Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

On the walk to the green, he thanks the Lutheran minister again for all he’s doing to help the Presbyterians in their crisis, and they talk about Wes Edwards. Wes often joined them out here on weekday and Saturday afternoons. Would that be good therapy for him? No. Lost cause. Though Dreyer is more hopeful. “Wesley has been a faithful servant of God. God will not abandon him.” “Far as I can tell,” Ted says, “that’s just the problem — He’s got inside him and Wes can’t get Him out!” Connie smiles compassionately at that and goes on to explain the sources of some of Wesley’s outbursts, including what seemed to be an Easter morning threat to destroy the church. “Mark 13.2,” says Connie. “Don’t worry. People with Christ parapathies often use that verse to assert themselves without even considering what it might mean.” Ted tells Connie about Debra emptying out all their bank accounts to finance the Brunists. “Jim’s wife Susanna says Debra told her she’d decided to lay down all she has and follow Christ. Only she laid down everything Wes has, too.”

While Connie sorts out his problems at the water hazard, Ted studies his lie. Not too bad. He’s played it before. About twenty yards beyond the pin in a clump of unmowed grass. It is technically fairway, so, with an unskilled parttime groundskeeper, it is within the club rules to clear the grass and debris around the ball, and he does so, then joins Connie on the bench beside the ball washer for a smoke while waiting for the others. He can still par the hole and plans to. Dreyer tips back his straw skimmer, strikes a match over his briar pipebowl, and asks about Irene. “A little better right now. Some kind of remission, I think.” When he called home from the bank to check in with the home care nurse, Bernice said, “Well, she keeps trying to get up and walk around, Mr. Cavanaugh. I think she wants to up and fly like Elijah.” “It has been hard, Connie.” “I know. The children?” “They were all back at Christmas and we’ve stayed in touch. It would help if they could get back more often, but my oldest is in the State Department and posted to the Far East, where they really have their hands full, my daughter out on the coast has a legal practice and small children, and Tommy’s finishing university, so I’m pretty much on my own. Tommy at least will be back for the summer.” He needs Tommy, needs his help, his attention. Tommy’s a bit lost right now, is even talking about going on to grad school, studying some subject other than business. Pointless. His grades are mediocre, way below his abilities. He got dropped from the basketball team, in spite of Ted’s influence up there, apparently for flaunting training regulations. He seems all too loose and easy, as if life were just a passing joke — it’s not a joke, damn it. Ted has only a B.A., all he has needed, and has always thought of business school as an excuse to keep fucking off, avoiding the hard decisions. But at least it might keep a kid like Tommy on track until he can grow up, so he’ll push the idea. Tommy had wanted to work in the bank this summer, but Ted couldn’t risk it — the boy has made a play for just about everyone in there, including Stacy — so he has managed to get him on the city payroll instead. They’ll talk all this out when he’s home for the weekend.

Nick Minicozzi’s shot lands conveniently at the lip of the green. Must be at least his fourth. A tough couple of holes but he has a natural swing and, though not daring, is a stubborn competitor. When Nick sent the official foreclosure documents down this afternoon, Stacy brought them in and stood by his desk for a moment while he leafed through them. She seemed decidedly unhappy. Probably she had talked with most of these people at her desk. In the stack, along with the unpaid house mortgages and failed small businesses: Maury Castle’s old shoe store. As the Deepwater night manager, Dave Osborne was something of a hero on the night of the disaster, so, with the mine closed, Ted helped him buy the store when Castle was elected mayor. He should have known better. Even Castle was losing money and he knew something about salesmanship. For a while, Osborne joined the others for lunch at Mick’s, trying to fit in, but he has not been in for some time now. Except for small loans Ted granted him, he has had no money to buy in fresh stock, so most of the shoes for sale are the same ones as four or five years ago. Osborne is now deep in debt with no obvious way out; the bank has played along too long, the shop has to be closed and put on the block like so many others on Main. But Stacy was still standing there—“Look,” she said, pointing: “New shoes!”—and he realized how much, just now, he needed her. He could not bear her censure. He set the documents aside. “These can wait,” he said (was he growling? he was growling). “If the bank owns all the property in town, what the hell’s it going to do with it?” “You’re beautiful,” she whispered as she left. Elliott’s ball lands short of the green. He may have just picked it up finally and thrown it. If he announces it was his third shot, he’ll fire him on the spot. When Nick arrives, cursing his slices, Ted says, “Your hips are moving forward before your hands are, Nick. At the driving range, try hitting a bucket of balls with your feet together. If your hips move first, you’ll lose your balance.”

The beautiful man is returning home in his beautiful car in a beautiful mood. It is late. He has stayed too long, and the drive from the distant highway motel where she stays on weekends takes more than an hour down dark two-lane country roads. But an immense peace has settled over him and he feels afloat on the night. Changes are taking place. Deep at the core. She has released something in him that he himself did not know was there. A buried self more open and lighthearted. Not frivolous, but possessed of a genuine lightness of being, one able to rise above (yes, he is afloat!) the cares and anxieties of the day-to-day world. The bank, the church, the Brunists, his so-called community have settled dimly into the background like two-dimensional markers of his new distance from them. And more loving, a self more loving. He had not known he could love as he loves now. Or be loved as she loves him. With all her heart, he knows that; she has touched him with her almost desperate confessions. It’s a miracle. A touching of souls. Her young body, he loves that, too, is crazy about it, cannot keep his hands or eyes off it, and when he apologized for his abject adoration (he was undressing her, slowly, as if unwrapping her, as if revealing something holy, her emerging body — it is holy! — quite literally aglow under the bedside lamp), she smiled dreamily and said, “You have the hands of a poet.” But it was not just her body — that was just, so to speak, the frosting on the cake (that is probably not the most poetic way of putting it, though he did like to lick it) — it was the young woman inside the body that most fascinated him: her good heart, her gaiety, her charming unpredictability, her fresh youthful wisdom. When he expressed his worries about the events of the upcoming weekend and all he was doing to confront them, she stroked his brow and said, “Maybe you’re overreacting.” “Could be. But I don’t think so.” “Listen, why don’t we go somewhere Sunday? A drive…?” And though it seemed preposterous and irresponsible, it also suddenly seemed right. The nurse and cleaning lady have the weekend off; maybe they’re going out to the mine for the ceremonies (are they part of that cult?), but Tommy will be home. It was possible. No, it was necessary. “Yes,” he said. A weight seemed to be lifting. “We’ll do that.” And she kissed him, and then straddled his shoulders, presenting him her butterfly to kiss, and leaned down to stretch her body out over his, her head between his legs. You go to my head…their little joke about that. He was so glad he’d left the bedlamp on. Is this wrong? It cannot be, it is too beautiful, too pure, too profound. And life is short, its rewards few and precious, gifts of the passing hours to be accepted or forever lost. If not now, when? “It goes on and on,” Stacy has said about life, “and then it stops.” She’s an agnostic. Or something else. But that’s all right, maybe he is, too, he hasn’t thought about it all that much. Probably not, but never mind. Love transcends all that. It’s her religion, really. Love as God, God as Love. If it feels good, it is good. They can go over by the river, he was thinking as her thighs squeezed his cheeks, is thinking now, afloat in his big Continental, and also of her thighs and all between them (unbelievably, in spite of all the night’s activities, he is hard again). That state park over there with the massive stone formations, hasn’t been there in years.