Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Do you hear it, Colin? Listen! Tea-kettle-tea-kettle-tea-kettle-tea! That’s a little wren calling. It’s hard to see them because they’re mostly down on the ground, hopping around in the tangle, looking for insects. But showing off up there, making sure you can see him, is what looks and sounds like a bunting. See? High up in that maple? Dark as a little ink spot but purply and gleaming in the sun. An indigo. That pretty warbling song, do you hear him?”

“I want to go back to the camp.”

“I know. We’re going back. But first we’ll walk through here and see how many different birds we can find, and then we’ll have a picnic by the lake. It’s our little holiday. I’ve fixed your favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and have brought potato chips and cold sodas and chocolate chip cookies for dessert that Ludie Belle baked just for us and even some marshmallows to roast if you want to.”

“I want to go back to the camp.”

It has been his litany since they drove out through the camp gates, but it is so peaceful and beautiful here in the lakeside bird sanctuary, more like the church camp used to be before it got so civilized. Debra feels certain that if she is patient he will warm to it and begin to enjoy himself and be grateful afterwards for their little midsummer treat, and they may be able to talk a bit about what might happen next. He could even like being away from the camp so much he’ll be willing to think about leaving it for good, just the two of them. The golden age of the camp has passed; it’s time to leave. They can go somewhere where no one knows them and she can get a teaching job, or work as a social worker or a librarian, and take care of him for as long as she lives.

“Can we go back to the camp now?”

“Are you afraid? Don’t be afraid. You’re here with me.” He only glares at her as if at a stranger. “Oh, look, Colin! Don’t move!” she whispers. “A hummingbird!” She nods toward a coral honeysuckle shrub where the little ruby-throated bird with its hypodermic beak, hardly bigger than a June bug, hangs in midair, its pale wings an invisible blur, its tiny heart pounding away over a thousand times a minute. Success at last! Colin watches it with awed fascination. Her own heart is pounding, too. She so much needs today to go well. Colin reaches out as if to touch the bird and it darts away.

“I want to go back to the camp.”

“Oh, Colin…” But he is already halfway to the car. She has to run to catch up. Overhead, a single bird sets off in alarm, arousing a flock and causing a ripple through the trees like a shudder down the spine.

“Help me, Lord. Show me what’s wrongful and what’s needful and what to do if something’s both.” Thus, under the shower, the penitent sinner, Christian songsmith, and unassuming man of peace, Ben Wosznik, weighed down with fury and awe and despair, pleads for illumination as the cold spray needles him. He has done what he can. He has run his errands and he has crafted the caps and fuses, saving the crimping of the fuses for such time as they might be needed. The old sticks are sweating their nitro and are dangerous, telltale crystals poxing some of them, but everything is buried safely out of sight and reach. The hard face they’re to be used on is not a wall of coal, only history, but it’s just as black and impenetrable and just as likely to blow out on you.

The camp’s communal showers have a new electric hot water tank that is turned on for six hours each day. The tight little shower in their house trailer has no elbow room, so after the hot water is off and the others have gone, Ben sometimes likes to come up here for a cold shower on his own. Sometimes, on good days, he thinks up new songs here, sometimes he just hums old ones, listening inside them for the grace he seeks. “The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide…” He’s humming that now. In the deepening darkness of a bright afternoon. A darkness poor Dave Osborne jumped into. Ben occasionally finds the young, curly-headed office fellow in here at this time as well, but the boy never stays; if he comes in while Ben is here, he always apologizes shyly and leaves immediately. That’s what has happened today. Darren is a strange boy with strange ideas, but also smart in a way Ben is not, nor could ever be. Consequently, though Ben respects him and listens to him, they never have much to say to each other. Ben gets on better with the other one, Billy Don, who is also a good Christian boy with some Bible college ideas but more down to earth. Thinking about those two boys, he is reminded of Carl Dean Palmers and the last time he saw him, that terrible morning, just below Inspiration Point, wearing his leather jacket, ball cap, and red boots, the lad’s beard still wet from a predawn shower. It was when Carl Dean said he wished Ben was his dad, filling Ben’s heart, and then to Ben’s sorrow he said goodbye and they hugged. Ben wishes now he knew how to reach him. He might be able to talk with him about this thing he’s thinking of doing. Maybe even get some help. He wonders if he will see Carl Dean again if those biker boys come back. He does not think he will.

Elaine is taking food again, only a bite or two of dry toast and a swallow of milk so far, but it’s a change of attitude, so they’ve agreed to release her today after the doctor makes his afternoon rounds. After his shower, Ben will take Clara to the hospital in the truck so she can ride back with Elaine in the ambulance. But the girl is not well. She does not look like she will ever be well again. A cruel punishment for such a pious child. And for her pious mother, too, who is near broken by it. About Bernice’s idea of trying exorcism, Ben doesn’t know. The child does not seem to be herself, it’s true, and anything is worth trying. But it’s not amongst his notions of how God works in the world and tends His souls, notions learned mostly from Elaine’s father, that gentle righteous man who set Ben on the true path all those years ago and brought him home to Jesus. “Grace is not something you die to get,” Ely used to say in his sure quiet way, “it’s something you get to live!” Ben has been working for some time on a song with that line, to the tune, loosely, of the old church number, “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go.” Another melody he has been humming of late: “I’ll do Your will with a heart sincere, I’ll be what You want me to be.” He may introduce the song tonight at prayer meeting, if he can get the second line right.

Though Ely’s spirit seems to have withdrawn from his wife and daughter of late, Ben has felt him close by all day, and he is reassured by that. Ely seems to be saying, just by being there, that there is man’s work to be done and Ben must do it, though he promises him no peace from the sin of it, nor does Ben expect such a promise. Contrarily, Ben has not felt Jesus close by, not for some time. Moses, more like. As he said to Clara at the hospital this morning, “I’m feeling more Old Testament than New.” “I know,” she said. “But we’re New Testament people, Ben. We have to bear up.” But she was crying and did not stop crying.

When Ben unearthed the first batch of dummies down where the attack on Elaine took place, he supposed he had found it all. Only when he chanced on the second smaller lot in Rocky’s violated grave did he realize the bikers must have buried their haul in separate parcels. More than anything else it’s that careful planning that convinces Ben they’ll return. How much is there? Sheriff Puller told them what the old inventory showed, but it was assumed to be out of date, and at the time no one took it seriously. But maybe they should have. The two parcels Ben has found would be only about a fifth of that inventory amount, meaning, if the number’s right, there may be five or six other locations — or even more, depending on how they split it up. After finding the heap in his dog’s grave, he paid a visit to his old abandoned farm shack where the biker boys holed up while they were here, figuring it was a likely out-of-the-way place for them to stow such things. He rooted about and took up floorboards and followed all their tracks, but he turned up nothing. Now, though, under the sharp cold spray, it comes to him like a revelation: that pile of small unburnt logs in the old wood cookstove. Everything else a shambles and those clean logs stacked as neatly as a kid’s building blocks. He’ll stop by there on his way back from the hospital.