Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Hovis and Uriah have walked back to the camp for the sunrise service to find their camper gone. “Them bikers must of stole it,” Hovis says with alarm. They are both alarmed. It’s all they own. How can they get back to West Virginia without it? They search behind all the other trailers and caravans in the lot just in case it somehow got hidden. Uriah pauses, turns to look off toward the mine hill. “How did we git over there in the first place, Hovis? We must of drove.” They both think about this. “Yup, we must of forgot. I’ll go git it, Uriah. You’re tuckered out. You go lie down.” “How can I lie down if we ain’t got our camper?” Hovis scratches his head, looks around again. No, it’s not there. “Didn’t think of that.”

Debra Edwards knows more of the words of the Brunist songs now and can sing along when Ben selects numbers like “The Wings of a Dove.” They are singing it in memory of their pair of nesting white doves so senselessly and barbarously slain yesterday. Ludie Belle Shawcross picked up the decapitated birds after they were thrown by the motorcycle gang and saved them for burial at this morning’s sunrise service here at the foot of the budding dogwood tree. The heads could not be found. The camp is not yet in full flower, but it is already bursting with color and it is alive now with birdsong as if all the birds were participating in the honoring of the doves: lots of sparrows trilling away, and the newly arrived orioles and warblers with their pretty voices, the chats, buntings, and chirping dickcissels all joining in as they celebrate God’s pure sweet love, sent down on the wings of a snow-white dove. Everyone had come to associate the doves with the “white birds” of Ely Collins’ and Giovanni Bruno’s visions, and the launching of their headless bodies into their midst on the Mount of Redemption produced a surge of fear among the Followers and prompted terrified predictions of dire events. Though Debra was not inclined to think of the bikers as demons, as many did, she herself felt this fear, and even more so on their return to their camp, which they found half-wrecked, her own home and Colin’s cruelly trashed. The front screen door was torn off its hinges, two windows were smashed and the plastic insulation ripped away, their beds were overturned and urinated upon, their cookies and chocolates were stolen, the hot water bottle from the manse had been beheaded just like the dog and doves were, and her nursing chair, rescued from the manse, had had its pretty velvet seat slashed. Poor Colin, overwrought by all the day’s excitements, went crazy on seeing it and ran out onto the camp road, screaming hysterically at the bikers, though by then they were miles away. Fortunately, she had brought Darren back to camp with her. He was the one person who could settle Colin down, and with a lot of coaxing he did so and, gratefully, took him to stay with him in the church office in the lodge, which, being locked and innocuous-looking, had escaped the gang’s depredations; she was exhausted and could not have stayed awake another minute to comfort a distraught boy. She dropped, fully dressed, like a lead plummet onto the pungent mattress and did not regain consciousness until she awoke, startled and afraid, unsure of where she was until the early dawn light and birdsong relocated her, Abner Baxter next door, berating his wife and daughters.

Debra felt quite charitable toward the Baxters before she actually knew them, and agreed with Clara that they should be welcomed back, but they have been like a flock of predatory cowbirds descending upon a garden of songbirds. Nest robbers. And their followers are no better, demanding and bad-tempered and unappreciative and disruptive. As the beekeeper Corinne Appleby said, “Nary a one of them knows how to smile.” Without any right, the Baxters have taken over the cabin next door, the one meant for Darren and Billy Don, and even though repairs on it have barely begun — it doesn’t even have a front door — they don’t seem inclined to leave it any time soon, which worries Clara and Ben. They put a tent up at the back to sleep the mother and daughters, Reverend Baxter and his three sons using the cabin proper, though now there’s only the oldest son after the younger two were expelled. Already, they look like they’ve been living over there forever. Unloading their clunky old car was like emptying a moving van and they’ve taken whatever they wanted from around the camp. What’s left of their family is here at the sunrise service, looking sullen and defensive, completely out of character with the beautiful day. Well, maybe they can’t help it. Debra was born with a smile on her face, they were not. She has to try to understand them.

What’s going on between Elaine and Young Abner is also worrying Clara, and if she’d seen what Debra has seen, she’d be even more upset. Clara has asked her, as a counselor for troubled young people, to have a talk with Elaine, but the girl has shied away from her, and now, after all she has witnessed in the garden, Debra might not know where to begin. Should she tell Clara what she saw? She should. But how? Clara would want to know why she didn’t interfere, and she doesn’t know the answer to that. Really, it’s all too embarrassing.

“They have rejected God, creation, and morality! Oh, they don’t call it humanism, they call it democracy, but they mean humanism, in all its atheistic, amoral, scientistic depravity!” The handsome bishop from Wyoming, invited to read from the Scriptures, is prefacing his reading with an attack on what he calls the devil’s religion and “the most serious threat to our nation in its entire history! You can’t be both a humanist and a true believer!” There are shouted replies and admiring gazes and soft “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chants from many of the gathered worshippers. The principal target of his denunciation is the false belief in evolution, one of the fables of her own upbringing, and one that has deprived her of the opportunity to help with the camp’s home schooling, so she feels somewhat targeted as well. She’s trying to unlearn all that to break down their distrust, so she also calls out an “amen!” or two, though she’s probably not convincing anyone. But humanism, she has come to realize, is what’s wrong with Wesley and all his stupid sermons, and that helps her to hate it as they hate it. The bishop puts on his spectacles and picks up the Bible, looking around at them all. “What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?” he asks. “We come from the dark, brother! Lead us to light!” “And I said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb!” “Washed in the blood of the Lamb!” they cry. And the “Bru-no! Bru-no!” chant begins again.

She knows that many of these people are feeling desperate today, having walked away from their livelihoods and given away all they own, and she knows what that’s like. She too has impoverished herself to help their cause, abandoning the security of the life of a minister’s wife to commit herself heart and soul to the Brunists. But though she feels for their plight, she wants them all to go away. Reverend Hiram Clegg, now preaching his last sermon before returning with his congregation to Florida — she will miss him and his warm kindly eloquence; like her, he always seems to see the bright side of things — is talking about those who have accepted voluntary poverty and the great sacrifices they have made and their need now to find further ways to support the community of Followers as it awaits the last days, quoting beautifully from the Bible and from the sayings of Giovanni Bruno as he always does, and she feels that though he is addressing the newly arrived multitudes, he is also talking to her. Well, she will work hard and continue to play her part and have faith and God will be pleased. She can sell things from the vegetable garden. Everything will be all right. It has to be.