Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“But, Wesley,” she gasps when she reaches him. “Jesus , I mean!” She feels like she’s swearing all the time. “This is not a wilderness!” Strange trenches have been dug here on the hilltop, like mass graves lined with chalk, and she stumbles in and out of them, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Can they be seen up here from the church camp? There is a dance she must do, one that will get them back to the car, but she’s too frightened to think how to start it.

“There’s a tree. It will do. Anyway, I was not thinking of a dance exactly. The place inspires me to something more like a sermon.” He spreads his arms like the beckoning Christ on mountaintops and in cemeteries. “Blessed,” he declaims, “are the free in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven!” There is a resonance in his voice she has not heard before, not even when he was in the Presbyterian pulpit. Maybe least of all then. Though of course this is a different he. “Blessed are the pleasure givers for they shall receive pleasure! Blessed are the demoniacs for they shall be invited to the dance!” Prissy realizes he is composing a love song for her and her heart softens and her fear subsides and she draws near. Perhaps this one tree is wilderness enough. They can use one of those backhoes for the pinnacle of the temple, whence Jesus is asked to leap but is restrained by angelic love. Her dance is taking flight. “Blessed are the lewd at heart for they shall see God! Blessed are the wanton for they shall not want! Blessed are the love makers for they shall produce the sons of God!” He knows. She is so thrilled she wants to cry. Her dances have not been in vain. She reaches for him, but he stays her hand. Something is happening down below. An old pickup truck rattles up on the dirt road, spewing black fumes. The doors fly open and a fat lady rolls out with a child in her arms — three other children scramble out of the truck bed. They come running up the hill. “Wait, Jesus! Wait for us!” the woman shouts. Prissy, shrinking behind Jesus, wants to flee, but he smiles down upon them. “The salt of the earth,” he says and extends his arms in greeting.

“Soon as we seen you, Jesus,” says the enormous woman fallen at his feet (“Rise with my blessing, my daughter,” he told her, but she said it didn’t seem right), “we run right over. We didn’t wanta get left behind. It was Mattie spotted you from up on Inspiration Point, the little sweetheart should oughta be made a saint. I couldn’t find my husband, but you can just reach out and bring him here. Isaiah is a righteous man and should not miss out. It wouldn’t be fair. You know, like how you say anyone who follows you has got to throw off everything and live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field? Well, he done that, Lord, I done that. These four children here they done that. You got six bona fide flat-broke disciples right off, Master, ready to go where you go.” The three little ones have accepted his invitation to rise and are now circling him curiously, eyeing with suspicion the woman huddled behind him. “There was a whole bunch of us waiting for you up here a coupla months ago. We were dead sure you were coming then — we prayed like all blazes — but we musta got the date wrong. Forgive us for that, Lord. Those two college boys try hard, but they don’t quite have it.”

“Remember the parable of the self-righteous train engineer,” he says, “for whom the timetable was his holy bible and as a consequence of his faith in it he ended up in a notorious wreck.”

“I didn’t know you had trains in your time, Lord.”

“My time is all time.”

“Let’s see if it’s really him, Mom,” the older boy says. “I’m gonna fall in the ditch. If he’s really Jesus, he’ll save me.” The boy stands stiffly at the lip and tips over, yowls when he hits bottom. “See? See?” he wails. Then his brother starts to cry too, and that sets off the baby.

“I had no intention of stopping you in your brazen foolishness, young man,” Jesus says, having to shout over the racket. “For as it is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, or me either. Take it as a lesson learned.”

“You heard Jesus, Mattie, get your little heinie out of there and stop your bawling or I’ll box your ears so hard you won’t hear for a week! You too, Markie. Look how you’ve got Johnnie going! Shut up now or we won’t let you fly to Heaven with us!”

“Mom, he’s not wearing any underpants!”

“Luke, you come out from under there. That’s trespassing and you can go to hell for that!”

It is in his tradition to suffer little children, but there would seem to be exceptions. “If Jesus is God, Mom, shouldn’t he have the biggest one?”

“Luke, I ain’t telling you one more time! We been waiting all our life to get raptured, praying so hard our knees is half ruint, and I ain’t gonna let you go and spoil it!” She drops the squalling baby and bounds forward on all fours, reaches under, and drags the girl out — dirty pink-slippered foot first — and then she has to grab the one called Markie, who wants his turn, and that one starts up again. The little girl hangs on to his ankles with both hands as her mother pulls and were it not for the woman behind him, he would be taking what in this unholy age in which he has landed is called a pratfall; he knows such things because he is all-knowing, but it’s true, he has been slow yet again to appreciate the risks in mixing with the salt of the earth. “Forgive her her trespasses, Lord. She’s a bit wild but — let go , Luke! — she was born that way, so it must be God’s will.” She pries the child’s fingers away and he is free at last, though he has lost his sandal.

“I think it’s curtain time,” the woman behind his shoulder whispers anxiously.

“So, c’mon. Let’s get going, Lord. Can’t hardly wait to get there. Some folks didn’t expect you until after the tribulation began, but I was always a pre-trib dispensationalist, except sometimes when it seemed like the tribulation had already started up, and then I was more like a mid-trib believer. But I was never a post-trib believer — you can ask anyone. I always said it would be like this. And I know everything about the four horsemen and the seven seals and seven trumpets and seven bowls and the abomination of desolation. Just ask me. Those other sinners back there, they didn’t believe me when I hollered out you were over here, so it looks like we’re all the holy remnant you got left.”

“The perfect candidates, my daughter, given the fusty nature of the Heavenly Kingdom, so called,” he says, speaking inside her own metaphors. The unmaking of those metaphors is at the very heart of his new mission. But they can be undone, he knows in his omniscience, only from within. “It would be interesting to see what your daughter made of the angels if she got inside their choir robes. But I’m afraid the time is not now. There is more yet to happen.” He would like now to simply fly away, as the song goes, to vanish suddenly and reappear elsewhere — in the studio, for example — but he has received no favors from above nor does he expect any. Instead, they will have to step behind the backhoes as though into the wings and slip away down the hill behind them. “I must leave you now. But I shall return after a certain time. You must deliver that message to your fellow believers. Go forth, my daughter, and prophesy. Go! Go with my blessing!” It’s a hard pitch and a tough house, but it works. He and the woman make their exit when all their backs are turned so that when they look back from the truck, they will be gone as if they never were.

The truth is, most of Priscilla’s dances are improvisations, their design appreciated only after they have been performed. Because that’s what life is. You visit your minister in his office for counseling and the next thing you’re dancing the Second Coming with Christ Jesus, and suddenly a little self-enclosed pirouette en dedans becomes a grand jeté. You have to stay fit and supple and open to the unexpected. They haven’t got around to the temptation of Christ today as they’d intended, and now they’ll just have to skip past that. Her plan for the morrow, has been all week, is to create an erotic celebration of the summer solstice (the summer solstice is erotic), a “Dance of the Wedding of Heaven and Earth,” with its story of the victory of sun and light over darkness and death while haunted by the simultaneous birth of the Lord of Darkness, and not coincidentally Jesus’ cousin John, followed by the descent toward the winter solstice. At which time her own child is due — a little lord of light — and everything starts up all over again. All this she has meant to script in, while turning the studio into a kind of symbolic forest, celebrating the unconscious, mother womb of dance itself, with Wesley and Jesus each playing their parts, their art their very artlessness. But now with the events of the day, she is having to make adjustments. What they do tonight will be a kind of rehearsal for tomorrow, but she will call it the “Dance of the Transfiguration” in recognition of Jesus’ rise to the surface (but where did Wesley go? she has to admit she already misses him, the dear befuddled man), focusing on the element of radiance—“And his face did shine as the sun” is the text she has chosen — something transfiguration shares with the fires and fairy dances of midsummer. They will anoint their bodies with fragrant oils and use special gels on the spots and dance, after adagio preparations, to the summer storm of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons . She hopes only that she’s up for it. The day has taken something out of her.