Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“Well, you asked me to speak with her and…”

“Yesterday morning Ben seen her coming from out the woods with Junior Baxter in their tunics and they was blood on them.” There. It’s out. Since Ben told her about it, she has been trying not to think about it, and therefore thinking about nothing else. She found the tunic before the girl could wash it and it was true. She has tried to talk to Elaine about it, but the child just ducks her head and says nothing. Clara felt herself growing angry — angry and fearful — and she had to back away and try to figure things out, but there was no time to do that; this weekend has taken all her time. Which has been true for too long. She is not the mother she used to be or ought to be. She has become instead the mother of a whole movement, something more important than just any one person, though she never asked for that, and her life is full up to the brim, often leaving her at the outer edge of her energy and abilities. “She sometimes does it to herself. In her room. A belt, I think.” Clara is finding it very difficult to talk about this. Her chest feels like there’s a big stone in it. She had not meant to tell anyone, but if it has to happen, it’s probably best it’s Mrs. Edwards. She has experience with young people’s problems and maybe can help. “Do you…do you think they’re doing anything they shouldn’t oughta? I mean, taking their clothes off or…?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve been watching them around the camp and up on the Mount. They never touch each other or even look at each other. It’s more like a kind of serious compact between them, not anything romantic. That’s my impression. But they are very cruel to each other.”

“Cruel?”

“I mean, you know, if you saw blood…”

“Yes.” Of course she has known all along, ever since that day on the Mount, what happened there, and then the letters Elaine and Junior have been exchanging and those sounds coming from Elaine’s bedroom, often just after a new letter arrived. Knew but didn’t want to know, and so kept on not knowing what she knew. She is standing in front of the open trunk, a package of chicken legs in her hands. Soft. Like a baby’s thighs. She feels close to tears. “I am so afraid.” Ben always says Elaine is a saintly little creature and he trusts God to take care of her, and that may be so, but it doesn’t help in figuring what to do. Clara, who has lost her husband and her son, feels like she is losing her daughter, too, and it is tearing at her heart. Since Ely died and all this began, Elaine has been her close companion. They have been approaching the Rapture together hand in hand, prepared to spend an eternity together, but she has also been her anchor to the earth. She is all she has in this world, even if this world soon will be no more, more precious than life itself. “If anything’d happen to Elaine, I don’t know as how I could bear it.” She can hardly speak. That little Catholic statue that Elaine gave her of Mother Mary with her bleeding heart on her chest, that’s what she feels like. What did Mary think when she held her dead son? What was the whole world to her then, and did she care if it was saved or not? “But what can I do?”

“I don’t know. But maybe you could take the boy out of it by offering to take his place.”

“What?” Clara is so startled by this suggestion she drops the chicken she’s been squeezing. “You mean, get whupped half-nekkid by my own daughter?”

She has made a grave mistake talking with this woman.

“Well, I don’t think she’ll actually want to do that. But letting her think about it might show her what’s wrong about doing this with Junior.”

“Oh. I see.” But she could never do this. Elaine would think she’d gone crazy. She picks up the chicken, packs it in, and slams the trunk closed. “I’ll think on it.”

Ben is going east soon to sing in some of the churches and maybe, she reasons on the ride back to the camp, she should go along and take Elaine with her. But can she leave the camp with all its problems? And she’s worried about Ben, too. When he came back from his rubbish dump run, instead of taking over the cleaning up of the camp and starting on the repairs as he was meant to do, he got his shotgun and left again, looking moody. He’d also forgotten to pick up the day’s groceries and replenish the supplies stolen by the biker boys, making it necessary for Clara to call on Mrs. Edwards for this emergency trip. That’s so unlike him. And now she has the problem of the Baxters and all the people here with no place to go, and Hiram, who has been so much help, leaving her to solve all these problems herself. “We got a new plan for the camp and all the rest,” she says suddenly, not sure just how she’s gotten to this matter, though she’s been meaning to bring it up since they left the camp, and she feels the minister’s wife stiffen at the wheel, “including the new motel Mr. Suggs wants to build, like he showed us last night.”

Mrs. Edwards turns the car radio on. “Will Henry said he was going to play some of the songs he recorded yesterday.”

Clara feels irritated with the woman but knows there’s no reason in it, and at the same time she feels beholden to her and sorry about what she has to say. “It means you and Colin and the boys will have to leave the camp buildings and move on down to the trailer park. We’ll be buying campers for you.”

“I had so hoped…” Mrs. Edwards says, looking stricken. “My halfway house…” She pulls over on the shoulder and stops for a minute. It’s like she’s having a hard time getting her breath. Clara wishes now she hadn’t told her and wonders if there might be some other way. The poor woman has worked so hard, given so much. She put that cabin together near all by herself, and she has always been so cheerful and caring and only just now she was trying to help with Elaine. “Colin will be…just shattered…” She is sobbing into her sleeve. And now Clara is crying, too. She has tried to hold it back, but she can’t. It’s just too hard. On the radio Duke L’Heureux, Patti Jo Glover, and the Florida youngsters are singing “Let a Little Sunshine In.” Clara is praying to Ely for guidance.

The Warrior Apostles are holed up in an old abandoned one-room farm shack, plotting their next move. In the comicbook Nat and Littleface have been reading, the villain is breaking into the U.S. Mint on the Fourth of July, while everybody’s off watching the parade, and stealing all the gold. Nat wants to see what’s behind the padlocked doors of the Deepwater mine buildings. He can’t wait until the Fourth of July, but all those people will be off the hill today, may be off already. Nat figures it’s best to hit the buildings after dark. Everyone will be exhausted and figuring all the excitement is over and they should be easy pickings. They’ll approach them by the back route off an overgrown dirt road running alongside the old train rails scouted out Saturday by Juice and Cubano. Meanwhile, if possible, they should not turn over their motors today, draw attention to themselves. Until the job’s done, let them think they’ve left the area. The shack is nearly falling down and is mostly stripped out, the front porch is gone and you can see through two of the walls, but it still has an old wood cookstove. Houndawg has brewed coffee on it, stoking the stove with part of the floor, and now he’s frying up a breakfast made out of some of the food they took last night from the camp. Tons of stuff — more than they’ll ever finish — including a quart of milk, which Littleface is chugging to the disgust of all, when Ben Wosznik turns up at the back door with a shotgun aimed at Nat’s head. “Don’t move,” the old bird says quietly. “Don’t even dare twitch or Nathan Baxter is history.” They all have blades and Littleface found two guns at the camp yesterday, though they’re probably in his saddlebag. Nat knows Littleface is prepared to die for him, but he shakes his head, staring straight at the old graybeard with the gun. “Though I’m dreadful sorry about what you boys done to poor old Rocky, who never hurt nobody,” he says, “I don’t aim to do you no harm. But I won’t hesitate to shoot y’all dead if need be, and y’know that. You’re trespassing on my proppity, and you got a bad reppatation round here, so no one’ll blame me.” “No shit,” snorts Houndawg, grinning. “This your crib?” “I just wanta make one thing clear, Nat Baxter. If you didn’t take that gun, and I don’t think you did, I don’t know how it got in your bag. I didn’t put it there, even if that’s what your brother’s whispering round. Somebody else hadta done it. That’s all.” Paulie suddenly starts leaping about like he’s trying to protest or dance or launch an attack and Ben swings the shotgun onto him. The knives are out. “Don’t shoot him,” Nat says. “My brother has fits.” He goes over to put a knife handle in Paulie’s frothing mouth for him to bite down on, and while he’s doing that, the old guy quietly backs out the door. Littleface has a gun in each hand and is headed after him, but Nat says, “No, leave the old man be, Face. It’s weird how you sometimes have to have somebody tell you what you already know.”