Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“A little while …” he said, but already he was tumbling, and there were great convulsions and mountains fell, burying his words. And again a little while …

She came to him on the arid plain, a motion of dull white on dull white, defined by her shadows, by her shifting tunic folds, by the dark point of her head. How she moved he could not tell, if she did at all: their convergence seemed governed by some law irrelevant to willed motion. From his height he could see the smooth curve of her brow, the clasp in her loose brown hair. He sought for images there, but convulsions of pain shrank his vision. Heal me! She looked up and, smiling faintly, uncertainly, held his gaze. Now! he gasped. In her hands, she held a fading dandelion, which now she brought to her smiling lips. From his great bulge of pain hung his knees and feet, and between them he could see her upturned face. Oh damn it, Marcella! Let me in! Her smile faded, her grieving eyes drooped to the dying flower, her lowering head’s delicate rotation conducting the hairclasp between his toes. In it now he saw himself, crosshung, huge below, head soaring out of sight. She turned, receding. When next he perceived her, she was kneeling, not far away, scratching a hole in the hard dead clay to plant the dandelion. Was that blood? “Please! Oh God!” But, smiling, she was patting dust around the stem. Her tunic lay limp on her spine and haunches, darkened between her thighs. A pale foot’s sole showed itself below the hem: then suddenly shot out, the hem flew up—“ No! .” he cried, squeezing shut his eyes. Something knocked against his cross: vibrations racked him and, screaming, he fell.

It was night. He was staring straight up at the ceiling, one arm outstretched and the other folded but elevated, and both pinned to something or other. His neck ached from the weight that lay upon it, and he was unable to see lower than the tip of his enormous nose. He was breathing hard; screams echoed in his ears still, the wound in his fork screamed still. Nailed into it: a flower — but had it taken root? He was almost sure, but he’d heard of amputees who felt their fingers and toes, and so he couldn’t trust the testimony of his nerve ends.

She came in then and said, “Well, the old cock crows again!”

“You mean—?”

“Does it hurt?” He heard water running, then felt the lid fly off it and a shriveling cold wrap it. Intact! “Shame to waste it,” Happy said, “but I don’t want any crowds forming outside your door.”

He laughed around the rocks and muck. “You know, I thought I’d lost it,” he said.

“You nearly did. You can thank that big horsey lady for holding back the hatchets.”

“Who? Clara? No kidding!”

“I guess she knew a good thing when she saw it.”

“Why didn’t those goddamn cops come?”

“I don’t know,” Happy said flatly, a frown crossing her freckled face. “Maybe they knew a good thing when they saw it, too.”

She helped him then to urinate, and though he felt like one long ravaged nerve, he was able to smile. “Take good care of it,” he whispered. “God gave the greater honor to the inferior part, let us not do less.” With a wink, she pierced his side with a needle, and the nerve coated over. He relaxed, and though he plunged once more toward darkness, he plunged now without dread; the nails in his palms were basketballs and his legs were lean and could run again. “I’ll be back!” he said, and, distantly, he thought he heard rewarding laughter.

Judas sat in the garden, propped against the tuberous trunk of an ancient tree, and gazed wearily upon his companions. Most slept, scratching fitfully at the old itches. It would come to nothing, he knew, watching them. He fingered the moneybox. There was now almost nothing in it. Why had they trusted him with it? Because his pure hope belied their weaknesses. They trusted him because he included them all and needed none of them, but they feared him for what he wanted, and his were never the decisions made. The prophet brooded distantly. For days now, Judas had suffered the man’s wretched beseeching eyes. Judas knew what he wanted, knew that the man himself nor none of these could ever do it. Simon Peter, snoring, scratched one calloused foot on a tree trunk. One of the others seemed to be making running motions with his feet. A woman, too sleepy to shuffle away the prescribed distance, squatted to piss; someone protested, and she moved on. The fattening Passover moon illuminated their fragmented pathos. Judas stood. He looked up toward where the prophet knelt, saw that the man was watching him. He’d expected that, but felt a shudder just the same. He stared out on the hard dry hills, stared ahead at the days succeeding days, the endless wearisome motions, all prospects sickened to habit, stared out on the hopeless generative and digestive processes of unnumbered generations, and thought: Well, anyway, it’s something different. And he went down into the town.

“Listen, Happy,” said Miller, celebrating the bath hour, “let’s set up a private little cult of our own.” He saw doubt cross her eyes, as she looked up from his wet belly to study his face. “Trade rings, break a pot, whatever it is they do these days, build for perpetuity.” Blushing, she turned back to the belly, rained suds on it from a sponge squeezed high. “Anyway,” he said, “it’d be something different.”

She dipped an index finger into his navel. “And on this rock …” she said, and they both watched the church grow.

The Coming of Light had been, unless one took Eleanor Norton’s point of view, delayed; the Powers of Darkness had stormed the holy Mount, throwing the Sons of Light into dungeons or dispersion, and so there were none there to whom God might, in proper glory, come. From visitors, from doctors and nurses, from others hospitalized like himself, Miller picked up the pieces, and, oddly, without hands to write it down, he seemed to enjoy it all the more. Happy, he learned, had watched it all on television — all channels carried it, in spite of the nudity, none apparently wanting to be the first to cut itself off — and though reception had been bad with the storm, she had recognized him floundering around out there in his trenchcoat and had decided he might need a little help. But by the time she had arrived, the police had at last moved in, religious freedom or no, the Brunists were being herded into schoolbuses brought out there for the purpose, and Miller was nowhere to be seen. Overhearing lurid accounts of what had just happened and thinking him dead, she had turned her woman’s wrath on the mayor, judging him guilty by negligence, and poor Mort Whimple had nearly joined the army of the blind. Then she had chased up the hill, learned from that fat boy who used to be Tiger’s assistant where he thought the body had been dumped, raced there to find him in an awry heap, a public curiosity, in a puddle before the red clay cranny of Cunt Hill. A mess, dressed only in mud and blood, but alive. She had grabbed an ambulance boy she knew and made them load him up — in spite of demands already rising on the Mount, where the cops, in their inimitable manner and being perhaps just a bit excited themselves, were opening a few recalcitrant skulls — and they had rushed him off to the hospital.

Eventually, another twenty or so Brunists had joined him, a few newsmen who, curiously, got the brunt of the Brunist wrath, as well as another forty-odd who sustained injuries from getting trampled inside the bingo tent which had suddenly collapsed. Few had died. A small child had been mashed to a pulp in the bingo tent panic and a woman near the entrance had perished in a fit; somebody had had a miscarriage; an old man, with several bones shattered when the tent fell, had died in the hospital of a stroke; a lady named Clegg had apparently succumbed in medius ritus to a heart attack, though she, like many, Doc Lewis said, had also got knocked around a bit; a woman who had flown in all the way from the East Coast had died a week later of pneumonia, and the old man in New Hampshire whose sight, he’d said, was returning to him had, following the new light, taken abortive flight off the roof of the old folks’ home; and, of course, a few weeks later they found Ralph Himebaugh under the Bruno bed, though by then Miller was already down off his rood and out of the hospital. Other than that: only broken heads, collapsed lungs, bruised bellies, crushed spines, and the like, minor statistics.