Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Down in the camp, the spreading fire is popping and crackling healthily now, thick smoke billowing. There are flames in the bushes. If it gets hot enough, he knows, everything will catch and burn. He ties his bandanna over his nose. The smoke will draw attention. He may have to leave soon. But not yet. It’s an amazing sight. He can’t take his eyes off it. A God-sized bonfire, only lacking the bodies of the wicked. But he can imagine them, God plucking them from across the face of the earth and bringing them here and tossing them in, watching them scream and claw at the air as they fall, and knowing that it is good because He is good. The way Young Abner used to throw ants into his trash fires. “Let them be cast into the fire, into deep pits, that they rise not up again! For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell , and set on fire the foundations of the mountains!” Texts he knows well, having often recited them over the dying ants. They will be at the heart of his ministry. “For our God is a consuming fire!” His voice is a little too high. He tucks his chin in and practices making it deeper. “For our God is a consuming fire!” Better. He fondles the revolver, points it at the continuing mayhem on the hill. It was fun shooting the two dead men. He wishes he had something else to shoot. Behind him, somewhere below, even as he makes that wish, he hears a cry. A girl, it sounded like. Maybe God has just answered his prayer, and appointed him His avenging angel.

The Brunist Followers on the Mount of Redemption are not sure whether it is the beginning of the Tribulation or if they are into the midterm Rapture and the dreaded Abomination of Desolation or if it’s the Final Rebellion and the all-consuming battle of Armageddon, but, wherever they are in God’s awesome plan, the End Times are as horrific as the Bible said they would be. There was a mighty explosion that rocked the world on its axis and, some say, caused the sun to bounce, followed by the unleashing of a great slaughter, which seems to have no end. Indeed, depending on how you read the Bible, it could last for a thousand years. In the mind of God, of course, a thousand years is just an instant, the seeming passing of time being an illusion of human existence. For God, all things happen at once, and that’s exactly how it seems on the Mount of Redemption right now: eternity squeezed into one punishing explosive moment. They have heard the trumpet judgments, felt the earth quake under the scorching sun, been stung by the ice and fire raining from the cloudless sky, experienced within themselves the shattering of the bowls, for it is written that “as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers.” “Send the fire!” they sang in genuine hope and longing, and now the fire has been sent and the bodies of the wounded and dead, as yet unraptured, litter the hillside. Day of wrath, O dreadful day! When this world shall pass away, and the Heavens together roll, shriveling like a parchéd scroll! They have known this was coming, all the shriveling and shivering, ceaselessly they have announced it, prayed for it, sung about it, and yet they have not known, could not have known. The paltry human imagination is not up to it. When the fire (when the fire)/Comes down from Heaven (down from Heaven) ,/This old world (this old world) ,/Will melt away (melt away)!/ Millions then (millions then )/Will cry for mercy (cry for mercy )/But it will be (it will be)/Too late to pray! Those with clear consciences smile with pious joy as they welcome their transport into the hereafter, their raised eyes ablaze with an inner light, while others, less certain of their fate, cry out in desperation to the Lord Jesus Christ for mercy, for forgiveness, for an end to the torment. Christ Jesus has indeed made his Glorious Appearance, returning as so often foretold, but he seems as stunned by events as the wailing believers who swarm about him, groveling at his feet, hands reaching out over other reaching hands to touch his garments, tug at them in supplication. All believe now. How can they not? He is, in the crushing horror, what hope remains. Children have crawled up on him, each trying to climb higher than the other, as if clambering up a crowded ladder to Heaven. As others have cried out, he has remained silent; as others have fallen, he has remained standing, overseeing what must be. Somewhere on his vesture and his thigh, they know, is written KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS, but under the clinging children this cannot be seen. His demeanor is stern, but composed. Bullets seem to have passed right through him!

Don’t you have anything to say to these people?

What can I say that I’ve not already said? I am confused by their confusion, oppressed by their hope. It’s all very sad. Yet I long for such innocent longing!

Then what are we doing out here? It’s really dangerous! And we’re not even ducking!

I know. Somehow that feels out of character.

But this is madness! Where is that wretched fellow who was with us?

Somewhere under all these others, I suppose.

Shouldn’t we at least be protecting all these children?

No. They are protecting us.

Helicopters clatter overhead with hollow amplified voices like those of creatures from outer space. “You must leave this property immediately! Put down your weapons! You are all under arrest!” They go largely unheeded. Though many have been brought low, the remaining Brunist Defenders and Christian Patriots, under the command of Ross McDaniel, the deputy acting sheriff and Patriot sergeant-at-arms, have managed to pin back the enemy forces at the top of the hill, using the excavated outline of the temple floor plan as a shallow trench bulwarked by fallen bodies, and they continue to exchange sporadic gunfire. At least, for the moment, the shooting has stopped from the base of the hill, where the town banker, exercising his wartime experience as a decorated senior officer, has pushed aside the state governor and the frightened young National Guard captain and ordered the rattled troops to stop firing and take cover behind the buses. With the megaphone wrested from the young officer, he turns to the outraged townsfolk, arriving now by the carloads, seeking revenge for the horrors visited upon them, and appeals to them to put away their weapons, warning them that they could face imprisonment or worse. They should return to their cars at once and clear the area. None do — it was the banker himself, after all, who urged them all to arm them-selves — but at least, after his warning, they stop taking potshots at the tunicked zealots on the hillside. He moves through the crowd, seeking out law officers, firemen, medics, conferring with them, and as he points out various positions, they all spread out.

Although they think of themselves as righteous servants of God and country, the citizenry at the foot and those in the air are serving human laws, not divine ones, and thus are recognized by those fighting the Holy War of the Last Days as members of the legions assembled by Satan, it being in the nature of the Powers of Darkness that they do not know they are the Powers of Darkness, just as, though they are doomed, they cannot know that they are doomed, else they would not play the roles in God’s grand scheme that they are obliged to play. Such are the beliefs of the ardent young Brunist evangelist, presently scrunched down in the puddled grave at the temple cornerstone intended for the last remains of the Prophet Giovanni Bruno, together with the hysterical First Follower and visionary who is his constant companion. As he once replied to the young woman accused by many of being the Anti-christ — and perhaps she is indeed an unwitting manifestation of that enigmatic figure, so essential to the Apocalypse — when she protested that it seemed unfair of the deity to single out a chosen elite: “Well, too bad. That’s how it is.” Victims have fallen in on top of them, but they have been pushed out again.