Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

With the improving weather, Glenda has taken the children — hers, Hazel’s, Wanda’s and a few others temporarily abandoned by people who arrived at the camp this morning — down to the garden to collect fruit and vegetables for their lunch and do a little weeding. Hunk has killed and gutted a chicken they will all share, hoping that the others over on the Mount of Redemption do not come back before they are done. Not even Jesus could stretch a chicken out among so many, and anyway, he’s not yet around to work such marvels, were he able. She also has some canned and packaged goods that Ludie Belle Shawcross gave her before she left, but Glenda intends to save them for the hard times ahead that she foresees. This is not prophecy or fortune telling, it’s just the stone truth they face. If Hovis or Uriah had come back, she would have had someone to drive the Dunlevy caravan and they might have left with the others, but those two fellows never showed and their house trailer is still parked in the lot. They both seemed more befuddled than usual this morning and they have probably ended up over on the Mount without knowing how they got there. She oversees the children’s little harvest, making sure the plants themselves are not pulled up with the weeds, and leads them in singing while they work — children’s hymns and nursery rhymes and popular songs like “Mairzy Doats” and “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” When she hears the roar of intruders coming up the back road, she hurriedly shepherds the children into the garden shed and closes the door and tells them they’re all going to play the quiet game while she reads their palms. Everyone wants to be first and they all start shouting and she has to shush them, telling them that there is a little voice she listens to when she reads their palms and they have to be very quiet so she can hear it, and if they listen very very hard, they may hear it, too. She does not tell them what she really hears in here: rustlings of the flesh. For here the two of them were found naked with the bullet holes in their heads and here something of them remains. As Glenda examines the children’s plump little hands, she whispers all the happy wonderful things she sees there. She sees dark things, too, but she keeps these to herself. Even if there’s sadness ahead for them, they’re only children and need not fret over it. And then, just as she hears the intruders sputtering along on the old two-track road on the other side of the creek, then pausing ominously, only yards away, one of the little ones starts to howl. Wanda’s oldest, Davey, a boy not all there. He is hungry and thirsty and has made a mess in his pants and there’s no stopping him. She claps her hand over his mouth and then the others start. Would God approve strangling one to save the rest?

Why did you bring us out here? Wasn’t once enough?

It’s my suffering Christ side. Being reviled we bless, being persecuted we rejoice, and all that. But now that I’m here, seeing this great multitude sunning itself on the hillside, I feel some more blesseds coming on.

Oh no. You’ve done that already.

I know, but I’m doing a rewrite. I shall open my mouth and teach the many, for it is my task to bear witness to the truth.

They’re beyond teaching. Look at them. They’re not sunning themselves. They’re out of their minds with fear and religious frenzy.

They stand — their shared arms outstretched in iconic embrace — on the cusp of the mine hill above the chalky cross trenched into the side, gazing down upon the astonished followers of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno, the pale plump Jehoshaphat fellow sweating in his brown suit at their side, excited children scurrying around their feet like foraging rodents. Some of the cultists have fallen to their knees in the greasy mud in frenzied prayer, tearfully repenting of their sins, which are no doubt multitudinous and unforgivable, and begging for admittance into the kingdom of Heaven, while others, more skeptical, draw together, scowl and grumble. “What’s goin’ on here?” the one in the wheelchair asks, peering virulently up at them from between his hunched shoulders. They fear most those on their knees. And the children. That troublemaker dragging the filthy pink slipper, for example, who is at this moment describing for all her pals what she saw last time when she crawled under their robe.

“Can we go now?” the quivering creature at their elbow asks, sotto voce.

“In a moment, Mr. Jenkins. First, I have some devils of false expectations to cast out.”

“Devils—?”

Well, if you’re going to insist on acting out this mad charade, we should stop standing here with our arms out like a scarecrow and sit as Jesus sat.

As I sat, I know. But there is no place to sit here unless you offer me your knee.

My knee is your knee.

Sometimes in nightmares young Reverend Jenkins has found himself standing before a great throng in his underwear, obliged to give a speech or a sermon he has forgotten. Though he is now dressed in a handsome if slightly stained three-piece corduroy suit, he feels as naked and lost as in his nightmares. It seems a lifetime since his bus ride into this crazed community — crazed with religion, true, but in some ghastly medieval or else futuristic way, not at all the peaceful-valley pastorate he had imagined, more akin to his happy days back in his hometown Sunday School Brigade. Unimaginable catastrophe has followed unimaginable catastrophe like the turning of pages in a horror novel, with footnotes by Jesus’ lady friend, who on the drive out here explained to him, among many other improbabilities, that Jesus, as he is known now, whoever he was before, is one of the true megalopsychoi of the world, and though Joshua didn’t know what that was, he did know that “mega” meant big, so it probably meant something like a great huge psycho, a total raving lunatic, and that made complete sense even if it did cast a shadow on Jesus himself — in his own time, that is — especially when she drew the comparison. “Blessed are those who learn by unlearning! who make by unmaking!” the fellow is crying now, stirring devotion and hostility in equal portions among the cultists like contending fires. “Who have faith in faithlessness and believe in unbelieving!”

“Hallelujah!”

“What did he say?”

“He said, have faith and believe!”

“I do , Lord!”

Joshua knows this is not going to end well. He did not want to come out here, but everything was blowing up and people were shooting at him and there were thunderous crashing and booming noises, so he was grateful that they spied him chasing after the car and stopped to let him in, no matter where they were going. By then he was crying, couldn’t help it. He is a modern man with modern beliefs who does not believe in Leviathan or Behemoth or the Whore of Babylon, much less the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, beyond their usefulness as metaphors (when engaged in that mode of discourse), but back in that town he felt as if literally pursued by all of them, and he feared worse ahead. The woman did not want to come here either, and on the ride out she begged the man to drive away to some safe place, but the man seemed not even to hear her, singing loudly that he was going to go tell it on the mountain. When they arrived, he jumped out and commenced to climb what turned out to be the malodorous back side of the cultic hill, Joshua and the lady following, because what else could they do? Joshua’s heart was in his mouth or else sunk in his sweaty new brown oxfords (blisters on both heels!), his terrified gaze taking in everything and nothing at the same time. As they drew near to the summit, they could hear people on the other side loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer — barking it out, really, like at a football pep rally. The lady gave a little cry as though she suddenly had a pain somewhere down where she was holding herself and ran back down to the car. Joshua tried to follow, but the Jesus fellow had an iron grip on his elbow, and arguing with himself all the while as if there were someone alive inside him, he dragged Joshua on up to the summit. And there they were, the infamous Brunists, spread out below them in the blazing sunshine, a kind of vast holy bedlam, hundreds of them, many in glowing white tunics sticking wetly to their bodies and belted with ropes, the wildest of them clustered behind a wet trench dug into the hillside as though penned up there. And guns, guns everywhere. As the helicopters clattered overhead, a preacher ranted about the children of the kingdom being cast into the outer dark with weeping and gnashing of teeth ( he was weeping, he was gnashing his teeth!), and the Jesus person next to him, against whom he leaned, shouted: “Blessed, my friends, is the outer dark!” Whereupon there was a gasp of recognition, or else of alarm, and people fell to their knees in the mud, and there were howls and hallelujahs, and shouts of anger and disbelief. “For it snuffs out the illusions of the inner light!”