Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Later that night, after Hiram Clegg and his Florida party have boarded their buses and returned to their motels and the others have gone back to Chestnut Hills or their campsites or wherever and everyone at the camp is asleep and the birds are silent, Colin wakes up from a terrifying nightmare in which he’d been dreaming he was hanging in the dogwood tree and the doves were pecking his eyes out, and he comes into her bedroom and asks to crawl in with her. She’s quite sleepy from the long day and quietly agrees, making a kind of chair for him to nestle into. The poor boy. He’s still gasping for breath and trembling like a leaf. She wraps her arms around him from behind and strokes his chest soothingly. Her own dreams are happy ones. The evening has been a great success. Reverend Clegg — Brother Hiram — even called her Sister Debra when lavishing praise upon her, and all beamed at that, and those who came up here with him called her Sister Debra thereafter, and some of the locals did, too. They even sang some songs she knew and she was able to join in. Colin likes to put his head inside her nightshirt and snuggle against her breasts, and he does so now. He has grown a funny little beard on his chin, wispy, like loose pale threads dangling, and it tickles her. She has been losing weight here at the camp, what with all the physical labor, and one day, alone in the garden, Colin shyly expressed his unhappiness about that. He loves her ample softness and wants her always to stay the same. This is my body. She and Wesley used to have a joke about that, one that usually led to oral sex, which Wesley seemed to like more than the real thing. Now it has a whole new meaning. Not her body as a sexual instrument or object, but as a maternal one, a nurturing one. Not a fetish, but a shelter. She knows her relationship with Colin may seem strange to many, but he is so innocent, she can only be innocent, too, and as protective as he is vulnerable. When he returned to the manse after his time in the psychiatric hospital, he was very fragile. She worried about him every minute of the day and kept as close an eye on him as possible. And one afternoon, peeking in through the half-opened bathroom door, she saw him with a knife at his penis, about to cut it off. She entered the bathroom in alarm, an alarm she tried not to show, and talked him into giving her the knife, and then she sat on the toilet seat and took him in her arms like a little boy and asked him why he was doing that. He was trembling then as he is trembling now. How do you explain such things to a troubled boy? She did her best. It is such a nice little thing, she told him, he shouldn’t want to harm it. “It makes me afraid,” he said. Which was when Wesley walked in and, without making any effort to understand the situation, just exploded and ordered the boy out of the house. Colin ran away in shame and was nowhere to be found and she was terribly worried that he might do himself harm, but he finally turned up in California with his old schoolteacher and began writing letters to her from there. “Mother,” he addressed her. Now he guides her hand down between his legs. His underpants are damp and sticky as they often are. She often sees him pushing at his pillows and has to launder the pillowslips several times a week. While she is cupping his tender little pouch in her hand, he falls asleep like that, snoring softly under her nightshirt the way children sleeping soundly do.

Ted Cavanaugh, aging fullback and team captain, sits outside their en suite bathroom door with toast and coffee and a morning cigarette, waiting to see Irene safely back to bed. He is thinking about his wife, as he does now so much of the time, and with pity in his heart, but he is thinking about much else besides. His life this winter had seemed so simple, but reality has shouldered in and blitzed him. He thinks of himself as efficient, rational, cautious, orderly, responsible, eye on the ball, but he has been none of these things. He has let problems at the bank and in the town slide, has not kept a close enough eye on his or the bank’s investments, has let his young son go his own way without counsel, and through sheer heedlessness has allowed that virulent extremist sect to return and sink new roots. Their followers have been swarming in all week, tents are up in the fields, the motels in the area are packed out, and there are more rolling this way. Pat Suggs, with the collusion of the Edwardses, has outmaneuvered him, and with time running out, there’s all too little he can do. Although that little will be done. All week he has been working on defense — injunctions, health and safety inspections, roadblocks and trespass regulations, anything to slow them down — and he has found that he can influence the town, even to some degree the state, but not the county. Did he give his support to Tub Puller in the election for sheriff? Can’t remember. Probably. Ex-coalminer, disaster survivor. If he didn’t oppose him, then same thing.

The church is without a minister, too, another headache. Connie Dreyer is helping them out over at Trinity, but the board must find a replacement for Edwards soon or they’ll all end up Lutherans. They have advertised the position in the church bulletins and consulted with the synod and Ted has made his own inquiries, but West Condon is not an easy sell. Ted has tried to get Edwards committed to a mental hospital for his own good as well as the town’s, but his wife, whose sanity is also open to question, has balked at signing the papers, and there are several on the board who are reluctant to get involved with controversial committal procedures. Probably have to wait until Wes does something crazy enough to involve the police and hope he doesn’t hurt himself or others. He’s thankfully out of the manse — they will have to send in a cleaning crew and the whole place will have to be redecorated — and is living now in the Tindles’ garage-cum-dance studio. Ralph is unhappy about it but saying little. Is it charity or an affair? Most think the latter, and many believe that’s what broke up the Edwardses’ marriage. Ted is skeptical, but what does it matter? He has always thought of Wes as a considerate softspoken intellectual, friendly, reliable, a loyal Rotarian and decent golfer, good citizen, so, even though there were early signals impossible to ignore (but he ignored them), Wes Edwards’ Easter crisis came like a bolt. No less so his wife’s sudden move out to the Brunist camp around that same time. Fleeing a lunatic maybe, or off on some wild tear of her own. Debra never struck Ted as particularly religious, just a kind of liberal do-gooder, a nuisance but no fanatic. Until now. Ted is fully aware of their finances. He has peered into their accounts and knows what Debra has done.

The toilet flushes and the doorknob rattles as Irene braces herself on it on the other side; he sets down his cup, stubs out his cigarette in the saucer, waves the smoke away. He has learned not to open the door for her, but to wait patiently for her to work the knob and stagger crankily out on her own. She always resents his presence, not wanting him to see her as she is now. She should be in hospital under constant care, but she refuses to go and he does not have the heart to insist. She is being “selfish” as she dies, and really for the first time, having always bent quietly to his wishes. He feels it as a kind of penance he must perform for what else is happening in his life.

It was the loss of her hair more than anything else that broke her spirit. Irene had such pretty hair, which she wore when young in tight dark curls. He made a special effort up in the city to have a dark curly wig fashioned for her, using old photos, but in truth it looked heartbreakingly silly on her and in her bitterness she managed to get it to the stovetop one night when he was away and set it afire. Does she even remember the love they once felt for each other? When he asks her, he gets only a dark stare in return. Such a pretty thing she was, tall for a girl and slender with a shy winsome smile, always well-dressed, fun to be with, a Homecoming Queen and the most popular girl in her sorority. And so utterly and charmingly dependent upon him, a faithful helpmeet, quiet and elegant in public, sweet and passive as a lover when they were still lovers, given often to tears after — of gratitude, he always believed. When they were young and courting, their song was “Goodnight, Irene.” Now that song is full of bitter irony. He made the mistake of humming it to her one night, meaning only to remind her that he still remembered and that he loved her, and she reached up and clawed at his face.