Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Homesick Uriah agrees to go with them, but his buddy Hovis has not turned up in the trailer park — he’s a bit slow, probably he didn’t understand what was happening — so Uriah goes trudging back up through the sticky brown mud in his old rain slicker and soft-billed cap to search for him. Outside the Meeting Hall, he finds big television trucks and tents and camera equipment and cars parked everywhere, even on the grass and in the flower beds, and crowds grown so thick he cannot squeeze into the hall, but he has a key to the kitchen service entrance off the back parking lot and he lets himself in that way. The kitchen is jammed up with people, too (his heart sinks a little, thinking about the hard labor they’ve put into this building, and how little these folks respect it), but over their heads he can see young Darren in the main hall addressing the gathered faithful, spelling out the peculiar signs that have marked this time and place for momentous events soon to happen and indeed already happening, as Uriah has often heard him do, though never so sure of himself as now. He speaks of the voice in the ditch and the headless biker and the double sevens and the emptied graves and the sightings of Christ Jesus, and along with everything else, he tells them what that sick man who was supposed to be the Prophet Bruno said last Sunday before the terrible explosion in the camp: “Dark… Light.” He says it has many meanings but it was partly an astonishing prophecy of that blast itself just minutes before it happened, and this is because of what Uriah and Hovis told him later about dynamite used in the mines sometimes being called “black lightning.” Darren was amazed. “Why, that just fits!” he said, and Uriah and Hovis felt proud, but of what they weren’t sure. Darren, who has grown up some since his early days here as Clara’s office boy, is wearing his belted white tunic with a golden medallion on a chain around his neck and carrying a mine pick like a kind of staff, just like the Prophet in the picture, the very image of a young holy man, his bright blond curls standing out around his ears like a halo. The boy has a quiet, spellbinding way of speaking, giving the impression he knows what he’s talking about, even if there is some question about that among most of Clara’s people who have known him longer. But these are not Clara’s people. These are the Followers who have been traipsing around in the fields after Abner Baxter, a whole army of them, brazen and hungry, wet, raggedy, and ready for whatever, including the Rapture and the violent upheavals of the Apocalypse, if that’s what’s next. Uriah supposes that if so many of his people are here, Abner cannot be far behind, and, sure enough, there’s a parting of the masses at the main door like the folding back of the Red Sea, and to loud applause and cheers and “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chants, in strides the Brunist bishop of West Condon with all the fiery purpose of a short red-headed Moses, thick jaw a-jut, a few cameramen and photographers sliding in in his wake as though he were towing them, and in his booming voice he calls everyone to prayer. You could hear him all the way over on the Mount of Redemption. That man can squench thunder, as they say where Uriah hails from. Darren sometimes talks over Uriah’s head in his college-boy way, but he can certainly follow Abner, who is more like those hellfire preachers and union organizers Uriah and Hovis had known and followed all their lives back home. Where now, though the weather’s no better there than it is here, Uriah longs to be. If he’s going to have to slop around in mud while waiting to get raptured, he’d rather it was West Virginia mud. He tries to remember why he came up here. He pulls out his fob watch to study it, but as usual forgets what time it is as soon as he pockets it again.

“Are ye ready for the Glorious Appearing? Are ye ready for Christ to return?” the Reverend Abner Baxter asks with his freckled fist in the air, his flushed face wet from the rain, and he is met with an affirmative roar. Abner’s bitter years in the wilderness have come to an end. There were times when he would speak and no one would listen, times when his embraces would be met with blows. Times when, as Paul said, “no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.” He has been hounded cruelly from town to town, has been shot at and pelted with stones and even with cow dung, attacked by night riders, betrayed, cursed, imprisoned, beaten, and deserted by family and fellow believers alike. About the only hardship he has not shared with the Apostle is shipwreck. On the other hand, Paul had no sons to lose or turn against him. In his intransigent faithfulness to the awesome and punishing Word of God, Abner has suffered the abomination of desolation as spoken of by Daniel the prophet and has been brought close to utter despair, but now, tempered by adversity, his faith annealed, it is he who will lead the holy remnant to glory. It is a word that fills his throat: Glory! “There must be a Day of Wrath,” he declares in a voice trembling with urgency, “when sun and moon and stars is darkened, and the Heavens is rolled together and the earth is shook!” As he looks back on his years of tribulation, he understands the tender generosity of the Lord’s wrath, the ferocity of His love. He can, like the Apostle Paul, now speak of these things with an eloquence born of terrible suffering and unyielding faith, and he does so here in the crowded Meeting Hall. “Bru-no! Bru-no! Bru-no!” the Followers chant. He recounts for them the horrors (another word that fills his throat) of the Final Days, many of which they have already suffered, and the blessings of the Heavenly kingdom that awaits them on the other side of their ordeals, which is not unlike the workers’ paradise he once imagined before his conversion to the true faith. “All things are cleansed with blood,” he cries, “and apart from the shedding of blood there is no remission! These things saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire , and his feet are like fine brass!” The Followers are shouting his words back to him, calling for divine judgment, and some commence to speak in tongues. The earthly kingdom of Christ is imminent; the assembled believers can feel it, they have only to go out and pledge their eternities to it.

“He will come in power and great glory and I tell ye, the time is now! The Millennial Kingdom as announced by the Prophet Bruno is at hand!” thunders Reverend Baxter and Dot Blaurock bellows back: “Amen, brother! I seen Him! He’s walking around out there right now! Hallelujah!” Her kids all shout out high-pitched amens and hallelujahs, too, all except little Johnny who passes a bit of wind in his sousaphone way, young zealot that he is, and then begins to howl, his howls drowned out, however, by echoing hosannas and amens at full throat from all those around her, God bless them. Abner raises his fist and shakes it. “But the blessed Mount of Redemption, which is rightfully and needfully ours , has been sealed off from us! The Antichrist is usurping God’s rightful place of worship and is desecrating the Temple!” There are shouts of outrage and dismay, and Dot joins in, even though the temple that is being desecrated is really only the idea of one. She has joined up with a lot of these revelational groups over the years and this is the best it has ever got. Young Darren now coolly lays out the plan of action: They’ll leave here and form up at the base of the hill, where the mine road turns off from the main road. “Give others a ride if you can! But we’ll wait for those coming on foot!” Then, with the Brunist Defenders serving as marshals (Dot has volunteered herself as a Defender, but they have not yet taken up her offer; well, they’re busy, she’ll just be one anyway), they will all march peacefully up to the tabernacle as outlined on the hillside, where they will hold a church service in memory of their fallen friend and saintly Brunist Founder, Ben Wosznik, so horribly murdered while heroically defending their Wilderness Camp home. And, yes, they can take their guns with them — this is America, it’s their right. “We won’t use them except in extreme self-defense, but we won’t be intimidated either.” Darren says they have spoken with the new sheriff and he will do what he can to ease their way, but if there is trouble they should follow the leadership of Reverend Baxter. Who — fist raised again, shouting out “Glory!” —bulls forward. With that, the crowd turns and follows him noisily out the front door. “Glory!” they shout. Maybe the television crews weren’t expecting this, for some of them fail to get out of the way in time and are fairly trampled by the sudden brass-footed rush to the exit. Dot herself feels chunks of camera gear crunching under her boots as she clambers out of the hall, Johnny in her arms, Matthew, Mark and Luke following at her heels. “Christ Jesus, here we come!” she shouts, but then she has to pause for Markie to take a wee-wee in a rain puddle. Even with all eternity to go jump into, the boy can’t wait.