Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

The first time he blew his wad it was like an accident and he didn’t know what was happening. He thought he’d been visited by angels. His old lady, who was not otherwise very religious, had a thing about angels and other supernatural creatures, and he was still pretty susceptible to all that. He sometimes thought he heard angels in his room, flying around like bats. Maybe they were bats. When he started getting serious about Christianity at the Baptist Church, it felt like growing up, and he looked down on his superstitious mother after that, though actually all he’d done was stop believing in Rudolph while sticking with Santa Claus. Then along came Mrs. Norton, who introduced him to Santa’s big daddy Domiron off in some other dimension, therewith offering him access to possibilities beyond his pathetic fucked-up smalltown life and making him feel like some kind of privileged highbrow. He finally got rid of all that crap in prison. Reading the Bible helped. One of the few books you could have in stir. He decided to plow straight through it, beginning to end. He read first with a certain awe (this has been the book for twenty centuries!), then with increasing irritation (who wrote this stupid thing?), finally with disgust and anger. A total swindle. Blaming God for writing it is a fucking sacrilege. Got interested in troublemakers instead. Which was just about anybody who got anything done. Jesus, for example, the wildass bastard. Before checking out, he got a pep talk in his cell from the prison chaplain, who interrupted him while he was saying goodbye to Sissy, and he let the bastard have it. “Jesus was all right,” he said, “but Christ sucks.” When the chaplain left, shaking his head, Sissy started giggling and bawling hysterically at the same time and told him he was completely crazy. His Crazy Apache.

Should he open another beer? He shouldn’t. Only half a six-pack left and no easy way to get more. Not much money for buying it even if he should break out of this place for a time, and as long as he helps out here with the building, no way to earn more. He has at least been well fed. Wayne Shawcross and Ludie Belle invited him to stop by their house trailer after the prayer meeting for something extra to eat. She’s in charge of the camp kitchen and has a well-stocked fridge. She probably keeps a bottle somewhere, too, but he didn’t want to ask. Not yet. Same with telling them about Elaine. They are good people, and he wanted to talk with them straight out about his feelings — they’d seen what he did after the prayer meeting — and he even thought he might show them his tattoo, but when they asked him what he was doing here, he told them what he’d told Elaine’s mother. Which is also true. He has been lonely. And both of them seem like pretty serious believers, Wayne especially, so he has to be careful.

The lights have gone out in the Collins trailer, which looms imperiously over him, aglow in the light of the full moon. In his imagination she sleeps in her Brunist tunic. The one she was wearing on Easter night all those years ago. When he thinks of her, that cotton fabric is what his fingers feel. Tonight, when the prayer meeting ended, he got up his nerve and walked over to her, his hands in his pockets, to say hello. It was an awkward moment with everyone watching and he knew his acne was flaring up. When he was actually in front of her, he couldn’t think of what to say. He found it difficult to look into her eyes, but when he dropped his eyes, there was her body draped in the thin tunic, and that confused him all the more. Finally he just nodded and said, “Hi, it’s me.” Elaine only stared at him as if he’d just threatened to kill her, and without saying a word, left immediately with her mother. Well, he thought, at least she didn’t tell him to go away. It’s only his first day. He can be patient. Meanwhile, he has opened another beer. It’s Easter night, the moon’s filling up the sky, and they’re in his car again. She’s trembling, but she has been through this before, and is ready now. “Stay the fuck out of this,” he says to Sissy. “Go take a walk and don’t come back until I blink the lights.”

“Come on, Billy Don, how can you not hear it? It’s right there, clear as a bell!”

“Well, that bell is just not ringing for me.” Yet again, for the umpteenth time, Brother Abner Baxter says: “…cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” “Honest, Darren, all I hear is a kind of hissing sound.”

“Exactly!”

“But it’s not anybody saying anything. It’s just a kind of noise. Might even be part of how Reverend Baxter is saying ‘darkness.’”

“No, it comes after , Billy Don. It’s her! I’m telling you!”

“Maybe you got better ears than me.”

“Maybe I have.” Sometimes Billy Don seems plain stupid. “But there’s more! Listen!”

Listen! That’s the whispered word Darren hears behind the powerful bass tones of the preacher: Listen! It is she. He knows it. The voice in the ditch. Marcella. They both have trouble saying her name. It is as though she has passed beyond the nominal, is mysteriously just “she.” Less than she. Or more. An aura. The displaced voice of the mystical figure pointing to Heaven in the painting in Reverend Clegg’s Florida church. A voice in pain. The recording, dated and catalogued, as are all their tapes, is the one from a week ago down at the foot of the mine hill during the arrival on the Day of the Sacrifice of Reverend Baxter and his family. Billy Don was holding the microphone, his own flat, ugly voice blocking out the others until Darren shushed him (maybe that’s the sound Darren keeps hearing, Billy Don thinks: his own shushing). “Do ye likewise, my friends, while there is still time for your souls to be saved!” Abner Baxter is urging on the tape. There’s a tiny pause between “friends” and “while,” and Darren backs it up and plays it again. “Do you hear it, Billy Don?”

“Sure. Reverend Baxter wants everybody to put on the armor of light.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Pay attention!” He plays it again, growing impatient with Billy Don. He’s doing this on purpose. It’s that evil girl. She’s corrupting his soul. “Between those two words, that girl’s voice, saying ‘to me.’ It’s just a whisper, but you can’t miss it!”

“Yeah, okay, I hear it now.” On the table between them is a blurry photograph of all the people on the mine road taken from the top of the hill, Darren having appropriated the dead woman’s box camera before anyone noticed. The old lady’s lens had been amateurishly aimed toward the sun and Darren presumably sees a ghostly presence in the consequent flare of light. “But why do you think it’s a girl’s voice? It’s most likely one of those old women standing around, but you can’t hear her except when Reverend Baxter stops to catch his breath.”

“No, listen again. No one at the camp has a weird breathy voice like that. No one alive, anyway.”

“‘Do ye likewise, my friends…’ (…to me…) ‘while there is…’”

Okay, it’s there. But so what? Ever since they met, Billy Don has shared Darren’s scientific quest for eschatological truth, and he was just as curious as Darren was when Patti Jo said she could hear the dead girl speaking to her from the ditch that day, but Darren is losing him on this one. Darren has played and replayed these mine road tapes all week, hoping he might have picked up her voice, pressing on long after Billy Don had given up. At the Sunday service this morning, after Brother John P. Suggs had confirmed for everybody the final acquisition of the Mount of Redemption and the anonymous gift that will make possible the building of their temple on it, setting off a burst of rapturous praise-giving, Patti Jo got up with her friend Duke to lead everyone in singing “Higher Ground,” and Billy Don, humming along in his tuneless fashion, found himself thinking about the way Patti Jo said she communicated with Marcella’s spirit. “Marcella doesn’t use words exactly. It’s more like she’s just thinking and I can sort of sense what she’s thinking. I know that sounds weird, but it feels completely natural.” So nothing really said, just a kind of shared thereness, and if that’s so, he wondered, watching Patti Jo’s breasts bob about under her white blouse (when they interviewed her, the poor woman had a lot of sad stories to tell — she’s had a tough life and it shows on her face — but she still has a lot of bounce and it’s fun to watch her sing), why did Darren think they would hear a voice when she didn’t? We’re not all mediums, Darren said. If it’s important, like Patti Jo says the voice says it is, then the spirit has to get through however it can.