Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

Fly with birds as a bird, swim in the sea as a fish, behave in the world as the world would have you, for all is illusion but illusion itself, and only the wise can exist in it with tranquillity .

And then the mine blew up.

It made Wylie recall something Eleanor had said on their way here to West Condon a year ago. As usual, they had stayed in inexpensive motels on the edges of towns, while seeking a settling place. Wylie would check the telephone directories to count the number of veterinarians in the area, would make inquiries about the extent of farming, animal husbandry, and so on. He had, in the past, worked as a lab assistant in hospitals, as a salesman and store clerk, and even, during one depressing period, as a janitor in the high school where Eleanor was substitute teaching. Usually though, he had been able to find work in his chosen field, especially in small and otherwise unattractive Midwestern towns.

They had made several stops before coming on West Condon. In Springer, for example, there had seemed to be too few vets for the amount of farming that was around, but they hadn’t liked the community somehow. A taste of degeneracy, a crabbed and wounded look about the citizens. More stops and then in Wickham they’d stayed a week, liked it, had even begun the house search, but Eleanor had chanced to see on the street, of all persons, the tall Carlyle druggist. They had left hurriedly (eventually to arrive and remain here), Eleanor biting her lip and breathing heavily. Maybe the druggist had had relatives in Wickham. Or maybe, as Eleanor had insisted, there had been more to it. But it had in any event been enough to awaken a worry in Eleanor that had apparently been lurking just under the surface. “Wylie,” she’d asked, as the car licked and snapped at the blacktop beneath them, “how many men came to see us that night in Carlyle?”

“Four, I think. Or three. No, four.”

“The druggist and—”

“The Wild boy’s father, Mr. Loomis, and—”

“And who , Wylie?”

“Funny. I can’t remember.”

“Nor can I, Wylie, but the fourth was there, there all the time!”

“Yes, but—”

“Wylie, I don’t think now that was the real person of the Carlyle druggist who appeared to me on the street in Wickham.” She’d paused, placed her hand on his arm, sending goosebumps to bis flesh. “It was a sign, Wylie … we’re being sent!”

The wind’s edged lick badgers the shifting thickening crowd, provokes from it a chronic babble of muted Sunday morning curses. Marcella, at the mine, blows her nose. Her reflections are pierced from beneath by omens of sickness: tomorrow, maybe even today. But these omens do not undermine her thoughts so much as provide a setting for them. It is as though once-disparate things are fusing, coalescing into a new whole, a whole that requires her sickness no less than the explosion that set the parts in motion. A puzzle oddly revolving into its own solution. The huddled round-shouldered figures, their bleak white faces of disaster, the pale fog of morning crawling sluggishly like a wet beast out of the yellow-bulbed night, the measured raddling of helmeted men, the toothed patterns chewed in the sky by the once-whitewashed buildings and the rust-red machinery — the both laminated with ages of soot, the raw shreds of gray slate masking the earth: all of it — each pain, each cry, each gesture — is somehow conjoined to describe a dream she has already dreamt. She knows first the curse, then hears the passing miner utter it; recognizes the platinum disc of the emerging sun behind the water-tower, then observes it there. If one among the present looks over at her, it is clearly a look of recognition — not of her, but of what is happening. The Salvation Army lady who has countless times already offered her a blanket now passes dutifully with another, and this time Marcella accepts it — but no, not from the cold. And, as she reaches for it, she feels her hand write an arc through the air, like a word without letters, yet for that all the more real — feels suddenly wrenched apart from herself, staring down, observing that act, that arc, that bold single sign in an otherwise stark and motionless tableau … she trembles slightly. The Salvation Army lady hesitates, observes her silently with heavylidded eyes. Although the woman has before been extravagant in her pity, the three gray dawns have humbled her. “Poor child,” is all she says, and then she turns away. The olivedrab blanket is thin and coarse, chafes Marcella’s skin, but it dulls some the wind’s hunger. She drapes it over her head and shoulders like a shawl, and waits .

Miller, the rash and intemperate, woke from acid dreams crying “Mercy!” and wallowing in peanut butter and bread crumbs, half strangled by the phone cord. He lay there, trying to recall who and where he was — then Jones’ phone call came to mind and he leapt from the bed, phone, crumbs, and all. Dressing, he telephoned his front-office chief Annie Pompa — their Girl Fried Egg, as Jones called her when he wasn’t calling her worse — and asked her to go down and open up the office, put the backshop force on alert.

In the front seat of the Chevy he found Wanda Cravens’ woolly cap, authenticating his folly. He pushed it into one of his trenchcoat pockets. Word was out and the mine road was alive with traffic. Fog gone, Miller pushed the Chevy up to ninety and stayed in the left lane. Twice, other cars lurched out in front of him to pass creepers, and, braking, he nearly spun to the ditch. He swore, lay on the horn, and gunned past them when they ducked sheepishly back in line. He was past caring.

He swung into the yard, parked in the restricted area, leaped out, speedgraphic in hand, locked the car. Checked his pockets, on the run, for film, notebooks, pencils, felt the woolly cap there. Grisly vision of Wanda Cravens throwing herself, sobbing, into his arms in front of all the popping shutters, haggard husband, fresh from the pits, staring incredulously on. Miller supposed Jones would be up at the Salvation Army tent, but didn’t want to face the man cold. Maybe it was all over. He paused to get a photo or two as he crossed the yard — gray sooty day: perfect tone — and exchanged words with those who waved or called out to him. He learned: Not there yet, but hope was gone. They had driven pipes through to the different rooms behind the fall, and had got no response. Miller calmed, photographed. Children keeping vigil. The dark stoic mother of a boy named Rosselli whose first night it had been to work in the mine. Tuck Filbert’s old father, refusing to give up hope, fighting to get on every rescue crew. He saw Wanda Cravens. She seemed undone by the news: in spite of the renewed attention given her, she had faded back into the baggy cotton print and run-down loafers. He stayed clear.

Circling wide to avoid her, Miller came across a prayer meeting. A clique of West Condon Nazarenes, powered by a squat ebullient man with thick red-maned head, and including several women widowed overnight, had seized the temporary Red Cross shelter pitched near the portal for the miners’ families, and from it now issued hymned plaints, remorseful cries, and bristling execrations upon the community’s sinful damned. Miller floated experimentally at their outer edge, but sensed his presence bedeviling them; even those who knew him seemed to resent his curiosity, or, at best, stared back at him apathetically. The jowly man leading them, he learned, was Abner Baxter, a faceboss who had led his section out Thursday night standing up. Though men prayed among them, most of his group were women, pale lumpy sorts with sacklike bodies draped blackly, kneeling in cinders and ashes. Baxter lacked eloquence and subtlety, but he had a compact bullying style of his own and a volcanic delivery. “Serve the Lord with fear!” he cried. “With trembling kiss his feet!” Their prayers defined the disaster as a judgment upon West Condon and a trial for God’s faithful. What massed them up and charged them, apparently, was the expectation that Ely Collins — their man of tested faith — would emerge with messages, and it was with no small awe that they now awaited him. Miller knew of Collins. A seasoned mechanic within the mine, he was a locally celebrated evangelist without. He’d run the guy’s photo a few times. Mrs. Collins was not among the group, he learned, but her daughter was: a plain gangly girl — pubescent gangliness — named Elaine. She wouldn’t speak to him. Then Baxter suddenly interrupted the meeting, roared at Miller to kneel with them or be damned. Miller rose and, holding Baxter’s raging gaze, slowly lifted the speedgraphic before his face and popped a photo, exiting casually before Baxter could get his wind back.