Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

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Originally published in 1969 and now back in print after over a decade, Robert Coover's first novel instantly established his mastery. A coal-mine explosion in a small mid-American town claims ninety-seven lives. The only survivor, a lapsed Catholic given to mysterious visions, is adopted as a doomsday prophet by a group of small-town mystics. "Exposed" by the town newspaper editor, the cult gains international notoriety and its ranks swell. As its members gather on the Mount of Redemption to await the apocalypse, Robert Coover lays bare the madness of religious frenzy and the sometimes greater madness of "normal" citizens. The Origin of the Brunists is vintage Coover — comic, fearless, incisive, and brilliantly executed. "A novel of intensity and conviction… a splendid talent… heir to Dreiser or Lewis." — The New York Times Book Review; "A breathtaking masterpiece on any level you approach it." — Sol Yurick; "[The Origin of the Brunists] delivers the goods. . [and] says what it has to say with rudeness, vigor, poetry and a headlong narrative momentum." — The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

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FOUND: Lady’s wool cap. Intimate circumstances. Inquire in person to Chronicle editor .

LOST: One husband and one wool cap, same night. Reward for cap. Box “Woolly.”

They called him “the widow-warmer” in Mick’s and asked him if he’d collected yet the reward of the woolly box. He reminded them that, as St. James had said, the consoling of widows in their affliction was the stamp of a religion that was pure and undefiled, and, since he was the only one in the Christian crowd who had ever bothered to read the Good Old Book, no one knew enough to append: “and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”

Stained and stung, daily abused, Miller sought relief — even a redemption of sorts — in the company of Marcella Bruno. At first, in the days following the disaster, he saw her almost daily on one pretense or another, almost always in connection with her brother. No problem that, for Bruno himself was news, nationally as well as locally: his escape story, white bird vision, precarious health, prolonged comeback, even his peculiar taciturnity. Miller’s own interest in the man soon dissipated: what he saw there was the browbeaten child turned egocentered adult psychopath, now upstaging it with his sudden splash of glory — a waste of time. But he made good copy, and Miller sold some of it nationally. With Marcella, it was another story. For one thing, she flattered the hell out of him, the way she looked at him. And there was a grace about everything she did, laughed, walked, turned. Bright, too. And she was beautiful. Coming or going, she caught a man’s eye.

But, finally, there was something that got between them. She lacked her brother’s laconic self-exaltation — open innocence was in fact the quality that best described her — but shared with him the old fiction of the universe as a closed and well-made circle. It ran deep in her, colored every phrase, and he began to hesitate in the pursuit of his obvious advantage: how did she in fact see him and what did she expect? There could be consequences he didn’t want. And he stopped being flattered by her affection when he realized how much she admired her nut of a brother. Understandable, of course: she was born into a family already centered around him, and all she had done all her life had been one way or another related to him. And there was the weight of racial habit, the deep-rooted Italian family traditions, especially those of the beleaguered immigrant families. Nevertheless, she was old enough to judge him rightly. Roman Catholic, too, but as with all mystics, a mild disdain for the establishment, and Miller had seen Giovanni go somehow cold and angry whenever Father Baglione, the local priest, showed up. No, mainly it was her child’s view of the plenum — until she accepted it as the mad scatter it was, they could never get beyond banalities and sex play. Did he want to get beyond? Apparently, though it surprised him, he did.

So, though caution braked his assault, he nevertheless kept the phone lines open, when with her did not reject and maybe even emboldened her long glances, and somehow felt certain that, sooner or later, they’d share a couch, whatever the circumstances of it might be. She, in turn, supposed his continuing interest in her brother, gave him status reports on his health, and talked of the people who came to see him. A recently arrived veterinarian named Wylie Norton and his schoolteacher wife were the most frequent visitors. Miller gathered that the Norton woman was a practicing medium of some sort, an automatist and old-fashioned sibyl. He had met the woman and found her harmless. More dramatic were the regular visitations of the Widow Collins and some of her Church of the Nazarene friends. These openly emotional but eminently practical people made an odd contrast with the introverted Catholic Bruno, though he welcomed them. It was mainly the accident of the work relationship between Collins and Bruno in the mine that now conjoined them. Collins, Miller learned, had accepted Bruno as his buddy out of Christian charity toward the rejected misfit, and maybe a little bit out of wonderment at rejection itself. Seeking sainthood, Reverend Ely Collins had probably been surprised that he had had it so easy. Collins, to be popular, must surely have touched more than once on the never-dead chiliastic expectations of the lower-class Christians, and so the violence of his death, the ambiguity of his final message, the singular rescue of his buddy, and, above all, the odd coincidence — if it was that, and it surely was not — of the white bird vision he shared with Bruno, now made these people — especially the suddenly widowed — wonder if something disastrous, perhaps worldwide in scope, might not be in the air. Their immediate fear, apparently, was the eighth of February. Their speculations amused Miller — who himself at age thirteen had read Revelations and never quite got over it — so he printed everything he thought might help them along, might seem relevant to them, amateur space theories, enigmatic Biblical texts, filler tripe on peculiar practices and inexplicable happenings elsewhere, as well as everything they wished to give him. Once the emotions had settled down and the widows themselves had established new affairs or found mind-busying work, their eccentric interests of the moment would be forgotten, of course. Which, in its way, was too bad. As games went, it was a game, and there was some promise in it.

Games were what kept Miller going. Games, and the pacifying of mind and organs. Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many of these actions himself as possible, adjustment was easier. And so it was that, on his way out of the hospital on a Sunday night, first day of the runt month and the day before Giovanni Bruno was due to be sent home, gamester Tiger Miller, not a wee bit agitated in the fork after a quarter of an hour with Marcella, used his wanton freedom to reject impulsively an old precept about bedding down with the locals and picked up a nurse at the doorway, took her home with him. He had noticed her the night of the rescue, sandy-haired Tucker City girl, now more or less of West Condon, family a mixture of immigrant Englishmen and East Europeans, he learned, bright-eyed and quick to banter. Mainly it was her long slim waist and plump butt that had drawn and kept his eye; privately, he called her Happy Bottom, and, in bed later, she laughed gaily when he told her. What was something so great as this doing in West Condon? Only a fool would stop to ask.

3

They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God! They have provoked me to anger with their vanities!

Abner Baxter paced the front room fretfully Sunday evening, waiting for Sarah to get the children dressed for the family’s evening worship. His knuckled white fist belted the desktop, slapped at the open Bible, thumped into the back of an easy chair. “Strive thou, O God, with them that strive with me!” he whispered hoarsely. He paused before a large reproduction of the great bearded Peter, standing over the convulsing Sapphira, enemy of another day. White with righteous indignation, quivering with holy rage, swollen with the power of the Lord, the mighty Peter in one volcanic gesture had shown the true glory of God. “Why hath Satan filled thy heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?” asked the caption.

Well, Sister Clara Collins’ “eighth of the month” heresy had harrowed them all, but Abner restrained his wrath, biding his time. He preached in the church on the faith of Enoch and Noah, Abraham and Moses, and let them read what they would into it. Time would do her in. But for now, she still had most of them with her, prideful and perverse as her foolish message was, and his duty to the Lord was to remain steadfast in the faith and wait for the woman’s inexorable fall.

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