The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  There are voices nearby. She sits up, rebuttons her shirt (there are three buttons undone; how did that happen?), gets to her feet. It is Cecil and Corinne Appleby, all in white, scouting out new places for their beehives. “Look at all the wildflowers!” Corinne says. The Applebys arrived a few days ago and set up hives by the creek near her vegetable garden in a patch of dogwoods and maples and wild roses. They are a pious soft-spoken couple to whom the entire camp has taken an immediate liking, and they are adding something valuable to the camp’s economy, but Debra doesn’t want them intruding on her private space, so she tells them that unfortunately the area is off-limits, having been designated as a building site, a white lie she hopes never comes true, and she recommends the bushy area with the webby tangle of sickly young trees on the far side of the garden. Cecil shakes his head. “Skunks,” Corinne says. “Do skunks like honey?” “They like bees,” Cecil says. “They have a clever trick for luring the guard bees out of the hive and eating them.” “Really?” “It’s a parable,” says Corinne.

  “Oh my friends, it is such a lovely spring evening, a Heavenly spring evening, and I feel such a wondrous happiness, standing here with you in the dusk of the twilight under this budding dogwood tree. As you all know, it is the wood from which Christ’s cross was made, but that was long ago when the dogwood tree was as tall and strong as the mighty oak. It is said that the Risen Jesus, God be praised, decreed that forever after the dogwood should be stunted and twisted and unsuited for such dreadful purposes, thus blessing the tree with a seeming curse. Just so have we been blessed by the seeming thwarting of our hopes by the powers of darkness on the Day of Redemption and the persecution which has followed, for from its soil has sprung, like spring itself, this great spiritual movement of which we are all a living part. Soon this tree will be releasing its precious cross-shaped white flowers with their little stains of blood and their tiny thorny crowns in the center of each blossom, making us all think of Him who was once nailed to a cross from a dogwood tree and whom, we have every reason to believe, we will, in our own lifetimes, rapturously embrace in person and live with in holy bliss forevermore. In the words of Brother Ben’s inspiring song, We shall meet our dear Lord there face to face! Oh yes! I hear you! Amen! Amen! We have come here this week to dedicate to the service of Christ in the name of our Prophet Giovanni Bruno our new official home, the International Brunist Headquarters and Wilderness Camp Meeting Ground, and all week long there will be special ceremonies and prayer meetings devoted to this consecration, climaxing on Sun day with a commemorative service on the Mount of Redemption. Yes, I knew that would draw gasps of hope and joy. Praise God that we are here and able to witness this holy event and to be there on the Mount on that great day and receive Jesus in our hearts. Amen! This is so magnificent a setting! I had no idea it was so beautiful. A veritable garden of God with a spring running through it as a river ran through Eden, a spring whose name is No-Name, as if to declare the purity of its source. It is a garden not unlike that of Gethsemane and is within view, as all of you who have been up to Inspiration Point know, of our beloved Mount. It is as if it were planted here for us and for us alone! Oh, thank you and God bless you, Brother John P. Suggs, for all that you have done to make this miracle possible! A large portion of Heaven awaits you! You have brought us home! For this, this, my fellow Brunists, is our home. Here, truly, He walks with us and He talks with us and He tells us we are His own! Here, truly, we shall find peace in the valley and glory upon the mountain! This is veritably a terrestrial paradise, as Mrs. Edwards calls it, a place she loves with all her heart and knows as no other knows it. On Wednesday she will be giving all of us a nature tour through it, an opportunity not to be missed to commune with God’s creation. But it was not always so. These paths were not always so open and well-tended. Our Meeting Hall, where later this evening we shall break bread together, was not always so beautifully kept and secure against the weather, nor were the cabins habitable or free from vandalism and vermin nor was there heat or water or light or refuge from the ravaging elements. A heroic effort was required to create what you see here today, dear friends. I ask you all to try to imagine the disheartening scene of ruin and desolation that greeted the first small band of Brunist Followers who arrived here in the dark winter days less than two months ago. The branches all were black and bare. There was no life in them. The winds howled and the snows fell and the rains poured down. A veritable flood ensued, a flood of mighty waters overflowing, lapping at the foundations of our little ark. Still, our valiant brothers and sisters pressed on with their noble labors, day in, day out, whatever the hardships. Only three weeks ago, my friends, there was no roof over our Meeting Hall. Only two weeks ago, as night fell, this camp was still enveloped in darkness, a darkness you will soon experience, as we re-enact the moment of the Coming of the Light, a moment our own dear Evangelical Leader and Organizer has called one of the most inspirational moments of her life, and a moment that some of us here helped, in our small way, to bring about with our modest contributions, and which we shall ceremonially share tonight, so hold on to your candles, you will need them soon. Such was the time of darkness, but now, lo, the winter is past, the deluge is over and the waters have receded; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come—listen to their godly chorus! And, ah! can you hear the doves cooing just behind me?”

  It’s picture perfect, as if a painter had arranged it: the tree haloed in golden late afternoon sunlight, the two pure white doves preening on an upper branch. The doves arrived a week or two ago and took up residence on the ledge of the old cistern behind the dogwood tree. They are too white for mourning doves. Debra thinks they must be domestic white doves, the first she’s ever seen at the camp. Escapees from a wedding party maybe, who lost their way. When she mentioned this to the others, the news was received with great excitement, and Clara said, “Or who found their way.”

  “And Jesus, when he got hisself baptized,” cries out little Willie Hall, “he went straightaway up outa the water, and, lo, the Heavens was opened up to him, and he seen the Spirit a God droppin’ down like a dove, and landin’ right on him. And behold they was a voice outa Heaven, sayin’, This here is my beloved Son, in who I am right pleased!”

  “Thank you, Brother Hall! Oh, the scene is vivid before my eyes, my friends! The Lord Jesus, who is the Incarnation of the Word, has come to the Prophet, who in his time was named John just as he is in our time, Giovanni, as you all know, being the Roman name for John. John was the greatest man on earth at the time, Jesus said so. So here he comes, watch him now, here comes the Word, walking straight down to the water, straight to the Prophet. And John says, There He is, that’s the One! Can you see it? The Word comes to the Prophet, they’re both standing there, there in the water, two of the greatest who ever walked on earth, the Prophet and the Word, looking in each other’s eyes. Oh, that’s too much for me! The eyes of the Word and the eyes of the Prophet meeting in the water! It takes your breath away! I want you to baptize me, says the Word. And he does, and when the Word is raised up out of the water, there comes the message from Heaven on the wings of a dove, ‘This is My beloved Son!’ The Spirit of God descending in the shape of a pure white dove! Oh yes! Hear it cooing behind me! It knows who we’re talking about! The sweet bird of God’s grace, the sign of the Holy Spirit! Ely Collins saw it! Even in the pitchblack depths of the mine he saw it! A sign from above! Oh yes! He sends us His pure sweet love! Sing it with me! On the wings of a snow-white dove…!”

  After leading them all in song (it might help, Debra is thinking, if she knew the words of the songs they sang), Reverend Clegg moves on to tell how doves were used for atonements (“You take a pair of doves, cut the head off one of them, turn it upside down and bleed it out on its mate, and then you set the living dove free, and when he flies he splatters the ground around with the blood of his beloved, and the blood cries out to God, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God!’ You see? Just so was our dying mate Jesus
Christ killed and His blood sprinkled on us, my friends, so we might go free, crying out, ‘Holy, holy, holy, unto the Lord!’ Oh yes! Holy, holy! Amen!”), how the robin got its red breast, how Jesus as a young boy was said to have made sparrows out of clay that flew away when He clapped his hands, and how swallows, who blind their young before restoring their sight, represent the Coming of the Light and also, somehow, the incarnation of Christ. “We once were blind, but now we see!” Reverend Clegg’s own little bird-watching tour.

  Returning last week to the town she left only a couple of weeks ago was like landing on the moon, the real town she once knew now buried under the strange otherworldly one they were driving through. Clara, too, remarked that it felt very peculiar. “It is hard to think,” Clara said, “that all our troubles come from here.” The camp, which seemed a million miles away, had become their cloister, their universe. All outside it was alien, though not dangerously so; there was something pathetic about the town, and about the manse as well. Which was, as she’d hoped, empty, though it was in a filthy state. There were dried eggs splattered against the kitchen walls and cabinets, spoiled milk in the fridge, a countertop and sinkful of dirty dishes, heaps of dirty towels and linens everywhere, and the furniture was all shoved about helter skelter. Pillows on the floor. Stains? She sniffed at the rumpled linens. She didn’t really want to do that but she couldn’t stop herself. How could she have lived here all these years with that stupid uncaring man? Clara waited anxiously in the car while, feeling like a thief (she was a thief!), Debra hastily gathered up everything she could carry and loaded it into the back seat, the trunk already packed with her new galvanized steel washtub, filled with chicken and beans and sweet potatoes and boxes of Jell-O. She started with her favorite chair, a low nursing chair bought at a country auction and reupholstered, piling everything else in around it, including the photo of Colin she’d saved, hidden inside the stacks of church sheet music (which she also grabbed up), the one taken of him at the orphanage on his ninth birthday, so cute in front of his birthday cake in his little shirt and tie, such a hopeful wide-eyed smile on his tender face. Clara does not know quite what to make of their living arrangements and on the way back to the camp expressed her concerns. Debra answered those concerns, explaining that she thinks of Colin, not only as a patient, but as her adopted son; they took out papers to adopt him officially when he was still in the hospital, but then Wesley selfishly refused at the last moment to sign them. Which was nearly true, and something like that might have happened had not Wesley been such a pig.

  Now, because Ben Wosznik’s dog has wandered up to sniff his leg, Reverend Clegg pats Rocky’s head and asks, “Do you folks know how Rocky here got his name? Brother Ben told me only today. The dog’s real name is Rockdust, for, as Ben says, he and his brother wanted to name man’s best friend after a miner’s best friend.” The dog wags its tail. It is almost as if it has known its cue. “It is rockdust that is spread in coalmines to prevent explosions, and had Rocky’s namesake been in sufficient evidence five years ago, we might still have Frank Wosznik and our beloved Ely Collins among us!” There are moans amongst the worshippers in the darkening evening, and some tears. Reverend Clegg’s eyes begin to water, and Debra, watching Clara and Elaine, feels her own throat tighten up. “Oh, I tell you, that was a dreadful night! That disaster that struck Old Number Nine! So many good decent hardworking Christian men died and died so young! But from that tomb, in the words of our ‘White Bird’ hymn, came a message of gladness, a message of gladness, though its author, so much loved and revered by us all, had passed to his reward. ‘Hark ye ever to the White Bird in your hearts,’ his message said, ‘and we shall all stand together before the Lord!’” Elaine is as pale as her limp tunic, though her ears seem flushed, her dry-eyed gaze fixed on some far horizon. Clara is worried about her daughter, and after telling Debra a little about the scenes on the Mount with the Baxter boy five years ago and their secretive correspondence ever since, has asked her, as an experienced counselor for troubled teenagers, to try to draw her out, but so far the child has shied away from any attempt to befriend her. Elaine does her work about the camp—setting tables and washing dishes, emptying the new trash bins, weeding, sometimes minding the little ones—in more or less utter silence, her distant stare unsettling. She is so ardent a believer it is almost frightening, and it is maybe that intensity her more practical mother cannot quite understand.

  “Oh, God’s ways are surely inscrutable, my friends. Out of the horror of that black night, that incomprehensible tragedy in the depths of the scorched earth, has emerged a transcendent vision and a stirring prophecy, one destined to shake the world! For it is the truth, and the truth is world-shaking! Just as the Holy Spirit was pleased to dwell in Jesus, so did it take up residence in that holy man Ely Collins, bringing to all of us, through him, the White Bird vision, and then, upon Brother Ely’s cruel death, the Spirit passed on into that disaster’s sole survivor, Ely Collins’ own underground workmate, our Prophet Giovanni Bruno. The Chosen One. In Brother Giovanni, the Spirit worked, as we know, a most marvelous transformation, turning a quiet solitary Roman Catholic coalminer into the prophetic leader of a great evangelical movement, awakening deep within the miner’s heart an unforeseen profundity, a remarkable visionary sensibility. It was our own Ely Collins who perceived this spiritual potential in Brother Giovanni. We know that the poor man had been taunted and abused by his fellow religionists, for a prophet, as is well known, is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house, and we know that he had been ruthlessly driven from his church for standing up against the priesthood, just as Jesus had stood up against the Sadducees, and it was Brother Ely, we know, who took him under his wing and sheltered him and nurtured his soul. And to what wondrous effect! In the words of Brother Ben’s hymn, my friends: Think of Moses, discovered in a river! Think of Jesus, a carpenter’s son! Think of Bruno, a humble coalminer! ’Tis the poor by whom God’s battles are won!” Whereupon—amid the cries of “Amen!” and “Yes, Lord!”—the gathered Followers, arms raised and waving, break spontaneously into another chorus of the song…

  “So, hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!

  Oh yes, hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!

  We shall gather at the Mount of Redemption

  To meet our dear Lord there face to face!”

  Debra’s arms are also raised and waving, she is singing, tears are streaming down her cheeks, she doesn’t know why but it happens all the time now, it’s as though for the moment the Spirit is lodged in her own heart, and she is no longer the camp director, she is only a humble believer, part of God’s company, God’s glorious company, it’s all so vivid and real. “Yes, Lord!” she cries out. She wants this. “Amen!” she says. And yet at the same time she is watching herself and questioning herself, feeling a stranger even to herself, so she knows she is still not saved.

  “Oh yes, how well I remember him and all that happened in that historic time! For, as you all know, I was here, yes, I was here and blessed to be a witness to all that transpired on that stormy Day of Redemption and the awful night before, the Night of the Sacrifice, which haunts me still. As you all know, my dear wife Emma was taken, over there on the Mount of Redemption, God rest her pious Christian soul, taken like the young girl Marcella Bruno, she was redeemed, they were redeemed, redeemed on the Day of Redemption, their souls were transported straight up to Heaven, leaving the rest of us poor sinners here on earth, pining to join them in God’s Heavenly kingdom. For the days that remain to us, God in his great compassion brought me my dear Betty, one of our First Followers who has devoted her life to our calling and who is here with us tonight. God bless her. Yes, I was here. I was here at that remarkable infolding of the faithful at the home of the Prophet on the eve of the Day of Redemption, summoned, as were all, by the Spirit. I was struck by the imposing nobility of our Prophet, by his august silence, his sober poise, his simple but powerful gestures. Not the gestures of a mere coalminer, but t
hose of a being inhabited by the divine. You have all seen his portraits and his photographs—there is a large one hanging in there in the Meeting Hall—wherein one can see at a glance that here was a holy man, a good man, an inspired man, a genuine vessel of the Lord. I say ‘was.’ Now, some of you may not know this, for I have only learned of it today, but our beloved Prophet has suffered the fate of so many prophets and saints before him. He has been ruthlessly executed by his captors, and by that element for which we celebrate his new New Covenant—by light itself! Probably shortly after his capture, though we have until now been denied the knowledge of it. Yes, he is gone—that’s right! pray for him! I hear you! God bless him!—confirming what many of us had suspected all along, for his going began that night, that day, over there on the Mount of Redemption, he seemed already half-transported. I was here. I was here when the fateful decision was taken to visit the Mount, the night before, to acquaint ourselves with it for the great day to follow. Was this a decision we made, or did God make it for us? I was in that room when Sister Clara, as though herself possessed by the Holy Spirit, rose to declare: ‘We go to the Mount of Redemption, not to die, but to act! The Kingdom is ours! It awaits us on the Mount of Redemption!’ Oh, how moved we were by this great lady’s majestic bearing and the depth of her faith, echoing her dear husband Ely, for whom we all mourned! You have all read about this in our church pamphlets. And I was there, over there on the Mount that Saturday night, as we all gathered around a great fire and sang and prayed and confessed our new commitment. I was there as the Prophet strode among us in his flowing white tunic, tall and bearded as Jesus was bearded and manifesting a strength heretofore unseen, his dark cavernous eyes aglitter with firelight, his hand raised in solemn benediction, nodding from time to time as if to say, Yea, in thee I am well pleased! It was as if Christ were growing in him, filling him up with his presence. I was there when someone cried that there were lights on the mine road and we extinguished the fire and rushed to our cars and—and—and—oh, my friends, I can barely continue! Forgive me! But I was there, there in the ditch beside the old mine road which you can see from up there on Inspiration Point, standing there over the dying girl, the saintly sister of our Prophet, who had been fasting and seemed dreadfully frail, lying there—I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I cannot hold back the tears!—lying there in the wildly crisscrossing headlamps of wrecked cars, her little body in its white tunic broken and bleeding, yet somehow at peace, yes, at peace, we all saw that, and on the breast of her tunic, here where the cross in the circle is embroidered, a heart-shaped bloodstain—oh, God save us! God save us all and bless the soul of our beloved Sister Marcella Bruno! Amen! Amen! I was there. I was there when foe embraced foe and all enmity ceased and we became one unified and universal movement, God be praised! And I was there, my friends, oh I hear you, I was there at the Prophet’s house at dawn the next morning, none of us had slept, when that heartbroken man of God, his strength failing him, rose up out of his grief and commanded us to baptize with light, the seventh of his famous seven words, and we did that, I was baptized by the Prophet himself, we all were. He was never to utter another word, for he had already, choosing his words one by one as if mining them from his very depths or as if extracting them from the beyond, said all that was to be said. We all marched out barefoot to the Mount and there began the day with which you are all so familiar.”