Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

The early morning light is leaking through the thick overcast sky. The camp will be stirring soon, but there’s still time to swing by the lodge on his way out to make himself a couple of sandwiches from the camp kitchen. His week’s wages, so to speak, well earned. When he turns off the motor and steps out of the van, he is struck by the moist dead quiet all around him, and it takes him back to Sunday mornings here at church camp all those years ago, when he’d rise before everyone else and walk into the more remote regions of the grounds to commune directly with God or nature or just with himself as he was then, green and hopeful. Suck up the morning dew. Jerk off. Deep into the summer, there’d be the sweet smell of vegetal decay, the ground hard underfoot, the promise of a hot sun; now it’s softer and denser than that, the greens brighter against the creosoted cedar cabins, even in the gray light — or because of it. There were no postlamps or phone lines then. Looks almost like a small mountain village now, nestled in the trees like something out of a storybook. The minister’s wife has planted a flower garden in front of the cabin next to the lodge that she and Colin are using and it’s in full flower, and there are other sprinkles of color in the high grass, mostly the yellows and whites and pale blues of flowering weeds, which he’s running through now, not knowing when he started, his heart pounding, a cry, a scream, shredding the silence, sounded like his name, his old one, the one she knows him by, racing past the cabins into the wet valley beyond, over tree roots and fallen branches, slashing through the shadowed ferns and sedges at the edge of the creek and splashing down into it in a single bound, stumbling on the stones there, turning his ankle, dropping to his knees in the water, everything slowing down, seeming to, his movements thickening as if in a dream, a terrified yowling, but pressing on, scrambling laboriously up the other side through the shrubs and brambles, losing his footing and sliding back down, clambering up on all fours, headed, he knows now, for that wild place where he used to spy on the minister’s wife, the patch of meadow in the woods, where he can hear voices, stifled laughter, tearing through the thorny forest undergrowth, crashing at last into the clearing, where he expects to find his old nem esis Junior Baxter, and does, but not as imagined, two guys in leather pinning him down on his back, that wild-eyed loudmouth biker and a fierce burrhead, orange fuzz on top, must be Junior’s kid brother, their knives out — are they killing him? — Junior gagged with the biker’s blue dew rag, naked but for what look like girls’ cotton panties stretched over his fat gut, his face bloody, mouth agape, maybe already dead, no sign of Elaine but a scatter of tunics that makes his heart sink, the biker and Junior’s brother rising to meet him, and then he hears her, or hears something, sees her, must be her, a pale naked thing back in the trees, two other guys rushing out from there, the spic and an older guy, blades flashing in their fists, it’s the fucker who set the fuzz on Face, cries the wild-eyed one crouched over Junior, and he knows that to get to Elaine he will have to go through them. His handgun’s back in the van. All he has are his fists. Nothing to do but meet what comes next…

Debra has left her panties in the woods but there’s no going back to get them now. No going back there ever. It was her favorite place in the world, but she is afraid of it now. She sits in her nursing chair with the slashed velvet seat cuddling a distraught Colin, trying to stop her own crying because she knows it makes him cry, wishing she could seal up this cabin and never leave it. Debra has always been known for her cheerful optimism — Wesley himself used to say she came right out of a Hollywood movie — and even when times were difficult she could always see the positive side, but now she feels utterly destroyed, sunk in that slough of despond she once read about in a book in college and didn’t really understand. In fact, it was just a joke — Wesley’s joke, really. Let poor Christian Pilgrim into your slough of despond, he would whisper, back when he would still whisper such things and do such things, turning it into just a wet sticky place, not a dreadful condition of the soul. Such a place as cannot be mended, the book said: the joke after her hymen broke, thought funny then, terrifying now. An abyss has opened up and nothing is funny. Colin has stopped sobbing but is still trembling like a frightened rabbit, like the little bunny she once had as a child, the one her mother said died of too much loving, and she strokes his silky hair and presses his head against her bosom, which always calms him, trying, as her own tears flow, not to let her chest heave and set him off again.

The day had begun so peacefully, well before dawn. Her worries — about money (it is all gone), about the threat of having to leave their cabin, about Colin’s daily ups and downs and the personal conflicts in the camp which upset him so — had seemed to drop away and a great contentment stole over her, as often happens when she is close to nature, which for Debra is the same thing as being close to God. The sky was overcast. There was no moon and the streetlamps had been turned off at midnight. She felt invisible as she slipped past the cabins and down through Bluebell Valley accompanied only by birdsong, the ground soft underfoot from the recent rain and the padding of long grasses. Instead of crossing the creek by one of the wooden bridges, she decided to take off her sandals and wade over, her toes and the soles of her feet scouting the rocky bed before taking each step like little prowling animals nibbling at the unseen stones. It was deeper than usual and there was an arousing rush of current against her ankles. She paused in the middle, and gathering up her skirt, knelt to scoop up a palmful of water, sipping a drop or two, then washing her face with the dampness that remained, feeling like an ancient priestess performing her holy ablutions. She prayed simply that nothing ever change, her prayer directed to the tender night more than to any being, then stepped on across and slipped her sandals on again. There was a small incline on the other side, and though it was pitch black in there under the trees, she seemed to know exactly where to plant each foot, and she felt full of grace as she rose up it.

She avoided the clearing, partly because the two young people sometimes came there, or used to before that strange ugly man who so frightened Colin turned up, and though she disapproved of their behavior, she did not want to seem to interfere with it, circling around through the trees until she found a little patch of pine needles behind some bushes where she could squat for her morning pee. Which she has always thought of, when able to avoid the suffocating outhouse and steal over to her private garden among the waking birds, as one of the most sacred moments of her day. Not the most Presbyterian of sacraments, but she loves it all the more for that very reason. She has sometimes gone there just as dawn was breaking, the sun’s rays slanting gloriously through the thick trees then as though the divinity were joining her there in a kind of blessing. For fear of alarming the other campers, though she is not at all shy, she is forced to do this on the sly. But in the old days, between camping sessions, when the place was empty, depending on whether or not it was the mosquito season, she often wore no clothes at all around the camp, squatting whenever and wherever she felt like, bathing in the creek, sunning in the small meadow or even amid the bluebells and wildflowers next to the access road or right in front of the lodge on the patch of lawn there, putting her body in God’s hands. And sometimes she didn’t even care about the mosquitoes, accepting their stings like little love bites. The camp has never had a serious tick problem, though there is always a risk, adding an edge of danger to these excursions. People think that ticks drop from the trees, but actually they stay close to the ground and latch on from below. She did once get one and she had to bend over so Wesley could pull it out. He was so squeamish. Finally she had to bat his hand away and do it herself.