Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“His foreskin? C’mon, you’re making this up, Sal.”

“No, he apparently had several, actually. They’re scattered all over Europe and displayed in jewel cases like little wedding rings. More than a dozen of them. Does that mean he had several dicks? I don’t know. It’s one of the unrevealed mysteries of the Christian faith.” There is a festive atmosphere up on the hill, but also an undercurrent of fear. The cultists are spending a lot of time peering up at the sky, and the onlookers down here can’t help following their gaze; when someone yawns, everyone yawns. She looks up, too. After a sexy, summery week, it has turned cooler and the sky today has a dark woolly look, uncombed and knotted (she is thinking about her own neglect in this respect; epic rats’ nest, as her mother calls it), and maybe it reminds everyone of the apocalyptic storm that pounded the hill last time. She remembers it. She was here. A giggler with other gigglers. Pathetic. “One big collectors’ item for a while was a farewell note he supposedly left his disciples, writing with the nails he got tacked up with, using his blood as ink and his own skin as parchment. But, as we all know, his skin went to Heaven with the rest of him, even if he left his blood and other exudations behind, so that article got remaindered.”

“I can see it coming. Next you’ll be telling me they collected his shit.”

“Well, there are rumors. I mean, if sweat, why not snot or vomit or ear wax, right? And what-all else. Dandruff? Dingleberries? That stuff under your toenails? I can just see all those guys chasing around after him, trying to grab up anything that fell off or out of him.” Idea for a story: Jesus Has a Wet Dream. Sacramental consequences. “They also sold off all of Mary’s bits and pieces, though her big item was her milk, which must have been more like cheese by the time it reached the customers.”

“Oh my God! Spare me, please!” Tommy turns away with a pained grimace (she has grossed him out again, the tender little thing; why does she do this?) and, handing her his Polaroid, busies himself with his Nikon. The Brunists are a colorful lot, animated and emotional, lots of hugs and tears and emphatic declamations and occasional convulsions, and they dress funny, so there are plenty of great shots to be had — the amateur yodeler from the radio station, for example, in his matching white Stetson and white boots with red flames at the pointed toes and on the crown of the Stetson, a white jacket with fringes on the sleeves and tight white pants, blood-red tie like his throat has been cut, guitar over one shoulder and tape recorder over the other, picking up field recordings. Or that cluster of wailing worshipers in white tunics gathered around the pudgy silver-haired faith healer with the sparkling teeth, praying for the grumpy broken-backed man in the wheelchair to get up and walk. But Tommy ignores them (she has not; this has all gone into her notebook) and, shifting the bill of his baseball cap out of the way, points his lens at some young moonfaced kids with guitars wearing Brunist tunics. Well, one of the girls is cute, bare-legged and bosomy and wearing her shortened tunic like a loose nightie, the hypocritical little bitch, he probably has his eye on her. Or, more precisely, on what she’s showing off between her legs. Come and see. Sally drops her cigarette and grinds it out. Fiercely. On edge. Can’t help it. A lot of young kids out here, buying this craziness. It’s scary.

“What I can’t figure out, though,” she says, hanging his camera over her shoulder and shoving her hands into her trenchcoat pockets, trying to stop herself from lighting up again, “is that, with all this emphasis on magical blood, there’s no mention of hawking Mary’s menses. I mean, hey, talk about miraculous effluvia.”

“I suppose they figured it’d make you sick instead of better. The curse of Eve, right?” This said over his shoulder while clicking away. The little twit, knees still raised, is smiling at him.

“That’s what the guys in charge called it. They used to chase menstruating women out of town and lock them up in a shed because they thought they’d ruin the crops or mess up the hunt — I mean, you could smell them from a mile off, couldn’t you? — and they got blamed for everything from causing the milk to sour and the clocks to stop, to bringing on earthquakes and hailstorms and curdling the mayonnaise.” That one about curdling the mayo she got from her Grandma Friskin. Who said it backwards a decade or so ago: “Well, at least I won’t curdle the mayonnaise anymore.” “But the magic sauce was also used to fertilize the veggies and fruit trees and chase off evil spirits, and they fed it to their pigs and chickens to spice up their bacon and eggs, so its rep was mixed. People even blended it with wine and drank it themselves for a longer life and for more kids and to pump up their spiritual powers and their dingdongs, which to guys is more or less the same thing. I mean, you know, good or bad, whatever the Ineffable touches, whammo. They believed the gunk could cure gout, warts, worms, the bubonic plague, epilepsy, and leprosy, not to mention fever blisters, buboes, and the whooping cough. Ragtime is a cosmic event, Tommy. It swings with the moon and flows with the tides. The big red monster. Powerful stuff.” Not that she believes any of this. It’s a literal pain in the gut. “So you can imagine the market potential of Mary’s monthlies, right? The real Holy Blood. In fact, the Blood of Christ is probably just a euphemism for it. Men are always trying to get in on the act. Take that wound Jesus got from the Roman dogface. Ever look at the paintings of it? It looks just like a bloody you-know-what.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“No?”

“No pubic hair.”

She grins at that. He’s listening. “Well, but he was still just a virgin, wasn’t he? In that respect at least, with his little loincloth like a sanitary napkin.”

“What’s with you?” Tommy asks, a bit exasperated. “Are you on the rag or something?”

“How’d you guess?” What did she think? He’d feel sorry for her? Probably just makes him want to throw up. It always infuriates her when it comes on and it makes her lose her cool. Today it seems worse than usual. It feels like her ovaries are eating her intestines. Like maybe her uterus knows she is excited and is trying to claw the egg back in case something happens. Is she excited? Sure. Damn it. She takes a drag on her cigarette. (Another one. When did she light up? Doesn’t remember.) “Cousin Tom, my roommate calls it.”

“How did I get this honor?”

“Time. Of. Month.”

“Oh. Very funny. Well, I’m just glad I don’t have to deal with that.”

“Too bad you don’t. The world might be a better place if men had their turn. Monthlies keep you pegged to the earth. Men get lost in their own spacey heads and fly off somewhere, and that’s how we got all this religious idiocy.” She gestures up at the middle of the hill, where a huge theatrical fat woman with arms as big around as phone poles and stiff hair poking up like straw ticking out of an old mattress, her tunic riding up over her bulbous rump like a wrinkled slipcover, has knelt and started to moan beside an unfolded aluminum lawn chair with plastic webbing raised up on four cross-like stakes, which seems like some kind of weird altar or shrine. Others fall to their knees around her. The woman points up at the sky and shakes her head violently and all the others do the same. Some of them seem to have red crosses painted on their foreheads. “I mean, just look at all those wacky Christians! Looney tunes, man!”

“But that isn’t real Christianity.”

“Yes, it is.”

He sighs impatiently, as though to say, oh shut up, and stares absently down at her shirt. She had tried this morning to pull on her old No-Name Wilderness Camp tee from when she was eleven, imagining it might be like a cool skin-tight top leaving a bare midriff, maybe tease out a romantic joke or two (hah), but she couldn’t get her head through the neck of it. She decided it was not smart to wear anything too provocative, so she left her perversely illustrated JESUS LOVES ME tee at home and chose instead one of her noncommittal holiday shirts, the one from Yellowstone showing Old Faithful geysering. Figured it might give Tommy ideas. It does. “Reminds me. I need to pee. Time to go anyway. Dad will be waiting for me.” See Sally smile. See Tom run. Off to feed the dummy. “We’re taking turns with Mom. The home care nurse has the day off. In fact, that’s her up there by the big tent. Bernice. The one in the headband, looking like an Arab refugee.”