Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

But Elaine’s commitment, the strangest and most important moment of her life, happened out there on the Mount of Redemption. Holding hands with Carl Dean, praying and singing and crying, Elaine had watched the lightning flash and the rain come down, had watched the terrible forces of evil gather like dirty clouds below them, had watched the worshiping multitudes rolling and dancing and beating each other, and she could tell that Carl Dean was pretty excited and not just about the End of the World. He kept looking around nervously and saying they might never see each other again after today and once he even asked her to go down in the trees with him so they could be alone a minute. But she was afraid and praying all the time, because she really believed, she really was sure it was going to happen and right then , and she kept looking for her Pa. She held on to Carl Dean’s hand because she was scared, but all the time she kept feeling miles away from him: suddenly the only thing that counted was that moment and Carl Dean couldn’t get his mind off what would happen next .

But then somebody came running up the Mount and he wasn’t in a tunic or taking off his dark garments of the earth and they saw it was Mr. Miller and Elaine felt a great terror because he seemed to be headed right for Marcella and everybody started screaming like crazy and Carl Dean ran away, left her all alone on the top of the Mount, ran to get Mr. Miller, and Elaine saw him hit him and everybody was hitting him and it was raining something awful and Marcella seemed to get right up and throw herself into the mud and Saint Stephen went tumbling down and Elaine was on her knees in the mud and bawling and calling for her Pa and terrified to be all alone and just then something hit her— whack! She spun, falling into the mud, scared to death, and she saw it was Junior Baxter. He was cold white in his tunic and his head seemed like on fire. He had a long greenish-white switch and he looked very serious. Nobody had ever switched her before, her Pa, her Ma, nobody. She looked around for her Ma, but everybody was over by Mr. Miller. “No!” she gasped.

But Junior didn’t hit her again. He looked around on the ground, found another switch somebody had dropped — the little tree there was nothing but a barbed pole now. He handed it to her. Her heart was pounding like mad, and she could hardly hold onto that greasy thing, could hardly see through the tears and rain, could hardly hear him in the rain’s roar when he said, “Hit me!” His voice was soft, almost like a girl’s. He turned his wet white back to her. She stood up, her knees shaky, but suddenly she wasn’t afraid anymore, the conflicts were gone, the strange sense of sin she felt for not being within was lifted, and at last the moment was whole. She swatted him lightly. She still didn’t know quite what she was doing and she was still bawling, but the sky seemed brighter even though it was still raining pitchforks and it seemed like they were suddenly all alone in the world and she thought: It’s coming! Now! And Junior’s switch whistled and bit into her side. She cried out, but the pain was a joy, strangely a joy, and the rain was right and the lightning and the frenzy, and everything was right now: she swung, hard— crack! Under his wet red hair, he smiled a little. She closed her eyes. His whip stung her legs. She lashed his legs. He whipped her tummy. She swung at his face. Faster and faster they slashed away and now the blows fell all over, on her face and chest, down her back, they didn’t take turns, just gave and took with all their hearts, and she couldn’t even see him, never knew when she hit him, just felt him out there, felt everything at once, and maybe she was singing, or maybe she was screaming, but it was coming, she grew a giant and lashed the world to her heart and her Pa was smiling down and the world was on her back, she stretched out her arms and dug her nails into its flesh and the rain was in her face and mud in her mouth, but she could still see Junior somehow, looking down with that serious face, the switch in his hand, and he had blood around his eye and trickling from his mouth, his hair red in the gray sky, and she stretched her limbs, north south east and west, stretched to embrace it all: NOW!

But when she looked again, Junior Baxter was on the ground and Carl Dean Palmers was on top of him, yelling that Junior’s Ma had just had a baby in front of everybody, though it turned out it really wasn’t a baby but a miscarriage, and he was hitting Junior with his fists, hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. And that was when it happened, when Elaine chose between love and sainthood: for one pitch-black moment she swooned away into the earth, to the very pit, then exploded up again into light, and the next thing she knew she was scratching and clawing Carl Dean, and screaming at him to stop, and when he did she fell down on top of Junior, all bloody and suffering, so Carl Dean couldn’t hit him again, and she screamed at Carl Dean to go away, go away! At first, she thought Carl Dean was going to cry, but then, instead, he sort of just went crazy. He called her what Junior had called her — he didn’t understand at all! — and right in front of her own Ma who had just come running up to say they had to get going because the Persecution was starting, and then, hollering like the Indians do in the movies, he went running right at all those policemen with their big white clubs. She never saw what happened because her Ma pulled her away, they had to run, they didn’t have time.

Later, she learned that Carl Dean had been sent up to detention for six months to a year for nearly killing three policemen. She thought that was awful, yet she sometimes wondered if he wasn’t the closest he ever got to real salvation right at that moment. He never wrote to her because of course he didn’t know where she was. That suited her okay. She never saw Junior Baxter again either, but they wrote letters. Sometimes they talked in the letters about what happened that afternoon on the Mount of Redemption. They both agreed they had “grown up” that day and had taken the whole world into their hearts. In the days that followed, things got broken up again, and they lost the complete feeling, but to help them remember, they agreed to touch each sore place every night when they said their prayers. The last mark to go away was one he had made across her heart. He said he believed that was very significant, for it meant that her heart was God’s, and she agreed. They both looked forward to the real and final Coming of the Light when they’d all be together in absolute union again.

Her Ma and his Pa also wrote letters, but not about the same things. Her Ma was worried, because Reverend Baxter kept insisting about having his own way on everything, and she thought maybe he tended to carry things too far sometimes. Like the baptism business, for instance, and some of the rules about the tunics. Her Ma liked to think of their Prophet as a great new spiritual force unleashed upon the world, a renovating force for all Christendom, she said, but it didn’t seem like Reverend Baxter even thought of himself as a Christian anymore, and he was more excited about the way the Prophet spit in the priest’s eye than in the way her Ma was helping the movement grow. Still, she went ahead and made him the Bishop of West Condon, mainly because nobody else was there anymore. Brother Willie Hall, who was supposed to be the Bishop, wasn’t able to stay on account of the Persecution, and so he and Sister Mabel became Traveling Missionaries for the movement. Elaine followed all this very closely, for she had a very strange feeling about something: she wondered if maybe she herself hadn’t come closer to Redemption that day on the Mount than her own Ma.