Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“You think that’s the sort of person Mary really was?”

“I have no idea, but neither did the clowns who wrote the Bible. They made up one character, I can make up another. If she catches on, it’ll change a lot of church art. A whole different comicstrip.”

Stacy is laughing again, has been all through the drive and lunch, worrying only that it might edge into hysteria, for she’s feeling quite giddy, unable to stop thinking about the time she was here with Ted and all they did and said that day. Today there are crowds of tourists with small chattery kids, but that day they were alone, or at least that’s how she remembers it, the world around them little more than a painted backdrop, with the prettified melodies of old love songs tinkling away on the sound system, a kind of charm bracelet music she seemed to hear even when they were standing out on Lookout Point, hand in hand, staring dreamily down on the rich muddy river ripe with spring, and feeling the surge of it. Probably the same songs are playing now, but they’re lost in the noisy chatter. She has had to fend off Sally’s curiosity about life at the bank and outside it, about the amber necklace she is wearing and how she spends her weekends, and when they came in here Sally remarked that the place seems to have some special meaning for her, so Stacy made up a story about a teenage love affair consummated in this village, the amazement of discovering sex for the first time, partly based on a forgotten true story that actually happened at a ski resort, and she even found herself describing the boy’s body, which was not at all like Ted’s body, yet somehow reminded her of it. Just because it had all the relevant parts probably — all the “bits and bobs” as English tea house habitués might put it. She was tempted to tell Sally the real story, or something like it, especially when she realized Sally jealously suspected the young boy she was describing might be Tommy Cavanaugh — it would be the fastest way to disabuse her of that idea — and she so longed for someone to talk to about it, but she couldn’t risk the scandal. It would end everything. So she has bit her tongue all day and kept changing the subject. It is how she has learned all about the Brunists — more than she ever wanted to know — but as told by Sally, it has been mostly an entertainment, full of amusing and horrifying and insane incidents. The terrible mine disaster, the lone survivor, the cult that formed up around him, made up of over-educated occultists and ignorant evangelicals possessed by the Jesus demon, their shy privacy shattered by the cynical local newspaperman who infiltrated the cult and then exposed them to the world, their naïve prophecy about the Second Coming and end of the world taking place out at an old slag heap which they called the Mount of Redemption, all of it becoming a huge international media event — a bizarre carnival, really — and ending in catastrophic failure. Out of which has grown this new religion with scores of churches and thousands of believers, while the little town itself, which purified itself by chasing everyone off, including the newspaper editor, has sunk into what Sally called the slough of terminal despond, probably quoting some book or maybe Shakespeare. “It’s all so depressingly predictable,” Sally said. “Round and round. It’s like living inside a palindrome.” Stacy already knew some of this, though not so pessimistically, for Ted is a market optimist and always has a positive outlook, but the story that was new to her was that of the prophet’s sister, which Sally described in intimate detail, based on secret photographs she has seen, admitting to having found the couch of the girl’s apparent deflowering and stretched out on it and felt the fire of that ill-fated romance. Stacy, who couldn’t help but imagine Ted as the ravisher, remarked that it all sounded like the makings of a good novel, but though Sally agreed that it probably was, it was not, she said, the sort she’d ever write. Whereupon she began describing some of her story ideas, which have struck Stacy as sometimes pretty funny, but mostly way too weird. Stacy says she likes more realistic stories.

“Like those ladies’ romances you read, you mean,” Sally says with a grin, picking at her teeth with a fingernail. “The conventional way of telling stories is itself a kind of religion, you know, a dogmatic belief in a certain type of human perception as the only valid one. Like religious people, conventional writers follow hand-me-down catechisms and look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens, not crafted by them and belonging to generations of writers long dead. So conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can’t keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time. It’s the price they pay. They don’t make as much money, but they have more fun.” Sally brushes some crumbs off her chested slogan, causing GOD to wobble as though calling for attention. Or nodding his agreement. “Tight-assed little paragraphs laid out in order like snapshots in a photo album are not for me. I don’t want a life like that either.” Sally has been fumbling edgily with her pack of cigarettes. She needs to get out into the open air. Stacy asks for the bill. “Recently I went to visit Tommy’s mother who’s dying of cancer and is pretty much bedridden, the poor woman. We spent a lot of time looking at her photo albums. You know, the usual parade of bygone days lying like corpses against those funereal black pages: childhood, college, family, kids, travels, and so on. I’m in some of them, playing with little Tommy in the park, making him cry, that sort of thing. What’s odd, though, is that she’s mutilating them. Ripping people out of photos, trashbagging whole albums. As far as I could tell, it’s mostly images of Tommy’s dad that are getting edited out. Who knows why. Maybe she feels he isn’t paying her enough attention, or she thinks he’s playing around, or she’s just mad that she’s dying and he isn’t. But, whatever, the more damage she does to them, the more interesting they get. They’re an ugly mess, but there’s passion now. Art.” Sally is smiling. Stacy isn’t, though she’s trying. “I asked her if she had three wishes, what would she wish for? I expected her to say something like not to have cancer or maybe the end of all cancer in the world or else something vengeful to go along with what she is doing to the photo albums. But instead, she said she wished we were all better prepared for the disappointment that life is.”

“Oh…! That’s so sad…”

On West Condon’s Main Street, the lunchtime klatch has reconvened at Mick’s Bar & Grill. Georgie, tagging along with the fire chief, needs a drink badly after what he’s just seen, but so far, no one has offered him one. Whatever made Dave off himself like that? Georgie can conceive of doing things that might leave him with limited chances of survival — he’s seen all the old war movies and has imagined his own ill-fated heroics (after a consolatory fuck or two with the village darlings) — but jumping forever into the night like that for no better reason than love or money makes no sense to him. Old man Beeker of the hardware store, munching away, says if things don’t get better on Main Street, he’ll be the next to tear up his ticket, and others echo him, though Burt Robbins says the problem was that Osborne was just another blue-collar meathead who couldn’t make the class jump. His snarling remarks always piss Georgie off, the more so when aimed at a solid guy like Dave, his body not even cold yet, but he keeps his peace and probably, because he can never turn it off, even has a stupid grin on his face. Is it bad luck to see a guy swing like that? Probably, but so is everything else.