Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Mr. John P. Suggs arrives, having been called with the news, and while they’re waiting for Ben and Clara, he tells Wayne and Welford they’ll meet in the office after lunch to talk about Sunday, and then he huddles with Hunk and Travers. More mischief afoot, Ludie Belle reckons. She has heard about troubled doings at the Baxter encampment and in Chestnut Hills and Ludie Belle figures those two fellows are mixed up in it. Mr. Suggs’ Christian Patriots. Wayne has been asked to join, but she has cautioned him against it. Too much like the sort of outfits her brother was in cahoots with back home, and he’s in jail now. Doing a lot of Bible reading. Probably come out a preacher like so many bad boys. The camp has been vandalized a few times of late in retaliation or else in provocation, and one night a shot was fired, so things are ramping up in an unpromising way. There aren’t a lot of people in the world who believe in this religion, and those who do can’t seem to get on with each other. It’s hard to figure. Creed. Where it gets sticky. For Ludie Belle, faith is part of the color of life. It goes with the horoscopes she reads, Mabel’s cards, changes in the weather, game shows on TV, Sister Debra’s nature love. Life would be a dull sad thing without it. After death? She doesn’t know. Wait and see.

When Wayne asks her quietly if she spoke with Hazel Dunlevy, Ludie Belle says she did. “I says it ain’t gone unnoticed, and she says, I know it, and she shows me the palm of her hand and says, see, it’s been writ there since she was borned, ain’t nuthin she can do about it.”

“Well, there ain’t neither of them got a spoonfulla sense, but maybe it’ll cool off,” Wayne says. They both know a lot about where such feelings can take a body and are slow to cast judgment.

Little Willie Hall bursts into the hall just then, crying out like that squeaky bellhop in the cigarette ads: “And when he gits home, he calleth t’gether on his friends’n neighbors, sayin’ unto ’em— Luke 15:6! —Rejoice with me on accounta I have jist got back my sheep which was lost!” His wife Mabel comes shuffling in behind with Ben and Clara as people shout, “Glory!” and “Praise Jesus!” and there’s a tearful rush toward them. Ludie Belle feels tears starting in her own eyes. It’s like something hard and heavy they’ve been holding back can be let go of now. But though Clara and Ben greet everyone like it truly means something, they’re both dry-eyed and Ludie Belle can see they’re not the same as before. Scrawnier and road-weary, but more than that. There’s something far off and broken about Clara, clenched up about Ben. Still in need of healing. Well, they can do that. Starting with fattening them up. She calls everybody to the table. Little Elaine, poor child, is not with them. That’s about the first thing everybody has noticed. “She’s ailing,” Clara explains and says no more. Beside Ludie Belle, Wayne whispers: “Clara’s bad hoarsed up and don’t look right.” Ludie Belle catches Mabel’s eye and Mabel shakes her head as she does when a bad card turns up.

Ben, alone, is back where it happened, trying to figure things out. Everything here where the bloodying of Junior Baxter took place was beat down that morning, the grass and flowers torn up and trampled on and all of it darkly wet like it had been raining blood. Now everything’s already grown back, this patch of weedy field wet today from summer rain and squishy underfoot, like nothing ever happened. Hard things happen and then become only ghosts of themselves. He and Clara have been visiting the Eastern churches, and most of the churches were full up and doing well and folks were good to them, treating Clara and him like heroes, hungry for news and eager to show they were all true Followers; but they were completely ignorant of the events at the camp, except those who’d come out for the dedication ceremonies, and even their memories were so different from Ben’s he sometimes wondered if they’d been in the same place at the same time. As for the troubles since: no notion of them. Even the history of five years ago was changing. It has been told so many times and in so many different ways that it often seems to be happening in some other place, a magical place like a Jerusalem or a Bethlehem, and he has to admit that his own songs make that even more so. Ben sometimes tried to set them straight in his quiet no-nonsense way, and they were attentive, but he got the feeling they were mostly only being polite, listening to his side of the story because of who he is, meanwhile waiting for him and all the other original witnesses to die so they could get on with their own version of things.

Kicking about, trowel in hand, Ben finds a water-soaked blue bandanna. So this must be the spot, or near to it, where they found Abner Baxter’s son, gagged by that bandana or one just like it. Probably came off a biker boy. Junior was out cold, his face running blood. They ungagged him and dipped him in the creek to bring him around. Only later did Ben learn from Bernice when she banded him up what was written there, and he knew then that it was probably his fault this had happened. What he told the younger one that morning when he caught them in his old farm shack, setting brother against brother. So he was in some way the cause for what happened to Elaine, too. Probably he should have just shot those boys when he had them in his sights. When he thinks about what happened here, he knows he could kill without remorse, and he knows that, even with God’s commandment against it, the prospect of eternal damnation would not stop him. But how did they know they’d find Elaine and Junior here that morning? Junior must have told them, not suspecting what his brother had in store for him. When he and Wayne and the others found him, Junior was wearing nothing but girl’s drawers. Elaine’s, as it turned out, though she seemed ignorant as to how he got hold of them. He said the same, trying to put the blame on the bikers, saying they must have done that to him while he was passed out. Later, on the road, Ben got to thinking again about their trailer break-in the morning the Baxters arrived. The missing money and handgun. So: the underwear, too, probably. Sick boy. It might also explain the belt he found here in the grass that morning, which Clara said could have been Ely’s. But Junior wouldn’t have walked down here in front of everybody, even in the dark, in nothing but girl’s underpants. Elaine was wearing even less, unless they stole her clothes. Far as he could understand her, they’d both had tunics on. Which made sense, given what they were apparently up to. But, if so, where were they? None to be found here that day and none here now. Whatever could those godless biker boys want with Christian tunics? There are a lot of things that Ben does not understand.

There was another pair of women’s drawers, for example. Didn’t see them at first that day. But, after they had hauled Junior up to the camp and cleared everybody out, Ben had come back here to look around, try to get a picture of what had happened. He found Carl Dean’s baseball cap at the edge of the woods, so that pretty much proved he was here, all right, hard as that was for Ben to take in. Then: a spot of bright color over there in the trees. He thought at first they must be Elaine’s, but they weren’t her size. Not her style, either: bright orange green-leafed flowers on them. When he realized whose they were, he also realized that she hadn’t told them everything. That maybe it was worse for her than she had said.

So today, after the meeting in the church office, he asked Mrs. Edwards to stay behind and help him with some notes of thanks he wanted to send to the Eastern churches. Clara, feeling poorly herself, was not up for the meeting and had left with Bernice after lunch to go check on Elaine in the trailer. The poor child won’t speak, won’t eat, the flesh on her bones thin like a wax coating. Which is worrying Clara sick, sapping the pluck right out of her. The meeting was mostly for his sake, filling him in on the changes at the camp, including the fancying up of the office they were sitting in, roomier now with the two boys out of it (Ben had failed to remark on it when they entered, and he knows that disappointed them), the legal actions being taken against them (“Won’t work,” said Mr. Suggs), the troubles they were still having with Abner Baxter and his people, the cornerstone-laying ceremonies for their new Coming of Light Tabernacle Church over on the Mount on Sunday. But Ben was worn down and worried and the closed office was thickly scented with waxy smells, and his mind kept floating off onto other things. That awful day, mostly — so vivid to him since they returned. So many unresolved mysteries. Young Carl Dean Palmers, just for a sample: what he did and didn’t do.