Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“I got a inkle a all that on the tellyvision replays later on. They kept showin’ that red injun’s execution for days after. He didn’t look a dot like Carl Dean.”

“Well, them evil sorts, Ludie Belle, they don’t always keep to their same shape. Meanwhile, out at the Mount of Redemption, they was all this killing going on. I nearly got squashed when that crazy backhoe come somersaulting down at me, like something from straight outa the Book a Relevations — you must of seen that!”

“I thought you was at the hospital.”

“I was, but by happen-chance they had a TV on at the nurse’s station and I seen what was happening and knew I was needed out there, so while we was waiting for a ambulance to move Mr. Suggs, I went running out to help. If you look close, you can see me off to the left scrambling on all fours towards that ravine out there, just as that back-hoe goes wheels up.”

“Well, you’re a better person than me, Bernice. Me, I see trouble like that a-comin’, I’m hikin’ my skirts’n skedaddlin’ the other way at full pelt. Which is what we done, and why you’re there and I’m here. I did hear on the news young Darren got hisself arrested, so what’s become a Colin?”

“I think he must of run away or they took him in. He wasn’t at the camp.”

“The camp? I thought it got burnt down and closed off.”

“Well, it did get seriously delapidated by that murdrous biker gang, but — I gotta swear you to secrecy, Ludie Belle, cause if it was to get out, more lives’d be in desprit danger — but people are still living out there. That mad Glenda woman and her passel of wild orphan kids, them audacious Blaurocks, and a whole bunch of poor people who come looking for redemption, women mostly whose husbands are in jail or worse. A lot of them was badly wounded, and I have had to doctor them on the sly. The camp is haunted by them two murdered adulterers and who knows how many other homeless spirits, and Glenda she says she seen the murderer hisself hanging round back under the burnt trees like he still had more work to do, though Glenda herself is suspected of those murders and of bewitching Hazel’s husband and binding him up in a hollow tree. Old Hunk Rumpel, he died fighting off the bikers and got his throat slit like you butcher a pig, but he don’t seem the haunting kind. Them two little Cravens kids who got bombed by the heliocopters, though, are probly still looking for their mother.”

“Wanda’s younguns? You don’t mean little Davey?”

“Him and his sister. Glenda has the rest of them. Wanda she got kidnapped, or else she was raptured. They’s different opinions.”

“Little Davey! The sadness is just about more’n I can sustain. The most thing I recollect about little Davey is that pearl a snot always a-glistenin’ on his upper lip. Like a kinder jewel a innocence. Lordy! I feel half-haunted myself!”

“The new sickbay is gone, so the Meeting Hall has been set up for bedding the wounded. It’s all burnt out inside and they’s a bad charred smell, but at least it’s still standing. So is that old upright pianner, though it’d probly crumble to ash if you touched it. Looks like made of coal. When I passed it by, I heard sounds coming from it, but nothing like music, not real music — more like the strings were whimpering and falling gainst each other. It made me think of what you said about that old player pianner in that place you was once in employment, how it seemed habitated, not by the dead so much, but by their miseries and their lost gaieties, and I thought, this old pianner, it is lamentating about when everbody was here and praying together and was full of hope and happiness and now see what it has come to.”

“‘The Lamentatin’ Pianner,’ it sounds like a Duke’n Patti Jo song. You should oughter tell ’em the story, maybe you’ll get famous like they are.”

“Patti Jo and Duke? They’re famous?”

“Sure, where you been? That song about the little girl who was overloved by her own daddy has been toppa the charts since they first let it out, and right behind it is a song about a crazy cowboy shootin’ up a jukebox and a unusual cemetery lovesong which has something of the Prophet’s dead sister in it. And they got other big hits, too. They’re the hottest thing in country since Hank Williams died. They even been on Grand Ole Opry.”

“I guess I missed all that. We don’t have a radio station here no more.” Ludie Belle asks her about the things hanging on the fireplace because Clara was asking about her husband Ely’s final message, and Bernice says all that got burnt up, nothing left but ashes, and while she’s telling her that, she hears someone at the front door. Maudie bringing that venal feeding apparatus, or else the exercise people. Maudie was complaining that Mr. Suggs did not seem to be digesting his food properly and was losing weight. “Come on in!” she hollers out, covering the mouthpiece. “I’ll be there in just a breath!” She hears the screen door slap and turns back to Ludie Belle. “I have to go, Ludie Belle, the theropests is here. But call again soon! They’s tons more to tell!”

In the bedroom, she pulls up short. It is not Maudie. It is the Antichrist. The one in female form. Right here in her own house. Wearing a T-shirt that says IT’S THE SADNESS. Face on face to Mr. Suggs, staring hard, like she means to suck his hidden story out of him. Or to snatch his soul like she did to that old lady out on the Mount that day. Bernice feels like she has just been struck in the heart and she can’t move a muscle.

“Hi, Mrs. Filbert. I’m Sally Elliott. You may know my folks. Isn’t this Mr. Suggs, the man who was bankrolling the cult?”

“It’s not a cult,” Bernice says icily with what whispery breath she has left, meeting the Dark One’s challenge. It’s almost as though she — or he (which is it?) — is changing shape before her very eyes. “It’s a church.”

“Sorry. I meant to say church. But I’m not here about that. I really hate to bother you, Mrs. Filbert, but there aren’t many people left around here still alive and not in jail who can help. I have already talked with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Franny Baxter and Mrs. Coates — who said to thank you if I saw you, by the way, for helping to get the charges against her boy reduced. She says there’s even some hope now of getting him released altogether on compassionate grounds. I gather that’s your doing.”

“Well, yes, I know some people.” Bernice has not heard this news, having lost touch with Thelma after she moved back in with her mother. It eases somewhat her anxiety. Her power is being acknowledged. She is able to take a deep breath, wondering if this has been a disarming tactic by the Dark One or if this is really just only a girl.

“You’ve done a good thing, Mrs. Filbert. There’s too much hysteria out there right now. It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it.”

“Dangerous? Just only stories?”

“Most dangerous things there are.”

“Do you mean…? Can they, you know, kill somebody?”

“Sure they can. What’s the toll now from all this madness? You might say story has killed them all.” The girl glances down at Mr. Suggs. He is in his alert phase and is taking all this in, wagging his finger for attention, but the girl ignores him, turns away. “But the story I’m interested in, Mrs. Filbert, is how Billy Don Tebbett died.”

“Young Abner Baxter shot him.”

“That’s what they say. Did you see it?”

“No, but everbody knows.”

“He told the police when they arrested him that he didn’t do it, and I also have my doubts.”

“How do you know what he told the police?”

“I was there at the camp. I heard him.”