The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (103 page)

“Sure. But it’s late.”

“I checked. The bar has snack food and is open until one. You’ll have to buy. I spent my last dime on the room.”

“No problem. I’ve got plenty. We can shoot the moon.”

So they start to get dressed and he pushes his hand between her legs while she’s pulling her panties up and there’s another delay, he taking her from behind this time. They’re both still pretty high and it seems better than ever, like they’ve got dangling nerve ends in all the right places, their bodies are just having the best time in the world, and then they start the dressing again, finishing this time, even though there’s a moment when she opens his fly and gives his penis a final kiss, his hands tangled in her wet snarls, before they head for the bar.

“Look,” Tommy says, pointing toward an opening door down the corridor, “it’s that cute chick from the bank!” He starts to call out, but then the guy she’s with steps out behind her, and Sally understands that the night has just suddenly ended.

IV.3

Sunday 5 July

“Mom! Come and see!” It’s the little Blaurock boy at the top of the hill. His mother lifts her mass up the slope. Her stretched tunic is split; it tears more as she climbs. Even before she turns with the news, Darren knows what it will be. He has been to the old cemetery this morning before church with Billy Don, has seen the vacated grave.
“It’s Rocky!”
Dot Blaurock cries out.
“He’s been raptured!”
Darren nods when others turn toward him. “I know,” he says quietly, yet most hear. He watches them rush to the top of the hill to see for themselves. He didn’t exactly know, but it fits. It’s happening. Anything can be expected. These are the End Times. Just as he has foreseen.

He is calmer now, but when he first saw the empty grave at the old municipal cemetery he was frightened. Billy Don was watching him closely when he led him to it. To see if he was only acting, as Billy Don later confessed. He was not. His alarm, fear, awe would have been obvious to anyone. But why just this one? Billy Don asked. Why not all the others? Because it’s a message, he whispered. A message especially for him. God’s reader of signs. In the words of their Prophet:
The tomb is its message
. One talks about these things, imagines them, prepares for them, but always as somewhat abstract notions somewhere in the future, inevitable but not quite real. Like death. Then suddenly here it is. This ceremony today on the Mount of Redemption is taking on new meaning, one he can only partially intuit and hope he is prepared for. That feeling again of a cold wind. He knelt there in the long early morning shadows amid the forgotten dead to pray for guidance. To himself, silently, eyes closed; this was not for Billy Don.

Billy Don also told him about the city’s plans to bring a person here to the Mount this afternoon whom they will allege to be the Prophet. Such tactics do not surprise him. False messiahs abound in scriptural depictions of the Latter Days; they are in effect further evidence that those days have arrived. “And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.” How did Billy Don find out about all this? For that matter, how did the authorities know about today’s unannounced ceremony? That evil girl. If she even is a girl and not a living manifestation of Satan himself—or herself. Everyone knows that the Devil, as a fallen angel, is sexless and can appear in any form. Billy Don’s treason runs deep. It is far worse than mere apostasy. He has been warned and has ignored the warning. “What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” It is such a tragedy, such a failure of understanding, with consequences to be suffered through all eternity. Darren has confided so much in Billy Don, ever since they were in Bible college together. He had such hopes. Now he realizes how wrong he was to do so. In the worldly realm of the body, of the senses, Darren has made some mistakes. The Devil has sometimes used Billy Don to tempt him away from divine things toward the worldly. He believed for a while—or chose to believe—that no man sins, for God does all things in him: “Nothing in a man’s works is his own.” An excuse for iniquity and folly. Such moral lapses are difficult to avoid here on this confused and sinful earth, but they are moral lapses just the same and he repents of them. Now they are entering upon a new stage of the human drama, and all that is in the past. In history, which is ending. Perilous times are come. He feels in his heart a great universal love, but he knows that Billy Don’s besotted and corrupted soul cannot be saved.

Colin comes running down the hill in his tunic, scrambling over the trench marking out the floor plan of the tabernacle church, to tell him what he has seen. He is at the edge of hysteria again. Rarely is he not. “It’s all right, Colin,” Darren says. “It’s good.” Colin gazes at him through his wispy hair, looks back up the hill, looks at Darren again, perplexed but trusting. He is utterly faithful to Darren and will do whatever he asks, but he is also difficult, demanding, and so fragile. There is always the risk of sudden, erratic, even dangerous behavior. Colin had a similar relationship with Sister Debra and see what came of that. Still, this troubled orphan’s spectacularly original visions provide a window onto things unseen by others—unseeable, really—even if they are not always easy to interpret. One night Colin told him that he dreamed he was in the Garden of Eden, lying in a soft pillowy place that was the giant body of the First Mother. Adam and Cain had already killed her. Her head was not there and something was flowing from her neck; not blood exactly, more like milk. It was causing wild vegetation to grow up around them, protecting him from Adam and Cain, but also giving them places where they could hide. Though the First Mother was dead, she wrapped him in her giant hands and he peeked out at the jungly garden through her fingers and saw atrocious things happening there, but believed they would not happen to him. Unless she let go. He awoke screaming because he thought she
was
letting go, and he came leaping into Darren’s bed to tell him, trembling violently, what he’d been dreaming. Darren was not sure quite what to make of such a vision, beyond its obvious appeal for protection, but Colin later said it might only have been the First Mother crying, but everything was shaking. That made Darren think of the coalmine disaster and the feeling he sometimes had on the Mount of Redemption that the ground was quivering underfoot. Eerie. The local vulgar name for this hill, he knows, is C—t Hill. He was coming to understand it might be a strange local vision of the Last Judgment, and—the end is always in the beginning—has incorporated Eden and the First Parents into his own interpretations of the End Times. He feels that, thanks to his disciplined pursuit of the truth, the world is gradually revealing itself to him as an open book.

His relationship to Jesus has also been evolving. It was as a boy genius and courageous young man that Jesus won his heart, and he was moved then by Jesus’ goodness, his love, his wisdom, the sufferings he endured for the sake of the truth he bore. As Darren grew older, Jesus’ human life lost its importance, becoming merely an anecdotal preface to his eternal role as Lord and Redeemer, his image of the Savior moving as if from one plane to another, the human story remaining behind in the world to guide and solace the ordinary believer, but only as an insubstantial shadow of the timeless one, which exists in a dimension-less space, where all is One, and where even the very image of Jesus is absorbed and vanishes. But now the human Jesus has reemerged in Darren’s thoughts, not so much as preacher, miracle worker, messiah, or martyr, but as prophet, for Darren, like the historical Jesus, is also living inside human time, experiencing the same hopes, fears, uncertainties as he did, struggling desperately to understand the enigmatic Father, and to help others to understand Him in time for their souls to be saved, and so feeling like a brother to him. His other self. They are stepping through history—it is the
same
history!—hand in hand.

At Darren’s personal invitation, Abner Baxter and his followers have arrived, several wearing Brunist tunics. They are clustered together over by the mine buildings, reluctant to intrude upon the gathering on the Mount, although there are many more of them than are here on the hill, even with the addition of the new Defenders. Clara’s presence, probably. She showed her clear disapproval upon noticing them. Abner feels a grave responsibility for much that has happened of late, most recently the horrific death Friday night of the son of one of his most loyal friends, almost certainly at the hands of his own wayward boys, so shockingly back among them. That friend is not here today. Most are appalled by these savage events; Darren is, but he is solaced by their fulfillment of ancient Latter Days prophecies. The dark angels have returned. The final tribulations have begun. He must be brave. It won’t be easy. The Bible says so.

Clara was not happy about today’s ceremonies—whose idea was it to dig an empty grave for Giovanni Bruno?—but she did not oppose them. After all, her deceased first husband is being honored and she admitted she could see the value of consecrating a future resting place for their martyred Prophet’s remains before the temple’s construction makes such decisions difficult. It was only that the ceremony seemed premature. She was even less happy about people arriving last night who said they were Brunist Defenders, answering her call and pledging their loyalty to her. She called Darren into the office, demanding to see the letter that went out over her name, and he showed it to her, reminding her that with Sister Debra’s interpretive help, he had foreseen with such awful certainty the imminent return of the motorcycle gang, and in greater numbers than before. He had spoken about this at prayer meeting weeks ago and he was worried about Elaine, and he is right to have been. Clara was at the hospital all the time then; he felt he had to do something that she would do. Now, with the murder of the sheriff, their bulwark against a hostile world, they desperately need more help. Surely she can see that. They are in terrible danger. And these people are here to serve her and protect her. They will be able to double the guards at the camp now and they can help complete the periphery fence. Darren did not believe this would be done—there was no time left for it—but it pacified Clara. He was quite calm. He knew what was about to happen, even if she did not. She only nodded and went out to help organize cots for the newcomers to use in the Meeting Hall overnight. Many have been saying someone should tell her husband about the rapturing of his dog, but he is nowhere to be found, even though he promised to introduce his new song, “The Tabernacle of Light.” Clara, Darren knows, is worried about him, too—so warm and reliable a man suddenly become so distant, so moody—so she is generally willing to let Darren have his way. Nevertheless, Darren now thinks of her as something of an obstacle.

At today’s ceremony, it has been Darren’s plan to place in the Prophet’s empty grave several symbolic objects—a tunic, a miner’s helmet and the mine pick on which he leans now as on the cross itself, the Prophet’s seven “Words” as scored by children of the Eastern churches onto a wooden tablet with a woodburning kit, a Bible opened to the Book of Revelation, all wrapped in oilcloth—while reading a selection of Biblical texts from both Testaments as elaborations on the Prophet’s wisdom. Now that he has received the message of the emptied tomb and learned of the city’s intentions, Darren will change slightly his scriptural selections, placing more urgent emphasis on the fearsome horrors ahead—the earth reeling to and fro like a drunkard (it
does
seem to be reeling), the stars plummeting from Heaven, the sun quenched and the moon turned into blood, the tortures of the damned—and adding in more about deception and false prophets. He intended to put in place today the headstone from Ely Collins’ grave, picked up some weeks ago by Mr. Suggs, but it seems to have vanished. Bernice Filbert has asked Mr. Suggs what happened to it. He cannot remember. He tries so hard, she said, but some things just aren’t there anymore.

Little by little, Abner Baxter and his followers have come drifting toward the Mount. Clara sends Wayne, Hunk, and Billy Don, along with three of the new Defenders to remind them they are not welcome, but her emissaries are met halfway by the acting sheriff, Calvin Smith. After a brief discussion (Wayne and Billy Don scowl up at Darren; he gazes back at them without expression), a compromise is reached, allowing the Baxterites to collect within earshot some forty or fifty yards below the tabernacle floor plan where the service is to be held. Down where a blackened patch marks the place where Sheriff Puller’s car burned and not far from where Darren captured “the voice in the ditch.” Perhaps the voice is there still. Or will now return. The acting sheriff, Darren has been told, has purged the newly deputized Christian Patriots of those alleged to have been involved in attacks on Abner and his people, and has added several new volunteers of his own choosing, mostly from among Abner’s followers. Darren wonders if the death of Sheriff Puller, which has allowed this to happen, was somehow God’s doing? Of course it was. Everything is.

No sign of the city authorities with their surprise visitor. Maybe they aren’t coming, having realized how futile it would be. Or maybe the tip, given its unreliable source, was a trick, a way to unsettle him, deflect him from what it is he has to say. Hovis comes over to say he thinks he just heard a motorbike over Tucker City way. Not that far away. Hovis pulls out his old gold pocket watch and stares at it. Off on the horizon, a summer storm is boiling up, coming in from the west off the back of the hill, the blackening sky setting the two yellow backhoes off in bright relief. All the more reason to get on with it and back to the safety of the camp. Darren points at the storm clouds and calls out: “Let’s get started! Trouble’s brewing!” And, as if by his conjuring, a group of people appear there at the top of the hill in front of his pointing finger.

It is their tormentor, the town banker, flanked by armed police, city authorities, the old priest in his sinister black robes, others who are probably preachers and town leaders, standing above them on the crest in their ominous dark glasses like tyrants and judges. The powers of darkness. They have come up the backside of the hill, no doubt hoping to surprise them. Darren is not afraid of them. The banker raises a megaphone to his mouth and calls out, “My fellow Christians!” The Followers have gathered around Clara inside the outline of the tabernacle church, as if seeking sanctuary in a holy place. Well, they are right. It
is
a holy place. Darren, near the open grave intended for the Prophet’s ceremonial burial, steps across the chalky trench to stand inside with the others and leans there on the mine pick, Colin quivering behind him. “We come to you in peace on this holy Sabbath, praying only that we might reach some understanding beneficial to us all. No matter which church we belong to, everyone here believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, and in the Father and in the Holy Ghost, and that’s the main thing.” The banker is grinding his jaws in suppressed anger, even as he tries to appear conciliatory. Most of those with him look uncomfortable, bullied into being somewhere they don’t want to be. “If we have our differences, they are minor compared to all that we have in common. Not only our Christianity, but this great country, too.”