Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“What do you mean?” the outraged banker demands, jutting the jaw that intimidated a generation of state high school football players. There are news cameras focused on them now, and the crowds are pressing round, drawn here in hopes of a repeat of the entertaining events of five years ago. “If we don’t leave, you’re going to arrest us?” His demand is met by strategic silence.

“Well, I think this is absolutely ridiculous,” says the Chamber of Commerce secretary.

The West Condon chief of police, one of the more flourishing members of the extensive Romano clan, and the principal supporter on his meager salary (and whatever else comes along) of eleven of them, had never thought that this would work and said so before reluctantly agreeing to haul his sad ass out here, dragging all these others with him. Chief Romano is uncomfortable around overheated evangelical types, so arrogantly full of false certitude, every man his own prophet and pope, and he is fully aware of the racist anti-Catholic biases of the likes of Puller and Suggs and that vicious firebrand Baxter, desecrater of St. Stephen’s Church, who is standing off to one side and seems about to explode, damn his tormented soul. But, though he has no authority here, he had no choice. He likes to say that all the people of West Condon are his boss, but Dee knows from whose imperious hands comes his paycheck, and he knows the kinds of games they play, the cunning and meanness in their hearts. If truth be told, there’s not a person in their party here not deserving of imprisonment if not hanging, himself included. But what can you do? Life is a crap shoot. He had one throw and this is what he got. “There won’t be no arrests,” he says flatly, fixing his gaze not on the sheriff but on his troops. Who are not, he knows, completely legal. Tub Puller’s ambitious little warlord fantasies. The way Monk Wallace explained it to him down at the station, Puller is amassing this vigilante army and hoping for disturbances — even if he has to create them himself — that will justify this unit enough to draw state money to finance and arm it. For the present, the volunteers — no Italians among them — are not only unpaid, they even have to supply their own uniforms and weapons. In it for the action. They can’t arrest anybody, though of course neither can he. John P. Suggs catches his drift. “If you want to stay,” he says finally, “be our guests. Just don’t stir up trouble. Last time, you let a mess happen. People got hurt. We’re not going to let one happen today.”

The West Condon mayor puffs out his fat cheeks and says in his booming voice, “We been told a woman was took to hospital. What’sa particulars?”

“She is Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” Puller says, consulting his notes.

“But what’s her problem?”

“Like I say, Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

There are hoots from the crowd. “That ain’t what the man ast you, Tub baby,” yells one of them. The sheriff knows him. A scrawny loudmouth coalminer named Cheese Johnson who sometimes worked his shift in the sheriff’s own mining days, if what that ugly fuckoff did could be called work. The strip mine operator knows him as Chester K. Johnson, a ne’er-do-well whom he hired at one of his mines after Deepwater but who lasted only a week. Chief Romano as a drunken jawbox he has picked up off the street from time to time, a regular client in the free flophouse he runs at the city jail. The banker as the uncontrollable wiseass who horned in on his original Common Sense Committee and nearly wrecked it, beating up old Ben Wosznik in his own house. No one’s happy that he and his shiftless pals are here. “No more stonewallin’, my man,” Johnson shouts in his nasal twang. “The ole girl’s gone tits up, ain’t it so?”

Clara Collins is watching apprehensively from a discreet distance. It was just such trouble that thwarted their gathering here five years ago, when it seemed certain that the Rapture was really going to happen, and she is afraid something like it might ruin her plans today. She tells Ben and Wayne to go get on the public address system with some good old-time gospel singing. “Let’s loose the Holy Spirit on them and drown out all this ungodly bickering!”

Reverend Abner Baxter, seething with injured pride at having been excluded from all these exchanges and emboldened by the return today of some of his closest followers — including Jewell Cox and Roy Coates, standing beside him like stone pillars — now lets go his daughter’s hand and, striding toward the banker and his minions, cries out: “Enough of these puffed-up babblings! Your deceitful words are a loathsome abomination!” Is he referring to the banker or to all parties present? Let them read it as they will. “There is no truth in your mouth, your soul is destruction , your throat is an open sepulcher! Do you hear? Look around you! Your land has become a desolation and a waste and a curse, your town an unholy emptiness! Do you not see? You have brought this evil upon yourself through your own sinfulness, and your unlawful persecutions of the just, and now nothing shall never live here again!” Old boss Suggs is looking unhappy. Good. Let the old sinner have ears. “Even him who led us to the Coming of the Light through his foreknowledge of God ye have taken away and by evil hands have ye slain him! Ye are viler than the earth!” “Amen!” calls out Jewell Cox, and Roy and Roy’s boys and Ezra Gray and his own son, Young Abner, echo him, and others, too. It is spreading. The hillside is becoming his hillside, and the cameras are watching.

“That’s enough now,” says Tub Puller, hands on his gunbelt. But it is not enough. The Brunist bishop of West Condon is rediscovering his own lost self. The long, hard years on the road have taken their toll, but he is home again. He can feel within him once more the power of God, and that power, he knows, is of indignation and wrath. He brushes past the sheriff, raising his fist at the town dignitaries, just as Reverend Konrad Dreyer of the Trinity Lutheran Church, perhaps having hesitated a moment too long, touches the brim of his straw and steps forward to attempt to speak on behalf of the West Condon Ministerial Association.

“But WOE unto the wicked! Your day of reckoning is come! That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of ruin and desolation! Your blood shall be poured out like dust, and your flesh like DUNG!” Reverend Dreyer, who fully understands these apocalyptic yearnings and is eager to reassure the cult of the Association’s basic support for the freedom of all Christian religion, and indeed other religions as well — the Jewish faith, for example — nevertheless finds himself somewhat overawed by Reverend Baxter’s fiery passion and clenched fist (good Heavens, does he mean to strike someone?), and he staggers back into his own footsteps, banging into a cursing cameraman. It might have been better, he thinks, to have expressed the Association’s views in a written letter. “In the fire of His jealous wrath, all the earth shall be consumed, for a full, yea, sudden end He will make of all the inhabitants of the earth! As the whirlwind passes, so will the house of the wicked be no more! But the tabernacle off the upright shall flourish!” Reverend Baxter gestures up the hill behind him, hearing the murmured “Amens” roll like ripples of subdued thunder as several drop to their knees. There are many new people here today, they have large expectations, he is speaking to them, telling them what they have been waiting to hear, he is of them, and they of him . He raises both arms like a conductor, whereupon strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” can be heard, as if on cue, like a call to arms — though it is not “The Battle Hymn,” it is one of the Brunist songs: “O the Sons of Light are marching…” Reverend Dreyer, who has been called here by his banker friend as a Christian leader, understands much of the present moment’s dynamics, at least all that regarding religion, for he has made a study of sectarian conflict, which he believes to be due, at root, to a small but specific set of irresolvable philosophical paradoxes that need to be accepted as conundrums and not be allowed to divide men on the basis of what cannot be differing truths but only differing opinions — or, rather, like most seeming paradoxes, single truths identified by the very contraries they contain. This does not seem to be the right moment to explain this, however. “For, verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall LIVE! All that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of DAMNATION!”