Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

Mildred Gray tells them how they are all selling everything they own and sharing the money as a single community, enjoying grand banquets and who knows what all, and how one night they all ate a whole leg of lamb apiece. Mr. Himebaugh, who is a very rich man, has given them all his money and is selling all his possessions and they say he is a true and living saint. Of course, she says, when it’s all over, they won’t have a stitch to their name. If they need one.

Lucy Smith then informs them with very tight meaningful lips that, speaking of not having a stitch, under the tunics all they wear is their underwear, and Sister Thelma whispers that she has good reason to believe they don’t even wear that , but she won’t say more. Utterly without any reason whatsoever, then, Sarah Baxter starts to weep uncontrollably.

Earlier in the evening, before the phonecall from the man who said he was Jesus Christ, Carl Dean Palmers has attended the Baptist Youth Group meeting. He used to be president of it and he is still very much looked up to. He is courageous in his questioning, and yet at the same time he is not conceited about being a senior and is not ashamed to believe, not ashamed to pray. Ashamed of Jesus! that dear Friend/On whom my hopes of heaven depend? Not Carl Dean! Tonight, as usual, Carl Dean has pressed the claims of his new affiliation. Reverend Cummins, who has always made it very difficult for him and has even threatened to bar him from attendance at the BYG meetings, was not there, so the eight kids who showed up were glad to listen to Carl Dean. “What have you got to lose?” he asked them. “You don’t even have to come until next Saturday, if you don’t want to, and you can all come together so you won’t feel alone. Listen, you got nothing to do next weekend anyhow. And what if it’s true? What if it really happens? You don’t want to miss out, do you?” They did not! And he reminded them how he was never one to get mixed up in anything crazy, was he? And he told them again how swell all the people were and how, if anybody in town just tried to get the least bit smart with them, they’d take care of them, and then he prayed out loud that they all find the grace in their hearts to be saved in this moment of trial, and with that they agreed to come. Saturday night. Carl Dean said he would get them all the materials they needed, and the girls promised to make the robes. They were very impressed and excited about the robes. He told them that there were many secrets they would learn, and, as a starter, he taught them the secret password and one of Mr. Wosznik’s new songs:

March on! march on, ye Brunists!

March on and fear no loss!

March on beneath thy banner ,

The Circle and the Cross!

In spite of all adversity ,

March out upon that mine!

The Cross within the Circle

Will make the vict’ry thine!

March on! march on, ye Brunists!

Forever shall we live!

The Cross within the Circle

Will us God’s Glory give!

So know ye are the chosen ,

The gold among the dross!

March on beneath thy banner ,

The Circle and the Cross!

And now, marched to the Mount (from their cars at the foot of the hill), standing courageously atop their origins and confronting a hostile world, dressed in pure white tunics embroidered in brown and tied at the waist with brown rope, the Brunists sing around a small campfire.

… Risk not your soul ,

it is precious indeed …

Ben Wosznik, guitar strapped around his neck, wanders tall and melodic among them. How is it that this mournful and uneducated, yet strangely reassuring man can to one be a father, to another a son a brother and lover all in one? Such, one might suspect, are the sort of mysteries that lie at the heart of and propagate all faiths.

… Sinners, hear me, when I say:

Fall down on your knees and pray!

Fearing not the Baxters, for no man with the truth fears, yet unwilling to evoke the Last Battles prematurely, they have left the car lights off, such that the lonely fire dramatizes the fragility of God’s spark in the world of men, and the holy glow that warms their hearts, as their bodies, which they soon will shed, grow cool.

“Oh, Ben!” sighs the widow Betty Wilson. “It’s so lovely!”

To that, amens are heard, and even that austere schoolteacher has two tears that gleam in the corners of her gray eyes.

… I was a stranger there, intent upon my way ,

But when I saw the crowd, I had the urge to stay…

By habit, and perhaps by instinct, they have always gathered near a small lone tree on the Mount, hardly more than a sprout, some distance from the grove of trees down near the mine that surely fathered it. The tree is like another member of their group, so familiar has it become: a promise and a shelter. Now, Dr. Wylie Norton, sitting as always at the edge of the group and nearer therefore to the tree than the others, chances to look up into its young branches and sees what looks like a kind of package up there. He stands, approaches it, peers more circumspectly, and, as he does so, the other members of the group watch him curiously.

He reaches up, grasps something. “That’s odd,” he says softly. The others crowd around. He is holding what seems to be a sort of tag, tied by a string to a bulky object above. He adjusts the glasses on his nose, squints, reads: PULL ME. Rather, he lets go of it, gazes blankly at the others. “What should we do?” he whispers in his tiny voice.

Ben Wosznik strides forward, takes a look at the tag, gives it a yank. There is a soft pop and then hundreds of white feathers cascade gently down upon their heads.

“The White Bird!” cry several women at once.

There is a rustling and whispering down in the grove of trees. The Brunists hastily stamp out the fire and flee to their cars. But before they do so, in spite of an inner certainty that this has been but another in the long succession of harrowing pranks, they gather up all the feathers.

The white bird: image of light and grace and the Holy Spirit, signal, as Eleanor Norton learned upon asking the One to Come, of a new life, another age. Has so radical a wonder ever happened before? Have mortals before been invaded by beings from higher aspected spheres? Or, as a reasonable man might ask: have men, known to be basically so reasonable, ever before anticipated with such unreasonable assurance such unreasonable events, behaved with such unreasonable zeal to obtain such unreasonable ends? A thoughtful question, and the sort that a reasonable man like Mortimer Whimple, the much-harassed public servant of this quiet reasonable little community, might fairly ask. Or Theodore Cavanaugh, that most reasonable businessman, whose cornerstones for the great community are old-fashioned hard work, good will, and common sense. Or a fellow like Vincent Bonali, that good-willed hard worker of incomparable common sense, whose only request is the right to earn a decent wage and live in peace with his fellow citizens. And so another man, until now thought to be reasonable, Justin Miller of the West Condon Chronicle , has presumed to answer them with wild tales (probably invented) of literally hundreds of white bird and Virgin Mary and other spectral visitations; of ecstatics who claimed to be the living incarnation of the Holy Ghost, marrying themselves to statues of the Holy Virgin, consummating it by the nearest available proxy, and substituting their own bathwater for the blood of Christ in the Eucharist; of a multitude of monks and minstrels with their own “messages from the tomb” that led thousands to their enraptured ends; of hermits who shook empires as resurrected kings; of well-to-do folks like you and me who took to whaling themselves with barbed whips and living in nude communion, the editor’s descriptions of which were rather excitingly graphic, and therefore probably obscene; of “third ages,” in short, at least five or ten times a century and literally dozens of times already in this one, the so-called modern or scientific age (the editor’s humorous and belittling references to messianic Marxism did at least seem reasonable to these reasonable West Condoners, if little else the editor wrote about did), with a conclusion on the Saturday before Easter to the general effect that all Christians were, in truth and by definition, as mad as March Hares, proving the editor to be, in the end, the most unreasonable man of all. Which probably explains and excuses the smashing of all the Chronicle windows on the night of Easter Sunday, the black cross swatched on the front door.