The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  Evangelist and country gospel singer Ben Wosznik is a worried man. He is sitting on the fold-down steps of his mobile home, his twelve-gauge shotgun over his knees, gazing up at the faint first light of dawn just beginning to creep into the darkness up at Inspiration Point. They are up there; he heard them coming back about an hour or so ago. A sinister growl, like the night itself was growling. As a good hunter, he knows better than to rush upon his prey; he must think this through, anticipate what they might do. Especially now that they are armed. But Ben has been up all night, tending the campfires and steadfastly keeping the overnight vigil at the Mount, sometimes singing with the youngsters and praying with them and with Clara and the others staying up, or trying to. His weariness now is making it difficult to reason clearly. “How mean y’figure them boys is?” he asks. Rocky’s answer is, as usual, noncommittal. But, tail wagging, he’s ready for whatever.

  Maybe he should wait for Abner Baxter to rise and talk to him about it first, but he doesn’t know when that will happen. Could be halfway to noon, beat down as the man is, and Elaine meanwhile could be in bad trouble. The fellow, Ben has to allow, is much changed, and not just by the graying of his thick red hair. The missionary life on the road has tempered him. Certainly Abner said some very generous things about him and Clara in front of everybody at the Mount of Redemption yesterday, and it seemed to come from the heart. His middle boy’s a heathenish little devil, though.

  Ben feels uneasy being away from the Mount, even for a short time, for he is a strong believer in the imminence of the Rapture and the Second Coming—has been since he first heard Ely Collins preach—and he is fearful of missing it somehow. Not through faithlessness, but simple negligence. Bad luck. He knows what they have been saying about the seven years of tribulation—meaning there are at least two to go, if they’ve got their start date right—but he keeps feeling in his bones something is apt to happen today and he has to be on the Mount when it does. Maybe so it does. But there’s nothing he can do. He has to wait for Elaine and work out these other problems, which he has been talking over with his dog.

  He doesn’t know where the girl is. Not on her bed where he left her, collapsed half-dead on top. She is often given to wandering around restlessly, talking or praying to her father, though she seemed almost unable to stand when he brought her back, so it’s hard to figure. She kept going last night in her meek shrinking way until well after midnight, but she was looking peaked and was plainly giving out, and when he asked, she admitted she wasn’t feeling very good. Maybe it’s her periodicals. She is always shy to say so, even to her mother. So he drove her in the pickup back to her own bed in their trailer home, she begging him in her timid little voice to please come get her if the Rapture suddenly started up. The lot was empty except for a trailer or two, those like the Halls with caravans and smaller campers having driven over to the parking lot at the mine or the access road at the foot of the hill, and by now most had retired into them, though, at Clara’s suggestion, they kept their window blinds open in case anything should happen during the night. Rocky was alone back here at the camp, tied to the hitching bar at the back of the trailer and feeling sorry for himself. Ben had had to leave him behind. Too many people around make the old fellow edgy, especially if they’re all fired up with the Holy Spirit, like so many were; but by midnight the crowds had faded away and those keeping the vigil on the mine hill were mostly dozing, curled up in blankets and sleeping bags—even Abner and his family had come back to camp, worn out from their long hard journey to get here—so he picked up Rocky when he brought Elaine home and took him back to the Mount with him to feed him scraps from their hillside feast and exercise him a little and so as to have company through the rest of the night. And was he thinking about the possibility of his dog being raptured up and joining him up there in the presence of the Lord? He was. As Hiram says, God created animals and God loves them. Look into your dogs’ eyes and see their soul. God will not forsake them. You will see them in Heaven.

  Now he has returned, bringing Rocky back to camp to protect him from the crowds, which were already, before dawn, starting once again to assemble—coffee is on over there and there are fresh doughnuts—and to check on Elaine. When it turned out she was not in the trailer and nowhere to be found, he couldn’t help but worry, not with those biker boys around. He is a man of peace, but if they did anything to little Elaine, he would kill them. Last night, when he walked in on them in the camp kitchen, the knives came out, so he figured, if he was going to pay them a visit, he’d better arm himself, and he went looking. His shotgun was there, but his wooden-handled three-screw Blackhawk wasn’t. Had he misplaced it? He spent some time hunting for it and chanced on the can where they kept the slush fund for day-to-day camp supplies. They had been dipping into it pretty often, what with all the expenses of this big reunion and anniversary, but he had topped it up himself only three days ago, and now there was nothing in it but a few coins. So, though it took a few minutes, it finally registered on him that they had been robbed. The money, the handgun, maybe other things. Probably in retaliation for his breaking up their little kitchen party. When they left or when they came back? Was Elaine here? Various scenarios flicker through his worried mind, none of them comforting.

  He stands. Has he heard something? Sort of like the muffled snapping of a dry branch. Down near the creek. Some animal probably. He hears it again. Was that a cry? Likely just a bird, or the squeal of a rodent—the owls often hunt down there. But now he’s torn. Does he go down to the creek to investigate or on up to the Point to confront the bikers? He asks Rocky what to do, but Rocky doesn’t know. He just wags his tail slowly in his melancholic way, as though he were worried, too. Ben could circle round but that might take too long. The direct path to both the creek and the Point bifurcates beyond the cabins. He’ll carry his dilemma to the fork.

  Maybe he is too weary from his journey, waxing faint like David among the Philistines. Or just overwrought by this homecoming and what it might portend. But, far from collapsing as Ben Wosznik has supposed, Abner Baxter, except for a thirty-minute doze, fraught with terrifying highway imagery, has been up all night, unable to put his troubled mind at ease. The Lord has directed him as Jacob was directed: Get thee to thine own house. Every man to his tents, saith Moses. Return unto the land of thy fathers, and to thy kindred; and I will be with thee. And so he has, with great effort and hope in his heart, returned to his origins and to the site of his spiritual rebirth. But he feels like he is home and not home, part of these people and this movement, and yet an outsider still, distrusted, misunderstood, resented even. Just as he was in his union organizing days. He has left the wilderness only to arrive in the wilderness. He understands the rules of the camp and wishes to abide by them, but they seemed uncommonly zealous about pointing them out. It was like they were intent on moving him on before he’d even alighted. He was hurt by that. For all their doctrinal differences, he does truly esteem and honor Clara Collins as a pillar of the faith, and even feels a certain Christian love for the woman unlike any he has ever felt for another, has since that night in the ditch when she reached across the horror to forgive and embrace him. “We are all murderers! Abner, join hands with us and pray!” He came late to the Prophet—almost too late. He was, as he has often declared, the greatest of sinners, for he not only denied the Prophet and his followers, he reviled and persecuted them. Then, on the eve of the Day of Redemption, God Himself intervened and the greatest of sinners was himself redeemed. To become—he knows this—the greatest of believers. That that night proved as decisive as the very Day of Redemption is a reminder that no date on the way to glory is without import. Abner believes that the day of the Christ’s coming will fall at the end of the seventh year of the Tribulation that began five years ago today, in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and that of the Prophet Bruno. But that does not make this day any less charged with potential meaning. Since his conversion, every day of his life from the best to the worst has been so charged
.

  Abner is well aware that there are many who call themselves Brunists but who remain merely plodding unchanged Christians, attached to their old beliefs and, even if convinced of the imminence of the Last Days, shy to profess Bruno as their Prophet. Abner has no such trepidation. He looked into the eyes of the Prophet on that fateful night as the man rose, gaunt and bearded, from his kiss of the dead girl, blood staining his lips and beard and even his brow, and he saw in those eyes the holy fire of divine possession. Bruno the coalminer, he barely knew, though they often worked the same shift. Bruno the Prophet, drawn up out of the fiery bowels of the earth, perhaps even resurrected from the dead, was transparently God’s messenger, and he knew him instantly. Perhaps, as some proclaim, the Holy Spirit passed from Ely Collins at the moment of his horrible death into his partner Bruno; more likely, Ely Collins, for all his renowned goodness, was found unworthy. Bruno was the Chosen One. Was he once a Romanist? Well, Jesus was a Jew. All that night in the house of mourning and during their Sunday morning crusade through the papist temple, and then all day on the stormy Mount of Redemption, the Prophet strayed not far from Abner’s side, and Abner felt anointed by him. Chosen by the Chosen. Bruno. Who, for Abner, has no other name. That the man is no more has come as no surprise. While others fled the Mount that day as the lightning flashed and the wind blew and the rain poured down, Abner stood his ground and railed against the attacking Powers of Darkness, and as they shackled the Prophet and led him away, Bruno turned to gaze one last time at him, and in that gaze Abner saw both a final farewell and a command: It was he, Abner, who must carry the sacred flame.

  For much of the Tribulation that has followed in faithful and intransigent pursuit of that mission, Abner and his family have lived mostly in tents pitched in campsites, fields, parks, church grounds, back yards, and cemeteries—“alongside troubled waters,” as he has often said—and they will no doubt have to do so again. Their travails have made vivid the Biblical accounts of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, but they have been, in the high-speed rulebound modern world, a bitter hardship. He has often had to bite his tongue while the law forced him to strike his tents and move on. And jail they have known, too, and worse. They have been as if destined for affliction, like Paul himself as he wrote in his letter to the church of the Thes-salonians. “For yourselves know that we are appointed thereunto.” For the moment, however, they have this barren little cabin to rest within, if God so grants, their tent pitched as an annex at the back of it. He has collected a set of cots from the Meeting Hall for his family, most of which remain unused. Only those of his wife and daughters in the tented extension are being slept in, if his wife’s nighttime misery can be called sleeping. Nathan and Paul are up in the motorcyclists’ encampment and Young Abner left to use the privy and never returned. The minister’s wife next door has also left her cabin—he saw her slip out into the night—but her whimpering boy is still in it. Abner heard them when they returned shortly after midnight, the boy having a hysterical fit, she shushing him; he hears him still. At a glance yesterday, Abner could see that the woman, though boasted about as an important convert, was not a true believer. A rich lady on a lark. And her boy, though one of the First Followers (and where was his mother then?), seems seriously disturbed. That they should be granted a cabin within the camp, even if she did pay for its repair, while he, the Brunist bishop of West Condon, is denied is an intolerable injustice, but one that he will have to learn, in this evil time, to tolerate. We glory in tribulations, we commend ourselves in afflictions, we are afflicted but not crushed.

  A sullen dawn now muddies the sky, and out of the trees below the Main Square emerges a shadowy armed figure, stooped and menacing, bearded, his dog at his side. It is Ben Wosznik. A simple man of simple faith, slow and steady, but though Abner admires him and has tried always to ingratiate himself with him, there is a distance between them that seems hard to bridge, and he worries now why he should be approaching him in this manner. “Abner,” he says, “I am glad to see you risen.” “Yes, Brother Ben. Like Joshua, who rose up early at the dawning of the day to bring down the walls of Jericho.” “Well, I hope you do not bring down these walls which has took a right smart a labor to keep standing. Abner, I got a serious difficulty. I come upon your middle boy and his friends last night in the camp kitchen, raiding the supplies and drinking hard likker. I asked them to leave, and afterwards my trailer got robbed. They took a handgun and all our emergency fund money. I don’t know what all else, but I am worried.” “That boy!” Abner feels his choler rising. Nathan has been a vexation since the day he was born, and all the whippings the boy has endured have not turned him from his innate wicked ways. He came into the world by the evil one possessed. Abner is already climbing the rise toward their encampment, his fists clenched, Ben Wosznik and his dog trailing along behind him.

  On top, he finds his two sons and their despicable companions sprawled out in a thick heavy sleep in their filthy sleeping bags, a surly and angry lot when awakened. They arise with knives out and with blistering blasphemies and obscenities, but they see Ben’s shotgun and back off, snarling like trapped animals. Ben circles around them, shotgun on his hip, peering into the undergrowth with a worried look. “They has been a robbery,” Abner says. “A gun, some money. I want them things. Now. Empty out your bags and pockets.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, old man,” Nathan says sourly and throws his backpack at him. “Empty them out yourself.” He does so. Greasy unwashed clothing, rags really, tools, comicbooks, transistor radio, leather gloves. A gun. “Is this the one?” “It is,” says Ben. Abner snatches it up, points it at his son. “The money.” “Ain’t got any. And I ain’t never seen that gun before neither.” Abner kicks through the miserable contents of the backpack. “All right. Then leave your motorcycle as repayment. And get out. All of you. You have shamed me.” There is a pause when nothing moves. Except his own shaking hand with the pointing gun. Which Nathan ignores, glowering instead at Ben Wosznik. Then he gathers up his possessions, stuffs them back into his backpack, and mounts his bike. “I said, leave the motorcycle here.” “Go to hell, old man,” he says, raising his middle finger at him. “Paulie—?” “Hop up here, Runt,” says the tall skinny one, and Paulie climbs up behind the older man with the gray braid down his back and raises his finger, too, and they’re off. Abner swings round with the gun pointed at his middle son’s head, but Ben Wosznik grips his arm and presses it down. “It’s only money,” he says quietly, taking the gun. “And I reckon that bike ain’t worth nothing anyhow. Probly stole, ain’t it?” “Yes.” His will is breaking, his humiliation complete. He feels like the night he fell to weeping on Clara Collins’ shoulder. No man should have to bear so much alone. The taunting roar of the motorcycles fades into the distance, punctuated by a final backfiring pop or two like snorts of cruel laughter, and then the morning songs of the birds return on this, the slowly brightening dawn of the Day of Redemption. He turns toward Ben Wosznik and opens his arms as though to offer an embrace and to say he’s sorry, when there is a sudden rustling in the thicket below them, and deer hunters both, they turn toward it.

  The bad brother has been sent into exile, but the reconciliation of the two patriarchs has been interrupted by the appearance in the valley below them of two spectrally white shapes fluttering separately through the trees and into the dimly lit clearing leading to the cabins. It is the two children, the children of God, tearfully departing the garden, clutching their talismans of leather, a kind of delirium possessing them still. The patriarchs stand as if frozen, high on a stony jut of land above them, beholding the scene. “My eyes ain’t so good,” whispers the bearded one. “Is that blood?”

  I.10

  Sunday 19 April

  “I’ve been thinking about the Holy Blood,” Sally says. Is she just killing time or impatiently pressing her luck? She has talked Tommy Cavanaugh into bringing his cameras and tape recorder and joining her on a “research project” out here at the Deepwater
mine hill in preparation for his new PhD career, doing her Girl Scout good deed of the day by luring him away from the bloodless banking life—“I’ll be your R.A. and take notes,” she said—and they are now mingling with the media folk and the crowds of the curious at the foot of the hill, watching the Brunists wander around up on top, about half of them in those white choir gowns. God’s little lambs. His white corpuscles. The hill is aswarm with them, and there’s a lot of coming and going and cheerful Heavenward gestures, but not much is happening, and Tommy is getting bored. Certainly no sign of the End of the World—though, who knows, maybe this is what it is like. The sheriff and his boys are out here, rocking around wide-legged like cowboys who just got off their horses and are trying to air out their crotches, but they seem intent only on keeping the townsfolk and reporters from pestering the cultists. She’d like to get closer, but there’s no way up unless invited by a Brunist. They apparently pitched their tents up there yesterday to get the jump on everybody, as Tommy put it; he said he drove by last night (with whom? don’t ask) and saw big bonfires blazing, and his dad, who had been working on ways to stop the gathering, bully that he is, was hopping mad when he heard about it. Tommy is sharing his mother’s old station wagon with his dad now because the Lincoln got beat up by a biker gang and is in the garage having the the dents taken out. She has heard about these guys. They’re some kind of Brunist tagalongs or security guards, but they’re not out here today. “The Holy Blood was the blood that came spouting out of Jesus’ side when that Roman soldier porked him with his spear. Later it got passed around to all the churches as a relic to work wonders with. Also whatever leaked out when he was scourged or squirted out from the nail holes. Like, you know, they had somebody there collecting it in little cups like you do when you kill a pig. It cured everything. Miraculous effluvia, they called it.” She liked this phrase. Miraculous effluvia. It has gone into her notebook. Which today she is pretending is her steno pad for Tommy the Scholar. “It was a hot pharmaceutical product. There was a lot of money to be made and there were several enterprising bagmen trafficking in it, though the Church of the Holy Sepulchre cartel in Jerusalem cornered most of the market since they claimed to have all this stuff on the premises, the place being a kind of dead meat mine. They also sold his sweat, tears, hair, nail clippings, and foreskin, not to mention everything he ever touched, like rocks he stepped or sat on, raggy scraps from his loincloths and winding sheets, and even shards of the basin he used to wash the disciples’ feet.”