The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

by Coover, Robert

  She can hear the children squabbling. Her private silent time is over. Spats and tears, arguments about what to wear, fever blisters and runny noses. Couldn’t be less like the Heavenly Kingdom. But she’s grateful for it and thanks God and Jesus and sets out the cereal bowls.

  Another who, like Billy Don, found himself last night enjoying the fit of palm to palmed—though in his case the cheek cupped was plumper and of a certain age—was the master plumber Welford Oakes. They were pressed together amid the crowds atop the Mount of Redemption, all eyes cast upon the Heavens in anticipation of the descent of Our Lord Jesus Christ in all His glory to establish Heaven on earth, and given the excited jostle, that his hand landed where it did could be seen as an accident, but not that it, without apology, remained there. She turned to frown up at him questioningly, and he smiled and murmured, “I thought y’might care to read my palm,” figuring she’d either knee him where it hurts and walk away, or she’d stay and then something different would happen. What she said was: “I ain’t never studied a palm before whose fate line cut clean acrost the life line like that.” He grinned, gave her a gentle pinch. “That’s what one a them other lines has to say about that,” he said, and moved away. Now, at the sunrise service down by the flowering dogwood tree, they are exchanging frequent glances, trying not to. He understands the risks, but, like it goes in “Amazing Grace,” “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine,” and that being so, one has to make the best of whatever’s left. Now the worshippers are burying those two headless birds and singing “Wings of a Dove,” and when they reach the love line, he casts a meaningful glance her way. But she is staring fixedly up over her shoulder as if still looking to the sky for a sign of the Coming. He turns to look up through the trees at what she’s peering at: Inspiration Point. When he looks back, she’s already gone.

  Hovis and Uriah have walked back to the camp for the sunrise service to find their camper gone. “Them bikers must of stole it,” Hovis says with alarm. They are both alarmed. It’s all they own. How can they get back to West Virginia without it? They search behind all the other trailers and caravans in the lot just in case it somehow got hidden. Uriah pauses, turns to look off toward the mine hill. “How did we git over there in the first place, Hovis? We must of drove.” They both think about this. “Yup, we must of forgot. I’ll go git it, Uriah. You’re tuckered out. You go lie down.” “How can I lie down if we ain’t got our camper?” Hovis scratches his head, looks around again. No, it’s not there. “Didn’t think of that.”

  Debra Edwards knows more of the words of the Brunist songs now and can sing along when Ben selects numbers like “The Wings of a Dove.” They are singing it in memory of their pair of nesting white doves so senselessly and barbarously slain yesterday. Ludie Belle Shawcross picked up the decapitated birds after they were thrown by the motorcycle gang and saved them for burial at this morning’s sunrise service here at the foot of the budding dogwood tree. The heads could not be found. The camp is not yet in full flower, but it is already bursting with color and it is alive now with birdsong as if all the birds were participating in the honoring of the doves: lots of sparrows trilling away, and the newly arrived orioles and warblers with their pretty voices, the chats, buntings, and chirping dickcissels all joining in as they celebrate God’s pure sweet love, sent down on the wings of a snow-white dove. Everyone had come to associate the doves with the “white birds” of Ely Collins’ and Giovanni Bruno’s visions, and the launching of their headless bodies into their midst on the Mount of Redemption produced a surge of fear among the Followers and prompted terrified predictions of dire events. Though Debra was not inclined to think of the bikers as demons, as many did, she herself felt this fear, and even more so on their return to their camp, which they found half-wrecked, her own home and Colin’s cruelly trashed. The front screen door was torn off its hinges, two windows were smashed and the plastic insulation ripped away, their beds were overturned and urinated upon, their cookies and chocolates were stolen, the hot water bottle from the manse had been beheaded just like the dog and doves were, and her nursing chair, rescued from the manse, had had its pretty velvet seat slashed. Poor Colin, overwrought by all the day’s excitements, went crazy on seeing it and ran out onto the camp road, screaming hysterically at the bikers, though by then they were miles away. Fortunately, she had brought Darren back to camp with her. He was the one person who could settle Colin down, and with a lot of coaxing he did so and, gratefully, took him to stay with him in the church office in the lodge, which, being locked and innocuous-looking, had escaped the gang’s depredations; she was exhausted and could not have stayed awake another minute to comfort a distraught boy. She dropped, fully dressed, like a lead plummet onto the pungent mattress and did not regain consciousness until she awoke, startled and afraid, unsure of where she was until the early dawn light and birdsong relocated her, Abner Baxter next door, berating his wife and daughters.

  Debra felt quite charitable toward the Baxters before she actually knew them, and agreed with Clara that they should be welcomed back, but they have been like a flock of predatory cowbirds descending upon a garden of songbirds. Nest robbers. And their followers are no better, demanding and bad-tempered and unappreciative and disruptive. As the beekeeper Corinne Appleby said, “Nary a one of them knows how to smile.” Without any right, the Baxters have taken over the cabin next door, the one meant for Darren and Billy Don, and even though repairs on it have barely begun—it doesn’t even have a front door—they don’t seem inclined to leave it any time soon, which worries Clara and Ben. They put a tent up at the back to sleep the mother and daughters, Reverend Baxter and his three sons using the cabin proper, though now there’s only the oldest son after the younger two were expelled. Already, they look like they’ve been living over there forever. Unloading their clunky old car was like emptying a moving van and they’ve taken whatever they wanted from around the camp. What’s left of their family is here at the sunrise service, looking sullen and defensive, completely out of character with the beautiful day. Well, maybe they can’t help it. Debra was born with a smile on her face, they were not. She has to try to understand them.

  What’s going on between Elaine and Young Abner is also worrying Clara, and if she’d seen what Debra has seen, she’d be even more upset. Clara has asked her, as a counselor for troubled young people, to have a talk with Elaine, but the girl has shied away from her, and now, after all she has witnessed in the garden, Debra might not know where to begin. Should she tell Clara what she saw? She should. But how? Clara would want to know why she didn’t interfere, and she doesn’t know the answer to that. Really, it’s all too embarrassing.

  “They have rejected God, creation, and morality! Oh, they don’t call it humanism, they call it democracy, but they mean humanism, in all its atheistic, amoral, scientistic depravity!” The handsome bishop from Wyoming, invited to read from the Scriptures, is prefacing his reading with an attack on what he calls the devil’s religion and “the most serious threat to our nation in its entire history! You can’t be both a humanist and a true believer!” There are shouted replies and admiring gazes and soft “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chants from many of the gathered worshippers. The principal target of his denunciation is the false belief in evolution, one of the fables of her own upbringing, and one that has deprived her of the opportunity to help with the camp’s home schooling, so she feels somewhat targeted as well. She’s trying to unlearn all that to break down their distrust, so she also calls out an “amen!” or two, though she’s probably not convincing anyone. But humanism, she has come to realize, is what’s wrong with Wesley and all his stupid sermons, and that helps her to hate it as they hate it. The bishop puts on his spectacles and picks up the Bible, looking around at them all. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” he asks. “We come from the dark, brother! Lead us to light!” “And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of
great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb!” “Washed in the blood of the Lamb!” they cry. And the “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chant begins again.

  She knows that many of these people are feeling desperate today, having walked away from their livelihoods and given away all they own, and she knows what that’s like. She too has impoverished herself to help their cause, abandoning the security of the life of a minister’s wife to commit herself heart and soul to the Brunists. But though she feels for their plight, she wants them all to go away. Reverend Hiram Clegg, now preaching his last sermon before returning with his congregation to Florida—she will miss him and his warm kindly eloquence; like her, he always seems to see the bright side of things—is talking about those who have accepted voluntary poverty and the great sacrifices they have made and their need now to find further ways to support the community of Followers as it awaits the last days, quoting beautifully from the Bible and from the sayings of Giovanni Bruno as he always does, and she feels that though he is addressing the newly arrived multitudes, he is also talking to her. Well, she will work hard and continue to play her part and have faith and God will be pleased. She can sell things from the vegetable garden. Everything will be all right. It has to be.

  Ludie Belle Shawcross has told her bluntly that she is out of her water here and should leave, but she could never do that, not so long as Colin stays, and now, like a lot of these poor people, she really wouldn’t have anywhere to go anyway. The Wilderness Camp is now her home; she has and will have no other. Debra has always admired Ludie Belle’s forthrightness in confessing her sins and has tried to emulate her, but yesterday, up on the Mount of Redemption, Ludie Belle shocked her by saying she makes most everything up when repenting. “I lean on history like a preacher leans on the Bible, sweetie. I select out a few juicy licks and stitch ’em together into a up-liftin’ story, if you know what I mean.” She said this after advising Debra she was getting too personal in her confessions, and she should learn not to give away so much. It’s nobody’s business, and they tend to hold it over you afterwards. “Anyways, it’s more entertainin’ with a little judicious resortin’.” Just then Colin came by, sweaty and excited from all that had happened, and buoyed up by his new friendships with the young people from Florida—he had been bouncing about all afternoon as if the ground were hot and burning his feet—and he paused a moment to lay his head on her shoulder and catch his breath. And then, as quickly, he was off again. “Be careful, honey. You’re playin’ with fire,” Ludie Belle said, and Debra, knowing she was red to the roots, could only walk away, not wanting to see that woman again.

  Instead of hovering behind her back as usual, Colin is standing this morning with the cheerful youngsters from Florida, who have been so nice to him. Reverend Clegg uses the word “radiance,” stretching it out in his resonant style (he is talking about the birds they are burying), and she thinks, yes, that’s exactly what she sees in Colin, an inherent childlike purity, glowing innocence. Radiance. He is a receptor. She used to have to shave him, not wanting him near anything sharp, but he has taken to letting the hairs on his chin grow. There aren’t many of them, no more than a dozen or so, and they are so blond they are almost like silver. It gives him a strange otherworldly look. Among his new friends, he has been tensely smiling, so rare for him, but they are leaving after lunch, so later he will cry again.

  When Ben Wosznik hands out morning work assignments for cleaning and repairing the camp, Franny Baxter volunteers to help load the collected trash into his pickup. Ben has asked everyone to bag and drop all garbage and rubbish at the front gate of the camp where his pickup is parked and he will take it to the rubbish dump, and she posts herself there to receive it and toss it in the truckbed. When he starts up the motor, she gets in beside him on the hard bench seat and asks him if he could drop her off somewhere near the edge of town on the north side; she wants to have a talk with Tess Lawson. He says he’s not going directly towards town, he’s stopping off at his old farmhouse to pick up Rocky’s dog tag and then proceeding on to the town dump. She can help him unload the truck and then he’ll take her where she wants to go, and she says that’ll do fine. He asks if she has asked her father and she says no, and don’t tell him, but she’s a woman now and doesn’t need his permission for every little thing. If he finds out…? “All he can do is give me a larruping, and I’m plenty used to that.”

  “He beats you a lot?”

  “Not like before. Nat sorta tamed him.”

  “Your father’s skeereda Nat?”

  “Everbody is. Junior’s setting hisself up to take over, but Nat’s the one with our father’s fire.” Ben doesn’t say anything, so she says, “I think it’s awful what they done to your dog. Junior is telling everyone you must of hid your gun in Nat’s backpack to make us all look bad and get us moved out, and that made Nat mad.”

  “Well, it ain’t so. Maybe Junior’s trying to hide something.”

  “That’s what I reckon.” Pulling out of the camp gates, they had to thread their way through the crowds of people milling about, coming or going, and the fields they are passing now are littered with tents and trailers. The mine hill, too, only partially cleared, new smaller tents popping up there. The life she has known, wants to know no more.

  “Your ma’s looking poorly. She was crying a lot yesterday.”

  “This place gives her the creeps. After what happened, having a dead baby out there in the storm with nobody to help her but me, she didn’t never want to come back. She should of stayed home in bed that day or gone to hospital, but my father drug her out there, saying if they was all transcended she would not wanta miss out, nor not the unborn baby neither. She was sick for a long spell after that, really sick, and she just never exactly got well again.”

  “That’s too bad, Franny. Must be a burden to you.”

  “It can be.”

  “So why is it y’mean to go see Tess? Y’reckon they’s a chance she’ll come back to us?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She knows you’re coming?”

  “Nope.”

  They are passing an old derelict farmhouse that would seem to be Ben’s, but, after slowing down, they roll on by. Ben doesn’t say anything, except a soft little grunt, but she saw what he saw: the wheel of a motorcycle sticking out at the back.

  “We baptized it and raptured it, Mom, all at once,” says Mark. “You ain’t God, kid,” Dot says, cuffing his big stuck-out ears. “I’ll rapture your little britches if you try anything like that again. Now you and Matty get down on your knees over in that corner and pray for an hour that you don’t get sent to hell for putting on airs and messing like that with God’s handiwork.” “Oh Mom, that’s where the sandbox was!” “We didn’t mean to rapture the cat, Mom,” Matthew wheedles. “We was only wanting to baptize it.” “I told you not to put gasoline on it,” says Luke, and Dot sends her to the corner, too. They have been sharing this unfurnished prefab in Chestnut Hills with a family from Alabama, who left in a huff when her kids burned their cat, no doubt heading straight out to the camp to tattle on them. Well, good riddance, she couldn’t stand the stink of their homemade kitty litter dug up out of the back yard and the Blaurocks now have the place to themselves, though they don’t plan on staying long. That family was just a bunch of ignorant, drawling rednecks who knew nothing about the latter days and were always complaining about keeping the place clean and about her kids bullying their kids and about little Johnny’s dirty diapers and his whiny crying and about her loud snoring and Isaiah always hogging the bathroom. Well, her husband can’t help it. He has a nervous stomach, and did they think they didn’t snore, too? If God wanted her to snore, what could she or anyone else do about it? Not sleep? Get serious.

  Dot and Isaiah Blaurock know everything there is to know about the Rapture and the Tribulation and the Last Days. They have been members of at least a dozen different churches and have been through what they went through yesterday any number
of times. They believe in the general prophecy and whenever they hear about another specific end date, they try to be there. They find that they always cheer the other people up just by turning up and they get a lot of hugs, and that always makes them feel good. They first heard Clara Collins preach and Ben Wosznik sing in North Carolina, where Isaiah was working as an itinerant house painter, and they’ve been following them around, off and on, ever since. Not much Isaiah can’t do. He has been a farmer, a blacksmith, a roofer, a factory worker, a ditch and grave digger, a miner, a garbage collector, a construction worker, a cook, and, even silent as he mostly is, a sometime faith healer. Other things, too, probably. Hard to keep track. He doesn’t do any of these things particularly well, though his ability to keep their old Dodge on the road is a miracle by itself, but he’s done a bit of everything and so he’s valuable to any community like this one. Doesn’t have much to say, her Isaiah, but God gave him a mighty engine and she’s grateful. Clara has expressed her personal gratitude that they have come here to help out and she says there is a lot for them to do; Isaiah has lent a hand in putting the tents up on the mine hill and Dot has already showed that jellybean preacher’s wife a few things about gardening. Dot grew up on a farm in upstate New York; she knows what she’s talking about. They will be moving out to the camp this noon during the farewell luncheon for the busloads of old bluehairs from around the country, knowing they cannot be refused. They are penniless, and except for essentials, without possessions, having given up all for Christ, and they will be needed out there. This little house is something of a mess and doesn’t smell good, but that’s at least half the fault of the rednecks and no reason they should have to clean up after them, so they will just gather up their things and leave it as is, glad to get out of it. It’s owned by some rich guy named Suggs who has bought the Brunists their camp and is building them a new church, so it’s just pennies out of his pocket to get the place spruced up. In fact, maybe Isaiah can get the job.