Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Babs and her friends have stopped lifeguard Tommy to ask him when the pool will open. Memorial Day weekend, everyone knows that, it’s just a ploy to get his attention. It works. Maybe she has underestimated the lure of Babs’ boobs. One of the girls drags a chair over and Tommy joins them. Babs glances over at her. Someone laughs. A schoolgirl titter. Who’s going to pay for these drinks? she asks herself, rising. She’s not.

“She was dreaming that she was playing tag with other children. I didn’t exactly recognize none of them, but you know how it is in dreams — especially someone else’s dream. I was one of the other children and I almost hardly didn’t recognize myself. Whenever she tagged someone, they fell down dead. Really dead. Their flesh melting off. I didn’t run away, the one who was me. I said I wanted to be tagged, but she couldn’t do it. She said that wasn’t the way the game was played. If I didn’t run, I couldn’t be caught. Only it was like I was saying that to the person who was me, and I was impatient that she — I mean, me — didn’t get it.” The country and western singer Patti Jo Glover is telling them the dream that Marcella Bruno dreamt one night inside her own dream. Everyone in Mabel Hall’s caravan sitting room is completely spellbound. Lucy Smith has never heard anything like it before, but the way Patti Jo tells it, it seems completely natural. Thelma Coates is sitting across from her and her jaw has literally dropped. Her bottom teeth are showing. Thelma had said she could only stay ten minutes, but it has already been much longer than that. Her husband Roy has forbidden her to come here, so what she does is hurry up her grocery shopping and dash by on the way home, hoping word doesn’t get back to Roy. He’s a mean man. She has a dark bruise on her cheekbone, and she probably didn’t get that by bumping into something. Lucy’s husband Calvin, who was upset at the way Reverend Baxter and his family were made to go out and live in the fields like animals, would also rather she stayed away from these people, but she always has lots of things to tell him when she gets home and he appreciates that, so he has not put his foot down. He only scowls when she brings him the news, even when it’s funny, to let her know he doesn’t really approve. When they first got married and she did things he didn’t want her to do, he would turn her across his knee and spank her, and though it hurt and sometimes made her cry, it was also kind of fun and often ended better than it began. After a while he stopped doing that, but he can still be pretty severe and occasionally lashes out in a fit of temper that’s not fun at all, though he always apologizes afterwards and they pray together, and when she asks him if he loves her, he says yes.

“Then everything changed,” Patti Jo says. “She was still dreaming and she was still in my dream, but I wasn’t in hers anymore. A man was. I could feel how happy she was at seeing him, and I wondered if it was Jesus she was seeing, but I don’t think it was. For one thing, he didn’t have clothes on and you could see everything and that didn’t seem like something Jesus would do, even in a dream. He was standing in water, or else he stepped into it, and although I was enjoying her dream without thinking too much about it, I could feel Marcella begin to worry. The man dipped his hands in the water, like as if to baptize himself or her or someone, and when he raised them, they weren’t there anymore, just the parts of his arms that hadn’t touched the water. And then I started to worry on top of Marcella’s worrying. The man stepped deeper in the water, or else the water rose up, and you just knew he was losing parts of himself. The business between his legs dipped into the water and when the water went away for a tick you could see that half of it was gone just like you drew a line through. The water got deeper, or else he sank into it, until there was only his head on top. He closed his eyes and his mouth gapped opened and the head floated away like that. And then Marcella woke up crying and I woke up crying.”

There is a moment of absolute silence as they all watch that floating head, and then Thelma Coates puts her jaws back together and says, “That man musta been that newspaper feller.”

“Or else her brother,” says the beauty shop lady Linda Catter. “I mean, if all she felt was just only happiness, and not, you know…”

Bernice Filbert says it was like a dream of wasting away with only the head remaining like a kind of blind repository for the soul, what you might call a rapturing by water instead of by air, and it may be the sort of experience the Prophet’s sister had when she died or else what she was afraid of. It’s always interesting what Bernice wears, and today it’s a one-piece dress that looks like it might have been made out of an old thin blanket, hanging loose in front for carrying things — the sort of thing women might wear in the field when they’re gathering — with a sash around the waist and a scarf over her head.

“Losin’ his hands like that,” says Hazel Dunlevy, the palm reader, “that man in the water, whoever he is, it’s like as if he’s losin’ his future, and I reckon that’s how it turned out.”

“But in dreams things are always the opposite from what they seem, aren’t they?” Lucy reminds them. “So, maybe he’s finding his future. Though it’s not like it’s a happy ending. Unless that’s an opposite too. Crying meaning like she’s really laughing, I mean.”

“In some dreams that’s true,” says Mabel gravely, looking down upon them. “And in some it’s not.”

The others nod solemnly at this, and Hazel says: “As fer a naked man bein’ Jesus, though, accordin’ to what Glenda says, Jesus often takes his clothes off in people’s dreams. Sometimes it’s more like a halo down there and that’s bad news, and sometimes it’s only ordinary, like as he’s one of us again, and that’s good news. If Jesus makes love to you in a dream, she says, that’s the best news of all.”

“Well, I hope that never happens,” says Corinne Appleby flatly. She rarely speaks at all, but when she does it’s deadpan and straight out and always makes everybody smile.

“I guess we need Glenda here to explain it,” Lucy says with a sigh. Glenda Oakes is watching the children, including Lucy’s own, taking them on a nature walk along the creek bed to the beehives and vegetable garden and back, though she’ll switch with Hazel and join them later when Mrs. Edwards arrives, because Glenda is the dream expert and Mrs. Edwards wants some help understanding her boy’s nightmares.

“Actually, I told Glenda my dream of Marcella dreaming,” Patti Jo says, “and she said possibly it was an old dream Marcella dreamt when she was still alive and she was only remembering it. But it didn’t feel like remembering, it felt like it was happening right then for the first time. ‘Well, how do we know what remembering is like for the dead?’ Glenda said. ‘It might be like dreaming.’ She said that a head without a body could mean that Marcella no longer saw that person like she saw him before, so, if the man was Jesus or her brother, it could be saying she was losing her faith, and for that matter the naked man could have been both Jesus and her brother at the same time and others as well and not only men. Maybe her haunting days were ending and the man was just everybody, the head floating away signifying her own growing distance from this world, and she was crying about that. But Glenda said she couldn’t be sure. She’d never interpreted the dream of a dead person before.”

Everybody has an opinion about this, mostly having to do with the difference between a live dreamer and a dead one, all of which pretty soon has Lucy completely beflummoxed. Ludie Belle interrupts all these airy speculations by saying that what she wants to know is what the niggles atwixt his legs looked like before they got melted, and Wanda Cravens asks: “Why? Y’reckon y’mighta reckanized them?” This is quite rude and embarrassing, but her friend Wanda isn’t really clever enough to be rude, it’s just something that popped out, and maybe others are thinking it as well, and it’s hard not to start giggling. But Ludie Belle only winks and says: “I was, you know, only wondrin’ bout it bein’ circumscissored or not, like as it might be a clue to who it was.”