The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Robert Coover

  It’s how he thinks. There’s no answer, just belief or damnation. Like now, when Darren replays the “still time for your souls” bit and says, “If you listen close, you can hear her struggling to be heard while the others are carrying on, like a kind of strangled squeaky sound.”

  “I think that might be the little Baxter kid. He was having a fit or something.”

  “I don’t think so, but even if it were, as I’ve tried to explain, Billy Don, that would only mean she might have been trying to reach us through him and it wasn’t quite working.”

  “You mean like he was sorta possessed.”

  Darren sighs irritably.

  Billy Don gazes out the window of their church office, which is still also their bedroom, the Baxters having commandeered their designated cabin with no signs of giving it up. No matter. Mr. Suggs has promised them a camper, which is a better deal anyway. It’s woodsy and late-April green out there, a jean-jacket getup-a-ballgame day, not a day to be stuck in here. Darren is growing exasperated with him, he knows, but though Darren is smarter than he is and he’s usually right, he’s trying too hard to make something out of nothing. It’s not just these mine road tapes. Darren has been puzzling through all their interviews and their field recordings of conversations picked up on the Mount and around the dogwood tree and everything else he thinks might contain secret messages. He had Billy Don set up the tape recorder in the ditch, where they left it overnight, hoping to pick up the ghostly whispering they could not hear by day, but the tape ran out and the battery died before they got anything. Darren claimed to hear strange rustlings, but when Billy Don said, “Rabbits probably,” Darren just got mad. Darren has also been counting all the words and letters in the original sayings of the Prophet, as well as those in the slightly different versions preached by Sister Clara and the others, subtracting one from the other to see if there is any pattern in what he is calling “the residue of corruption.” Darren is not as hot on Sister Clara as he once was. He has turned all the letters of each of the seven prophecies in both versions into numbers, has asked Billy Don to do a lot of adding and subtracting and averaging and figuring out ratios and square roots, then converted the numerical values of the differences back into letters again, and he has performed the same kinds of operations on Ely Collins’ final death note, focusing especially on the words with improper capitals and misspellings. “If this message comes from God, Billy Don, and I believe that it truly does, for a great religion has been born from it, then we have to assume God makes spelling mistakes only on purpose!” Darren calls it the ancient Greek science of isopsephia, dating clear back to the Sibylline Oracles, which exactly predicted the birth of Jesus Christ centuries before it happened. This was amazing; Billy Don was impressed.

  Now Darren is replaying “while there is still time for your souls to be saved,” and at the end there is just enough of a pause to hear the word “week” or something like it. Billy Don has less trouble with this one, he just isn’t so sure where it’s coming from. Before he can say so, though, Darren has already moved ahead to the next break. Oh oh. Billy Don gets it now. “You hear it, Billy Don?”

  “Yup.”

  “‘Of Sundays!’” There’s a kind of glow about Darren when he gets excited. His blue eyes seem to grow bigger behind his little round spectacles and it’s like you can look right through them into the sparkly cavern of his head. He backs up the tape and plays it again. “‘Listen… to me! …A week…of Sundays!”’ Darren whispers, imitating the voice. “That’s what she was trying to tell us, Billy Don! Just like the Prophet!”

  “Wait. Let me hear that again. Are you sure it’s Sundays? Sounds more like it’s got an ‘m.’ Like ‘some days.’”

  “Don’t be dumb, Billy Don! What could that possibly mean? This makes complete sense. You can even hear her say ‘again’ a moment later. ‘Listen to me!A week of Sundays…again!’ Hear it?”

  “But, well, that’s not exactly what her brother said. He said, ‘Sunday week.’”

  “That’s right. ‘Coming of Light, Sunday week.’ But it turned out to be a week of Sundays, or seven weeks after the Day of Redemption.”

  “June the seventh.”

  “June the seventh. The Midnight Coming. When everybody gathered together five years ago all around the world. It was even bigger in terms of numbers than the Day of Redemption.” Darren’s voice has begun to sound like the wheezy voice in the ditch.

  “Six weeks from today.” Billy Don tugs on the end of his moustache. Could it be? Was the spirit of the dead girl really trying to reach them? It’s possible. And scary. It means the Rapture might be even closer than they have been supposing. Nothing was to have happened for another couple of years at least. If it’s true and not just something Darren is making up, he doesn’t have much time to acquaint himself fully with the ways of the world and find a partner for eternity. It’s like he’s aged suddenly from twenty-two to eighty-two overnight. He pushes these doomsday thoughts aside and concentrates on the Prophet’s sister instead. Though they never knew her, and she’s a saint and completely dead, whenever Billy Don thinks about Marcella Bruno it is not her spirit that comes foremost to mind, or even the beautiful painting in the Florida church, but her radiant nude body in their secreted photos of her on the leather couch, photos he peeks at ev ery chance he gets—as God’s disciple and exegete, of course, seeking truth and understanding. As soon as Darren leaves, he’ll get them out again, examine them for further revelations. And use the new office phone, give Sally Elliott another call. He wants to ask her about all this. And thinking about the end makes him feel bad (he’s not eighty-two, darn it), and she always has something funny or smart to say that cheers him up. “So what do you think? Something’s gonna happen that day?”

  “I don’t know, Billy Don. I’m kind of scared. I need your help.”

  When Darren asked Clara what happened to Marcella’s body, she didn’t know. “When things settle down here, we can maybe ask.” Though some believe the Day of Redemption was the beginning of the Rapture and Marcella was transported directly to the Kingdom of Light, Clara, while allowing that it could be so, doubts it would have happened unwitnessed. Well, she is a good woman but she has a more naïve view of God’s transparency than they do. “But why was the girl out there on the mine road all alone in the first place?” Billy Don wanted to know. “Why wasn’t she with everybody else?” “She’d took sick, bless her soul. We was planning to take her out there the next day with us, but it was only the day before and we didn’t want her to worsen. We probly oughter left somebody to watch over her, but I guess they was too much else to think on.” “What kind of sick?” Darren asked. They didn’t get an answer to that, though before she went back to Florida they overheard Betty Wilson Clegg say she believed the poor child really died of heartbreak. They feel fairly certain, after seeing the forbidden photos, what she meant by that, but they also think that Mrs. Clegg is something of a simpleton, and Darren in particular believes that such banalities trivialize God’s operations among humankind. God is not a ladies’ romance writer. They have conducted sit-down interviews with many of the Brunists in their effort to capture the early history of the movement, but Sister Clara is always too busy for long conversations, so Darren has made a habit of simply leaving the recorder running whenever she’s in the office, and maybe she knows that and maybe she doesn’t. She has said some things about Abner Baxter that suggest she doesn’t, or else she forgets.

  Reverend Baxter is one of those who believe the Prophet’s sister and First Martyr was taken up bodily into Heaven. Billy Don has speculated that’s because it relieves his guilt about the accident, but that just shows how earthbound Billy Don still is. The plain fact is that Brother Abner is a pre-Tribulation dispensationalist and Clara Collins is more post-Trib, so he would naturally expect Marcella to be taken immediately into the presence of the Lord, whereas Clara would suppose she’d have to wait for everybody else. It’s as simple as that. Darren doesn’t like Abner B
axter any more than Billy Don does, but he never lets personal feelings interfere with his pursuit of absolute truth, an attitude much like Reverend Baxter’s, though Darren is more of a searcher, while Reverend Baxter is, well, a preacher. Darren and Billy Don are, as they like to say, dialoguing with history, but Billy Don believes there are as many histories as there are people and all of them are true, history being made up of memories and the recording of memories, which is why he is enthusiastic about their project. It also means the real truth will always elude him. Darren knows that they live in two kinds of time at once: human clock time and cosmic eternity. And though any understanding of the mysteries of eternity demands an accurate knowledge of clock time—history being a kind of obscure reflection of metahistory, as he likes to call it, having learned the word in Bible School—the seeming paradoxes of clock time are resolved only when absorbed as unities within timeless eternity. Reverend Baxter, in his blustery way, seems tuned in to that. He also adheres strictly to the original sayings of the Prophet, to the extent that they were written down or could be remembered. Darren is impressed by this faithfulness to prophetic utterance. Sister Clara has freely reinterpreted them, which is, frankly, disrespectful and a kind of corruption. Thus, Giovanni Bruno’s “Circle of Evenings” is no longer even a prophecy but only a kind of blessing upon her Evening Circle church group. Sister Clara is thoughtful and caring, a deep believer utterly devoted to evangelism and the Brunist vision, and the sincerest person Darren has ever known, but she is also a stubborn pragmatist, a compromiser and a builder, her apocalyptic message watered down by personal beliefs in charity and brotherhood and the establishment of a new faith. He understands her motivations but finds something impure about them. Well, he is not himself a proselytizer. The truth is the truth. If only one person grasps it and is saved, that is enough. Brother Abner, contrarily, is more of a revolutionary, radically committed to the truth as it has been revealed to him, even if it is a terrible truth. Sins not expurgated by fire, he has preached, will be punished by fire in the life to come. If the Brunists are, as they call themselves, “the Army of the Sons of Light,” Abner Baxter is the Army, Clara the Light. Darren is afraid of Brother Abner and loves Sister Clara but knows in his heart he belongs in Abner’s Army.

  Clara and Ben have also talked in a frank way on the tapes about First Follower Carl Dean Palmers, who turned up at the camp unexpectedly last Friday, calling himself Pach’, or Apache. A strange, beardy, tattooed fellow in a tattered ball cap and engraved red boots who keeps to himself but is not afraid of hard work and who may or may not still be a Brunist believer. Ben mostly argues for him, but Clara seems full of doubts. Because of her daughter probably. Pach’ seems to have his eye on Elaine, who is homely and spindly and a half foot taller than he is. Hard to figure, though he’s no beauty either. He has been a wild and disturbing presence for many, seen as an apostate and a dangerous interloper, an ex-con with criminal ways, but Darren and Billy Don have found him something of a godsend—Darren because he is potentially a fount of information about the earliest days, Billy Don simply because he has needed someone like him at the camp his own age to talk to. They have seen his dark side in the somewhat obscene photos taken on the Day of Redemption, but Darren argues that his frenzy was a kind of divine frenzy. A hero who took a lot of punishment for others. And his arrival proved a good omen. The very same day he entered the camp, they received the amazing news that they were suddenly the new possessors of the Mount of Redemption and other lands about, and many credited Pach’ with bringing them this miraculous good fortune by his return to the fold. He has been slow to open up and says he can’t remember what the Prophet actually said, but he has told them some very vivid prison stories and what it was like down at the city jail the night after the Day of Redemption, and Darren is eager to learn more.

  When Billy Don attempts to explain the Marcella tapes to Sally Elliott over a cherry-chocolate sundae in the Tucker City drugstore (she’s buying as usual, knowing he’s penniless), he is a bit disturbed by how funny she thinks it all is, but he appreciates the relief from Darren’s fierce humorlessness, so he smiles his embarrassed smile and goes along. They are sitting at one of those old-fashioned wrought-iron marble-topped ice cream tables that he associates with the town he grew up in. He feels at home in here and is happy to be with this girl again. Sally wants to know how the voice ended up in the ditch, so he tells her the story of how the girl got left behind when the Brunists gathered on the Mount with box suppers the night before the Day of Redemption and how she came running out there all alone just at the same time that the Brunists’ worst enemies, the followers of Reverend Abner Baxter, came driving out there to attack them, and how the Brunists, seeing the lights on the mine road and hoping to avoid the confrontation, jumped into their cars and with their lights off went charging down the hill toward the Baxterites, hoping to get past them before they could get turned around, and how there was a terrible pile-up (Sally is laughing again, but this is serious) and the poor girl got struck by six or seven different cars and died there in the ditch.

  “That’s terrible, Billy Don!” says Sally, still giggling. “And her voice just got stuck there and can’t get out?”

  “No, it’s not like that. If she’s God’s messenger, she might be heard anywhere, any time, and even by different people in different places at the same time. But it was such a key moment. Reverend Baxter was converted and became a Brunist that night at the ditch, and there was a great reconciliation and they all marched together the next day to the Mount of Redemption, and that’s really how the church was born. Right after that came the Persecution and everyone got split up and wandered about. And that Saturday last week was exactly five years after the Night of the Sacrifice, and it was when Reverend Baxter and Mrs. Collins and all their followers finally came together again, right there beside that same ditch. It was just natural something unusual might happen.”

  “That’s what it’s called? The sacrifice?” Sally plucks another cigarette from her pack, offers him one which he again turns down. “I only chew the stuff,” he said shyly the first time, then worried she might have found that too hicksville and laughed it off as a joke, or tried to. “You know,” she says, lighting up, “I remember my dad saying something at the time about her maybe being killed in a ritual sacrifice.”

  “That’s an insane rumor. These are all just ordinary people like you and me. They don’t do stuff like that. Your dad must have got mixed up with the Powers of Darkness.”

  He expects her to smile at that, but instead she turns melancholy. “You’re not far off. My dad’s in the dark all right, always has been. Less light in there than you can get out of a used sparkler. And mixed up? Absolutely. But power? He’s had the stupidest job in the world and he just got fired from it. Now he’s going to be filed away in some corner down at city hall. They’d make him the janitor, but he can’t stay on his feet long enough to push a broom.” She blows a long plume of smoke and watches it rise toward the tin ceiling of the old drugstore, then gets out her notebook and jots something down. He’d only meant to joke in his clumsy way, but he obviously touched a sore point, and he’s sorry. Sally doesn’t have all that much in the way of a bosom, just two soft bulges, but it’s hard not to stare because she always wears T-shirts with funny things printed on them. Today there’s a flying star and it says: IF YOU GET HIT BY A SHOOTING STAR, YOU’LL METEOR MAKER. That’s probably sacrilegious, but he likes it that she gives him things to read there so he doesn’t have to keep looking away. Maybe he should say he’d like to bookmark it and take it home with him. If he only had the nerve. As far as he can tell (she has a kind of shameless way of scratching herself), she doesn’t wear a bra either. “So, the poor girl. Just bad luck, hunh? Went for a jog, wrong place, wrong time?”

  “Well, we don’t think it was just luck.”

  “Oh right. God’s secret designs. Kill a kid to kickstart a new religion. And so now you guys are trying to crack God’s code. Don’t you ever
wonder, Billy Don, why any god, if there were one, would want to play such silly games with people? If he wanted something, why wouldn’t he just come out with it?”

  “He did that. It’s called the Bible. It’s up to us to read it and understand it and live by it.”

  “Yeah, I’ve read the thing. Most of it. Skipped some of the dumber parts. If God wrote it, he’s a crummy writer. He didn’t, of course. A bunch of beardy guys with tight assholes did.”