Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

It was all he could do to stop himself from exploding into a tantrum when a giddy, excited Billy Don returned to tell him the Elliott girl would be taking them on a tour of the town cemeteries in search of Marcella Bruno’s grave. When he confronted Billy Don with his treacherous deception (his voice was trembling, he couldn’t help it), Billy Don only blushed and grinned sheepishly and asked if he was going with them or not? No, he snapped. Certainly not. It was completely stupid — even if they found a grave marker with her name on it, they could not know whose the buried body was, or even if there was one — and it could be dangerous. He begged Billy Don not to go, but when Billy Don left, he left with him, in part to protect his deluded friend but mostly because he could not seem to stop himself.

They started in what the other two believed was the most likely place, the San Luca Catholic cemetery, and they did find the parents’ grave with its small “Riposa In Pace” headstone, together with three other Bruno children buried close by — two boys just out of their teens and an unborn baby girl — but no sign of Giovanni or Marcella. Of course, they were probably excommunicated by then and not allowed in here. That was the girl’s judgment, but just the same, they scoured the cemetery grave by grave, Billy Don squatting down to read the names and numbers, the Elliott girl sometimes taking notes. The place felt alien to Darren, full of open-armed Virgin Marys and tearful angels, and he did not believe he would learn anything here, so he trailed along behind the others, keeping a wary eye on the irreverent girl and on the other visitors wandering about, mostly old women wearing headscarves. In case anyone asked, they were presumably college friends of hers, working on a history project, but if they were found out, the consequences could be serious.

He did pause for a moment in front of a square blocky tombstone for two brothers who died apparently at the same time in 1931, an accident or something. There were two carved miners’ helmets on top and a strange Italian inscription that read “Quello Che Siete Fummo, Quello Che Siamo Sarete.” “Siete” might be “seven” and “fummo” “smoke,” he thought, but he had no clue at all about “sarete” or “siamo.” The helmets had lamps on them, just like the one Clara often uses for baptism ceremonies, and the four numbers of the year, he realized, added up to fourteen, twice “siete.” Could “sarete” be some kind of tunic or something? The Elliott girl saw him studying it and came over to read the inscription over his shoulder, blowing her obnoxious “fummo” past his ear. “What’s a ‘sarete’?” he asked. Barked, really. He was finding it hard to be civil. “Well, my Italian is pretty lousy, but I think it’s all a play on the ‘to be’ verb. Something like, ‘What you are we were and what we are you’ll be.’ Couple of guys who wanted everyone to know we’re all in the same club.” He felt stupid and angry. He began walking toward the gate and eventually they followed, laughing at some private joke.

They went on to the Woodlawn, Our Savior, South Baptist Memorial (in which they recognized the names of several of the coal miners killed in the Deepwater accident, including Ben Wosznik’s brother), and West Condon Municipal cemeteries, all out beyond the edge of town on one side or the other. In one of them the Elliott girl asked them about her aunt Debra. Had Darren any intention of replying to the girl’s question (he had not), he would have said that she is a committed leader within the movement and one of its most selfless benefactors (this was mostly true), serenely (less true) awaiting God’s next interaction with human history. He might also have told her that it was Colin, in a clearly visionary moment, who had recognized her as an emissary of the forces of evil — he mistakenly called her the Antichrist, though everyone knew what he meant — at the time of her brazen infiltration of the gathering last week on the Mount of Redemption. Colin, though desperately unstable, is a special sort of genius, attuned to vibrations beyond the ken of others in the way that certain high-pitched frequencies could be heard by dogs but not by the human ear, and Darren always listens carefully to everything he says. Billy Don did answer the girl and what he said was that Mrs. Edwards is “kind of upset” about all the new people in the camp and about having to give up her cabin and that she spends most of her time now down in the vegetable garden with Colin and Mrs. Dunlevy.

Here in the old city cemetery, where there does indeed appear to be a patch of graves marked only by rotting wooden crosses with obscure markings on them, the kind of place unwanted bodies might once have been dumped, Darren has found many small signs of possible relevance: several gravestones with encircled hands pointing to Heaven on them; somber quotations from the Book of Revelation; a flying bird, probably a dove, also in a circle on the tombstone of a woman named White; a carved bleeding heart on a broken stone obelisk (“The face of evil!” the wicked girl exclaimed, pointing at the heart, and for some inane reason the two of them fell all over themselves in hysterical giggling); several number combinations of seven and fourteen; and a dizzying quantity of letters, words and names lying about like the answers to a lost crossword puzzle. He feels he is drawing close to something but has not yet found it.

It was not easy getting in here. The Elliott girl knew where it was, but even so, it was hard to find, the paths overgrown, the cemetery itself hidden behind trees, brush, and bramble. She said there was an easier way in, but it was more public, the graveyard being only a hundred yards or so from one of the country club golf course fairways, and indeed they have come across a few gashed golfballs. It was while crawling through the thickest part on the way in, blackberry bushes snagging at his chinos, the sky overhead darkening, broodingly overcast, that Darren suddenly knew that he’d come to the place to which he’d been so mysteriously drawn, and he began to forgive the girl in the way that one feels inclined to forgive the Antichrist for doing what he has to do to bring on the Last Days. Until she said, “It’s been a long afternoon, guys. Time for a pee. Ladies this way, gents that.” Billy Don happily stepped behind a tree and relieved himself noisily into the dead leaves, but Darren left them in disgust and pushed on into the old graveyard on his own.

Billy Don now comes on a rectangular hole in the ground and he and the girl both assume it is an open grave, one that was either robbed or never filled. “Spooky!” Billy Don says, and in truth there is something unsettling about it, but Darren knows it is not what he is looking for, or what is looking for him. More like a kind of prefatory signal. It occurs to him that God’s purpose in taking or hiding Marcella’s body was to stimulate the very search he is undertaking, and that this insight itself is a kind of preparation. “Do you think it might have been hers?” Billy Don asks with a hushed voice.

“Just as likely it was dug by drunken kids on a graveyard dare,” the girl says dismissively, but she seems nervous, too, and lights up another cigarette. “You know, who can spend the night sleeping in an open grave? It’s so overgrown, I think this one must have been dug or disturbed a long time ago.”

“Well, five years is a pretty long time…”

While the other two poke around in the hole like the disrespectful predators that they are, Darren moves among the gray stones as through a book with scattered half-erased pages, searching out the graveyard’s hidden corners. The earth is soft underfoot, rising and dipping slightly (there is probably a webwork of old abandoned mines below and one day all of this could be completely swallowed up), the tombstones tipping and leaning in odd directions, many of them broken or fallen. The roots of maturing trees have reached into the graves themselves and upended their markers and no doubt stirred their bones. Darren is not disheartened by these reminders of time’s ravages and the brevity of the human span. On the contrary, he finds the place unspeakably beautiful in its humble abandon and knows that God would find it so too, loving its buried denizens in a way not possible in those manicured grassy fields of grand self-congratulating monuments. He is happy he has come here.