Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“I remember when Ben first come,” Wanda Cravens says in her thin nasal wail. “There in that Eye-talian house. He was like a kinda miracle. He sung Amazing Grace.’ Him and Betty Wilson. It made me cry.” Wanda hardly ever shows any emotion. Things just happen to her and she lets them and doesn’t seem to care. But she’s crying now, just a little. Mabel was also there that night when Ben and Betty sang. Ben said he had read about them in the newspaper. Things were not going well, everybody was feeling depressed, but his comforting presence lifted spirits and his singing touched them all. It was very beautiful and Betty’s voice had never been prettier. He was like a gift. They knew everything would be all right after that. A song sung well can do that. Through the years, Ben anchored them with his singing. When the Cleggs were back visiting in April, Mabel noticed that Betty was still carrying the torch. She will be much affected when she learns what has happened. Betty is out on bail now, but both she and Hiram are facing trial for stealing that McCardle woman’s money — mostly for the church, though maybe not all. She called Clara long distance to tell her that it was all just an honest mistake and everything would be put right, but they needed some help to pay for lawyers because their accounts were frozen. Clara said the church would do what it could, though she made it clear to Mabel later that she was not happy with what the Cleggs had done and felt let down by them. But she also asked everyone to pray for them, because that’s Clara’s way. She is a woman of charity and peace and of deep abiding faith, sincere and giving. She is the best person Mabel has ever known. It hardly seems possible all this could be happening to her. And she drew to her side two of the best men the whole world has known. Both victims of horrible deaths. Her son, too, in the war. There is talk now about burying Ben in the grave opened up for Giovanni Bruno’s symbolic burial across from Ely. Both men side by side on the Mount of Redemption, flanking the entrance to the new temple. But Clara isn’t interested. She doesn’t want to talk about the tabernacle temple.

At least Clara is talking to Ely again. Or Ely to her — he has been absent for a time, as Clara has confessed to her. Mabel believes this talking is real and is a good thing, and she hopes that Ben will be able to get in touch with Clara now, too. He and Ely will be good friends and together they can help poor Clara whom Mabel loves more than her own self. Ben has been distant for a while, just like Ely, and Mabel knows Clara has felt this and has worried about it. He seemed to lose interest in the camp of late, all the building they had been doing, even the day-to-day like taking the garbage to the dump. Something preys on him, Clara said to her one day. They realize now how much they have relied on him and how sorely he will be missed. Ludie Belle says that her husband Wayne is lost without him. He just mopes and shakes his head and “keeps a-backin’ and a-forthin’.” Bernice, who has popped in under her head scarf and umbrella from across the lot where she has been caring for Clara and Elaine, says she thinks Ben stopped taking care of things because he somehow knew he was going to die. “He had that way of peering in instead of out.” Others agree that a certain gravity had overtaken him and that maybe he had some foreknowledge of his fate. His newest song used one of Ely Collins’ famous lines. It was almost like he was preparing to join up with him. “Ben has gone to be with his dog in Heaven,” Linda Catter says with a wistful sigh, referring to the discovery yesterday of Rocky’s empty grave over at the Mount of Redemption, but Corinne Appleby notes there was a dog’s bone left behind—“You wouldn’t rapture a dog and not take his leg bone along, would you?” Glenda Oakes says she rather hopes you get a change of bones when you get raptured. She doesn’t want to suffer her arthritis all through eternity.

Mabel did not witness the dog’s empty grave. It was strange, but not the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the man they brought to the Mount. Was he really Giovanni Bruno? Nobody thinks so; he didn’t look like him at all. Mabel knew the Prophet well, right from the beginning. He didn’t say or do much, but he had a quiet stately way about him. This one was all jittery. Whoever or whatever he was, though, he certainly looked ready for a grave. If he hadn’t been dug up from one. The powers of darkness are capable of tricks like that, as Bernice always says. If what it looked like happened had really happened, he’s certainly in a grave by now, or back in the one where they found him.

There are mixed feelings about young Darren, too, but it’s hard to deny his special powers. The way he prophesied the return of the motorcycle gang and more disturbing events for yesterday, the way he foresaw the rapturing of Rocky, the way he pointed to the barren empty hilltop and seemed to make all those people appear out of nowhere, the way he announced the appearance of the false Bruno when he was still not visible, the way he approached the strange man and made him fall to his knees just by his presence. The man seemed to shrivel and die at Darren’s feet, or return to death. Like vampires do in the movies when you stake their hearts in the sun. Or in real life, too, probably, though to the best of her knowledge, Mabel has never known a vampire, and certainly has never seen one die. Then, as soon as the man fell down, there was the explosion at the camp. As if the dark powers, losing one battle, were determined to win another in a different place. Only Darren remained calm. It was like he knew all along what was going to happen.

Glenda Oakes has talked with Darren and she says he believes that, for a moment anyway, the spirit of Giovanni Bruno did inhabit that wretched creature and revealed to him a new eighth prophecy: Dark Light. This was just before he fell down. Like all of the Prophet’s pronouncements, its meaning is somewhat obscure, but that’s in the nature of all prophecy, as Mabel, a fellow practitioner in her modest way, knows well. Her cards predicted the disaster yesterday, for example, even the exact number of deaths down in the wild place where poor Elaine was so calamitously abused. Looking back she could see that, but she failed to interpret rightly. Darren says if Ely had lived it would all be much clearer, but the messages have had to reach them through a damaged medium, like through a thick curtain. Glenda says that Darren believes God chose these means on purpose, making His message unavailable to any except true believers with the will to seek understanding. And the gift to achieve it. She says this with a certain sadness because she doubts she herself has the gift. Of course, Glenda says everything with a certain sadness. Since the shooting deaths of her husband and Hazel Dunlevy, Glenda has lost the power to interpret dreams, but she is becoming a palm reader. She doesn’t know how this is happening, but it is.

Ludie Belle is closer to the other boy in the office, Billy Don, and has a less admiring view of Darren. “I don’t over-confidence that finicky young feller,” is how she puts it. “He’s swoll up with hisself and kindly snaky in his prophesyin’ ways, bushin’ up what’s inconvenient to his hypostulations.” True, Ludie Belle admits, Darren is the only one who seems able to handle “that fittified boy” now that Sister Debra’s gone, but she is not certain in her mind if how he’s doing that is “as healthsome as it should oughta be.” She doesn’t explain what she means, but the others can imagine what’s on her mind; Ludie Belle has never quite left her scarlet past behind. Darren sending out a pamphlet over Clara’s name when she wasn’t looking was a sign of how pushy he’s become, and Ludie Belle is pretty sure he’s wearing Clara’s missing medallion under his tunic, a kind of thieving of a spiritual sort. She considers him something of a Judas for turning away from Clara and toward Abner Baxter, with his fire baptisms and his violent sons and followers, and frets that it might have been Darren who set Colin against Sister Debra and so broke the mind and spirit of that poor honest woman. Bernice, who still goes out to the West Condon municipal hospital every day to help with Mr. Suggs, has told them Mrs. Edwards has become strange in her ways and has been transferred to a hospital for people with mental problems. Were the things Colin accused her of true? Is anything that crazy boy ever says true? Ludie Belle wanted to know. Their vegetable garden is mostly untended and overgrown now. Colin won’t go back because he believes she’s still down there somewhere. Hiding in the bean rows. When those men crashed into the Appleby beehives the night that Welford and Hazel died and the fireworks went off, Colin started screaming that it was Debra who was doing that. When they tried to calm him down, reminding him that she’d been taken away to jail, he cried: “She’s a witch! She flew out! She came back!” Yes, it’s true, they all heard this. “And now Darren cossetin’ him like he’s some kinder reborned Patmos John…”