Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Flesh generates melancholy.

Everything generates melancholy.

That night in the back seat of his dad’s car all that time ago. Boy Blue. His boner poking at her side like the legionnaire’s spear. Knocking on the door. That she was ready to open but didn’t know it.

Where is the little girl afraid to peep? She’s behind the ice plant, getting in deep.

A pastoral romance.

She sighs irritably, folds up her notebook, stuffs it back in her trenchcoat pocket. She aches for a smoke, but if she leaves the tent she’ll just have to walk on down the hill and home again. Her thirty minutes were up half an hour ago.

After Tommy split (when Angela tips down the sun visor to admire herself in the makeup mirror tonight: sur-prise! ), she decided to try for an invitation up the hill. Fellow believers were recognized and led up past the sheriff’s barriers, but she could never fake that. The reporters and camera crews, like the tourists, were restricted to the bottom of the hill, but cultists sometimes came down to talk to them. Two guys in particular seemed to be acting as spokesmen for the group; a tall slouching boy with handlebars covering an overbite, shaded pilot specs, burns and a hairknot, and his shorter friend, a more earnest and scholarly sort with a round face, granny glasses, and curly blond hair (she’d die for hair like that, she’d even brush it). She wandered over to tune in and it was clear they knew, in the way that baseball nuts know their stats, what they were talking about. They had the cult history down pat. Christian history, too. All the schisms and theories and prophecies and interpretations. Or at least they seemed to, what did she know? They had the Bible mapped in their heads as well. They could jump around in it at will, whip off quotes, name chapter and verse, draw parallels and morals. When some guy behind a camera asked if the Brunist movement wasn’t heretical, they coolly said they didn’t believe in the concept of heresy. All human efforts to grasp God’s purposes have value. No one has a monopoly on the truth.

“Right on,” she said over the reporter’s shoulder, and the boys smiled benignly.

“The truth,” said the blond one, “is more like something that exists apart in the intellectual space shared by everyone, not something bottled up inside this or that individual. All voices have to be listened to closely in order to catch a whisper of God’s voice behind them.” Whisper. Nice.

“The truth’s more like the air we share,” said the mustachioed one. “Not what you or I happen to have in our lungs at any moment. And like air, we can’t see truth, but we know it’s there and we can’t do without it.”

She could see problems with that metaphor, but she didn’t say so. Instead, she waited until the reporters were out of the way, and then she said, “Hi. I’m Sally Elliott. You guys really know your stuff. I’m impressed.” She knew she had a genuine expression of angst on her face because of the cramps. “I don’t think I’m going to become a member or anything, but I’m really curious and I wondered if you could give me, like, a kind of guided tour and tell me what’s going on?”

“Are you a Christian?”

“Well, a Presbyterian.”

“Really? Here in town? The minister’s wife is a member now.”

“I know. Auntie Debra.” Not really her aunt, of course. Was that cheating?

They looked at each other and nodded and introduced themselves and invited her up. Maybe her scruffiness helped. From what she could see under the tunics, or by those who lacked them, she fit right in. Probably a good thing she didn’t have the cameras, though. Billy Don, the taller one, said this was hallowed ground and she could only stay for thirty minutes, unless she wanted to confess and become a member. There was still time. They were watching her uneasily (behind Billy Don’s shades, she could see, one eye was askew), but they also seemed hopeful for a new adherent. Probably gave them status. Banking another soul.

The tour didn’t take long. There wasn’t much to see, but that wasn’t the point. “Hallowed ground” was the point, and she its inquisitive intruder. When she asked, Darren and Billy Don explained that the lawn chair perched on the four waist-high roughhewn wooden crosses was like the one on which the dead girl (they said: “first martyr”) was laid out on the Day of Redemption. Others passed by, pointing at the sky. She remembered the thin bluish corpse, whipped by wind and rain, only the second dead body she had ever seen. But she had forgotten the lawn chair. Probably too freaked out to notice. On the day, even while she laughed with her friends, she worried the Brunists might be right and she’d get left behind. She could still think that way. She’d been poised for a sprint up the hill if things started to happen. At the same time, she was afraid of getting struck by lightning. Billy Don asked her if she’d like to stop and pray, and she said she would like to meditate for a moment, and she assumed a grave expression and stared down at the lawn chair and had a rather ghoulish thought about Sleeping Beauty.

They walked her around behind the reception tent, as they called it, to the lone tree there, which had something to do with the invention of their new baptism ceremony with light instead of water. “It’s like a new covenant — not replacing the old, but transcending it in the way that light transcends water.” This ceremony awaited her if God granted her grace and understanding and she became a True Follower. They pointed to a large tent further up the hillside, whose open flaps revealed rows of folding chairs and said this could happen tonight if she were ready to confess her sins and give herself to Jesus. She asked more about this. Apparently there is a special “liturgical” flashlight they use just like the one from the first time. Or maybe it’s the same one. The tree had a frail shaggy martyred look of its own, gaunt, leafy but without real branches, a wounded pole. Not unlike that of their leader Giovanni Bruno, as she remembers him from the day and from photos of the day. She asked about him and learned that he is dead. Not, apparently, from natural causes. Unless all causes are God’s causes and therefore natural, she reminded them, hoping they didn’t hear the irony, and they nodded solemnly at that, and seemed to relax just a little. They pointed out the place down on the mine road where the girl was killed and the area just below them where the Powers of Darkness gathered with their ominous yellow schoolbuses. Where she herself had stood. Full of darkness, to be sure. By the time things really got hairy, though, the Powers had to do without her and her friends. They’d earlier started for the bingo tent to get out of the storm when they heard a lot of screaming in there and that scared the pants off them and they ran all the way home and had to watch the rest on television.

Though some of the scowls she got suggested she was still oozing an aura of darkness, for the most part she was welcomed with smiles and praise-the-lord greetings, the two boys her ambassadors. The kids from Florida all gave her loving hugs, including the cute one (who, Sally was happy to note, had gapped front teeth and a lisp), and introduced her to others from their bus and people they’d come to know here. There were apparently over a dozen buses parked at the camp, and more down below here on the mine road. It was like being at a big school pep rally. On Homecoming weekend. She learned from the boys that the cult was now hundreds of times bigger than it had been. Something was happening. It was almost elbow to elbow up here. She met the radio announcer in the white cowboy togs, who was talking with a tall skinny dude with a guitar and his girlfriend about a gig at the station. She might have been part Mexican. When Sally asked her why she was here, she said she’d got called. Like someone called her on the phone. A lot of these people talked that way. Voices in their heads. In the wilderness of their heads. A dingbat with a rigid grimace and steely blue eyes under a peroxide blond toupee wandered past, trailed by admiring ladies in bouffants. He was lecturing them at full throttle on the meaning of the cross in the circle they were wearing on their tunics. Some numbers game involved, having to do with Christ’s thirty-three years. “And, yea, there was give them to each one a white robe,” he cried out. “Cause the spirit has took on flesh, a new day is come, brung by the White Bird, the Holy Spirit, and you are in it, my friends, a new day what will last to the end a the world!” There were people falling about in what her comparative religion textbooks used to call fits of divine madness, and other people strolling about with cups of coffee and beatific expressions, calmly watching the ecstatics as they might watch children playing in a sandbox. Weird. Tom and Sally at the Reality Border. “Do you guys ever do stuff like that?” she asked, and got only smiles in return, though Darren added, “God speaks with many voices.”