Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Hello, Nick. Calling from home. Here checking on Irene before heading out to the club with Tommy.”

“Terrific day for it, Ted. Do you need a fourth?”

“Thanks, but Tommy and I have things to talk about.”

“Is Irene—?”

“About the same. Concetta’s here. But, Nick, I just heard that, after everything else that’s happened today, the bank has been vandalized.”

“Yes, graffiti painted across the east wall and window. Something from the Bible, I think. Getting someone to clean it up now. They’ve arrested a man named Johnson.”

“Johnson? Chester Johnson, probably. Bad seed. In and out of jail so often he should be paying rent.”

“That’s him. But he seems all but illiterate. Everyone says it was really your mad preacher who did it.”

“Edwards?”

“He must have sprung his cage. That dancer has been running around all afternoon like a headless chicken with her feathers up and tail showing looking for him.”

“I think I caught a glimpse. Are we ready to make those arrests?”

“There are still some jurisdiction issues, but, yes, the warrants are prepared for our boys to enter the church camp and we know where the minister is being kept.”

“So what’s holding things up?”

“Well, I was going to do it early next week.”

“Do it today.”

In the melancholic penumbra of St. Stephen’s, waiting for Father Baglione to turn up so she can take confession, Angela Bonali prays silently to the Virgin Mary, asking that the Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, intercede for her in restoring Tommy Cavanaugh’s temporarily lost affection. He is confused and frightened, O holy Mother, and does not understand his true self. There are many different images of Mary in the church — the pious Virgin, grieving Mother, triumphant Queen of Heaven; Angela has chosen to pray before a more voluptuous and youthful Mary, smiling sweetly, the curly-headed Baby Jesus at her ample breast. The sight of the infant nuzzling his mother brings tears to her eyes. I live my life in sorrow, she tells the Virgin, calling upon the White Dove song she shared with Tommy. Darkness hides me where I kneel to pray. I thank you, dear Mother, for your promise to help me in my need today.

Mary knows of course about the anal and oral sex and the dirty pictures and all the rest of it, and Angela can only hope that the Blessed Virgin in her Heavenly wisdom, for all her lack of experience, can understand and forgive. When she sees it through the Virgin’s eyes, it does look a bit sordid. But from deep inside herself, when lost in his embrace, suffering shivers of delight, it is mysterious and beautiful. Cosmic. It helped us feel so much part of each other, O holy Mother. We became as one person, it was really divine in the true meaning of that word, and I felt closer to God than I’ve ever felt before. She can see how Mary might not be convinced. It’s just so hard, she whispers, feeling a pain in her chest (and also in her rumbling tummy — she is starving!), to be a woman. Please don’t let me fall back into my dark ages. You remember how awful that was. I couldn’t bear it!

Gazing at Mother Mary looking down upon her so lovingly, no matter how sinful she might be, Angela is reminded of her own mother, whom she misses terribly. They came here often to pray together, though the last time she prayed alone. It was the day of her mother’s funeral, the loneliest and saddest day of her life. Her dad always barks a lot and stomps around the house like the most important person in the world, leaving his cigar butts and ashes all over the place, but her mom, big and warm and kind, was just quietly there for her. Someone to talk to, to lean on. She let Angela know just how she felt but she never scolded her. Now Angela is the woman of the house, cooking and cleaning for a sullen old man and a despicable bully of a brother, earning until now the family’s only steady income, and all her brothers and sisters expect this of her, so long as the old man is alive. A woman! It’s hard to believe she’ll soon be twenty! She crosses herself, feeling Death’s chill blowing past. Sancta Maria, Mater Domini nostri, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

In catechism class, Father Bags always insisted on learning the Latin prayers; Angela was good at it and still remembers them. Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum… I am sorry for my sins. Which, in Latin, seem less personal, less shameful, more like just the way the world works. One night, when Tommy caught her crossing herself before making love, he asked in his joking way if she thought that would make the sex better. She said she was only asking that their love be blessed. But wasn’t she sinning? No, not really, she said, gazing upon him, feeling almost feverish with desire. It was okay because she loved him with all her heart and would love him forever. That made him grin and blush, which was pretty unusual for Tommy Cavanaugh. His erection dipped slightly, so she knelt and kissed it as she might kiss the toes of a saint. And then, because one thing usually leads to another, not as she might kiss the toes of a saint. His manliness always thrilled her. Well, his whole beautiful body did, his handsome face, his excited gray-blue eyes, his smile of pleasure, his strong long-fingered hands and the way they gripped and stroked her. “His searching hand seared a path down my abdomen and onto my thigh.” She has written that in her diary. Should she tell Father Bags that in confession? How would you say it in Latin?

She realizes that her thoughts have drifted away from prayer and she tries to return to it. Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve… But she is too hungry. Ad te clamamus, she cannot. All day she has been suffering a wild desperate craving for a banana split with scoops of strawberry and chocolate ice cream, hot caramel sauce, maraschino cherries, nuts, and whipped cream. It would be the worst thing ever for her diet, but these mad cravings happen to expectant women and she is almost certainly having to eat for two now, isn’t she? And she hasn’t had a bite all day — the refrigerator was empty, Charlie having cleaned it out — no wonder she’s hungry. She could devour a pizza, too. With double cheese. But after the banana split. Father Baglione has arrived and is shuffling about by the altar with his shoulders above his head and his big nose in his cassock like an old buzzard. Perhaps this is not the best moment for confession. She begs the Holy Virgin not to let her monthlies come — not yet, anyway — whispers another Salve Regina and prays that her father’s house be saved, and leaves the church. Was the old priest scowling? He always scowls.

Father Baglione is known for his scowling sobriety. The scowl is a gift from his Lombard forebears; the sobriety he has acquired in consequence of it. If a playful spirit came naturally to him, as to most children, it did not sit well on his countenance and inspire playfulness in others, except at his own expense. He was known derisively from a young age as Bags and was often the victim of bullies and practical jokers. He therefore abandoned the playground and withdrew into scholarship — which he was not very good at, never having mastered his new language — but as a poor immigrant boy, he had few other options, and soon enough, relying on diligence, he found himself in seminary, where jollity was less of a virtue, memorization more useful than reason, and Latin closer to his mother tongue. His face was there deemed a pious one and he adopted that reading as the true one, achieving a reputation for humble self-denial and implacable orthodoxy. His father was a New York cobbler, but he had immigrant uncles who had taken up coalmining, and so willingly accepted a parish in coal country among natives of his own country, supposing it to be the first step into the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But Latin, he has come to learn, is not the persuasive language of accession in the American church, nor is humility its channel. So here he remains, dear old dour old Father Bags, a living portrait of the communal gloom. He knows that others, gazing into his face, sense that he has seen into the very depths of their sinfulness and is appalled by it, and they are intimidated by that, and reveal more than is probably their intention. Today his scowl is deepened by his sense of the impending danger posed by the cultists at the edge of town. The church must be protected against further criminal assault, and these deluded madmen operating under the guise of religion must be stoutly resisted. Resistance requires unwanted meetings with representatives of other local churches, who deem themselves — though unrepentant schismatics and heretics and ignorant beyond belief — to be Christians, and having to listen to their nonsensical pieties and tedious Biblical quotations. The translation of the Sacred Scriptures into vulgar tongues and thereby its transmission to the uneducated and inflammable masses, as Father Baglione has often remarked, was one of the great calamities of human history.