Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

Ben asked them to come out early this morning and help strike the tents and clean up the camp after what the bikers did to it, but you can’t do everything, not when you have four excitable kids and a husband who can’t get off the can until noon. Dot understands the rednecks’ complaints — Isaiah is sometimes a nuisance to her, too. At least the camp has separate outdoor privies for ladies and gents, though she has trouble getting through the skinny wooden door. She and Isaiah like Ben better than Clara, who is a bit bossy for their taste, though she has a big church to run, so you have to give her credit, and both of them are two of the flat-out sincerest people she’s ever known. They believe. You can feel it in everything they say and do. It was what most drew her and Isaiah to them. But they’re both missing something, too, something that lets you know they are in touch with final things. They are, to put it plain, too down-to-earth. They are not possessed . That’s what this group is mostly, a lot of sincere dedicated people, full of conviction, but without much pentecostal fire. They can do things like build camps, but they can’t lift off. They’ve assembled a good team, though, with singers and preachers and bookkeepers, plenty of hard workers and even some prophets — those two boys don’t look much like prophets, but that’s probably what they are, and they’re smart as a whip. Or two whips. Dot always thought there must be a scientific way to get at this mystery-of-all-mysteries, God being the master scientist after all, and if anyone can puzzle out when the Rapture is like to strike, it’s those two, whatever might be their private ways. Dot looks forward to being interviewed by them as she figures she can set them straight on a few matters. That woman Mabel Hall seems like she’s on to something, too, though it’s not completely Christian. More gypsylike. Old Goldenthroat from Florida has a great gift of the tongue and can really wind up the faithful, but he is something of a smoothie, you can’t quite trust him. He was trying to do some faith healing out on the Mount yesterday but it was a complete washout. Isaiah has had better luck at that, and he can hardly string three intelligent words together. Still, old Hiram has gathered a real churchful around him and they pay their own way, so you can’t complain. As for the rich man Suggs, he is like a kind of Joseph of Arimathea, more just part of the background plot than a main actor. He won’t even wear the tunic. He might or might not get taken aboard when the Rapture happens.

The nearest thing to a man possessed she has seen is that short, jowly preacher, Abner Baxter. The women around him are pathetic and Young Abner is a spongy dimwit, but Abner Senior is full of beans; or, better said, full of fire. Holy fire. He knows the Bible forwards and backwards and has a voice that could knock down the walls of Jericho. His commie background is worrying to some, but it only shows he has always been on the side of the poor, even before his Christian conversion. He has raised some hard questions out there, questions that still need answering. Just why they are spending all that money on building a church, for example, when the end is coming anyway and there are needy persons who must be fed while they wait for it. He gets people’s backs up with his rage and bluster and his biker boys are an embarrassment (Dot understands wild kids, he shouldn’t be blamed for them), but he’s a man driven by his calling and someone you have to listen to. That’s what she and Isaiah think, and a lot of other people are thinking the same way.

Abner Baxter is also the one, even more than Ben and Clara, who seems most set on keeping Bruno in Brunism. His last conversion was a hard one and it has stuck. It’s the words of their Prophet that makes these people different, but they don’t all get it. Brunism is otherwise like a lot of the evangelical churches Dot and Isaiah have been members of: the Bible as the infallible word of God and its prophecies as future history, the creation of the world in a day by the hand of God, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ with direct access to Him through prayer, the fall and salvation of man through adult baptism following the repenting of sins, speaking in tongues, faith healing, all that sort of thing that no one can argue with, plus of course a focus on the Rapture, the Tribulation, the millennial reign of Christ, and the Final Judgment, all announced by God in the Bible, all imminent. What Bruno delivers is a step past that. He has announced a whole new era, betokened by baptism by light (Isaiah and Dot favor Abner Baxter’s reading of this as baptism by fire and have signed up for it), as though to say, this is it, it’s coming now, get ready. And he has opened up a new window onto exactly when and where it’s going to happen. You have to believe God is going to get some advance word out to the faithful, and that’s what seems to have happened here. It’s what the Mount of Redemption and all these dates they’ve been learning are all about and it’s why Dot and Isaiah have come here. Jesus may turn up any minute.

Just who or what Giovanni Bruno was is more of a mystery. A man of the people, yes, from a humble family, who fought his own priests as Jesus did his, and was martyred. Above all, a man filled with a messianic fever — you can see it in the eyes of the pictures of him. But it seems like the real father of this movement was Clara’s first husband. Ely Collins had the Holy Spirit in him, saw visions, converted a lot of these people, and was about to prophesy the end of the world, when he suddenly got killed in the mine as if the Antichrist were after him to shut him up. Before he died, though, he apparently passed the Spirit on, or God did, to his younger partner, who people said was like a son to him, so Johnny Brown, as many are calling him, wasn’t really Johnny Brown, or Giovanni Bruno either, but more like a living transmitter for the voice of Ely Collins, and through him, of the Almighty Himself. Some say, especially those around Abner Baxter, that their Prophet, whom they call simply Bruno— Bru-no —actually died in the mine, too, but that his body, which still had both legs, was allowed to stagger on long enough like a kind of holy zombie to carry Ely Collins’ spirit and message to the world. They say there was a bird did all this. Pretty weird, but Dot has known weirder and she likes the story. It adds up, and right now, it suits her.

It’s time to get ready to move out to the camp. They’ll be doing lunch out there in a couple of hours and there’s nothing to eat here, all the food they hauled back from the buffet yesterday having long since vanished, so they can’t be late. There will be crowds of hungry people; they’ll have to fight for a place at table. No problem. She’s good at that. The three kids have left the corner when she wasn’t looking and are probably out terrorizing the neighbors’ brats again. There aren’t many toys in this slummy neighborhood, but they have managed to break or steal just about every one there is, what can you do. There’s no tub out at the camp. She’ll have one last hot bath and then pop all four in her bathwater for a quick scrubdown before leaving. Maybe she can get Isaiah to take a bath, too, though he doesn’t often. She sniffs the air. Little Johnny’s filled his pants again. The kid eats like a horse and poops like one, too. At least, when they get raptured, praise the Lord, there’ll be no more dirty diapers.

While loading the food they have bought — for the second time — for today’s big farewell luncheon into the trunk of Mrs. Edwards’ car in the highway supermarket parking lot, the woman asks Clara if she’s aware that her daughter may be practicing some form of flagellation. Clara knows what the word means and what this is all about, but the question has caught her by surprise and she asks anyway, and the minister’s wife says it was the ancient religious practice of being whipped or whipping oneself as a purification rite. Clara has read about it and heard preachers preach about it. Punishment of the flesh as the corrupt prison of the spirit, the imitation of Christ’s own sufferings, the flogging He took from Pontius Pilate, and so on, a kind of extreme penance. Sometimes not just to purge one’s own sins, but those of the entire world. But she is skeptical. For the poor, Ely used to say, life is penance enough; we don’t need to heap more pain on it. And there’s something downright unhealthy about it. It’s supposed to be an act of humility, a rejection of the body, but it’s mostly just the opposite. And it can be something nastier. Ludie Belle Shawcross has stories. “How do you know about this?” she asks.