Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

The revelation was sudden and explosive. Almost as though the floor were heaving. Wesley flung off the robe and lurched to the bathroom, where he emptied out violently at both ends, adding to the mess in there and to his despair — a thorough purging, his quaking gut gushing out as did Judas’ bowels. As he sat there, letting it rip like the tearing of a veil, he thought of this immediate ordeal, somewhat hopefully, as ridding himself of the invasive Godson, but in fact it was only the debris he expelled, as it were. The residue continued to speak above the eruptions. Hah, it declared. Let the temple be purified! A voice more distinct than ever, as if freed from the muffling crusts and dregs. Whereupon, Wesley, his belly relaxing at last, came to understand the communion service in a way he had not done before.

You let that bully push you around, Jesus Christ says now in the rain. You didn’t stand up for me as you ought. You denied me.

No. Should’ve denied you maybe. Didn’t. Only doubted. Your story’s so full of holes.

Probably you were reading the wrong people.

Well, the Evangelists…

Like I say. Another generation, never met them. They made up stuff and couldn’t get their story straight. And they may have had their reasons, but they changed everything. You can’t trust them.

I know that. I wrote a paper on it.

You got a B. It wasn’t very good.

How do you know what I got?

What? Am I not the Son of God?

Are you asking me or telling me?

You don’t believe in me…

How can I not?

Wesley, all alone in the inhospitable world, is climbing a small rise, snapping his replies out around his bobbing pipe stem, gesticulating in the rain. Which shows no sign of letting up. There are legends of Indi an burial mounds in the area. Maybe he’s on one. Walking on pagan bones. Dem dry bones. Getting a bath today. He is surrounded by folds of raked land (one of those huge steam shovels, taller than the buildings of West Condon, sits idly in pooling water at the bottom of a giant furrow) and considers that the road he’s on with its glossy black chips amid the gravel may be merely an access road for the strip mine. Going nowhere, like himself. He doesn’t know why the mines look like that, though he supposes it’s not unlike digging up potatoes with a harrow. Though coal doesn’t grow in rows. Does it? He’s been here for years and knows almost nothing about mining. No miners in his congregation. No owners either, who mostly live elsewhere, one big city or another. An engineer, once. Man who coached the church softball team, but whose main pastime was extended fishing and hunting trips up north. Wife sang in the choir. Had nice legs. Which she showed in a friendly way. He ignores Jesus’ remark. He is an innocent man. This has often gone unappreciated. Maybe too innocent. Miller often railed at him on the subject, saying innocence was the main cause of the mess the world was in. Suffer me no little children. Did Miller say that or did Jesus? Jesus, he recalls, rather liked little children. Some say too much. Not Wesley’s problem. On the contrary.

From the top of the hump, he can see, some distance off, perched on the side of a hill and silhouetted against the drizzly sky, one of those intricate mine structures for tipping and emptying coal cars. Or were they for loading them? What does he know? It does not look like a cross. It looks more like a crazy assemblage from a child’s toybox, but it has the stark lonely aspect of one, and it adds to his melancholy. Must be Deepwater No. 9. He saw it up close only once. The day after the accident. Ninety-eight men dead or buried. Most catastrophic thing to happen to the little town since the early days of the union battles. About which he also knows nothing. He and Debra went out there because it seemed the Christian thing to do. Offer consolation and so on. He felt completely out of place. He knew none of those people and didn’t know how to talk to them. They brushed him aside like the clumsy ineffectual intruder he was. The best he could do was commiserate with other ministers he recognized and offer his church facilities, though for what he couldn’t imagine. He was grateful to see Justin Miller out there, covering the story for his newspaper. He ached for a connection that would make him feel less an outsider. But Miller was tired and ill-humored and belittled him, calling him, in effect, a complacent ill-informed hypocrite. Which he was. What could he say? He went home, didn’t return, though Debra stayed on to serve doughnuts and coffee in the Red Cross canteen. People are suffering, she said when she came home. And we’ve lost touch with them. His response was a Sunday sermon on the spiritual origin of physical matter: i.e., that the carbon in the coal is not from the soil but from the air. Buried sunlight. He’d discovered this in the set of encyclopedias kept in his church office, frequent source of sermon inspiration. Didn’t know why he hadn’t looked up “coal” before. It was created, he’d learned, in the carboniferous age when the Earth was seething hot and the air was saturated with the fine dust of carbon atoms, a time when there were dense forests, trees a hundred feet tall, and forty-foot ferns, bats with wingspreads twenty feet, dragonflies as big as vultures (the grandeur fascinated him and he took notes for other sermons)—“And then: the Earth shrank, the crust wrinkled, forests sank into shallow seas, tons of boiling mud buried millions of green trees in the Earth’s hot maw, mountains pitched upwards, vomiting floods of lava, earthquakes split mountaintops into jagged peaks, seas bubbled — ah! we live, my friends, in a quiet time: 8,500,000 furious years were needed to press out that one bed of coal out there, which we hack out, bring up, burn in minutes — we live, yes, in a quiet time, but at incredible speed…” Debra called his sermon frivolous, an insult to the dead and bereaved (she said that someone, who was either scandalized or laughing, told her they thought he’d said “in the Earth’s hot ma”), and went straight back out to the mine, arriving just as they were bringing up that fellow Bruno, the lone survivor. It’s a miracle, she said when she got back. She was clearly moved.

If that is the Deepwater mine, then he’s not all that far from the old Presbyterian No-Name Wilderness Church Camp. You could see that same mine structure from Inspiration Point. The Presbyterian kids at camp called it the Gate of Hell and threatened to take the little ones over there and drop them down the bottomless pit. “You just keep falling forever and ever and you can’t see anything even with your eyes wide open!” And that hill must be the one where the Brunists gathered to await the end of the world. Another kind of blind forevering. How did he find his way here? To this hump, this vista, this convergence? He reconsiders his abandoned Presbyterian belief in predestination, for he seems to be doing what he has to do, even though he does not know he is doing it. That hill, he knows, is John P. Suggs’ next target. He should warn Cavanaugh, but he owes the man no favors. When Suggs approached him back in the early fall with a fair offer on the old abandoned camp, Wesley was interested. Church camps no longer had much appeal among his Presbyterians and it would require a major investment to make it operational again, even as a rental. Except for the occasional church picnic and the annual sunrise service, it had fallen into complete dilapidation. Debra, having a romantic attachment to the place, objected. She had loved it out there, had often spent days at the camp on her own, cleaning it up, making small repairs. Wesley had felt more comfortable in town, hated the flies and mosquitoes, the dark, the straw ticking and old dust, the privies and communal latrines and showers, the constant worry about snakes and ticks, the burrs, thorns and nettles, the lack of books, poor light, bad food; but the rough life excited Debra. She confessed once that she felt like she was naked all the time out there, or wanted to be. She still had fading hopes the camp could be restored in the way that she still had fading hopes they might have a child. She hated strip mining and said it was his moral duty to protect the camp from such a brutal sacrilege. Then suddenly she changed her mind and urged him to complete the sale. They could use the revenue for her halfway house for troubled teenagers, she said. Her pet project. Her abrupt turnaround was a surprise, but suited him. The sale was approved by the synod, and in early February the papers were signed, turning the land over to the coal baron. Whereupon Colin Meredith turned up with his strange beatific smile and goggle eyes and the conspiratorial whispering between them began.