Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

She sat up abruptly with the uncomfortable realization that this was a story she had to write. If for no other reason, because she owed it to Billy Don. He was coming to see her that dreadful morning. And that may have been the reason he was shot. It would also be a way of paying her dues to the literary tradition while yet making it a story of her own. Even as she sat there, bony elbows on bony knees, her bottom sweating on the leather cushion, the basic structure revealed itself to her. She has often described this moment in interviews, leaving out the dope and the sweaty butt. She would name everybody, risking whatever legal actions, while exploring each character, each scene, imaginatively, as if they were characters and scenes in a novel, trusting that her imagination would tell her more than the “facts” alone could. There would be invented characters, too, filling out the religious typology and enriching the story content. She would relate it in an exploratory first person, moving as author from darkness to light, while keeping Darren and Billy Don center stage, as in “Jan.” The Baxters would be there, but backgrounded as part of the story of the cult. The Killing of Billy D was becoming a reality. Her body meanwhile had forgotten its appetites, overtaken by a mind on the boil. You think too damned much, she said irritably to herself, as she pinched out the roach and pulled her underwear on.

Mind erosion: the dust storms of daily excitement and triviality that blow away the sensitive topsoil of the spirit — the idea that attention-power is finite and precious, and that unless the individual is obstinate and cunning, this power may be dissipated, conventionalized. A note inspired by all that’s presently eating up her life, the spent storms of birthday parties, poolside yatter, boy-chasing, and pop culture immersion now displaced by travels on behalf of the book, TV and radio talk shows, newspaper and magazine interviews, book and film proposals, teaching offers, rallies and protests, the daily froth of news and chatter, sex. Unless such notebook jottings as this be counted, Sally hasn’t written a creative word of her own since the book came out.

Of course, to be fair, she has also been trying to save a few lives. The first routine appeals against the death penalties were turned down at about the same time she reached the writers colony, and she has spent most of the time since then fighting those judgments one way or another. They were what drove her through the research and writing of The Killing of Billy D , and at such an accelerated pace; forget the publishers’ nagging deadlines, for her it has always been a race against the executioners, hoping to use the book as a circuit breaker. Not an easy one to write. Not only was it a different sort of writing than any she’d done before, she realized as soon as she’d settled into her cozy little cell at the writers colony just how much research she needed, and almost none of it in books. There were so many people she should talk to, now scattered around the country, so many places to visit, images to collect. But she had no car and was saving her book advance and West Condon earnings for when the writers’ colony gig ended, so to get started she had to trust her memory and imagination. As a warm-up exercise, she developed character files for Darren and Billy Don, pouring into them all her memories and speculations, and then similar files for the Baxter family, the orthodox cult leaders, their opponents, all the secondary players in her drama. Who tended, threateningly, to multiply. Putting characters in was not what was hard, she realized. It was keeping them out. Moreover, her agent had, with difficulty, managed to sell her newest concept to the same publishers as before, and they continued to demand the full and true story of the cult, even if only as background, giving her a contracted deadline of six months for submitting the entire manuscript.

When her books arrived from home, boxed up with her notebooks, photos, drawings, and the Brunist files and newspapers she’d snitched from the Chronicle office, she was able to patch together a few paragraphs about the cult, its beliefs, its growth, its schisms, its relation to similar millennial movements of the past. All that was fine but, except as suggested by her “Jan” story, her book still wasn’t on its way. She had always resisted that workshop bromide, “write about what you know,” but she had no choice; not to be forever treading water, she launched the first rough draft with her own experiences that day in the culvert, the fall from the tipple being told in flashback as she lay there. Little research required, though it meant she was also, against her own outlined intentions, becoming a point-of-view character in the story. This character, she decided, would be somewhat like herself and yet not exactly herself. For one thing, she pasted an earlier version of the historical Sally on the fictional Sally, not the childish one who still believed, prayed, and fantasized an afterlife, but the one who lived unthinkingly in a world saturated with religion as one lived with air and water, using the Billy Don drama then as a way of freeing this character from a passive acceptance of the unacceptable, in much the same way that her imagined Sweet Betsy goes from innocence to bawdiness in her western epic idea, such that by the time she is cowering in the culvert she has come to understand that the real criminal that day was Christianity itself. Or, rather, the human mindset — in part, a susceptibility to made-up stories — that gives this dangerous nonsense such terrible power. Thus, a spiritual journey, after all, a remark she often makes in interviews or talk show conversations while explaining why that was not the book she ended up writing, each repetition gradually hollowing it out until soon she’ll be free of it.

Some people at the colony were writing their socks off; for others, it was just a free-sex exercise pit. Sally allowed herself to get laid when the opportunity arose, for now that she’d got the hang of it, sex had become important to her, but she didn’t let it get in the way of the writing. She had launched hundreds of stories over the previous year or two and had finished almost none. If this was going to be her life, she knew, she’d have to stop playing the dilettante. She had a book to write. She dedicated at least ten solid hours a day to the writing. Reading and writing. Plus two of hiking or roaming the hills on one of the colony’s bicycles — another kind of writing. Or unwriting. She clocked herself, kept a chart, made sure there was no cheating. For the first couple of weeks before Billy D took over, she seemed to have time to do it all, work on the book, write new stories, revise the old, read voraciously, fill more notebooks. She felt good, as good as she’d felt in years. She smoked less (though always a butt lit while fingers were on the keys, even if left to burn itself out in the tray), immersed herself in the beauty of the surroundings, reveled in the meal-time conversations with other writers. Many of them came from money, had been to the best schools, had had lots of literary mentoring and friends who were editors and publishers; but they didn’t intimidate her. She knew she had something they didn’t. Coaltown grit, for one thing.

But she was facing a deadline, and there were things she had to know before she could continue. She described her research needs to a writer at the colony one evening, a somewhat older man with suave moneyed ways, and in particular her desire to interview Junior Baxter on death row somehow, there being some things she had to know that only he could tell her, and he said he might be able to help. He loaned her a car to take wherever she wished, a fast road-hugging foreign sports car unlike any she’d ever been in before, much less driven — she felt hot in it — and he introduced her to an activist lawyer friend from the city, Simon Price of Price & Price, whom she was able to convince to help her fight the Brunist death penalties. The other Price was Simon’s wife, a lawyer who specialized in human rights cases — women’s rights, in particular. “Looks a lot like Haymarket all over again,” Simon said after studying her typed-up notes. Several routine gestures had not yet been made, so he was immediately able to get all the November and December executions delayed another six months while he prepared legal briefs and affidavits, and she brought this good news the next time she saw her wealthy friend at the colony. Though he seemed to know everything about literature, he didn’t seem to be much of a writer, usually just smiled when she asked him what he was working on. When not talking about her book, they discussed music, art, literature, politics, and in provocative engaging ways she’d not enjoyed before. He was the coolest man she’d ever met, and he seemed to like her, too. He laughed generously when she was being funny in her wiseass way, listened carefully when she got serious. He liked her enough that he invited her to his house one evening, promising to get her back in time not to disrupt her writing rhythms. They drove for an hour or so through thick forests to a luxurious home with beautiful views, a lot of art on the walls, thousands of books, a grand piano in the middle of a room set aside for it. Everything in its place, but as though unused. Like Dracula’s castle, she thought, but she didn’t say it. The sex on satin sheets was easy and good — maybe not passionate, but fun — the wine he served her sensational. It turned out he was one of the writing colony’s principal benefactors (an expensive dating club for him, she imagined) and a U.S. Congressman, wealthy enough to pay for his own campaigns, but a guy with a serious agenda, an agenda she mostly shared; she would vote for him. Much of the forest they had driven through was his, he said. They drove through it at least once a week after that and he always got her back to the colony by her usual bedtime. She was quite ready to stay over, to hell with the discipline, but he seemed to need her Cinderella hour even more than she did. Maybe there were other wives and lovers awaiting their turn, she thought, and her time was up.