Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

The morning does not go well. The ad force returns glumly from futile rounds, reporting they weren’t even allowed in the door most places. Miller encourages them not to worry about it, he anticipated as much, didn’t he? A little patience and things will return to normal. The girls up front, those who remain, receive angry phonecalls canceling subscriptions, but he tells them to accept them gracefully and to arrange for larger bundles to be left at newsstands. No one, he knows, will want to be without the paper, and after it’s all over they will all renew. Without Jones, however, the pressures of the day mount. Miller attempts to gather most of the routine material by phone, but gets almost no response from anyone. Even Dee Romano at the police station hangs up on him.

Just before heading to Fisher’s coffeeshop for breakfast, he hears from Barney Davis: the mine is closed. He banners that instead of the Brunists, but ties it to the Brunist story. At the coffeeshop, he finds Robbins, Elliott, and Cavanaugh already discussing the closing, the word having flown ahead of him. Cavanaugh turns his back as Miller enters. Amuses him. Cavanaugh could be like a little kid playing cops and robbers, getting mad and going home when the others wouldn’t fall dead when shot.

“Highest paid industrial worker in the U.S.,” Robbins is snarling. “If he had any brains, he’d take a cut in pay to keep his goddamn mines open.” Cavanaugh settles into his traditional role of defending the moderate labor movement, Elliott agreeing with everybody. Merest rituals.

“Pecan waffles, Doris,” he says. They turn on him, then turn away.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Robbins is arguing. “I’m not saying the miners don’t deserve good pay and good working conditions. I’m only saying—”

“They don’t deserve good pay and good working conditions,” says Cavanaugh.

“In a lot of ways now, you have to admit, Burt’s right,” Elliott offers by way of mediation. Right is right: he’s a goddamn fascist. And so on. Over and over. “Coalmining is a marginal business these days, and the union has pretty much brought on itself the closing down of so many.”

Traditionally now, it is his, the expert’s line: “That and dieselization of the railroads and strip-mining and the profit motive and the rising cost of machinery and underground gasification and rulings on—”

“Hark ye,” interrupts Robbins, “to the white turd!” Not even much laughter. It is, from their end of the counter, all too true. Well, anyway, they’re reading his newspaper. And, in spite of their anger, in spite of his battered plant and decimated force, even in spite of his breakup with Marcella, Miller feels oddly pleased with himself. He has not, by God, been assimilated.

There is an awkward silence then, and something seems to be missing. Puzzles Miller for a moment. Then he realizes it is Jones’ absence. At just such moments, Jones would always grunt, cueing the others to amused attention. Time for a story. Most likely horrible, for Jones was horrible, horrible but decorated with a deathly humor, for Jones was also funny. The Father. A reservoir of gaudy misery, he collected horror like others collect stamps. And he never failed to get them. They always attended when Papa Jones cast his bloody pearls. Now, without him, they stand, exit as a group.

“Where’s Wally this morning?” Miller asks Doris, who has just cleaned the crud off the grill with a dishcloth which she is now using to dry a few coffee cups.

“Who, the boss?” She arches one penciled brow, loose-wristedly flaps a palm at him. “Spent the night on the Legion floor. Can’t walk, can’t turn his neck, can’t talk, he’s in a hell of a mess! When I seen him coming down the street like that, I thought, oh-oh! Doris, old girl, you better take the day off! But you know what?”

“What?”

“He come in giggling like a idiot!” Doris whirs one index finger around her ear. “Now he’s upstairs sleeping it off.”

A couple East Condoners enter the coffeeshop, take stools at the other end of the counter from him. Look at first like newsmen, but they turn out to be salesmen passing through. Newspapers — including his Saturday night edition — rattle, eggs sizzle and pop on the grill, coffee cups clank. The salesmen kid with Doris and the one reading the Chronicle asks if she’s ready to meet her Maker.

“Which maker?” she retorts flatly, hand on grease-stained hip. “I been made by so many, I wouldn’t know one from the other.”

The salesmen whoop at that. Even Doris grins as she flops the eggs to platters, glances over at Miller and winks. And now, treated to this classic, they will travel and the word will be carried. Miller grins at that, as Doris turns, flips up the top of the waffle iron. Sloppy as she is, she never misses the moment: they’re always golden brown.

Miller receives them. “A blessing, Doris!” he praises, pouring syrup. “You’re a goddamn saint!”

The Brunist Mrs. Betty Wilson is waiting for him on his return to the office, posted plumply and skittishly in the chair by his desk, and her news depresses him deeply: Giovanni Bruno seems much stronger now, it’s almost like he’s suddenly come alive, but his sister, she says, hasn’t eaten a bite or said a word for nigh on a week now, and she seems, well, a bit strange. “Sometimes she don’t even, even take care of herself, Mr. Miller. But nobody blames you, Mr. Miller. Leastways, not me or Clara or Wanda or Mary. We know they’s more to it than meets the eye.” What met the eye was Marcella arriving hysterical and more or less stripped.

“Thanks, Mrs. Wilson. You’re quite right.”

“Clara is jist tearin’ up the countryside, Mr. Miller, and now Ben Wosznik he’s helpin’ her, you remember Ben. Oh, the most terrible thing! Last Friday, the very day they crucified Christ Jesus, why, a whole buncha men come and beat up poor Ben, yes, that there Mr. Cavanaugh and Mr. Bonali and a whole buncha them fellas. And they drug poor Mary Harlowe right outa her own house and like to kidnap her little children, it was jist awful! They come to the Halls’ place, too, I seen them, but Mabel she didn’t let them in, and that’s jist a good thing she didn’t! And now Ben and Clara, why, they’re lookin’ for more folks to come next weekend and Clara she’s very optimistic. Of course, you know how she is, Mr. Miller. And that Palmers boy, he’s got seven or eight new members somewheres, though of course them young ones hardly ever stays on.”

All good stuff. Miller gets more details on the Common Sense visits, then he tips her, and the woman leaves. Irresistibly, he opens his desk drawer, takes out Jones’ photos. There you are, he says: the Tiger. Look at her face. Jones caught it all. Well, she’s mad, he tells himself, and it was she, staking too much on a thin fantasy, who broke herself; he was little more than the accidental instrument … his audience, however, remains unconvinced. Conscience, he knows, is merely instinct socialized into guilt— Can one, knowing this, still fall prey to it? Yes, concludes this man much given to this sort of theorizing, another flaw in the evolution of mind. He dumps the photos back in the drawer, realizing the whole thing is starting to make him sick.

Then, like an act of grace, there appears in his morning mail, a black-bordered envelope.

One day during the Last Judgment proceedings, there appeared before the Judge a prophet and his beautiful sister. Aha! said the Judge to the prophet: I believe I know you! Yes, smiled the prophet with modest pride: I foretold your coming. How could you have done such a thing, asked the Judge: when I didn’t even know myself? Perhaps there is another, replied the prophet with a sly inscrutable wink over the Judge’s shoulder: yet greater than either of us. Hmmm, said the Judge, considering that: yet it seems improbable. What is probability in a universe such as ours? asked the prophet. I don’t know, I guess I was just a born skeptic, said the Judge with a wry knowing smile: But now what am I to do with you? I suppose you want to go to Heaven. Well, uh, no, Your Honor, replied the prophet: if you don’t mind, I’d rather like — hee hee — to be put in charge of Hell. Hah! good boy! said the Judge: It’s done! When, however, the Supreme Judge asked the prophet’s sister, whose beauty might have weakened any lesser Judge, she opted for Heaven .