Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The kid sister received the check, represented the family during the big ceremonies. She did a good job of it. And Vince thought, If everybody in the goddamn country is going to be looking at West Condon, it’s sure a helluva lot better to have her up there than her brother. He realized he still wasn’t too happy about its being Bruno. The speeches were full of praise for West Condon’s great community spirit and its stamina. Whimple, the congressmen, Ted Cavanaugh, the preacher, everybody scored the same theme. The band played the high school fighting song. Vince remembered with pride those team huddles, back when Ted Cavanaugh captained the squad and ran his famous offtackle plays over Vince, remembered the slaps, the spirit, the power, how they spat water and dug in their cleats and pounded away. Jesus, it’s a great place! he thought, and he knew then he was right in getting out of the mine, right in coming topside to play a real part, knew by God he’d make it.

After the ceremonies, everybody still milling around, not wanting to go home and lose this thing, Vince ran into Barney Davis, the mine manager. Barney asked him if he’d mind delivering the charity drive checks to Cravens’ widow and Minicucci’s folks. Vince said okay, make a nice farewell gesture.

“What do you mean, farewell?” Davis asked.

“I’m getting out.”

“What? You mean you’re quitting the mines?” Davis laughed. “Shit, Bonali, it gets in the blood. You can’t quit easy as that.”

“Yeah? Well, watch and see, Davis.”

Davis laughed again. “I’ll believe it when I see it in the Chronicle,” he said.

Once a day, six days a week and sometimes seven, year in, year out, the affairs of West Condon were compressed into a set of conventionally accepted signs and became, in the shape of the West Condon Chronicle , what most folks in town thought of as life, or history. Compactly folded into a soft, damp, aromatic pouch, it fluttered onto porches nightly, was gathered in by the several citizens to easy chairs and kitchen tables, there to open its petals like the proverbial lotus, providing, if not exactly wisdom, at least plenty to talk about and maybe a laugh or two. That its publisher and editor, Justin Miller, sometimes thought of himself as in the entertainment business and viewed his product, based as it was on the technicality of the recordable fact, as a kind of benevolent hoax, probably only helped to make the paper greater, for it was certainly true that although the Chronicle was as old as West Condon and as much father of the town as child of it, it was only when Tiger came home to take it over that it became a real institution.

Miller himself was something of a local institution even before that, having been the greatest athlete to pass through West Condon High School. Small towns like West Condon seldom reached the state basketball finals, but Miller had taken them there twice, to this day a kind of Golden Age to the town’s middle-aged and old-timers, a legend for the young: number 14: jersey retired. He had, meanwhile, captained both the track and baseball teams, edited the school paper, presided over his class twice, made mostly A’s, and, surprising no one, vanished from the premises immediately after graduation. Nobody asked why he left: anybody with any sense did. So, his extraordinary decision to return a few years later, giving up his freewheeling life as a correspondent in order to resuscitate the defunct Chronicle , had come like a breath of new life: hey! Tiger’s back in town! things are moving again!

And there were prodigies: the highway was widened by the state, two mines resumed operations awhile, and a new factory making plastic toys was established on the outskirts, though this operation later folded. The newspaper, of course, was great, if Tiger had anything to do with it it had to be great, won a lot of prizes, put West Condon on the map. The basketball team won the conference title and Tiger started up his semipro baseball club, never had a losing season. And whenever the town fell into the dumps, people looked to the Chronicle , counted on Tiger to pull them out, and he usually did.

So now their communal eye was on the Chronicle again. Deepwater No. 9, last mine in the area to keep operating, was closed since the disaster, and rumor was, it was going to stay that way. No new industry, business was poor, and people were moving out again. Hard winter. But was Tiger still with them? Most folks thought so, but there were bad signs. Rumor was that the paper was losing money, and Miller didn’t seem to care. Some of the Rotary Club meetings had been treated pretty unpleasantly, punch lines left out of speeches, names misspelled, that kind of thing. The traditional Christmas spirit had got knocked, too, when Miller started running parodies of the best-loved Christmas songs and gave the Yuletime charity activities almost no space at all. Some said, that’s the trouble with Miller, he keeps going soft just when you expect the best of him. A lot of jump, but not much of a miler. It was still a matter of town curiosity that Miller had led the basketball team to State his sophomore and junior years, but had been unable to get them past the regionals his senior year. Some said he was screwing around too much that year; others thought they saw “some spark go out of him,” as though he’d become just plain bored; others blamed the coach. And that was why, while most people saw his return to take over the Chronicle as a heroic kind of yea-saying, if not indeed an act of grace, there were those, even then, who wondered if Tiger might not simply have run out of wind out there in the world and returned to rest up awhile in a place where heroism was still possible without sticking to training rules.

And now, since the mine disaster, people wondered why this big play to the spookier side of the Bruno rescue and all those peculiar little squibs about religious eccentrics? Miller was a skeptic, didn’t go to church, everybody knew that: so why this sudden interest in so-called miracles and visions? When Reverend Wesley Edwards first came to town to take over the Presbyterian pulpit he had, prodded by some of his elders, sought to reactivate Miller’s interest in the church. Miller’s skepticism hadn’t bothered him, he was a skeptic in most ways himself, and in fact he’d got a kick out of arguing with that romantic rationalist. But there was no getting him back to church. Miller was an atheist, and a fundamentalist to boot, who couldn’t see past the end of his own flesh-and-bone nose, to put it politely. And then Miller had started throwing some of his own remarks back at him, and Edwards had realized he’d compromised himself in the course of their talks. So one day he had just taken the pipe out of his mouth and said, “Justin, make your peace with God, surrender to His will.” Miller had snorted, and that had been the end of it.

Then, on this otherwise calm sixth of February, a Friday when church news was customarily printed, there appeared, right on the front page in a small neat box, a paragraph which announced that the Evening Circle of the West Condon Church of the Nazarene would convene on Sunday evening at the home of Mr. Giovanni Bruno. “All interested townsfolk are invited to attend this very important meeting.” Edwards smarted. Nothing the Presbyterians had ever done had made the front page, not even his own election to the chairmanship of the Ministerial Association. What was Miller up to? Edwards sensed it: it’s me he’s after.

Actually, Miller had toned the story, giving Mrs. Clara Collins much less than she’d asked for, a bare announcement where she’d wanted a screaming banner. He’d just come back from Mick’s and his daily late-afternoon ration of hamburger-ash and beer the day before, Thursday, having left his assistant Lou Jones behind, regaling the boys with horror stories from the history of coalmining. Jones had a knack. He’d turned a grisly tale of management goons working over a hapless unionizer into a goddamn song-and-dance act that had had the whole klatch laughing and crying at the same time. Miller didn’t know much about Jones, he’d just turned up one day announcing he’d decided to seek his fortune with the West Comedown Comical. Miller had laughed and taken him on. There had been some hint of a job as an all-night disk jockey that he’d just involuntarily surrendered (“Obscenity was the uncouth charge,” Jones had said), but on the other hand that might have been several jobs back. Jones was, in brief, a complacent drifter, gifted with an uncommonly facile feedback system, making his way any way he could, keeping a perverse eye out and telling good stories about what he saw. Miller was glad to have him, and though his humor sometimes had a way of biting too deep, he generally enjoyed the guy.