Robert Coover: Origin of the Brunists

Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. What did he really expect? The Final Judgment, perhaps. Something, certainly, of importance. What he did not expect was to find himself standing on the night of Saturday the eighteenth — the Night, as it turned out, of the Sacrifice — in a ditch alongside the old road to Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, watching a young girl die. He had been prepared, as only a man of great but simple faith can be prepared, for profound and terrifying events, but he had not been prepared for that. He couldn’t even remember much of it later on, so squeezed had his mind been by plain awe. The crowd all came out of their cars and stood around, some up on the lip of the ditch, others, like himself, down near the girl, down where the long grass threw black spiked shadows. Some stared as though not seeing her. Some wept hysterically, knelt to pray. None, surely, were unmoved. He recalled seeing Mrs. Eleanor Norton at one point lying in the roadway as though dead, her husband fanning her desperately with the hem of his white tunic. Yes, oddly, Hiram retained that pointless detail: Dr. Norton’s fat knees planted painfully in the ruts and cinders of the old mine road, revealed like a secret signal with every flap of the tunic hem. But the rest of it remained forever obscure to him, lost in the mad crisscross of headlight beams, a dreamlike conjuring of happenings that whirled in a fantastical circle with neither beginning nor end.

They had anticipated, on arriving that afternoon at the home of the coalminer-visionary Giovanni Bruno, a small group of believers, such as they had seen witnessing on television, but they encountered instead literally hundreds of people milling about. At least half of them, Hiram noted, were newspaper, radio, and television people: many cameras, much light, an unbelievable excitement. He went looking immediately for Sister Clara, found her speaking animatedly with a group of people, like himself dressed in streetclothes, yet with the unmistakable quality of the Church of the Nazarene about them. “Sister Clara!”

“Brother Hiram!” Clara cried, and hurried toward him to take his hand in both of hers. “How wonderful! You’ve come!”

“Yes, after all you told me, Sister Clara, I could hardly stay away.”

She introduced him to the group, friends of the faith from New Bridgeport. Hiram had never seen Clara so inspirited. She spoke glowingly of all their plans, of all the wonderful people who had answered the call, of this great moment that was gloriously upon them. Hiram, in turn, told her he had brought five persons with him, including his wife Emma.

“Well, we still don’t have tunics for everybody,” Clara said. “We plain didn’t expect so many folks, Hiram. But I can give you two now for you and Emma, and maybe we’ll get enough more done by tomorrow for the rest.” She led him to a bedroom close by and presented him with the tunics, took a moment to explain some of the marvelous things that had transpired in that room, that very room, in the turbulent fourteen weeks just past.

“It is so … so humble, Sister Clara,” Hiram remarked. “So appropriate.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “This house has been like our second home.” She paused, her strong face sunk for a moment in memory and grief. “I lost my own home, you know, mine and Ely’s.”

“Yes, so you told me. And yet it is, as you yourself said, Sister Clara, but one more sign among the many, one more assurance in the contest with doubt.”

“Yes, but I got to admit, it hurt me, Hiram.”

“It would have hurt any of us, Clara. You have borne the strain of these awesome months like a true saint.” She did not reply, seemed absorbed in her own thoughts. “These tunics, do we just put them on over our—?”

“No, but see Ben about that. He’ll direct you where to change and all.”

And so then he led Clara over to where Emma and the others were waiting. He was deeply impressed, observing the widow Clara Collins. She stood so tall in her tunic, so strong and self-possessed. He had heard her speak on other occasions at tent meetings and in company with Brother Ely, but always then in that great man’s shadow, and he had never before observed such eloquence in her, such candid poise, such great personal magnetism and contained power; she was as though possessed by the Holy Spirit Itself — and, indeed, was this not precisely the case?

More of Clara’s friends arrived, groups from Wilmer and Tucker City and a couple from Daviston, distracting her once more. She pointed toward where Brother Ben Wosznik could be found, and Hiram led his people over there, explaining elements of the movement as he understood them. Ben greeted them warmly, recognizing Hiram and Emma from his visit with Clara the previous Monday, and calling them by their first names. He informed them of the regulation regarding the wearing of only white garments under the tunics, and shepherded them upstairs to show them where the bathroom was. On the way, he interpreted for them the meaning of the design on the tunic, the cross that turned out to be a sort of coalminer’s pick, the enclosing circle, the use of the color scheme of brown upon white, and they talked about their expectations of the Coming of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Light. As for the wearing of white underneath, he said that one of their members had gone to town this very afternoon to purchase a wide assortment of white underclothing for those who, in understandable ignorance, might have come without. Hiram had liked Ben immediately, upon the very first encounter, and now, climbing the narrow staircase in this strange house, below him a most strange and disturbing excitement, confronting the strangest event in Hiram Clegg’s life, he all but loved the man. Ben Wosznik breathed humility, compassion, loyalty, warmth. Wherever Clara Collins and Ben Wosznik are, Hiram thought that moment, there I belong.

Hiram, suffering from a mild seasonable cold, had dressed that morning in his old white longjohns, though the spring weather hardly called for it, and now he was glad that he had done so. The tunics were lightweight and it was easy to get a chill. Emma, on the other hand, was wearing her black brassiere, and the other articles were pink. “I feel so undressed, Hiram,” she confessed, once into the tunic and the underthings removed. Her breath still came quickly, irregularly, as a result of the climb upstairs, poor woman — her weight had become a severe problem to her these last years.

“I’ll try to find some things for you,” Hiram said. “I certainly don’t want you to have any pulmonary problems now, just at a time like this!”

“Oh, now, don’t worry, Hiram.” She smiled, panting a little. “It’s not the exertion, it’s the excitement.” And that was true. All that day and the next, it seemed impossible for Emma to catch her breath, even while sitting quietly.

Ben showed them where to hang their clothes, and they descended then, all together, returning to the turbulent event, and now to the very heart of it, for by their tunics they had announced their commitment. Ben led them to the altar, where, surrounded by such relics as white chicken feathers, the Black Hand of Persecution, a Mother Mary with her heart exposed on her breast, and, in a gilt frame, the famous death message of the beloved Ely Collins, the teacher Mrs.