Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Bernice Filbert, fairy watcher (they are so common, she doesn’t know why everyone doesn’t see them), has risen at dawn to prepare a lunch for her brother-in-law, just as she rose each dawn to fill her coalminer husband’s lunch pail until that day the mine blew up, taking away a man she never knew beyond his mealtime druthers nor really wished to know. Now, with Lem out of the house, she is plucking her eyebrows and considering the expression she will draw there for the day, a day known for the otherworldly and the unexpected. Open-eyed curiosity perhaps, one brow arched slightly higher than the other, both slightly lengthened to suggest spiritual composure and a readiness to accept whatever might come her way. From Mr. Suggs’ viewpoint: a combination of optimism and professional concern. Bernice has kept her eyebrows plucked since she was a young girl, just like her mother. “You ever seen any of them ladies in the Bible with hairy eyebrows?” her mother would demand, pushing Bernice’s face into the Illustrated Bible pages. “It ain’t lady-like!” And it was true — they did all seem drawn or painted on. Her mother scolded Bernice for everything from uncombed hair to scuffed shoes and just about all between (but not the personal parts, her mother was fiercely silent on the matter, and once, without any explanation, slapped her for flowering her dress before Bernice understood what was happening). But she scolded everyone, it was her mother’s way. She was a permanently dissatisfied woman, as she herself often said. Start by thinking the worst, she would say, and you’re already halfway there. By studying the women in the Bible pictures, Bernice also learned how to keep her hair braided and pinned up under scarves and shawls and how to stand in company and tilt her head just so in conversation and how to make some of the dresses the ladies wore. Today she has chosen a modest but becoming dress of the sort young Esther might wear at the well, though she is thinking more about Queen Esther and how through wile and diplomacy she saved her people, so she has added a lightweight shawl made of crocheted doilies dyed golden and a necklace of colored beads, which, for all others know, might be precious gems.

Her daddy was a miner, nicer than her mother, but easily bullied like Mary’s Joseph was, and not much help when Bernice was being scolded. When he died of the black lung, her mother went to live with her mother, a crotchety old thing even bossier than she was, but by then Bernice was already a licensed practical nurse and married to Tuck Filbert, so she stayed here in West Condon. Tuck was an older fellow who knew her daddy in the mine and always admired the contents of his lunch bucket. She was well past the marrying age and no one else was interested when her daddy, who was already ill with the black lung, suggested it, so without much ado it happened, and there she was, like Ruth and Esther and so many ladies in the Bible, the young bride of an old man, arranged by another old man. Tuck did his duty by her a time or two, but he wasn’t enjoying it and neither was she, so they stopped it, and that was it, and it was enough. Tuck was not much of a husband or even a friend, but leastways he never took hickory to her as she had feared, being forewarned, though she has sometimes said he did, speaking in parables as she often does, for even if he never actually hit her, all those Filberts do lash about fiercely with the tongue, and enough to draw blood. At least to the cheeks.

Her dowry was the wardrobe of Tuck’s mother — who had gotten the flu one winter and passed away without anyone noticing until it was Sunday dinner time — together with a lot of old curtains, table cloths, and other frills the Filbert men had no use for. Bernice adapted all these things to her Illustrated Bible styles, creating interesting collars and puff sleeves and velveteen bodices made out of old pillows. She lengthened the skirts with decorative borders and used beaded cloth belts high up under the breasts with corset-like laces up the front of some of them, and added sashes and brass bracelets and head scarves and an abundance of simple flowing shawls and sashes, often cut from old bedsheets and dyed in primary colors. Her patent leather shoulder bag doesn’t exactly fit, but she needs it in her career, just as she now needs her reading spectacles, which dangle on a plastic chain — an accessory Rachel and Ruth probably did without; at least, it’s something you don’t see in the pictures. Because sandals are not appreciated in this part of the world, she has mostly worn high-top nurses’ shoes, though last week she found a pair of sandals in Mr. Osborne’s shoe store and he was so surprised to see them there he gave them to her for a quarter each. She has been trying them out from time to time, watching the reactions of others. Won’t do when winter comes, of course; in the Bible, it’s always summer.

“So, whatcha reckon, old fella? Am I justified? Ain’t we taught to hate evil and cleanse the world of it and ain’t them biker boys worse’n devils?” In the past, when troubled, Ben Wosznik always talked things out with Rocky, and sitting alongside the dog’s grave on the backside of the mine hill, having hiked over here from the camp as the midsummer dawn opened up the sky, he is doing so now, his dog as good a listener dead as he was alive. Though he misses the reassurance of Rocky’s wagging tail. I love you, it had said. You are right. You are always right. But is he? He’s not sure. Hating is one thing, already a sin, but acting on that hate? Doing something that can’t be taken back? Even if it feels like a holy thing to do? “Catholic folks has a halfway place t’go, Rocky. Maybe they’ll let us in and you’n me’ll meet up there.” He gazes affectionately at the grave and then notices that the small wooden cross he carved for it is standing there all right, but at the foot instead of the head, where he put it. And sideways. He gazes off past the big earth-moving machines (they went away for a day and came back again; old man Suggs must be getting better) toward the old tipple and mine buildings, thinking about this, and sees something he hasn’t noticed before. A bone. They ate a lot of chicken up here, but that’s not a chicken bone. His heart sinks. He knows he is going to have to open up the grave. He might be able to claw it away with his fingers, but if Rocky’s still down there, it’s not really something he wants to get his hands into. He wanders over to the mine buildings to see what he can find and under the tipple, where the old rusty railroad tracks pass through, leaning up against a timber, he comes upon a shovel. New one, still shiny. Like the ones he bought for the camp. He already knows what he is going to find.

“Yo, wake up, little Suzie. Let’s think about livin’…”

“I am awake, Duke. And already thinking. You reckon we could maybe pay a visit to the old Bruno house?”

“Now that’s a early mornin’ cogitation t’stir the dust in the attic, Patti Jo. What’s sparked it up?”

“A dream I just woked up from. Or else I woked up first and then I had the dream. It was about playing with Marcella in her bedroom, like we used to do. And there was something she couldn’t find. She wants me to go look for it.”

“Well, bless her little phantom heart, what was it?”

“I don’t know. Just something. I guess I’ll know when I get there. Since your fire chief friend told you where she was buried, it just seems something I gotta do. We can take it and put it on her grave.”

“But didn’t you tell me that Bruno place was fenced off?”

“Yes, but I don’t think the fence is in very good shape. You can see people have been in there, messing around, wrecking stuff.”

“So, a out’n-out burgle, y’mean. You kin tell what day a the year it is by the craziness it sets off. My ma useta keep me home such days. Said it was the day of the swamp demons. But, heck, why not? Sonuvagun, sounds like fun, so long’s nobody don’t start shootin’ at us. Tonight though’s our big night. The live recordin’ session. Don’t wanta die before we’ve played this ballgame to the last out.”