Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

By the time the lights come on again and the phones finally work, Bernice’s account of recent history has taken a more nightmarish turn. For one thing, she has blamed the need for candles on the Baxters’ use of Leviathan to drink up all the power, putting the whole world, and certainly West Condon, at their mercy, and as she is rather proud of this development, she continues to use candles long after it is necessary. The candles, moreover, cast wavery shadows around the bedroom which she characterizes as demonical spirits, pointing them out to Mr. Suggs in a harsh frightened whisper— “Over there! in that corner!”— knowing he can’t bend his neck to look, can only glimpse the flickering light and dark. Sometimes she even frightens herself. She has introduced into the motorcycle gang the oldest Baxter boy, the one with the Mark of the Beast on his forehead whom everybody astigmatizes, and, remembering something that blond boy once said about the Horsemen of the Acropalypse. she has given them all individual motorcycle colors and specific woes and plagues to distribute. What they all did to Clara’s poor daughter has now become a legend of horrific proportions that continues to happen night after night, as if it were some eternal punishment in Hell. She has even brought back the middle Baxter boy, the one who got blown up: “They took his head off but now he’s riding round with that gruesome thing tucked under his arm, still yelping curses out its bloody lips and demanding everbody what to do! I wouldn’t of believed it myself if I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes!” She told how Sheriff Puller was seducted into his car by the naked Baxter girl and handcuffed to the steering wheel and how the biker boys set his car afire, and how they stuffed an innocent boy in the trunk as extra fuel. Mr. Suggs seemed very upset by this story, so when he asked the pointed question if Sheriff Puller was alive or dead, she said he was alive but he was so melted down to his blackened bones you wouldn’t hardly recognize him. She looks into Mr. Suggs’ heavy-lidded eyes, and sometimes she sees seething anger there and sometimes confusion and sometimes even fear. As Holofernes in his drunken stupor might have felt looking up at sober sword-bearing Judith, or Sisera foggily seeing Jael enter with her hammer and tent stakes.

Of course, Bernice has no such tools, nor would she likely be treated as a national heroine, as those women were, if she had them and used them as they did. There are, true, the subtler weapons of her own profession — the feeding routines, the medications — but Mr. Suggs is being monitored constantly by Maudie and the doctors, and they would not appreciate any creative tamperings with his regime, nor would it feel the right thing to do. For she is not Judith or Jael, she is only Bernice Filbert, LPN, of West Condon, the kindly long-suffering public servant and at heart a good person intent only on helping others, even Mr. Suggs, whose own life is a great burden to him and to her, and who fails to appreciate all that she has done for him. He could have blinked out at least one thank you. It is a harsh world, governed at least partly by malevolent forces, not all visible, and Bernice has only her nursing skills and her faith with which to defend herself. And her stories. Which are not always understood by others, though they are her chief remedy against the desolation. She is reminded of something Ludie Belle once said about her prayer meeting confessions: that by being partly true and partly made up, they were more true than if they had been completely true, because the plain truth hides a lot of things.

By coincidence, as she is thinking about this, the telephone rings in the kitchen, and it is Ludie Belle herself calling from out east somewhere, almost as though by thinking about her Bernice has conjured her up, the sort of coincidence that happens often in Bernice’s life. And they both have so much to tell each other! Right off, Bernice asks about Clara and Elaine and all the others, where did they go, she looked everywhere for them and was scared they’d all been kidnapped, and Ludie Belle tells her how — for Clara’s sake, and little Elaine’s — they took off before all the troubles. They agreed on a meeting place near the state line, and they were waiting there for Cecil and Corinne and Hovis and Uriah and Billy Don to catch up, but somebody noticed the bumper stickers they’d forgot to remove, and they all got arrested. Ludie Belle was able to convince them that those stickers got pasted on without their acknowledge while they were passing through from out west, and she showed them Clara and Elaine in their sickbeds and said they were rushing them to a hospital in the east where specialist doctors were waiting for them, and the police got nervous not to have somebody die on them and let them go, provided they immediately crossed the state line. But that made them miss the others and she still doesn’t know what happened to them but supposes the three fellows are back home by now and the Applebys and their bees are probably off chasing the pollens. Bernice says she hasn’t seen the Applebys, but she’s sorry to say that the two West Virginia coalminers were apparently blown up on the Mount of Redemption, though there’s not much remains of them to tell for sure, and as for Billy Don Tebbett, he got murdered by Young Abner Baxter. Ludie Belle lets out a little cry and says she is wholly destroyed by this news, for Billy Don was one of her favorites, and she asks for all the details and Bernice provides her with all she knows, and then some.

Ludie Belle in turn tells her that her Wayne and the Halls are doing fine and have been telling their stories to the Eastern churches, and Elaine seems to have resigned to accept the baby she is carrying and isn’t trying to kill herself or it anymore, “though I did ketch her a-swoppin’ her belly with a flyswat as like to get the baby customed to what’s in store for it, but, come grass, Clara’s grandchild should be safely borned.” Bernice wants to say that she hopes it will be completely human, but decides better of it for it might bring bad luck. Ludie Belle goes on to say she hopes Clara is still around for that occasion, for the poor woman is calamitously ill with a cancer in her chest that has mettasted to other places and there is not much confidence. Bernice says this is the worst news she has heard since all these troubles began but that, somehow, she already knew it. She is thinking about what she told Mr. Suggs about Clara’s strange coma, and she worries that her stories might be invading the world. “I guess I had some apperhension.” At least out here, Ludie Belle says, Clara is well cared for. “They give her a lotta reception and dote upon her like the saint she is.” Bernice urges her to sprinkle some miracle water on Clara every day, but Ludie Belle says she has used it all up and that Bernice should send her some more. Ludie Belle likes to wear a drop of Bernice’s water behind her ear like perfume, because she believes it might help her hear what people are thinking.

Ludie Belle has been following all the news on the car radio and now TV, plus what all the brothers and sisters in the Eastern churches have been able to fill in, but it’s like news from the sky and she needs to get it from on the ground, so Bernice tells her all about how when she was out at the Mount looking for everybody she had a forenotion about Mr. Suggs being in trouble and raced off to the hospital just in time to hide him from the motorbikers who were coming after him, and how she has been privately caring for him ever since. “I am now receiving a special salary from the government.”

“The government?”

“I can’t say no more.”

In fact, Mr. Thornton has been true to his word and he has got the wicked banker’s lawsuit thrown out and she has been able to catch up her mortgage. When she received the statement, she multiplied the remaining amount due by ten to see what she would receive if Mr. Suggs were to expire that day, and it was quite thrilling, but he isn’t likely to pass away for some time yet. When Maudie was last here, she noticed that Mr. Suggs had lost some weight and musculature, and Bernice acknowledged that he was getting easier to turn because there was less of him, but Maudie said this was normal, she shouldn’t worry, Mr. Suggs could live on for years and he might even get better. Meaning more and more of the principle will be paid off and the final sum will be smaller. Something to think about, and she has been thinking about it. She goes on now to tell Ludie Belle how the Baxter motorbikers went roaring through town blowing up everything and shooting everybody and setting the whole town on fire. “That’s when the heliocopter fell and Linda Catter got sent to glory along with all those other poor people in the bank, and the one they say was Carl Dean Palmers got rocketed clean off the hotel roof.”