The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (130 page)

“Sorry. I meant to say church. But I’m not here about that. I really hate to bother you, Mrs. Filbert, but there aren’t many people left around here still alive and not in jail who can help. I have already talked with Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Franny Baxter and Mrs. Coates—who said to thank you if I saw you, by the way, for helping to get the charges against her boy reduced. She says there’s even some hope now of getting him released altogether on compassionate grounds. I gather that’s your doing.”

“Well, yes, I know some people.” Bernice has not heard this news, having lost touch with Thelma after she moved back in with her mother. It eases somewhat her anxiety. Her power is being acknowledged. She is able to take a deep breath, wondering if this has been a disarming tactic by the Dark One or if this is really just only a girl.

“You’ve done a good thing, Mrs. Filbert. There’s too much hysteria out there right now. It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it.”

“Dangerous? Just only stories?”

“Most dangerous things there are.”

“Do you mean…? Can they, you know, kill somebody?”

“Sure they can. What’s the toll now from all this madness? You might say story has killed them all.” The girl glances down at Mr. Suggs. He is in his alert phase and is taking all this in, wagging his finger for attention, but the girl ignores him, turns away. “But the story I’m interested in, Mrs. Filbert, is how Billy Don Tebbett died.”

“Young Abner Baxter shot him.”

“That’s what they say. Did you see it?”

“No, but everbody knows.”

“He told the police when they arrested him that he didn’t do it, and I also have my doubts.”

“How do you know what he told the police?”

“I was there at the camp. I heard him.”

“Well, maybe it was you done it, then.”

“Billy Don was my friend. I was hiding. Someone was shooting at me. I think it was Junior Baxter himself.”

“Well, then…”

“But Billy Don was already dead. Had been for some time, I think. Looked like he’d been shot by someone up close. So many guns. Could have been anyone, I suppose. But, tell me, Mrs. Filbert, did Darren Rector ever carry a gun?”

“No, he wouldn’t touch one. Wouldn’t even do guard duty on that account.”

The girl pauses to think about this, staring down at Mr. Suggs again. “What if there were an afterlife and that was what it was like?” she says, more to herself than to Bernice. “A kind of unending nightmare. And you can’t die, not even if you want to…” Bernice feels a shiver run up her spine. Because she has thought this, too, or something near it. It’s like the girl, who probably isn’t a girl after all, is reading her mind. “Do you think Mr. Suggs would know anything helpful?”

“He’s had a bad stroke. He can’t talk. Probly can’t think neither.”

Mr. Suggs is wagging his finger vigorously and the girl sees this. “Do you hear me, Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “Is your name Yankee Doodle?” He wags his finger. “That’s usually a sign for saying no.”

“No, he’s just trying to wave at you and say goodbye because your questions is confounding him.” The anxiety is back. The sense of imminent danger. A demonic presence.

“Is your name Mr. Suggs?” He blinks. “I think I’m getting somewhere. Are you being well cared for, Mr. Suggs?”

He wags his finger urgently and Bernice, gathering up her courage for this may be the last thing she does in life, interposes herself between the two of them and orders the fiendish intruder out of the house.
“Now!”
she screams, and she crosses herself in the Romanist way to further shield herself against the Evil One.
“Or I’ll call the police!”

When she has gone, vanishing as if she were never there, Bernice turns on her patient, her heart pounding. His ingratitude! Not well cared for? She feels utterly betrayed—after all she has done for him! But the secret’s out. Scary’s not enough. It has to be something worse than scary. And fast! “You shouldn’t of done that, Mr. Suggs. What you got is you got me and you shouldn’t do nothing to make me mad. Up to now I been nice to you, telling you the truth, most of the time, but not all of it. I still haven’t told you, for example, that Clara and all them have turned the church camp into a casino full of wicked women. That’s right. I was afraid you wouldn’t like that, so I was holding back. Nothing you can do about it. Your money’s all gone. That fat lawyer with the slicked-down hair has took it all. You won’t see him no more. He don’t need you now. You are a pauper, Mr. Suggs, and you will get buried thataway.” Maudie will be here soon. She prepares a hypodermic. “You’ve not paid your taxes, so the banker, he’s got your coalmine now. They say he’s struck oil, worth zillions, but it’s his, not yours. He’s laughing at you all over town.” She thinks of her new stories like tent stakes driven into the brain. Rebecca at the well: tying her visitors down and pouring buckets of water down their throats. She stabs the needle into his belly. “And Ben Wosznik? Well, he run off with another woman, a half-nekkid young thing who can sing a mite, and now they’re out in the bars singing dirty songs, and it has just broke Clara up and she has took to drink…”

EPILOGUE

Two years later

Sally Elliott’s first novel,
The Killing of Billy D
, receives mixed reviews, but the attempt by a state governor to obtain an injunction against its distribution does push it briefly onto the bestseller lists, both fiction and nonfiction in some publications, and draws national and even international attention once more to the notoriously bloody events involving the radical eschatological Brunist cult and the court cases that arose from them. The book’s controversial mix of fact and fiction—dubbed “faction” in the press—disturbs many critics but is dismissed by others as imitative of a current fad among senior writers to “invade imaginatively” the lives of real living persons, typically criminals and politicians, if those are two separate categories. When she is accused of stretching the truth, she replies that it is a way of
seeing
the truth, for if you stretch something it tends to become more transparent. She worked hard on the prose in spite of the deadline pressures, the daily race against time, but that goes largely unremarked, except negatively by comparison to those senior writers, but her main goal is achieved: revived interest, at least on radio and television talk shows, in the death sentences passed upon Reverend Abner Baxter and his son and three others still on death row, enough to launch another round of appeals to overturn them. The talk shows are something new for her and at first she can’t resist shocking her audience and interviewers just for the fun of it, but, with coaching from her husband, she has gradually acquired a cooler persona. Plenty of brass still, but tempered by the strings, as he says. She still leaves her hair in a wild tangle. That’s who she is. But she wears shirts now instead of tees, sometimes leaves her old trenchcoat at home, and smokes without leaving the cigarette dangling in the corner of her mouth while she talks. May even, not to pollute the clean country air where now she lives, give it up altogether.

The Killing of Billy D
was not the sort of book she had ever expected to write. She had thought she was going to start with something like “Against the Cretins” or “Riding the Hood” or a new western epic idea she had that summer, featuring Sweet Betsy from Pike as her lusty, journal-keeping narrator. But when she presented some of these pieces to the writing workshop upon her return to college in the fall, they were roundly ridiculed, not only by the class, which was largely made up of brainless Boobs Wetherwax-types with a few mad Christians disguised as writers thrown in, but by the professor as well, who scribbled dismissively on the copy he handed back: “A whimsical misuse of a vibrant imagination.” While having oral sex with him on his office couch (“I wonder,” she mused aloud around slurps, “if vegetarians avoid oral sex?”), he volunteered the further criticism, her vibrant arse bobbing in front of his nose in a room all too brightly lit, that she always adopts essentially the same point of view, namely her own, whether she calls it Goose Girl or Sweet Betsy or The Hood, and suggested (he had long hair and a cute little beard that tickled her thighs; she liked it) that she attempt a man’s point of view just as an exercise, maybe something out of her what-I-did-last-summer adventures she’d been telling him about.

So, all right, she turned to look once more at what she saw that day in the ditch. It was unbearable, but she was a writer and she would bear it. She had spent the rest of that summer talking with anyone who might help her see clearly what had happened. There weren’t many. Most of the Brunists had fled or been jailed, and those who had mingled with them tended not to trust her. All she knew for certain was that Billy Don was planning to exit the camp and meet her at the Tucker City drugstore before leaving the area altogether and that, before he could do that, somebody shot him in the head. She was convinced that person was his ex-roommate, Darren Rector, but she could find no one else who thought so. She revisited the place where it happened, but it was overrun with army troops and police and much of it was closed off. Even the ditch where the car was. She could only stare from some distance at the culvert where, sick with fear and grief and guilt, she’d spent that long afternoon. There were still wrecked school buses and an overturned backhoe at the foot of the mine hill the first time she went out there, but soon they were gone too. Eventually they let her up near the tipple to look for her lost things, and she did find her T-shirt, a colored rag half-buried in caked mud, and a lens cap, but her notebook was nowhere to be seen. Was someone reading it? Well, her first published work, so to speak.

By the end of the summer, the Mine Hill Massacre trials, as they were called in the media, were underway. An aggressive young district attorney, sniffing the possible fall of the governor and an opportunity to rise on the law-and-order issue, charged the cultists with murder and incitement to murder, as well as conspiracy to commit those crimes and others. It was a time of conspiracy trials, a popular current genre, a way to avoid having to prove the crime itself while maximizing punishment, no matter the offense. Simon calls it the worst law ever written. She herself was called on to testify about Billy Don’s eight a.m. phone call, what she witnessed from the coal tipple, and what she saw when she peeked into Billy Don’s wrecked car. She had to do a lot of explaining about why she was out there in the first place—developing a book about cognitive dissonance, she said (
that
kept them at bay)—and she confessed her fib about running away, admitting that she was lying in the culvert all the while, so scared she couldn’t speak. To explain why she was so frightened, she had to tell them that someone was shooting at her. No, she didn’t know at the time who it was, or who it was that shot Billy Don either, but when she started to tell them who she
thought
it was, they told her they were not interested in her opinion and dismissed her. The prosecutor pressed for the death penalty in over two dozen cases in addition to bringing similar indictments against an unspecified number of motorcycle gang members, the survivors thought to number between ten and twenty-five, for whom a nationwide hunt was on. In addition, over two hundred people were cited with disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, possession of unlicensed or stolen weapons, unlawful assembly, delinquency, trespass, and similar lesser crimes, and some of them were sent straight to prison, though most of the others were handed stiff fines, which, being indigent, they couldn’t pay, so they were also sent to jail for a time. “Scab justice,” as those who had been around earlier in the century called it. Jail them or shoot them.

By then it was clear that the forensic evidence against Junior Baxter in his more conventional murder trial was all but conclusive, the bullets in the heads of the two men at the camp trailer park matching the one in Billy Don’s brain, all three coming from the gun in Junior’s possession, still hot from firing at the time of his arrest, no prints on its handle or trigger except his. Moreover, when they arrested him within yards of the scene of the crime, he was wearing Billy Don’s broken sunglasses. Probably couldn’t even see through them. And he was certainly capable of it; he had shot at her, after all, and with even less reason. But she found it narratively more interesting to stick to her original assumption that it was, in effect, a dark love story, allowing her to get inside the warped mind of that megalomaniacal zealot and experience vicariously an act of impassioned yet cold-blooded murder. She named her victim Donny Bill, or Donny B and, stealing a famous name from the Anabaptists, called the killer Jan, a sexually ambivalent name for a pretty boy with blond curls, and one who, though eloquent and smart, was susceptible to spooky ideas, as in real life, so-called, both Darren’s and Jan’s. The Dark Lady who might have been responsible for Donny B’s fatal defection went unnamed and was eventually omitted. Mere debris. She set the story at the church camp but made them all Bible college students on retreat, avoiding the complications of the cult while keeping the weirdness of their beliefs, especially as embodied by mad Jan. Since she was telling the story from Jan’s point of view, she was able to use some of her research into the history of chiliastic sects and play with end-times language in suggestive sexual ways during Jan’s attempted seduction of Donny B, and she even managed to include a paragraph in which Jan, in a pure and saintly manner, not unlike Santa Teresa, imagines making love to Jesus, an act mostly concealed by mystical religious speculations and revealed primarily by the self-evident fact that the boy has been masturbating throughout. Donny B finally gets fed up with Jan’s mad touchy-feely evangelism and decides to leave the camp. Jan, jilted, is both enraged and grief-stricken and maybe afraid that Donny B might tattle on him, and he asks his friend to meet him up on Inspiration Point, away from the others, to say goodbye. Sally was losing sympathy with her crazed hero and his nutty apocalyptic imaginings and she had to work hard to make the genuineness of his emotions believable. Donny B was easier, a more or less commonsensical, good-natured guy who rarely said no to any request and so found himself up on the Point, all alone with Jan, with a gun in his face. His own, taken from his packed suitcase. The story ends: “‘Close your eyes, Donny Bill, and pray.’ Stubbornly he won’t do that. He just stares back at Jan with an icy glitter in his eyes. Sad. Only one thing to do.”