Robert Coover - Origin of the Brunists

White dove will mourn in sorrow ,

And the willows bow down their heads ,

I live my life in sorrow ,

Since Mother and Daddy are dea-ea-ead!

Sooner or later, in a sad, a terrible, yet also beautiful moment, they will have to talk about religion, that impossible thing, bigger than both of them, cruel to their love, her Catholicism and his Protestantism, and, after that, sooner or later, they will have to tear themselves apart. Forever. Tears spring to the edges of his eyes. There are tears in her eyes, too, and he wonders if her thoughts are the same as his. “I love you,” he says. He kisses her long and tenderly, tragically, and though her whole body is available to him, his embrace is chaste and gentle, a promise of his eternal care for her. So beautiful is she, so virginal, so his … his white dove …

As the years roll by I often wonder ,

Will we all be together some day?

And each night as I wander through the graveyard ,

Darkness hides me where I kneel to pray!

White dove will mourn in sorrow…

Sainthood, ultimately, is a rising above — not only God — but the Destroyer as well. Saint Rahim, rigid, hungry, but supremely at one with the All, stares meditatively in front of him at springs and the red and blue stripes of a cotton mattress. Illusion at moments of remarkable distance. A great calm. Through discipline to pattern. Distantly, a toilet lid clunks carelessly against the enameled tank. Like a bell in the mind. Shattering of peace, but still the perception of pattern. Again — as always — his childhood washes over and through him here, like an infusion of raw guilt, imprecise as ever in the imagery it calls up, yet piercing in the accuracy of emotions aroused. Panic! This dust—! He twists, squirms, chokes. Then it passes. He sighs. In truth, he feels better just now than he has felt all day, his second to go without food. Just six more days, and they say it gets easier after the third day. He believes he can make it. Abstractly, he worries about his cats. They have also been subjected to a fast, but he is not certain they will survive the week. Except for Nyx. Nyx will survive. He smiles.

Water running. Door hinges revolving. He turns his head, watches her bare feet pad wearily across the wooden floor. Poor dear child! She is very weak. He would give up speech, too, but cannot afford it, not even for her sake. He needs every word at his command to keep the others from faltering. God! he cannot stand alone! She arrives at the bed, pauses. She has forgotten to turn out the light. An urge to kiss her small toes — just a foot from his face — leaps to his lips, but he overmasters it. Discipline is his greatest virtue. She curls a toe. Oh God! He starts to cry, clamps his hand between his teeth, bites down with all his strength. She turns toward the door, hesitating, as though measuring the distance. Then, mechanically, her small feet, under the hem of her tunic, pad back to the door. The light goes off. She no longer troubles to put the hook.

Almost before he realizes it, her feet are near his face again. God! catches his breath, holds himself rigid. At last, she enters the bed. The mattress hardly sinks below her weight now, so thin is she. He reaches up, strokes the gentle depression. Calm returns. He waits for her to sleep. The perfect man is the motionless cause.

The news of the mine closing broke on Monday and Sal Ferrero came by Tuesday morning, the fourteenth. Vince was up on the ladder. He had stirred up the old paint, was just putting a new coat over the patch he’d started on the south side nearly a month before. He knew what Sal wanted to talk about, so he hooked the bucket on the top of the ladder, crawled down. They had known it was coming, everybody had known it for weeks, but still it had hit them hard. “It’s awful,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief, wiped the paint off his hands.

“It’s a real blow, Vince.”

“I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do.” He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, shaking his head thoughtfully. “Care for a beer, Sal?”

Sal looked at his watch. Poor guy seemed lost. “Pretty early,” he said. “But, hell, okay.” They walked up on the porch, Vince’s four-fingered hand clapped on Sal’s narrow shoulders.

“How about a couple beers, chicken?” Vince called in through the screen door. They eased themselves into chairs like tired old beat-up men. Vince fumbled in his pocket, found a half-smoked cigar butt, stuck it in his cheeks. “Well, goddamn it, I knew they’d do it, Sal.”

“I know.” He sighed, pulling one big ear absently. Looking at his old friend closely, Vince saw for the first time that Sal was getting to be an old man.

Etta came out with the beers, but today there wasn’t any of the usual kidding around. Sal and Etta looked at each other, shook their heads in troubled silence, and she went back in. Last night, she cried for over an hour; in fact, she’d hardly stopped crying since Charlie pulled out without a word Sunday afternoon. She was some better today, but still pretty glum.

“Well,” said Sal, sipping at the beer, “I suppose they did what they had to do.”

“I tell you what they had to do, Sal. They had to think about us, the people of this community, that’s what they by God had to do! Instead of fretting how much they were gonna suck outa here — no, Sal, they ain’t no excuse! It’s high time we started fighting back!”

Sal nodded. Poor guy was really down in the dumps. Vince felt bad, but somehow not as bad as he probably ought to.

“Sure leaves us high and dry, Vince.”

“You said it — and now with all this Brunist shit — Jesus!”

“Sure is getting wild, all right.”

“Wild ain’t the word. Did you see that story Tiger published last night about them people who got together naked and whipped themselves all bloody, and how they got ahold of some little virgin girl and made a big mess outa her?”

“No, I musta missed that. I hardly noticed anything except about the mine closing.”

“Well, there was a white bird in this story, too, or maybe they called themselves a ‘White Dove Gang’ or something, but the awful thing was how they take this girl and tell her she is the Mother of God, see, and they strip her naked and spread her on the altar.” All the while Vince read it, he kept seeing his daughter Angie there, and it made him so mad he wanted to cry. “Then they have a big ceremony and everybody whips her and screws her, just a little virgin, see, who doesn’t know what’s happening.”

“That’s pretty awful, Vince.”

“Wait! You ain’t heard the worst! If she gets knocked up, they strip her again and stick her in a barrel of water. Then they chop off the little kid’s left tit and close up the bloody goddamn hole with a hot iron!”

“Jesus Christ! You mean this was in the newspaper?”

“I’m telling you, Sal! But the point is, they chop this tit up and eat it, see, just like it was the Host—”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Wait! That’s not all! If she has a boy, why, they say that this is the Savior, and they take this little newborn baby and they stab it and drink its blood. Then they dry up the body and beat it to powder, and, Sal, they make bread outa that powder and they eat that, too!”

“Have you still got that paper?”

“Sure, I saved it.”

“But you mean these Brunist people are doing things like that? Why, that’s horrible, Vince! I didn’t realize—”

“Well, this wasn’t the Brunists, this was some people in Russia a hundred years or so ago, but the point is, like Miller is virtually saying, Sal, in the end, they’re all the same.”