her coming from out the woods with Junior Baxter in their tunics and they was blood on them.” There. It’s out. Since Ben told her about it, she has been trying not to think about it, and therefore thinking about nothing else. She found the tunic before the girl could wash it and it was true. She has tried to talk to Elaine about it, but the child just ducks her head and says nothing. Clara felt herself growing angry—angry and fearful—and she had to back away and try to figure things out, but there was no time to do that; this weekend has taken all her time. Which has been true for too long. She is not the mother she used to be or ought to be. She has become instead the mother of a whole movement, something more important than just any one person, though she never asked for that, and her life is full up to the brim, often leaving her at the outer edge of her energy and abilities. “She sometimes does it to herself. In her room. A belt, I think.” Clara is finding it very difficult to talk about this. Her chest feels like there’s a big stone in it. She had not meant to tell anyone, but if it has to happen, it’s probably best it’s Mrs. Edwards. She has experience with young people’s problems and maybe can help. “Do you…do you think they’re doing anything they shouldn’t oughta? I mean, taking their clothes off or…?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been watching them around the camp and up on the Mount. They never touch each other or even look at each other. It’s more like a kind of serious compact between them, not anything romantic. That’s my impression. But they are very cruel to each other.”
“Cruel?”
“I mean, you know, if you saw blood…”
“Yes.” Of course she has known all along, ever since that day on the Mount, what happened there, and then the letters Elaine and Junior have been exchanging and those sounds coming from Elaine’s bedroom, often just after a new letter arrived. Knew but didn’t want to know, and so kept on not knowing what she knew. She is standing in front of the open trunk, a package of chicken legs in her hands. Soft. Like a baby’s thighs. She feels close to tears. “I am so afraid.” Ben always says Elaine is a saintly little creature and he trusts God to take care of her, and that may be so, but it doesn’t help in figuring what to do. Clara, who has lost her husband and her son, feels like she is losing her daughter, too, and it is tearing at her heart. Since Ely died and all this began, Elaine has been her close companion. They have been approaching the Rapture together hand in hand, prepared to spend an eternity together, but she has also been her anchor to the earth. She is all she has in this world, even if this world soon will be no more, more precious than life itself. “If anything’d happen to Elaine, I don’t know as how I could bear it.” She can hardly speak. That little Catholic statue that Elaine gave her of Mother Mary with her bleeding heart on her chest, that’s what she feels like. What did Mary think when she held her dead son? What was the whole world to her then, and did she care if it was saved or not? “But what can I do?”
“I don’t know. But maybe you could take the boy out of it by offering to take his place.”
“What?” Clara is so startled by this suggestion she drops the chicken she’s been squeezing. “You mean, get whupped half-nekkid by my own daughter?”
She has made a grave mistake talking with this woman.
“Well, I don’t think she’ll actually want to do that. But letting her think about it might show her what’s wrong about doing this with Junior.”
“Oh. I see.” But she could never do this. Elaine would think she’d gone crazy. She picks up the chicken, packs it in, and slams the trunk closed. “I’ll think on it.”
Ben is going east soon to sing in some of the churches and maybe, she reasons on the ride back to the camp, she should go along and take Elaine with her. But can she leave the camp with all its problems? And she’s worried about Ben, too. When he came back from his rubbish dump run, instead of taking over the cleaning up of the camp and starting on the repairs as he was meant to do, he got his shotgun and left again, looking moody. He’d also forgotten to pick up the day’s groceries and replenish the supplies stolen by the biker boys, making it necessary for Clara to call on Mrs. Edwards for this emergency trip. That’s so unlike him. And now she has the problem of the Baxters and all the people here with no place to go, and Hiram, who has been so much help, leaving her to solve all these problems herself. “We got a new plan for the camp and all the rest,” she says suddenly, not sure just how she’s gotten to this matter, though she’s been meaning to bring it up since they left the camp, and she feels the minister’s wife stiffen at the wheel, “including the new motel Mr. Suggs wants to build, like he showed us last night.”
Mrs. Edwards turns the car radio on. “Will Henry said he was going to play some of the songs he recorded yesterday.”
Clara feels irritated with the woman but knows there’s no reason in it, and at the same time she feels beholden to her and sorry about what she has to say. “It means you and Colin and the boys will have to leave the camp buildings and move on down to the trailer park. We’ll be buying campers for you.”
“I had so hoped…” Mrs. Edwards says, looking stricken. “My halfway house…” She pulls over on the shoulder and stops for a minute. It’s like she’s having a hard time getting her breath. Clara wishes now she hadn’t told her and wonders if there might be some other way. The poor woman has worked so hard, given so much. She put that cabin together near all by herself, and she has always been so cheerful and caring and only just now she was trying to help with Elaine. “Colin will be…just shattered…” She is sobbing into her sleeve. And now Clara is crying, too. She has tried to hold it back, but she can’t. It’s just too hard. On the radio Duke L’Heureux, Patti Jo Glover, and the Florida youngsters are singing “Let a Little Sunshine In.” Clara is praying to Ely for guidance.
The Warrior Apostles are holed up in an old abandoned one-room farm shack, plotting their next move. In the comicbook Nat and Littleface have been reading, the villain is breaking into the U.S. Mint on the Fourth of July, while everybody’s off watching the parade, and stealing all the gold. Nat wants to see what’s behind the padlocked doors of the Deepwater mine buildings. He can’t wait until the Fourth of July, but all those people will be off the hill today, may be off already. Nat figures it’s best to hit the buildings after dark. Everyone will be exhausted and figuring all the excitement is over and they should be easy pickings. They’ll approach them by the back route off an overgrown dirt road running alongside the old train rails scouted out Saturday by Juice and Cubano. Meanwhile, if possible, they should not turn over their motors today, draw attention to themselves. Until the job’s done, let them think they’ve left the area. The shack is nearly falling down and is mostly stripped out, the front porch is gone and you can see through two of the walls, but it still has an old wood cookstove. Houndawg has brewed coffee on it, stoking the stove with part of the floor, and now he’s frying up a breakfast made out of some of the food they took last night from the camp. Tons of stuff—more than they’ll ever finish—including a quart of milk, which Littleface is chugging to the disgust of all, when Ben Wosznik turns up at the back door with a shotgun aimed at Nat’s head. “Don’t move,” the old bird says quietly. “Don’t even dare twitch or Nathan Baxter is history.” They all have blades and Littleface found two guns at the camp yesterday, though they’re probably in his saddlebag. Nat knows Littleface is prepared to die for him, but he shakes his head, staring straight at the old graybeard with the gun. “Though I’m dreadful sorry about what you boys done to poor old Rocky, who never hurt nobody,” he says, “I don’t aim to do you no harm. But I won’t hesitate to shoot y’all dead if need be, and y’know that. You’re trespassing on my proppity, and you got a bad reppatation round here, so no one’ll blame me.” “No shit,” snorts Houndawg, grinning. “This your crib?” “I just wanta make one thing clear, Nat Baxter. If you didn’t take that gun, and I don’t think you did, I don’t know how
it got in your bag. I didn’t put it there, even if that’s what your brother’s whispering round. Somebody else hadta done it. That’s all.” Paulie suddenly starts leaping about like he’s trying to protest or dance or launch an attack and Ben swings the shotgun onto him. The knives are out. “Don’t shoot him,” Nat says. “My brother has fits.” He goes over to put a knife handle in Paulie’s frothing mouth for him to bite down on, and while he’s doing that, the old guy quietly backs out the door. Littleface has a gun in each hand and is headed after him, but Nat says, “No, leave the old man be, Face. It’s weird how you sometimes have to have somebody tell you what you already know.”
Reverend Hiram Clegg, when called upon at the farewell luncheon in the vandalized Meeting Hall, expresses his heartfelt gratitude for the warm hospitality the members of his congregation and those of all the other congregations present have received at the beautiful Brunist Wilderness Camp this past week, shares with Brother Ben the sorrow of all for the tragic death of the noble Rockdust, and announces his congregation’s substantial gift for the Brunist Coming of Light Tabernacle Church, a portion of which is to be employed for a memorial stained-glass window honoring Ely Collins, Giovanni Bruno, and Marcella Bruno. Though some might have hoped for prophecy’s grand fulfillment on the stirring occasion of this great Brunist family ingathering, they have been witnesses, by way of the miraculous coincidence of the repeated calendar, of the fulfillment of Giovanni Bruno’s prophecy of a “Circle of Evenings.” He and all his fellow Followers will be returning to Florida with renewed commitment to the faith and hope for the future as designed by God, and, oh yes, they will be back, for their hearts are here with this great movement and its resplendent new home. Here where, one day soon, make no mistake, they shall all meet their dear Lord face to face. “Face to face, we will behold him, far beyond the starry sky; face to face in all His glory, we shall see Him by and by!” He leads them in prayer and in song and feels tears spring to his eyes at the thought of leaving, though in truth he is weary of the bus and motel life and is eager to be home again and away from the camp’s problems and its gathering discord.
The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Page 34
