Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Tub has his own notions. It had been a particularly bad Saturday night in the county. Mischievous kids on the loose, the usual drunken wife-bashing, the arrest of the Edwards woman (she’s also here in the hospital somewhere; Suggs told him to forget about her, a lost cause), the weekly Patriots training session interrupted by the camp murders, a string of burglaries over in Randolph Junction, the trashing of the Blue Moon Motel, and before the night was over, he’d got called out to the camp a second time after some drunks intruded and set off some fireworks down near where the murders had happened earlier. They had caught one of them — that stupid jackass, Johnson — when he plowed into the beehives in the dark. Tub, his mood worsened by the onset of a toothache, kicked him around for a time, asking him questions, trying to find out who had been with him and thinking he might even try to pin the double murders on him, but the jerk was so badly bee-stung — must have been hundreds swarmed onto him — Tub didn’t have the heart to work him over as he might have done. His arm looked like it might be broken, so Tub shipped him off to the emergency room instead. Anyway, he knew who the others were, and if there were any sleepers, they’d be easy to spot by the bee stings. As for the fire, he figured Lem wasn’t that far off when he first went looking for someone to batter to death. Those fuckups had been causing trouble all night, setting off a wild brawl at the Blue Moon before their assault on the Brunist camp; after collecting the fireworks debris at the camp, Tub wasn’t surprised when more of it turned up later in the ruins of Lem’s garage. Given everything else that had happened, he’d decided against filing any report about the camp break-in by those drunks, not to draw more unwanted attention to that place. He certainly doesn’t want any state or federal forces moving in, taking over his job. But if Lem gets his sanity back, they’ll have a talk.

When Governor Kirkpatrick called him to say he was under a lot of pressure from people to send in the National Guard, Tub figured he was talking about the mayor and the town banker who had been badgering him too, and he told Kirkpatrick that Castle and Cavanaugh were alarmists, everything was under control, and if there should be any trouble, which he doesn’t expect, he could simply mobilize his volunteers, if the governor would authorize that, and the governor said that he would, that it seemed like the best solution. He’d even organize some sort of emergency budget for it if it turned out to be necessary, which is what Tub wanted to hear, saying that one thing he needed right now was more riot gear. The governor said he could do that. He was mainly concerned about some event the day after the Fourth, which Tub had heard about but without paying much attention. It seems the Brunists are organizing some sort of ceremony at the mine hill that day, Kirkpatrick said, and Cavanaugh is planning to spring a surprise on them that might backfire. The governor had stuck his neck out on this one and wanted to be sure the sheriff and his deputies would be out there that day, keeping an eye on things, and Tub said not to worry, they would be there. Tub has been explaining some of this to Suggs, choosing his words carefully, when he notices the old man is no longer focused on him, his eyes still open but without that fierce stare. Tuck’s widow, checking his pulse just to make sure, says Suggs often sleeps with his eyes open and that that’s what he’s doing now.

“Dave Osborne stayed on the phone until everyone he could reach below had been directed to safety, then joined the first rescue crew. We needed him down there. It was black as only you guys know it can be and thick with hot coaldust, and no one knew the Deepwater workings and could move through them blind like Dave Osborne.” It’s Barney Davis speaking, the Deepwater company supervisor at the time of the accident, now employed by the State Mining Board, having been shoehorned into the job by the company owners to protect their asses up in the capital. The Barn’s crew-cut hair is as white as it ever was, but he looks younger than he did five years ago; life in the capital suits him. Everybody else here in the church looks twenty years older, Tub included. He’s standing at the back, near the doors, rather hoping there might be an emergency call that will get him out of here. He is short on patience with this sort of memorializing sentimentality, and what little he has is being ground away by his nagging toothache. Should go to a dentist, keeps putting it off. He associates these places with the dead, funerals being the only times he turns up in them. Tub is not a churchgoer just like he’s not a flag waver. He is a patriot and a believer simply because this is the world he lives in and there is no reason not to be. He enforces the law around here, and it’s American law and Christian law, and if he started questioning too much how it got that way, he wouldn’t do a good job of it. He knows who he is, and that’s enough. The world will take care of itself and doesn’t need him for its ceremonies. But should he be wearing these guns on his hips in here? Probably not. Well, tough titty, as the saying goes in or out of a church. Without them he’d feel like he was not wearing pants. “We were anxious to find survivors and get them to the surface as quickly as we could, so we went below bareface with only wet rags against the dust and gases. What we found down there was a nightmare. Airlock doors blasted open, timbers the size of phone poles snapped like matchsticks, roofs down and piled on top of machinery and men, buggies crunched like sardine cans and blown up against the ribs, twisted rails looking like some kind of devil’s 3D handwriting. Dave Osborne guided us through all that with nothing but our cap lamps, aiming straight for the worst of it, sometimes on our hands and knees.” It was partly due to The Barn’s negligence that the mine blew up in the first place. Everybody knows that. In a just world the sonuvabitch would be doing time, but no one’s making a point of it. That’s not why the union invited him back. They know Davis is trying to get some mines reopened and they want him to keep doing that. Though the Osborne memorial service organized by the union is being hosted by the Lutherans, there are people here from most of the churches in town, including the RCs, all sitting together over at one side of the church like at the back of the bus, and even a few of those evangelicals from the church camp. There was a buzz when they showed up. Tub assured them he’d watch out for them, but they don’t really fit in here in this town anymore and they know it. They sit stiffly, looking like aliens wearing human masks, even more uncomfortable than the RCs. “Some of us started getting sick from the gas, so we turned back and brought up the first bodies we’d found. Dave didn’t want to quit and we had to drag him along with us back up to fresh air. He got himself fitted up with an oxygen tank and tools and went right back down on the next crew, working straight through until dawn. Dave Osborne was probably the first live person some of you out there saw that night. A hero. He was.”

Before the ceremonies, standing around outside having a smoke, Davis had to take some flak from miners, led by that gasbag Bonali, complaining about the sale of the mine to the holyrollers instead of reopening it and putting men to work again. The Barn reminded them, pushing his rimless specs up his thin beak, that he is no longer associated with that company, but it was his understanding the sale still had not gone through and so far it didn’t include mineral rights. That’s what he’d heard. Tub didn’t know that and he wondered if Suggs does. Tub can appreciate Davis’ situation now that he has been sheriff a while: the endless contrary demands, the petty criticisms, everybody trying to get your ear and bend it. He can imagine being sheriff for life — for one thing, it gets him free tailored shirts and pants — but he wouldn’t want anything up the ladder from that. As for Osborne, the truth is he was easy to get on with — no ambition, so stepped on nobody’s toes, good at what he did — but Tub knows he also let things happen down there in his good-guy way. The man knew about the shoddy inspections, the covering up of reports of faulty wiring, the lack of regular rockdusting and excessive coaldust on the haulage ways, the failure to seal off leaking marsh gas, and he grumbled about all these things like everyone else did, but he didn’t pipe up like he should have. Osborne was at his best telling jokes. Sure came up with a zinger at the end.