Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Calvin led her past the guards at the door into the old camp lodge, made of stone and still more or less intact though mostly black on the inside, and there at the back of the room near the iron stove, under a hanging gas lantern, a man in raggedy underpants was lying on a camp cot with an ugly wound in his thigh. She was told he had been shot and had dug the bullet out with his own knife and had somehow managed to stagger away from the hill and escape arrest. Bernice washed the wound with fresh well water a woman brought her, sprinkled it with a few drops of her miracle water, applied mercurochrome (he screamed like a child and swore at her in an unChristian way, and Calvin scolded him for that), and bandaged it. She doesn’t know why, but when she was helping with the tetanus shots at the hospital during the crisis that first day, she dropped a clean needle already filled with toxoid into her shoulder bag, and now she had a use for it, and she saw that all this was foreseen. After the injection, she gave the man the rest of her mercurochrome and bandages and told him to wash the wound and medicate it and change the bandage every day. He was full of a feverish rage and told her she only had to fix him up well enough that he can make it into town and have it out with those papist wops who shot him and murdered his friends. Thus she was saving one life to bring about the possible ends of others. Medicine is like that. It fixes little problems, not the way the world works. The man didn’t even thank her, but Calvin did and said there were other people needing some help and asked her if perhaps she could come back with more supplies. She said she would do that, but in truth she doubted she would ever set foot in this strange, accursed place again.

The big Blaurock woman was whumping around the Meeting Hall in her elephantine way, in and out of Clara’s old office, fat baby under one arm, shouting out commands and commentary, and wishing to avoid her, Bernice asked if she could see Glenda before she left and Calvin brought her down here to the old trailer lot where Glenda is living in a cluster of old vehicles with all the children, together with a handful of other people who escaped from the Mount, mostly women. Glenda’s own two caravans were stolen, but whoever took them thankfully dumped out everything before they drove off, including most of the children’s toys, and they left behind the small house trailer belonging to those two West Virginia miners who never came back, and that’s where Glenda is living, as well as in some abandoned cars and trucks, set about in a kind of circle the way settlers used to do on the prairie. She and Glenda now sit amid them, swatting at the mosquitoes. Bernice says she saw that Blaurock family up by the lodge, acting like they own the place. “Well, they don’t let nothing nor nobody get in their way,” Glenda says, “but the camp wouldn’t work without them. Isaiah, he goes out every day and forages for food and soda pops and other useful things. Dot, she has found a post office box key in Clara’s old office and has pointed herself the church treasurer and is writing to the faithful, asking for money. And her kids is out peddling souvenir stuff they have found in there that didn’t burn up in the fire, old letters and tape recordings and suchlike, even somebody’s diary, and including, they say, some dirty pitchers them two boys was hoarding, which her little girl sold for enough to buy carryout pizza last night for everybody. It was a kinda party after all the misery. The little girl called it their nek-kid bottoms party on account of the pitchers that paid for it. Clara, she would never have ’lowed that, but most everybody thought it was cute and give her a big clapping. They were too hungry not to. They ain’t nothing left to eat here. They have harvested the vegetable garden right down to the dandylines and crab grass and killt alla Hunk Rumpel’s chickens, and they have cooked up a great many of the wild birds and small animals. They have even et the owls.”

“I took notice it was quieter than usual.”

“Sister Debra would be horrified at the slaughter, but she always did care more for birds than people. Isaiah also brings back whatever newspapers he finds, and Dot, she digs through them, looking for other end-of-the-worlders. She says she’s found a feller up in Canada who’s got it all figured out, so they’re laying plans to migrate up there and invade that movement, and they are inviting everyone along.”

“Will you go?”

“I don’t know what choice I got.” Glenda fixes her with her one eye and a little shiver runs up her spine. There’s a faint breezy rustling all about even though the air seems still and she can’t help thinking about the ghosts of Hazel Dunlevy and Welford Oakes fluttering about somewhere nearby. With the lights out and the birds dead, it must be a spooky place here at night.

She tells Glenda what she has seen at the hospital and around town — all those downtown buildings full of the spirits of the recent dead, the shoe salesman still swinging in his window — and about how she and the head nurse at the hospital saved Mr. Suggs from being murdered by the motorcycle gang led by the naked Baxter girl. She is taking care of Mr. Suggs now privately, and thanks to her miracle water, he is much improved. The doctors are all amazed. “He is setting up and eating normal and don’t need diapers no more. Even his hair is growing back on top of his head — and it’s red as a carrot.”

Several of Glenda’s collection of little ones have arrived, complaining that they’re hungry, and that reminds her that she has to go find Calvin to drive her back; it’s Mr. Suggs’ feeding time. She fishes about in her shoulder bag and finds half a packet of cough lozenges and she passes those out to the children, promising to come back with more things. Just as she’s about to leave, however, Glenda takes a grip on her hand and turns it over, palm up, and studies it, her head cocked so the eye stares straight at it as if shooting a beam into it, and it feels almost like it is burning. She flinches, but Glenda has a tight grip. “I suppose people have told you, Bernice, about your head line and your life line and how little luck there is between them, but I wonder if they have showed you the line of escape, sometimes called the line of fancy, running crosstways down here near your wrist?” The children are crowding around to look. They seem quite dangerous. “Not everybody’s got one, but yours is plain to see, like to say it’s a powerful influence on your nature. People with lines like that, they oft-times have arty lives, but when it crosses the health line like this…” she traces a line with a long horny fingernail from Bernice’s fingers to her wrist and the sensation is that of being cut open, “they can lose control and end badly.”

Bernice’s heart is pounding. All she wants is to have her hand back and to leave this fiendish place immediately. “Badly…?”

Glenda turns her eye up to stare it at her, still gripping the hand, her gold tooth glinting in the dusky light. “A fatal confusion of the spirit,” she says, and Bernice feels her knees go wobbly. “Madness.”

“I am sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Suggs, but something evil has got into the Wilderness church camp. It is infested with the ghosts of murdered sinners and a brood of filthy-minded imps and a cannibal witch who is one of them cyplops with just one eye. Wherever she walks a fire breaks out behind her and they’s no more birdsong because she aims her evil eye into the trees and the birds they fall like rain. Even the owls. Murderers are lurking out at the edge, and worse things, too, if you could see them, but there’s like a thick smoky cloud has sunk down over the camp with a rotten smell like the Devil makes. And Sheriff Puller, he’s come back, but he is blind and walks rocking back and forth the way dead people who crawl out of their graves do. Ben Wosznik has been doing all he can, praying and fighting and singing, but he is badly wounded in the thigh and we don’t know if he will live or die. I was able to doctor it, but it is a ugly wound and has got infected and we fret for him in the secret service. Clara and her daughter, they have fell into a kind of coma trance, which is that evil cyplop’s doing, and many people are losing their minds or are in fear of losing their minds. I wisht I had better news, but fear and trembling has got holt of me, and I am glad that we are safe here and far from all that sad desolation.”