Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Well, not in his van he didn’t. That got left behind. People set it on fire.”

“They burned his car?”

“Everyone was pretty upset. Ben was the maddest I ever saw. He didn’t raise his voice. He just got his gun and started laying the law down. The sheriff came, too. And Mr. Suggs. Reverend Baxter and his family and most all his friends got kicked out.”

“But what did they have to do with it?”

“Well, two of the bikers are sons of his, and the other one was somehow mixed up in it too. They found him near-naked with his face all cut up. He was…”

“Was what?”

“Nothing.”

He has set the spoon down. His hands are shaking. She reaches across the table to hold them for a minute. “Was what, Billy Don?” she whispers.

“He was wearing her underpants. He’d…he’d taken them off her… when…”

Cretin: 1779, from Fr. Alpine dialect crestin , “a dwarfed and deformed idiot,” from V.L. christianus , “a Christian,” a generic term for “anyone,” but often with a sense of “poor fellow.” The word Christian itself was not used in English until 1526. Good name for her Wizards in the woods. But the Castle is full of cretins, too. An internecine battle. Which in the time of knights and castles didn’t mean an internal struggle within a group. It meant simply murderous, fought to the death. Characterized by bloodshed and carnage, a great slaughter. The Castle and the Wizards aren’t there yet, but give them time.

All history as the history of language. A pathology of sorts.

Here’s one for Tommy. There’s an Australian myth in which the Primal Father swallows a lump of sago and shits it back unchanged, the turd then turning into a pig, which the Father names after himself. Look at me! I did this! The people hunt the shit-pig, which by now is confused with the Father, and the youngest son shoots and kills it. But then it’s resurrected for a time, God is great, and it goes around opening women’s pudenda and teaching people how to fuck. Who knows where the youngest son came from. Then the shit-pig dies again and people cut its flesh up and preserve it as “strong medicine.” Some places have strips of dried human flesh they say are relics of the pig-father’s body. Used for faith healing. No new religions, only heresies.

And where were you when the Incarnation hit the fan?

Humor does not displace the terror or hide it from us, but it deflects its immobilizing power. It says here.

Billy Don’s story has left her shaken. She would like to do something about it, but she doesn’t know what. This is all she can do. Write stupidities to herself. It’s a kind of masturbation. Which, come to think of it, is a better idea. To be continued…

Sally is sitting in an old-fashioned oak swivel chair in what was once, she’s been told, the West Condon Chronicle job room. Now it’s used mainly for storage, including the newspaper archives, mostly unsorted. The print shop itself, job press and all — all that remains of the West Condon publishing industry — has been moved into the former editorial offices, where there are windows. They look bleakly out on a broken asphalt parking lot and the ruined backside of the old hotel, but they look out. This room, lit only by a flickering fluorescent, is a win-dowless storehouse of dusty old typewriters and telephones and other nameless junk, stuffed filing cabinets, stacked unlabeled boxes, and piles and piles of moldering paper, including yellowing newspapers and dimming photographs, one small stack now her own. The very disorder has helped Sally find some of what she has been looking for, the breakdown of the filing system having obviously worsened near the end — and then, once out of hospital, the editor himself was soon gone without, apparently, looking back, so whatever was left in the closed front offices just got dumped in here, helter-skelter. Thus, the more random the confusion, the more likely she is to find material related to the events of those tumultuous final days, almost as though, after the damp fizzle of the grand finale, that tumult shrank back into these stacks and continues to roil them.

Her medieval history class at college met early on Monday mornings, much to everyone’s disgust, so she chose this post-Pentecostal one for her visit to the old newspaper plant in pursuit of what she described to the funny little toothbrush-mustachioed guy running the print shop as “thesis research.” She remembers him vaguely as a teacher and some kind of coach at the high school. His current commission: a two-color mailbox stuffer outlining the goals of the New Opportunities for West Condon citizens committee, which he showed off proudly. He took her on a brief tour of the newspaper press and composing rooms at the back with their typesetting machines and antique flatbed press and soot-blackened windows and ancient Coke machine, the dusty concrete floor littered still with lead slugs (she pocketed one), then ushered her into this old job room, pulled on the lights from a dangling string, and clearing it of piled-up binders and ledgers, offered her the leather sofa. She said no — too quickly. She knows where she is. She’s not superstitious, but if she were, she would have said it feels haunted. This whole boneyard of a room does, but especially that sofa.

The first thing she has come on in here is a large stack of the last issue of the paper. Last ever. April 18. The Saturday before the End. Monday didn’t happen here. History stopped, just like the cultists said it would. Huge two-line banner: WE SHALL GATHER AT THE MOUNT OF REDEMPTION! The Brunist evangel to be shipped to the world. It’s mostly a photo essay, as if it were by now all beyond words, or else the editor ran out of things to say. Her dad’s in one of the pictures, standing alongside Tommy’s father, some preachers, and Angela’s father, who was apparently something of a bigwig at the time in what was called the Common Sense Committee. NOWC père. Plus all the cultic stuff of prophecies and song lyrics and relics and doctrines, interviews, letters to the editor. Funny one from an old lady in her nineties who said she was getting a slip from the doctor to explain why she couldn’t make it out to the Mount and giving her phone number. If something started to happen, they could give her a call and she’d ring a taxi.

She has dug around and come up with all the earlier issues back to the April 8 special edition, the one that first broke the news about the cult and created such a furor: BRUNISTS PROPHESY END OF WORLD! across all eight front-page columns. Amazing horror-flick pic of a charred black hand. The Prophet in a contrasty iconic mug shot. Photos of helmeted coalminers. The mine hill with nobody on it. The burned ruins of a house. Squibs about other cults used as filler. The editor was clearly fascinated, as is she, by the long, weird, and often violent history of apocalyptic movements, nowadays known euphemistically as evangelical or fundamentalist churches, and there’s something in every issue, published without comment almost like contemporary news items: tales of millennialists, crusaders, ecstatics, flagellants, flat earthers and faith healers, naked adamists, hermits declaring themselves resurrected kings or sons of God, mystics, martyrs, messiahs, priestly rapists, ritualistic cannibals, visionaries (miraculous white birds flock past with the seasons), and other mythomaniacal eccentrics and criminals of the cloth. But also those who resisted these fantasies and the dire consequences they suffered, beheading the least of it. She sometimes thinks of herself as standing alone, breaking new ground. It’s easy to forget that atheism is as old as theism. And that the ratios haven’t changed much. Nor the power structure. According to the articles, end of the world gatherings seem to have happened several times a year over the centuries — some ending tragically, most comically. She learns, without surprise, that the Rapture idea was never mentioned in the Bible or in ancient times but was invented by a couple of religious charlatans in the middle of the nineteenth century and sold to suckers ever since. The Chronicle editor was obviously an atheist: to what extent was he St.-Pauling this crazy cult into a worldwide church with his deadpan epistles? Over her shoulder the Lutheran minister smiles, puffing on his pipe: God the Engineer at it again.