Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“But then…you were…is it Wesley?”

“Maybe.” He belches, shrugs. “Probably it’s just the chop suey.”

Prissy feels a great sense of relief and joy. Her abdominal muscles relax and she allows the changes taking place there to proceed. They are a family again.

Midsummer at cock-crow. The day that the earth hesitates in its nervous wobble, begins to tilt the other way again. The day, as they say, that the sun stands still. For lovers of the night it is the worst time of year, for there is so little of it. Few are up to greet so untimely a dawn. The night-duty police officer is. End of Bo’s working day. Dee and Monk and Louie will be here soon, and he’ll be able to go home and get some Z-time, Bo Bosticker’s Zs being a town legend. He has been sleeping beside the phone all night, but that doesn’t count. The garage owner Lem Filbert is another, greeting the rising sun fiercely, angrily, tools in hand, cursing his lazy mechanic in the same manner that he greets, at more or less the same hour, the midwinter dark. He is working on the Cavanaugh kid’s topless fire-engine red fuck-machine, eager to get it done not only because the boy has been badgering him, but because he’ll pay his bill when the job’s complete, as too damned few in this town do. Guido Mello puts up with a lot of shit working for Filbert, including ten-hour shifts, but he’s an old union man from his coalmining days and he won’t start until his shift starts at 7:30, and Filbert, an ex-miner himself, has to respect that, no matter how it pisses him off. Not that Guido can sleep in; his kids wake him as kids do parents all over town and countryside, up with the sun, the little heathens, then cranky all day. And if it’s not the kids, it’s the TV, the telephone, alarm clocks, flushing toilets, banging doors, or just the light pressing in through drawn shades. For prodigal son Georgie Lucci, emerging unwillingly from a sick stupor on the firehouse floor (didn’t quite make it to the mattress), it’s his hangover that forces him into some kind of consciousness, or else its contrary. For Sheriff Tub Puller it’s a nagging toothache, for Hovis out at the church camp his “rheumatiz,” for Lucy Smith the need to fix breakfast for her early-rising husband Calvin and her squabbling offspring. Calvin is headed to the roadside Baxter encampment this morning ahead of his deputy sheriff duties to see how poor Abner is getting on and to let him know that the police officer who beat him up has been suspended. She has never seen Calvin so mad about something. The banker’s wife, having risen before her husband and snuck off to the bathroom on her own, is not sure now she can make it back. Maybe she can just sit here until the home care nurse turns up. She crosses herself, hoping that, under the circumstances, it is not disrespectful. The ex-coalminer Salvatore Ferrero is awakened just as in the old days by what his mammina called il canto del gallo . Some of his neighbors are probably awakened by it, too, less nostalgically. They objected bluntly—“No fucking chickens, Sal!”—when he set up his backyard coops a few years ago to help his family through the rough times after the mine closing, but he has provided each of them with the occasional chicken and sack of eggs and they have grown accustomed to the reek. A rooster is crowing at the Brunist Wilderness Camp, too, displacing the hoots of the resident owls on this day that somewhere in the world is the Day of the Owl and thought of as somewhat sinister. The camp chickens are cared for by Hunk Rumpel and Wanda Cravens, layers mostly for the communal breakfasts, though the cull of cocks and unproductive hens brings meat to the table, too. The little ones always love to watch Hunk kill chickens, which he does by grabbing their heads and whipping them round and round in a great flutter of feathers until the necks snap off and the headless birds flop and stagger comically about the chicken yard. No one likes to pluck the things, though; the task in rough sketch usually falls to Wanda, designated chief chicken plucker, with Ludie Belle Shawcross and the other ladies cleaning up after her. The coops are kept downwind of the trailer park, out in what used to be deep left field of the old softball field, far enough away not to be a nuisance unless there’s an unexpected easterly, but near enough to hear the cock’s morning fanfare.

The bumptious crowing of the rooster was the first thing camp director Debra Edwards had heard as she slipped out of her cabin and set off on her sacramental morning trek, though as she stepped deeper into the woods it faded away, overtaken by the noisy morning chatter of her beloved birds overhead. In spite of everything that has happened, Debra has done her best to keep her chin up and adhere to her daily routines. She has tended her garden daily, weather permitting, harvesting fresh fruit and vegetables for the supper table; has assisted Ludie Belle and the other women in the kitchen and Clara and the two boys in the church office; has policed the entire campgrounds at least once a week; and has — with the help of Corinne Appleby, who brings fresh beeswax to the task — kept the woodwork and furniture in the Meeting Hall polished, all the while caring daily for Colin and their own cabin home. The Blaurock children massacred her herb and flower garden out front, playing some sort of apocalypse game in which her flowers were the condemned sinners, but she has been able to rescue the hardier plants and continues to provide fresh herbs for their daily meals. The cabin is fragrant with them today, for last night she gathered herbs and flowers from her garden and from the woods and hung them on the doors and windows and over the beds, something her Swedish grandmother used to do at Midsummer — for protection, as she said, and Debra so needs protection. She has taken comfort in the camp’s dependence on her and the gratitude of all her friends here; she has also cried a lot. She is crying now. It’s not just the dead bird, it’s everything. She now avoids what was once her secret corner of the camp, but when she can, she still communes with God in her own special way each morning at daybreak, which up to today has been earlier and earlier every day. No matter. She hardly sleeps at all anyway, even when taking the little pills the camp nurse brings her in her shiny black bag. Debra used to pray for sleep; now she only prays she not be sent to prison, leaving Colin on his own.

This morning she has followed No-Name Creek downstream to an untraveled place halfway toward the beehives, and after spraying her under parts against mosquitoes, has squatted beside the creek at the foot of an old wooden footbridge canopied by small trees, out of sight from Inspiration Point, where Ben Wosznik often goes for his morning prayers, her skirt tucked up around her waist, staring in grief through her tears at the body of the little gray phoebe, no doubt another victim of the Blaurock children’s BB gun. Bernice insists she has seen fairies down here at dusk, whispering to each other amid the fireflies and dragonflies and clouds of gnats, and this little phoebe was probably one of them. Do fairies live forever, or are they mere will o’ the wisps, released like mayflies to dance one night and die? And if so, is one night, if beautiful, enough? Should they be grateful? The Blaurocks were here yesterday. Each Friday they turn up just before lunchtime, and each Friday Mrs. Blaurock is told not to come back, but she always does. It is hard to refuse such a big intimidating woman. And her silent, unsmiling husband also seems somewhat ominous. Yesterday, the oldest boy, Mattie, was shooting at birds with a BB gun and Debra took it away from him and scolded him, but his mother grabbed it roughly out of her hands, giving her a push that backed her right up against a cabin wall, and handed it back to the boy, saying she was interfering with his Second Amendment rights. He has no right to shoot my birds! she screamed, fearing she was about to break into hysterical sobs again, but Hunk Rumpel collared Mattie as he ran past, took the gun away, and snapped it in two over his knee. The children started to protest, but Hunk took one step toward them, the folded gun bits in one fist, and they scampered off. Later, they were up on the Point, throwing stones down at everybody in spite. Debra always longed for children of her own, but what if she’d got some like those? Well, the one she has is not all that easy either. She stifles her sobs, wiping her eyes and nose on her skirt hem. Colin, who collapsed after being up half the night from a nightmare about people walking around without any skin on, will be waking again soon and he will need her. Amen, she whispers, and letting her skirt fall, rises to her day.