Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

It’s picture perfect, as if a painter had arranged it: the tree haloed in golden late afternoon sunlight, the two pure white doves preening on an upper branch. The doves arrived a week or two ago and took up residence on the ledge of the old cistern behind the dogwood tree. They are too white for mourning doves. Debra thinks they must be domestic white doves, the first she’s ever seen at the camp. Escapees from a wedding party maybe, who lost their way. When she mentioned this to the others, the news was received with great excitement, and Clara said, “Or who found their way.”

“And Jesus, when he got hisself baptized,” cries out little Willie Hall, “he went straightaway up outa the water, and, lo, the Heavens was opened up to him, and he seen the Spirit a God droppin’ down like a dove, and landin’ right on him. And behold they was a voice outa Heaven, sayin’, This here is my beloved Son, in who I am right pleased!”

“Thank you, Brother Hall! Oh, the scene is vivid before my eyes, my friends! The Lord Jesus, who is the Incarnation of the Word, has come to the Prophet, who in his time was named John just as he is in our time, Giovanni, as you all know, being the Roman name for John. John was the greatest man on earth at the time, Jesus said so. So here he comes, watch him now, here comes the Word, walking straight down to the water, straight to the Prophet. And John says, There He is, that’s the One! Can you see it? The Word comes to the Prophet, they’re both standing there, there in the water, two of the greatest who ever walked on earth, the Prophet and the Word, looking in each other’s eyes. Oh, that’s too much for me! The eyes of the Word and the eyes of the Prophet meeting in the water! It takes your breath away! I want you to baptize me, says the Word. And he does, and when the Word is raised up out of the water, there comes the message from Heaven on the wings of a dove, ‘This is My beloved Son!’ The Spirit of God descending in the shape of a pure white dove! Oh yes! Hear it cooing behind me! It knows who we’re talking about! The sweet bird of God’s grace, the sign of the Holy Spirit! Ely Collins saw it! Even in the pitchblack depths of the mine he saw it! A sign from above! Oh yes! He sends us His pure sweet love! Sing it with me! On the wings of a snow-white dove…!”

After leading them all in song (it might help, Debra is thinking, if she knew the words of the songs they sang), Reverend Clegg moves on to tell how doves were used for atonements (“You take a pair of doves, cut the head off one of them, turn it upside down and bleed it out on its mate, and then you set the living dove free, and when he flies he splatters the ground around with the blood of his beloved, and the blood cries out to God, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God!’ You see? Just so was our dying mate Jesus Christ killed and His blood sprinkled on us, my friends, so we might go free, crying out, ‘Holy, holy, holy, unto the Lord!’ Oh yes! Holy, holy! Amen!”), how the robin got its red breast, how Jesus as a young boy was said to have made sparrows out of clay that flew away when He clapped his hands, and how swallows, who blind their young before restoring their sight, represent the Coming of the Light and also, somehow, the incarnation of Christ. “We once were blind, but now we see!” Reverend Clegg’s own little bird-watching tour.

Returning last week to the town she left only a couple of weeks ago was like landing on the moon, the real town she once knew now buried under the strange otherworldly one they were driving through. Clara, too, remarked that it felt very peculiar. “It is hard to think,” Clara said, “that all our troubles come from here.” The camp, which seemed a million miles away, had become their cloister, their universe. All outside it was alien, though not dangerously so; there was something pathetic about the town, and about the manse as well. Which was, as she’d hoped, empty, though it was in a filthy state. There were dried eggs splattered against the kitchen walls and cabinets, spoiled milk in the fridge, a countertop and sinkful of dirty dishes, heaps of dirty towels and linens everywhere, and the furniture was all shoved about helter skelter. Pillows on the floor. Stains? She sniffed at the rumpled linens. She didn’t really want to do that but she couldn’t stop herself. How could she have lived here all these years with that stupid uncaring man? Clara waited anxiously in the car while, feeling like a thief (she was a thief!), Debra hastily gathered up everything she could carry and loaded it into the back seat, the trunk already packed with her new galvanized steel washtub, filled with chicken and beans and sweet potatoes and boxes of Jell-O. She started with her favorite chair, a low nursing chair bought at a country auction and reupholstered, piling everything else in around it, including the photo of Colin she’d saved, hidden inside the stacks of church sheet music (which she also grabbed up), the one taken of him at the orphanage on his ninth birthday, so cute in front of his birthday cake in his little shirt and tie, such a hopeful wide-eyed smile on his tender face. Clara does not know quite what to make of their living arrangements and on the way back to the camp expressed her concerns. Debra answered those concerns, explaining that she thinks of Colin, not only as a patient, but as her adopted son; they took out papers to adopt him officially when he was still in the hospital, but then Wesley selfishly refused at the last moment to sign them. Which was nearly true, and something like that might have happened had not Wesley been such a pig.

Now, because Ben Wosznik’s dog has wandered up to sniff his leg, Reverend Clegg pats Rocky’s head and asks, “Do you folks know how Rocky here got his name? Brother Ben told me only today. The dog’s real name is Rockdust, for, as Ben says, he and his brother wanted to name man’s best friend after a miner’s best friend.” The dog wags its tail. It is almost as if it has known its cue. “It is rockdust that is spread in coalmines to prevent explosions, and had Rocky’s namesake been in sufficient evidence five years ago, we might still have Frank Wosznik and our beloved Ely Collins among us!” There are moans amongst the worshippers in the darkening evening, and some tears. Reverend Clegg’s eyes begin to water, and Debra, watching Clara and Elaine, feels her own throat tighten up. “Oh, I tell you, that was a dreadful night! That disaster that struck Old Number Nine! So many good decent hardworking Christian men died and died so young! But from that tomb, in the words of our ‘White Bird’ hymn, came a message of gladness, a message of gladness , though its author, so much loved and revered by us all, had passed to his reward. ‘Hark ye ever to the White Bird in your hearts,’ his message said, ‘and we shall all stand together before the Lord!’” Elaine is as pale as her limp tunic, though her ears seem flushed, her dry-eyed gaze fixed on some far horizon. Clara is worried about her daughter, and after telling Debra a little about the scenes on the Mount with the Baxter boy five years ago and their secretive correspondence ever since, has asked her, as an experienced counselor for troubled teenagers, to try to draw her out, but so far the child has shied away from any attempt to befriend her. Elaine does her work about the camp — setting tables and washing dishes, emptying the new trash bins, weeding, sometimes minding the little ones — in more or less utter silence, her distant stare unsettling. She is so ardent a believer it is almost frightening, and it is maybe that intensity her more practical mother cannot quite understand.

“Oh, God’s ways are surely inscrutable, my friends. Out of the horror of that black night, that incomprehensible tragedy in the depths of the scorched earth, has emerged a transcendent vision and a stirring prophecy, one destined to shake the world! For it is the truth , and the truth is world-shaking! Just as the Holy Spirit was pleased to dwell in Jesus, so did it take up residence in that holy man Ely Collins, bringing to all of us, through him, the White Bird vision, and then, upon Brother Ely’s cruel death, the Spirit passed on into that disaster’s sole survivor, Ely Collins’ own underground workmate, our Prophet Giovanni Bruno. The Chosen One. In Brother Giovanni, the Spirit worked, as we know, a most marvelous transformation, turning a quiet solitary Roman Catholic coalminer into the prophetic leader of a great evangelical movement, awakening deep within the miner’s heart an unforeseen profundity, a remarkable visionary sensibility. It was our own Ely Collins who perceived this spiritual potential in Brother Giovanni. We know that the poor man had been taunted and abused by his fellow religionists, for a prophet, as is well known, is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house, and we know that he had been ruthlessly driven from his church for standing up against the priesthood, just as Jesus had stood up against the Sadducees, and it was Brother Ely, we know, who took him under his wing and sheltered him and nurtured his soul. And to what wondrous effect! In the words of Brother Ben’s hymn, my friends: Think of Moses, discovered in a river! Think of Jesus, a carpenter’s son! Think of Bruno, a humble coalminer! ’Tis the poor by whom God’s battles are won!” Whereupon — amid the cries of “Amen!” and “Yes, Lord!”—the gathered Followers, arms raised and waving, break spontaneously into another chorus of the song…