Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Lucy Smith was getting her hair done in Linda Catter’s Main Street beauty shop when some noisy little kids came by with the shoe store flyers. Linda said she hadn’t been able to afford new shoes for over three years and that this was her chance, so they dashed over, mid-perm, Lucy’s hair still in curlers and wrapped with piled-up wet towels. Well, what they witnessed was not gratifying and certainly there were no new shoes to be had, though Lucy saw people running away with armloads before the police locked the place down. When the poor man kicked the window, Lucy nearly fainted, and she still feels sick. As soon as they cut him down, Linda ran back to her beauty shop to call everyone she knows, and Lucy followed her there on shaky knees, sinking back dazed and nauseous into her chair in front of the mirror. Where now she sits, staring aghast at the pasty white face staring back under its thick white turban and looking only half alive, listening to Linda tell and retell her grisly tale. Lucy recalls her last visit to Mabel Hall’s caravan, when Mabel turned over the card of the Hanged Man, next to the Tower card. The Hanged Man was hanging by one foot, not his neck, and he looked quite peaceful with his legs crossed like he was sitting upside down watching TV, but the Tower was being struck by lightning and exploding apart and people were falling or diving out to die on the rocks below. It was quite terrifying, really. Mabel said it meant that there is a great calamity on the horizon, but one must surrender to the inevitable — something like that. But how does one know what’s inevitable and what’s not? If something is after you, can’t you run away? Maybe it’s like in dreams, when you want to run but can’t. Lucy was frightened then and she is frightened now. Was what just happened the calamity? Or was it only the card before it? Between Linda’s calls, she asks if she can please phone her husband. “I was so scared, Calvin,” she tells him. “Pray for him,” Calvin says calmly. “He was not a practicing Christian, but he was a good miner and a good man. I owe my life to him.”

As do many men in town, guided up through the blasted and gaseous Deepwater mine workings by Osborne that night of the disaster that killed ninety-seven, Dave the night manager at the time, a miners’ miner who had begun at the face and risen through the ranks. He knew Old Number Nine like the devil knows hell, as Cokie Duncan puts it, smoking and spitting with fellow miners out in the street in front of the store, squinting into a sun they still mostly avoid. Cal Smith’s boss, Sheriff Tub Puller, now pushing grimly through the milling crowds to confer with the town police, is another who reached the surface that night thanks to Osborne. As is wheel-chaired Ezra Gray, who made his wife Mildred push him all the way here as fast as she could in hopes of a free pair of shoes, Dave’s kicking of the window like a kick in the teeth. That’s how Mildred would put it later to Thelma Coates. Some years back, before he was night manager, Dave was Ezra’s faceboss, best he ever had. Ezra resented Dave becoming a downtown businessman, a kind of betrayal of his own kind, and now just see what it has come to. By the time Thelma Coates gets the phone call from Linda Catter, her sons Aaron and Royboy have already run back from town with the alarming news, and she and Roy set off for Main Street, the boys running ahead. Thus the word spreads and scores of others turn up in front of the shoe store, though the body is gone and the store is locked, the broken windows taped up with flattened cardboard shoe boxes. Witnesses of the suicide detail the event to the newcomers, and some who were not witnesses do, too. It’s Ramona Testatonda who brings the sad tidings to the Bonali household in a call to her friend Angela, who in turn carries them to the front porch, where her father is sitting with Carlo Juliano. Mortgage foreclosure has been their bitter theme, the Juliano family also walking the edge, and is now more so, Carlo arguing that it’s that which has brought Dave Osborne to such ultimate despair. “That goddamn bank is killing this fucking town,” Vince says, biting clean through his well-masticated cigar. As his daughter runs back in to call Monica Piccolotti, his son Charlie comes out, digging at his crotch as though that’s where the problem lies buried, and tells Carlo he plans to do something about the way things are and they should talk about it on the way to Main Street to see for themselves what has happened. There they run into Nazario, Ange Moroni’s boy, with his hangabout pals, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their sullen lips. Moroni compliments him for busting the banker’s son’s ugly honker, and Charlie fills them in on the persecutions he and his family are suffering as a consequence from the bank, the city, the county, not to mention all the fucking heretic churches, including that maniacal god squad out at the church camp who once tore up St. Stephen’s with mine picks. He pops his knuckles, and working a toothpick around in his teeth, nods his head toward the sheriff and his deputy, now in a huddle with the banker and the mayor, and says, “Look at them racist pricks over there bunched together. Dreaming up some new shit. See? The sheriff’s eyeing us. They’re all in cahoots. Fucking Klan all over again. We gotta do something about it before we’re all mulched garbage.” Moron grins icily under his rumpled fedora and nods at his pals. Moron’s mother, Concetta Moroni, was here earlier, but is gone. She had slipped away from the Cavanaugh house for the shoe sale, witnessed the shocking scene in the store window, which she feared was some kind of divine admonishment for her own sinful greed, then fled when her employer showed up at the store and kicked the window in, and she is now, having told poor Mrs. Cavanaugh all about it, showing her patient, who is a bit dopey today from all the drugs she is taking, how to pray with the rosary she has given her — an old one that her husband Angelo received from his grandmother but rarely used, though it was in his jacket pocket when he died. She hopes God will perceive this gift of a family heirloom as penance and compensation for things she took and cannot give back. Later, she will call all her friends and they will meet after working hours in someone’s kitchen to talk about this strange event and what it means to their sad little town and their own uncertain futures. At the hospital, Concetta’s out-of-favor predecessor in the Cavanaugh household, Bernice Filbert, has heard the ambulance wheel in, and after she gets the news from Maudie, she hurries down to Elaine’s room to let Clara know. Clara is still as woeful as those two wailing Marys outside the tomb of Jesus and she only half registers, but Ben has arrived and he takes the news sorrowfully. “He was a friend,” he says in his tired rumbly voice, “and a good man. I’m mighty sorry to hear it.” When she calls the camp, it is young Billy Don Tebbett who answers, and he promises to get the word to others, especially people like Willie Hall, who worked in the mine with Dave Osborne. The first person Billy Don calls, though, is Sally; her mother answers the phone and tells him Sally is not home, is there a message, and though he is somewhat confused by this unexpected connection with someone he has not ever really thought about before except in the abstract, he blurts out the story of the shoe store owner hanging himself in his own shop window, as understood by Bernice Filbert, who wasn’t there. In Bernice’s version, he was found hanging in the window with a closing down sale sign pinned on him, and it is that version that Susanna Elliott carries to Main Street and shares with others.

“His sidekick, Dirty Pete, is a thick-bearded docklands thug, dumb as a rock, as you might say, and Big Mary I see as a kind of badass guerrilla leader of the right, organizer of monks, nuns and popes, violent, ruthless, intransigent. A giant. Indestructible, but heartbreaking in her lonely grandeur. The real power behind the Sweet Jesus Gang.” Far from the Main Street buzz of West Condon and ignorant of it, Susanna’s daughter Sally is describing for Stacy, over Cokes and sandwiches, one of her new story ideas. They are sitting in the Two-Door Inn, a mawkish imitation of an English tea house with exposed beams and wall lamps with fringed red shades, paper placemats shaped like crocheted doilies and plastic menus — if you ask for tea, which is not on the menu, you get a grocery store teabag and a cup of hot water — but, silly as it is, it is dear to Stacy’s heart. “Her krypton is her virginity: if she loses that, she loses all her power, so she is brutal in preserving it. I’ll call the story ‘Christian Love.’”