Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

A tremor of dread convulsed Sarah’s heavy body, iced her spine: the end! “Oh, Abner!” she cried, and reached for him. He shrugged her off sternly. The children had stood, stirred, and tears floated now in Franny’s eyes.

Abner calmed them. He reminded Sister Clara that the accident had happened on the eighth of the month, that Ely had probably only meant to date his note to her.

“Maybe,” Sister Clara said, clearly not convinced. “But ifn he died today, why did he put the eighth? And they ain’t a period there before. God’s signs to Ely seem terrible urgent to me, and I — Well, anyhow, I wanted both you folks to read it and meditate on it. Me and Elaine, we been showin’ it around tonight to all the friends. I mean to bring it with me to Evenin’ Circle next Sunday night, so’s we can all talk it over together. I hope I kin count on you two bein’ there.”

Sarah nodded, of course, she always went, but glimpsed Abner’s sudden reprehensive glower — and understood then what it was he had been demanding of her all day — and why he must hate her, knowing she wasn’t able. “Yes,” he said, for them both.

Sarah thought, as Sister Clara and her daughter departed, that the family worship would be considered ended for that night, but Abner shoved shut the door and spun enflamed on little Paul. “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass,” he recited thunderingly into the now-recognizable terror-riven room, “and a rod for the back of fools!” His freckled white hand, pinked with fine red hairs, grasped the razor strop and cracked it across his thigh.

“No, Abner!” whispered Sarah. “Please!”

With frightened fingers, Paul dutifully unbuttoned his pants. Abner, twitching with impatience, reached to tear them from him just as, in terror, the boy made water. It sprayed out in frantic spurts on Abner’s hands and knees — reflexively, Abner’s right hand whipped and the razor strop cracked like a rifle shot into the child’s wee fork. Paul screamed. Sarah cried, “No! Abner!”

Abner, implacable, gripped the boy’s frail shoulder. “If thou beat a child with the rod,” he blustered, “he will not die!”

But Franny, sobbing, covered Paul’s body with her own like a mother hen. “Beat me!” she cried.

Abner was in a froth. Paul shrieked insanely under Franny’s shield. Sarah saw a horrible smile flirt at the corner of Junior’s mouth. She stood. Though terrified, she would not allow it again!

But then Abner did a wonderful thing: he ordered them all out of the room but for Franny. Sarah wouldn’t even let them hear the flogging, she sent them straight to bed. Paul’s peewee was strangely flushed, but he had quieted at least, and she could hear him talking with Nathan in their room. Alone, outside the door, Sarah listened to the blows fall.

When Abner came to bed, his anger had abated. She was fearfully disturbed, but he was disinterested in her explications. She lay awake hopelessly, not knowing what it would all come to. In spite of Abner, Sarah had been cruelly penetrated by the prophetic vision in Brother Ely’s deathnote, and only one sinister mystery still vexed her: Why had the Lord chosen to take Brother Ely just the second before he would have completed the terrible message?

Until the lightness passes off, she sits on the edge of the bed, as though at a beginning place. Then she slides to the marble floor and pads in bare feet into her brother’s room. Withdrawn he lies, absorbed into the bed, one with it, dark etching on the immaculate sheets. “Giovanni!” she whispers. No sign is given her but the determined pulsing of a vein in his neck. His skin has shrunk taut over his high skull, exaggerating the recession of his hairline. His black hair is long on the neck, feathers dark and wild on the pillow. He is … somehow … changed: yes, a new brother must come of it. She fears for him. So white! The dried blood she’d seen on his face seems to have sunk beneath the surface, now mottles with rose the flesh’s pallor. For the first time since the night of the disaster, black doubts peck at her .

Miller was met on Monday midmorning arrival by an officeful of comedy and the miner Willie Hall, who’d been waiting there since eight, Lou Jones having left for “Mick’s Dispensary,” leaving the message that the doctors advised complete rest and not to expect him for a week or two. His prank had been a complete success, and the wirecopy which he retrieved from the wastecan testified to UP’s subsequent panic. Someone had run over to the bus station to buy up the early morning editions from the city, and all but one carried it, one of them happily subheading the prayerbook episode. Miller equipped his ad force with copies to entertain the businessmen they called on that morning, and wrote up a boldface box for that night’s front page on “this strange and inexplicable lapse in East Condon journalism.” He wondered if the UP rep was still in town — man! the dumb bastard had even embellished his cribbed account with praise of Jones’“long and worthy experience” in the mines and his “model Christian fatherhood”! Such are history’s documents! He laughed. Miller had been seeking this vendetta ever since Jones had jockeyed through his latest typo a couple months ago on “the new Chronicle subscription rates, announced this week by publisher and editor Justin Milker,” which eventually made The New Yorker . He’d been burned more than once by Jones’ propensity for the rigged typo, his worst being when Mrs. Ted Cavanaugh, wife of the banker, was named “Lay of the Year at the Presbyterian Church”—Only by the grace of Ted’s fear of court publicity had they escaped being sued. Now he had squared it and had twitted the sloppy East Condoners as well.

But, pleased as he was, he had little chance to enjoy it. His Monday edition lay blank before him, plugged only in part by the two full-page ads of condolence from businessmen, professionals, and organizations, and the uphill ritual of his newsday now had to be compressed into half the time. Yesterday’s special had devoured all his standing copy on the mine, leaving him at best some eighty or ninety column inches of unused miscellany lying idle. Yesterday’s photos were not printed, but there were a few old ones he could use a second time. Hastily, he plotted a six-page layout and sent back a pageful of wirecopy. He asked Willie Hall, seated stoically deadpan in the vortex of a pandemonium he didn’t understand, to give him five minutes more and raced over to Mickey DeMar’s Bar and Grill to deposit copies of the UP story with the morning klatchers. Found Jones in there with Ted Cavanaugh, dimestore owner Burt Robbins, and the Chamber of Commerce secretary, Jim Elliott, town’s tireless prince of gossips. Miller had a rushed coffee, while Mick and the others enjoyed the tale. It was a great entertainment, and others who arrived joined the laughter. Robbins, dependably acidic, tagged Jones with “Father” and the rest delightedly picked it up, all but Cavanaugh, who almost always excepted himself in the banter and who in any case had been cool toward Jones since the typo that had humiliated his wife. To escape the worsening consequences, Jones agreed to return to the stable, and that eased some the day’s increasing stress.

While Jones issued wearily forth like a jaded elephant to collect the routine tidings, Miller hurried back to the waiting Willie Hall, and Hall had no sooner left than in came mine supervisor Barney Davis, and he was followed by Vince Bonali, one of the facebosses on at Number Nine Thursday night near the blast in the southeast section. It was after noon before he got his breath and ate the doughnut Annie had bought for him.