Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Mom! Come and see!” It’s the little Blaurock boy at the top of the hill. His mother lifts her mass up the slope. Her stretched tunic is split; it tears more as she climbs. Even before she turns with the news, Darren knows what it will be. He has been to the old cemetery this morning before church with Billy Don, has seen the vacated grave. “It’s Rocky!” Dot Blaurock cries out. “He’s been raptured!” Darren nods when others turn toward him. “I know,” he says quietly, yet most hear. He watches them rush to the top of the hill to see for themselves. He didn’t exactly know, but it fits. It’s happening. Anything can be expected. These are the End Times. Just as he has foreseen.

He is calmer now, but when he first saw the empty grave at the old municipal cemetery he was frightened. Billy Don was watching him closely when he led him to it. To see if he was only acting, as Billy Don later confessed. He was not. His alarm, fear, awe would have been obvious to anyone. But why just this one? Billy Don asked. Why not all the others? Because it’s a message, he whispered. A message especially for him. God’s reader of signs. In the words of their Prophet: The tomb is its message . One talks about these things, imagines them, prepares for them, but always as somewhat abstract notions somewhere in the future, inevitable but not quite real. Like death. Then suddenly here it is. This ceremony today on the Mount of Redemption is taking on new meaning, one he can only partially intuit and hope he is prepared for. That feeling again of a cold wind. He knelt there in the long early morning shadows amid the forgotten dead to pray for guidance. To himself, silently, eyes closed; this was not for Billy Don.

Billy Don also told him about the city’s plans to bring a person here to the Mount this afternoon whom they will allege to be the Prophet. Such tactics do not surprise him. False messiahs abound in scriptural depictions of the Latter Days; they are in effect further evidence that those days have arrived. “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.” How did Billy Don find out about all this? For that matter, how did the authorities know about today’s unannounced ceremony? That evil girl. If she even is a girl and not a living manifestation of Satan himself — or herself. Everyone knows that the Devil, as a fallen angel, is sexless and can appear in any form. Billy Don’s treason runs deep. It is far worse than mere apostasy. He has been warned and has ignored the warning. “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” It is such a tragedy, such a failure of understanding, with consequences to be suffered through all eternity. Darren has confided so much in Billy Don, ever since they were in Bible college together. He had such hopes. Now he realizes how wrong he was to do so. In the worldly realm of the body, of the senses, Darren has made some mistakes. The Devil has sometimes used Billy Don to tempt him away from divine things toward the worldly. He believed for a while — or chose to believe — that no man sins, for God does all things in him: “Nothing in a man’s works is his own.” An excuse for iniquity and folly. Such moral lapses are difficult to avoid here on this confused and sinful earth, but they are moral lapses just the same and he repents of them. Now they are entering upon a new stage of the human drama, and all that is in the past. In history, which is ending. Perilous times are come. He feels in his heart a great universal love, but he knows that Billy Don’s besotted and corrupted soul cannot be saved.

Colin comes running down the hill in his tunic, scrambling over the trench marking out the floor plan of the tabernacle church, to tell him what he has seen. He is at the edge of hysteria again. Rarely is he not. “It’s all right, Colin,” Darren says. “It’s good.” Colin gazes at him through his wispy hair, looks back up the hill, looks at Darren again, perplexed but trusting. He is utterly faithful to Darren and will do whatever he asks, but he is also difficult, demanding, and so fragile. There is always the risk of sudden, erratic, even dangerous behavior. Colin had a similar relationship with Sister Debra and see what came of that. Still, this troubled orphan’s spectacularly original visions provide a window onto things unseen by others — unseeable, really — even if they are not always easy to interpret. One night Colin told him that he dreamed he was in the Garden of Eden, lying in a soft pillowy place that was the giant body of the First Mother. Adam and Cain had already killed her. Her head was not there and something was flowing from her neck; not blood exactly, more like milk. It was causing wild vegetation to grow up around them, protecting him from Adam and Cain, but also giving them places where they could hide. Though the First Mother was dead, she wrapped him in her giant hands and he peeked out at the jungly garden through her fingers and saw atrocious things happening there, but believed they would not happen to him. Unless she let go. He awoke screaming because he thought she was letting go, and he came leaping into Darren’s bed to tell him, trembling violently, what he’d been dreaming. Darren was not sure quite what to make of such a vision, beyond its obvious appeal for protection, but Colin later said it might only have been the First Mother crying, but everything was shaking. That made Darren think of the coalmine disaster and the feeling he sometimes had on the Mount of Redemption that the ground was quivering underfoot. Eerie. The local vulgar name for this hill, he knows, is C — t Hill. He was coming to understand it might be a strange local vision of the Last Judgment, and — the end is always in the beginning — has incorporated Eden and the First Parents into his own interpretations of the End Times. He feels that, thanks to his disciplined pursuit of the truth, the world is gradually revealing itself to him as an open book.

His relationship to Jesus has also been evolving. It was as a boy genius and courageous young man that Jesus won his heart, and he was moved then by Jesus’ goodness, his love, his wisdom, the sufferings he endured for the sake of the truth he bore. As Darren grew older, Jesus’ human life lost its importance, becoming merely an anecdotal preface to his eternal role as Lord and Redeemer, his image of the Savior moving as if from one plane to another, the human story remaining behind in the world to guide and solace the ordinary believer, but only as an insubstantial shadow of the timeless one, which exists in a dimension-less space, where all is One, and where even the very image of Jesus is absorbed and vanishes. But now the human Jesus has reemerged in Darren’s thoughts, not so much as preacher, miracle worker, messiah, or martyr, but as prophet, for Darren, like the historical Jesus, is also living inside human time, experiencing the same hopes, fears, uncertainties as he did, struggling desperately to understand the enigmatic Father, and to help others to understand Him in time for their souls to be saved, and so feeling like a brother to him. His other self. They are stepping through history — it is the same history! — hand in hand.

At Darren’s personal invitation, Abner Baxter and his followers have arrived, several wearing Brunist tunics. They are clustered together over by the mine buildings, reluctant to intrude upon the gathering on the Mount, although there are many more of them than are here on the hill, even with the addition of the new Defenders. Clara’s presence, probably. She showed her clear disapproval upon noticing them. Abner feels a grave responsibility for much that has happened of late, most recently the horrific death Friday night of the son of one of his most loyal friends, almost certainly at the hands of his own wayward boys, so shockingly back among them. That friend is not here today. Most are appalled by these savage events; Darren is, but he is solaced by their fulfillment of ancient Latter Days prophecies. The dark angels have returned. The final tribulations have begun. He must be brave. It won’t be easy. The Bible says so.