Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to come before,” he said.

“Well, maybe jist as good you didn’t.” Trace of a smile touched the corners of her mouth. “We had a couple purty rough nights. But this’n’s apt to be a mite better.” The Halls tittered nervously.

Miller asked about the meeting on the eighth, but she didn’t seem to want to talk about it, except to repeat Bruno’s six-word message. As for the small and uneventful gathering on the fifteenth, she only shrugged, said that Mrs. Norton had received a “kinder prophecy like” that something was sure to happen this night, the first of March. Something, uh, final? Nope. “It ain’t the eighth.” He pursued further the matter of Mrs. Norton’s talents, seeking skepticism, but saw clearly that Clara was impressed by them, thought Eleanor “a fine Christian woman,” believed that it was God who had brought them all, each with his different gifts, together. “She’s been a great comfort to me, Mr. Miller, and she’s taught me more about the Holy Bible than I ever knowed before.” He wondered if she’d changed her mind about the Second Coming, but before he could ask, she was gone, trotting away from him as abruptly as she had come, her feet broad and knobby in the white pumps.

Marcella stood at his side, and in the moment they had together he asked her what exactly they were expecting tonight. “I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps … the coming of light.” Was that irony he heard? Was she, like him, having fun with all this? He wished to know what she meant, but feared to risk too much. Instead, he asked her why she had told him that tonight’s password was designed “to keep out the Baxters.” Did Abner Baxter have something to do with it?

“He’s the one who hates Mrs. Collins. He’s the man who turned all her friends against her and made his own wife the president of Mrs. Collins’ Evening Circle.”

“Was he here on the eighth?”

“Yes. He’s a fat man with red hair and a furious temper.” She made funny puffing gestures of fatness and fury. “He made everybody walk out and leave her alone. He’s with the enemy.”

“The enemy? Who are they?”

“Why,” she said with a smile, as though surprised he should ask, “the powers of darkness.”

He smiled in return, but it made her stop smiling, and that confused him. “Don’t you think it’s kind of funny,” he said to cover for his smile, “that a redheaded preacher should be the devil’s advocate?”

“If you saw him, you wouldn’t think so,” she said, and there was no smile at all.

Elaine Collins and Carl Dean Palmers had become engrossed in a quiet argument about religion. Colin Meredith, severed, walked over to join him and Marcella. Affected, the boy’s walk, but not effeminate exactly. The nice child, the ever-willing friend, the shy young man who would fade into the shy old bachelor, fastidious, moody, kindly, especially toward small children. He explained that he had known Mrs. Norton for several months, that she had been helping him establish contact with superior spirits. He had introduced his friend Carl Dean to her, and although Carl Dean was skeptical at first, they had both come to have a lot of faith in her. She was extremely sincere and intelligent and unselfish, and she had done a great deal for him, not so much yet for Carl Dean maybe, but she had made a whole new person out of him , leading him away from the love of earthly things to love of things of the spirit. He had brought an end to all his bad habits, and had even discovered that sometimes he did attain to a kind of communication with the other world. Well, maybe not exactly a communication, but something very much like it. It took literally hours and hours of meditation and humility and self-searching and seeking without thought, but once in awhile something happened, something really unbelievable, it was like — like a light turning on inside. Afterwards, after this kind of terribly exhilarating experience, he couldn’t explain it, or even describe it, it was beyond the capacity of human language, like Mrs. Norton always said. But, really, it was wonderful, a truly extraordinary experience — but then, Mr. Miller probably already knew what he meant. Beside him, Marcella nodded for him; she seemed pretty caught up in what this silly kid had to say. Also, Meredith said, he sometimes received — like Mrs. Norton, through his right hand — messages from his dead mother and father, but that was mainly thanks to another woman he had known a couple years before in the orphanage; Mrs. Norton didn’t seem too excited about these writings from his parents, though of course she said they were surely true. She herself, she had told him, had received her very first communications from recently dead earth people, or spirits that assumed their parts. Now, with her help, he was learning how to achieve much greater things.

Willie and Mabel Hall came over, disrupting the boy’s monologue. Marcella excused herself, left the room. “Well, as the Good Book says,” said Willie Hall, “‘the poor has good tidings preached to them!’” Hall looked at no one when he spoke, just gazed off and let fly.

“You know the Bible well?” Miller asked.

“And ‘somethin’ greater than the temple is here!’“

Mabel Hall, though not too big, outweighed her husband by a good thirty pounds and had a couple inches on him, but Miller’s first-sight estimate of her as the muscled tyrant proved far from the case. She was as submissive as Willie was impulsive, as mute and secretive as he was loquacious.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hall, but what do you think is going to—?”

“As the Good Book says, Mr. Miller, ‘in malice be ye babes, but in mind be men!’ And ‘many are called, but few are chosen’!”

It was useless, so Miller gave it up.

“Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong—” Marcella came in and announced that refreshments were ready. She smiled over at Miller, and he winked in return. Everyone stood and moved with polite gestures toward the dining room, sweeping Marcella in ahead of them. All but Giovanni, of course: he watched them exit, expressionless. His eyes were what you noticed: glittering, black, restless, the flesh around them sunken, making them seem to protrude abnormally.

Miller held back, let the others go ahead, and he saw, as he’d more or less anticipated, that Eleanor Norton was also delaying, fussing with her logbooks. When the others had filed into the dining room, she approached him. “I saw you were talking with Mrs. Collins.”

“Yes, for a moment. I must say, she seems very impressed by you. She says you have been a great inspiration to her.”

Mrs. Norton sighed, absently rubbed a small medallion that hung from her neck on a chain. “She’s a sincere woman, Mr. Miller, but … a frightful amateur.” She smiled up at him, accepting the sympathetic smile he returned her. “Tell me,” she continued without transition, “do you believe in communication with spiritual beings at higher levels?”

Marcella had explained enough of what had happened until now to prepare him somewhat for tonight’s experience, and he had even half expected this woman’s very question, yet when she put it directly to him, he discovered he didn’t have an answer for it. He reached again for his cigarettes, checked himself just in time. Chatter trickled in irrelevantly from the dining room. Giovanni looked on from his bed. “It’s a subject,” he managed finally, “in which I have long had a serious interest, Mrs. Norton.”

“Good,” she said simply, apparently accepting that, lame as it was. “Oh dear, we really have so much to do!” She focused on some great distance, sighed. “I do hope we shall be ready!”

He ventured: “For what, Mrs. Norton?” All he had picked up so far was that she claimed to be able to receive messages, through writing and sometimes, in emergencies, through her voice, from superior spirits, spirits at what she called “higher aspects of intensity,” and that now she had reached the seventh such aspect, perhaps the last, whence she received periodic communiqués from a teacher known to her as “Domiron.” This Domiron presumably existed, not exactly in a different place or a different stellar system, but somehow in this same space, but at a different density level, as though his atoms were lighter or something.