Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

I just have this uneasy feeling we should be leaving. Well is he, you know, that hath found prudence, et cetera. “Perhaps, miss, we’ll come back another day.”

Priscilla Parsons Tindle, returning from her highway shopping with a carload of flowers, decides to stop at the bank on her way through downtown to reprovision her depleted purse. She has amazing news for Wesley and she has decided to reveal it to him without words by way of a special May Day dance on a vast bed of flowers. Her May basket. She has chosen blooms with big velvety petals, which she plans to pluck and heap up in a great pile on the studio floor as a kind of aromatic nest, first dancing a vigorous bounding grand allegro dance of the joys of spring all around the studio to work up a good sticky perspiration, then plunging into the petals for the celebrative part of the dance, during which, now clothed only in sweet petals as if in full flower herself, she will, in effect, with movements she has been mentally choreographing on her drive, prophesy the extraordinary events of a few months hence. He may misunderstand her meaning and try to join her in the nest, but that’s all right too.

She parks in front of Mrs. Catter’s beauty salon and walks back toward the bank, just as two policemen come jogging across the street, their hands at their holsters, and with a great banging of doors and loud shouts enter into it. She decides perhaps it is not the right moment and returns hastily to her car.

I recognize the big one. The Roman legionnaire who speared me when I was nailed up and already dead and couldn’t defend myself.

“He was a gum-chewer?”

No, but he worked his jaws in ominous ways. We can’t let them get away with this. Do something.

The legionnaire has tipped his police cap low over his brows and is cracking his knuckles restlessly as though itching to inflict grievous bodily harm. The police station — counter, chairs, telephones, clock on the wall, notices pinned up — is much like the bank, but darker and dirtier and without any pretty girls. Would his money be safer here? It would not.

Oh oh. Get ready. I think we’re in for a scourging. That guy coming looks exactly like Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate introduces himself as Police Chief Romano. Romano! What did I tell you!

Police Chief Romano asks why Reverend Edwards has been arrested, and the legionnaire snaps back in his hard blunt gum-popping way: “Public nuisance.”

“What was he doing?”

“Scaring the pants off them girls in the bank,” says the legionnaire’s partner, releasing a gob of brown spit into a paper cup.

“Nonsense. I was merely checking my bank account. It seems I have been robbed.”

“Robbed?”

“That’s right, Officer. My personal account has been emptied out and closed.”

“Was this an individual account or a joint account?”

“That hardly matters. It has been done without my knowledge or permission. The bank owes me an explanation, not to mention the missing money.”

“Unh hunh.” Police Chief Romano, who looks like a man who has seen everything, closes his ledger and pulls on his nose and says, “Let him go, boys.” The legionnaire protests at that, smacking his fist in his palm, but the police chief says, “He’s harmless, Charlie. Only a bit batty. It’s his old lady has cleaned him out. Her and them people out at the church camp. You might say he’s got a point.”

While driving home, Priscilla has been rehearsing her “push-push” sequence for the nest of flowers dance, hammering the steering wheel with her pelvis, and she realizes that the climax of her May Day performance will be quite exciting and almost certainly misunderstood by dear Wesley. And by Jesus, too, probably, whom (if that is not stretching a pronoun), in some odd way, she has also come to love, though she believes he will be quicker to grasp the portent of her dance and be more approving of it. His story really. But now what to do with the flowers? They might wilt in the car or in the house or studio, and moreover she wants to surprise Wesley tonight and really does not want to have to deal with Ralph’s tedious questions or even more tedious silence. She decides the best place for them is in the open air in the shade at the back of the studio under the blacked-out window, and all the better if it rains on them a bit, so she quickly improvises a little number she calls her “bundles of joy” dance, sweeping the precious blooms from the car to what she calls “backstage” in a series of little twirls and leaps that the neighbors will probably think of as quite loopy, though surely they are used to it by now.

This is, was for years, has become again of late, Priscilla’s way. Life as dance else not life at all. It is her own special vision, her way of creating the beauty that life, left to do its own thing, so sadly lacks. In her professional years with Ralph, she preferred austere staging, harsh lighting, African percussion and Eastern wood and string instruments, and a minimum of costuming, finding even a body stocking too constrictive. Ralph was an elegant partner, always there, supportive, given to understatement, which set off her own passionate exuberance, but somewhat passive, waiting always for her to take the lead. Their dances seemed often to end without resolution, more like questions, really. He did not understand climax; he was incapable of it. He was something like a self-contained tango partner, formal (he even dressed in black with a pleated white shirt; only in the studio would he wear less), taut with an inner tension, but ultimately predictable. Priscilla had always aimed at the unexpected, for life, she felt, was all too predictable, and it needed something out of the ordinary for it to be experienced at all. It was, in effect, her way of praying to what she preferred to call the Life Force rather than God, though she was a believing Christian like most people were, simply too preoccupied or unsuited to figure things out on her own and trusting the wisdom of those whose vocation it was — Wesley, for example, various astrologers and philosophers, her great-aunt when she was still alive — and Priscilla addressed the Life Force wherever and whenever she could. She had dishwashing dances and laundry and ironing dances and shopping for Ralph’s high-fiber breakfast cereals dances. Sometimes these were just spontaneous responses to the moment, a flash of sudden inspiration in a department store aisle or on a putting green, but she tried always to choreograph her dances, in retrospect when not possible before, choreography being her way of thinking about the world. Giving it, it being shapeless, shape. Being nameless, name.

Over time, however, trapped in this small town by the curse of a small family property inheritance and limited income, her vision slipped away from her, and the mundane became the mundane once more, her only dance the spiritless dance of the sorrowful housewife. The studio became a place to give classes to children, and her exercises, which she kept up without knowing were mainly a way to keep her weight down. She felt like such a fraud. She and Ralph became active at the church as a way, in her case at least, to keep a faint spark alive, her husband taking over Sunday School and the choir, she becoming the church organist and organizer of holiday pageants. And so the years went by. She and Ralph no longer danced together, though sometimes they gave little concerts, at the church mostly, Ralph singing, she accompanying him on the piano. She found herself increasingly focused on the mortal condition: If there was no further reason to dance, what was left except waiting for death? She would have created a dance to explore this question, but she was no longer creating dances.

And then there was Wesley. The great-souled one. What happened in his office that first time did not feel like a dance, it felt more like getting run over by a train. But that was because she had pretty much stopped dancing and had forgotten what it felt like. Of course it was a dance. It was the dance. Whereupon she returned with all her heart and mind to her abandoned art of choreography. The magic was back and she was alive again. Really alive. How could she not love this man?