Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Of course, emaciated females often suffer from amenorrhea,” the doctor is saying in his kindly but frustrating way, “but the urine samples seem to indicate…”

Clara doesn’t know what the doctor is talking about but is too ashamed to ask and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about urine samples, so instead she brings up the issue of forced feeding again. It was just such an awful thing, couldn’t they maybe stop it?

“I’m afraid she seems determined to starve herself,” the doctor says. “We could let her do that to herself, I suppose, but not to the baby.”

What?

“Unless…”

“What are we gonna do about Elaine, Ben? She won’t eat and won’t talk and won’t bestir herself. She probably wouldn’t breathe if she could find a way to stop. I can’t hardly bear to look on her with that thing up her nose.”

“Maybe it ain’t right to make her suffer so. Maybe we should just only leave her be. Let the Good Lord decide.”

“How can you say that, Ben? She’d just go and die! We can’t let that happen!”

“No…but then I don’t know what.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t of come back here.”

“It woulda been worse for her out on the road.”

“I know. (She sighs.) But, well, it’s not right to say it, Ben…but this don’t feel like—”

Darren, hearing someone outside the door in the main hall, hits the pause button, hides the tape recorder under a loose stack of paper, goes to check. It’s only Hunk hauling in a stack of wood for the partitions in the new women’s restroom next door. Hunk grunts and nods and heads off to the kitchen for breakfast, which may or may not be his first one. He eats enough for three or four people, but then his wife and kids hardly eat anything at all, so it comes out even. Clara, Darren knows, is at the hospital, Billy Don is sleeping in after night guard duty, and Mrs. Edwards will be down at her garden by now. The only one he’s not sure about is Ben, but he’s not likely to come to the office unless Clara is here. So, unless Billy Don staggers over early, he should have the place to himself for another hour at least for this urgent task. Which is his alone. The Prophet’s final resting place has been dug. The Fourth this year is on a Saturday; Darren has scheduled the graveside ceremony on the Mount the day after. He is not sure exactly what will happen but he must know everything he can know before then. Ben is less involved since he got back. Darker in mood. God has been a little slow to act, he has said on these secret recordings. Clara said he mustn’t talk that way, but she also seems full of doubt. Maybe those who opposed the temple were right, she allows at one point on the tapes. And now these thoughts that he’s just been listening to from a week ago about abandoning her mission here. Darren, sitting in the office, door closed and locked, ponders this waning conviction, which may be part of a larger scheme of things. It’s almost as though what happened to their daughter was ordained so as to weaken the present church leaders’ resolve, or to expose their hidden weakness, make them more vulnerable to the rise of new, more intransigent leadership strong enough for the end times. Clara and Ben have been brilliant at getting the message out, creating a large movement, playing their part as Ely Collins in his martyrdom played his, but now a new phase has begun, and maybe — Jesus himself had no patience with family sentimentality — they’re not up to it. Perhaps Abner Baxter should attend the ceremonial burial of the Prophet. It might be useful for him to hear these tapes. Darren punches the play button, leans his ear into the speakers, keeping the volume low.

“—home no more. Them Baxters has near ruint it for me…”

“When Clara cries, it sounds more like Balaam’s donkey.” Bernice Filbert, using the private phone in Mr. Suggs’ room during one of his blanked-out times, is describing Clara’s newest crisis to Florrie Cox. When Bernice took a break from her bedside duties in Mr. Suggs’ room a while ago, she walked down the corridor to see how Elaine was doing, and she found Clara down on her knobby knees, looking red-eyed and broken. “Near worse off than her own child,” she tells Florrie. Clara wouldn’t say anything past the noises she was making, but Bernice guessed the problem right away, for she had picked up rumors from the nurses — and the girl’s face breaking out like that, those tiny give-away bumps on her nubbles — rumors confirming what she had been worried about since the day it all happened. She tried to help that day with her nursing skills and miracle water, which does not work for everything, but which, if she could have used enough of it, might have worked for that, but Elaine fought back like a wild thing. Of course, she was scared to death and hurting, but it was more than that; something had got inside little Elaine and it was changing her. “Now the prognosis are that the child is on a straight path to the madhouse if she don’t die first.”

“That’d be a shame,” Florrie says. “I hardly don’t know what to think.”

Bernice remembered that Reverend Hiram Clegg has worked some exorcisms, from what they were saying when he was here a couple of months ago, though when she said to Clara they should ask him back, Clara squeezed up her face like she was having gas pains and shook her head no. She hasn’t told Florrie any of this, simply saying that Elaine has taken a turn for the worse, is back on the feeding tube, and Clara is in a dreadful state. Mr. Suggs is shifting out of his more or less silent seven-sleepers state into his lively speaking-in-tongues mode, which is sometimes followed by a short period of furious clarity, but more often is not. The one thing he seems to appreciate at those times is when she dabs his forehead with her miracle water and recites the magic words, something she did every day back when he was unconscious in his coma, and it does seem to make him better, if only for a moment. She also sometimes adds a drop of miracle water to his bath water, but this so far seems less efficacious. Florrie, hearing him carrying on in the background, asks after him, and Bernice says he’s about the same, though some parts of him are shriveling up and some parts are getting longer. She can hear Florrie trying to imagine what parts she is talking about, so she adds: “His nose, for example,” and doesn’t say whether it’s growing or shrinking.

“Mostly, he looks next thing to a dead man, Florrie. He’s outa his head more than he’s in it, but at them moments when he’s got his wits about him, he’s full up with notions, and he keeps me trotting.” At such times, they use an eye-blink code, which she proceeds to explain to Florrie. “We got blinks for numbers and letters and all that, but mostly we do it by me asking him questions and him blinking once for yes and contrariwise not blinking at all. Like, I say does it begin with A, and he just lays there, and I try other letters and finally I say does it begin with F, and he blinks, and I try A again, and he just lays there again until I get to L, and he blinks, and I ask, you mean Florrie? And if he blinks we go on to the next word, and if he don’t we keep working on that one.”

“Really? He ast about me?”

“No, for goodness’ sake, I was just giving a for sample, Florrie. Showing you how hard this is.” When Mr. Suggs’ brain attack struck him down, Bernice felt struck down too, for he was what stood between her and a life in prison. But one day a lawyer from the city turned up. Big ballooned-out gentleman with a bunch of chins, dressed in a tailored suit with a hankie in the pocket, and a tailored shirt, too, because all his buttons were fitting just right. Shiny shoes and shiny up on top as well, with just a few yellow-dyed hairs pasted down. He said he knew the sick lady she and Florrie had been caring for, but, no, he wasn’t a friend of the family. It took a lot of eye-blinking, but eventually Mr. Suggs gave the lawyer limited power of attorney, witnessed by her and Maudie and the physical theropest who sits him up every day. The lawyer, whose name was Mr. Thornton, worked out a salary for her, saying she was sort of like a private secretary, taking dictation in this special way, and he seemed to hint that if all went well, there’d be more for her, though he didn’t say exactly what “well” was. He also promised her he’d fight all the thieving and embezzlement charges against her and he did not expect any of them to even get to court because everything was on the up and up, he himself had seen to that. At first she’d thought he might be one of those rascally humanits, but now she knew who he was because she had helped Mrs. Cavanaugh place the calls. Mr. Suggs was so tired out by all these negotiations that he slept for a whole day after, and the first thing he asked when he woke up the next day was where did that lawyer go he was just talking to? “I only wisht I was a better speller, Florrie.”