Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Can we fly to Heaven now, Darren?”

“No, we’ll wait here.”

“I’m afraid. I want to go sit in my chair.”

“Stay down, Colin. We’re safe here.”

“I want my chair!”

“Here, this is like your chair.”

“It’s wet!”

“No, it’s all right. Just sit on me. Raise yourself up a little so I can… there. Is that better?”

From the other empty cornerstone grave comes the stentorian voice of the spiritual leader of the Holy Remnant, the Brunist Bishop of West Condon. “Sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the habitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord has come!” He has been foxholed there by his loyal supporters, who shield him from those who wish to kill him. He is staunch and unbowed still, fist raised in defiance of the stuttering gunfire around him. “There has never been such a day before, and there won’t be no other after it! The sun and the moon they’ll go dark, and the stars will quit their shining!” On top of the Mount of Redemption, intent on thwarting the will of the Almighty, is the Romanist villain who thrashed him so mercilessly when he was held, like the Apostle Paul, in captivity: It is all falling into place. Divine history is revealing itself. He is who he has always thought he is. “Do you hear?” he bellows, his voice resounding over the scorched hillside. “Yea, God is fed up with the wickedness on earth and nothing will escape His fury!”

His chief guardian, the black-bearded deputy acting sheriff, hunkered down in the trench next to him and firing at anything that moves up on top, is not so certain God has the upper hand. Through carelessness they have ceded the higher ground, and now they are easy targets out here on this barren hillside and risk total decimation. He turns to the Christian Patriot nearest him, the bishop’s new son-in-law. “I want you to cover me, Lawson. Keep them pinned down up there. They’re mostly just kids and scared outa their skins. You shouldn’t have no problems. If they show more’n their cowlicks, put a bullet in their dumb brains to give ’em something new to think about. I’m gonna make a run for them backhoes.” He selects two Brunist Defenders to go with him, and as they are about to attempt their run, another in a plaid shirt and billed cap, leaning on his rifle, struggles to his feet and begins to sing: “Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross!” Yet another rises beside him, then another. “Lift high His royal banner, it must not suffer loss!” Soon there are half a dozen, then ten, twelve others courageously pulling themselves erect and raising their militant voices, rifles at their shoulders, their fusillades pounding the hilltop rhythmically as they sing. Even the old fellow in the wheelchair pushes himself forward and joins in with his sharp nasal caw. “From victory unto victory His army shall He lead…!” It works. The Patriot leader and his team run low behind them, sprint the final open yards, and reach the backhoes before the first shots are fired at them, bullets now whanging ineffectually off the backhoes’ pressed steel bodies.

At the foot of the hill, the town banker and team captain, having positioned his gathered forces in preparation for wresting the hill away from the cultists and their adversaries, delivers his ultimatum to the governor. His price is a multi-million dollar emergency rescue fund for the town. “Otherwise, these cameras are writing your political obituary. You might as well go up there and lie down with the others.” The governor, though clearly shaken by events, tells him to go to hell, his jaw thrust forward in political poster defiance. “Moreover, Governor, I can prove criminal negligence. I have all the evidence. Including recorded phone conversations.” The governor cries out in exasperation as someone else cries: “Look out!”

A backhoe bears down on them like some long-necked prehistoric monster, head bobbing and smacking the earth, iron jaws agape, picking up speed as it careens down the hillside, rolling over the crippled and the dead, taking out the little tree, its lifeless black-bearded operator slumped over the controls. They barely have time to lurch out of the way, the banker shouting a warning to those huddled down behind the school buses, when the backhoe slams into them, overturning one of them, somersaulting over its own bucket and dipper stick and landing on top of the heap, belly up.

Shocked silence follows, broken only by scattered moans.

And then: “Fire! Fire at the camp!”

Pillars of smoke are indeed rising over the camp. “It’s the biker gang!” The helicopters go wheeling urgently in that direction. “Yes, there’s a motorcycle down there!” comes the crackly report from the sky. “And a couple of dead guys. One’s wearing a badge, might be a cop. And— wait ! — we do see movement! Over near some kind of shed! Looks like they might be shooting at us!”

“Whoever they are,” the governor screams, “take them out! Now!”

“Careful, Kirk, there may be some innocent people over there.”

“Out of my way, Cavanaugh! Captain! Mobilize your forces! Prepare to occupy the camp!”

The banker shakes his head, lifts the megaphone, and directs his own hastily assembled troops to move up the hill with him, drawing a net around the belligerents, just as the Knights of Columbus Volunteers appear at the top, weapons leveled at the cultists, ordering them not to move. Their leader, grinning around a thick wad of gum, waves the banker up, saluting him ironically. One last moment of suicidal madness, and then it is over. At least on the Mount of Redemption. Not far away, the camp is being shelled. And then that stops, too. It is not yet three in the afternoon.

The Brunist Tabernacle of Light, represented by the chalky cross carved out on the side of the hill, slowly empties out, its traumatized worshippers and their Defender and Christian Patriot guardians ported off to jails, hospitals, mental institutions, and the temporary morgue in the West Condon city hospital parking lot. Some at the foot have cheered the takeover of the mine hill and the humiliation of the cult, shouting insults at them as they are led away, but the majority, somewhat awed by all that they have witnessed, watch quietly, then they drift away, returning to their smoldering town. Most West Condoners, like people everywhere, even if church-goers of one persuasion or another, are content to live out their insignificant lives (ultimately, they console themselves, all lives are insignificant) within the conventions of human history, the modest everyday stuff as found on tombstones and in newspaper obituaries. It is for them that the many reporters and cameramen are recording all these happenings, looking always for those iconic moments by which large events are later remembered — the helicopter on the bar-and-grill roof, for example, the runaway backhoe, the present scatter of abandoned tunics on the hillside — and they find another now when the young Brunist evangelist with the blond curls rises peaceably from the empty grave at the foot of the trenched cross with his terrified friend clinging to his side. Though the young man respects human history as evidence, sometimes hidden, of God’s entrammelment in human affairs (this is how the Christ story is to be understood), he himself lives within divine history, as best he understands it. Today that history has been full of a terrible violence, but, as he knows, it is not terrible to God, for whom death is only a kind of brief translation to a more glorious state and not to be feared. Both are handcuffed, and as the terrified boy is torn away from his side and commences to scream hysterically, the young man says, “Please. Don’t hurt him. He needs help.” There is a vulgar reply, which will be cut from the evening newscasts, and then he who lives in divine history turns to the news cameras on the slope below him, and with a sad, forgiving smile, raises his manacled wrists above his golden head, and this is the image that will appear over and over that evening across the nation.