The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (134 page)

There were a lot of cultists still imprisoned back in her home state, many of them sentenced to twenty years or more, and most of them were eager to accept Simon’s offer of free legal help in exchange for answering a few questions. Simon sent in a team of young legal volunteers with a list of thirty such questions for the first round, some of them meant to draw their cooperation by giving them a chance to explain themselves, others focused on what happened that day, with questions about Billy Don, Darren, and Junior Baxter mixed in, trying to pin down times and trace the movement of the handgun. When the answers came in, they compiled a list that suggested possible leads, and together they flew out for further interviews. By then she was married—a private civil ceremony in December, a brief ten-day honeymoon in San Francisco (they went to a lot of concerts) and wintry Yosemite—and was well installed in her new study, with the book finally taking shape. She had an outline for it, meaty yet succinct, which she was able to send to her publishers a week ahead of schedule. They were pleased, excited even, and began talking about jacket designs and book tours.

During the prison interviews, disguised as Simon’s secretary, she filled notebook after notebook, not only with information, but also with character descriptions and sketches, idiomatic novelties, odd personal anecdotes and histories, but if she was somewhat duplicitous, Simon was not. He inquired into their individual stories of that violent day, listened carefully, took precise notes of his own, and indeed has managed to get many of their sentences reduced and some of them freed. It was decided that, with her reputation, she would stay away from the initial meeting with the two Baxters, but even so, Simon said, they were uncooperative, Abner ranting in his Old Testament style, Junior sullenly impassive. The only moment he showed any emotion at all was when Simon asked him about the torn tunic with his name stitched on a label at the neck, found on the backside of the mine hill, and that emotion was only momentary surprise and an embarrassed flush. At his trial he had first said that Darren gave him the gun and sent him over to the camp, but now he wouldn’t speak of it at all. One prisoner told a volunteer that he did see Darren carefully cleaning and loading a handgun that might have been the one in the picture he was shown, though he didn’t know what Darren did with it, and he said he told the defense lawyer that, though it never got mentioned at the trial. But when she and Simon interviewed him, he was adamant that he would not testify in court. If they dragged him there, they wouldn’t get a word out of him. Never wanted to see the inside of a courtroom again until the Final Judgment, he said, and spat defiantly into a tin cup. After her own day in court, even if only as a witness, she was sympathetic. A weirder place than Wonderland, where the least thing you say can change your life forever. In the end it was a lot of work, and though she got material for her novel from it, it yielded little they could use in the capital cases. But she and Simon grew fond of each other on these travels, casually slept together in shared hotel rooms as though it was what grownup people always did, knew without having to say so that they’d be loyal friends for life.

Her marriage was a curious thing. Not at all what she’d expected. But expectations: what are they? Notions imposed by others. The stubborn entrenched ways of the tribe. He proposed to her by leading her to the west wing of his big country house and showing her the perfect study, fully equipped with picture windows looking out over the forest upon the mountains to the west, meaning that on sunny mornings she’d have an illumined postcard view of the mountains and often, in the evenings, spectacular sunsets. He said that if she married him this would be hers—the car, too, of course. In fact, just about anything she desired. She didn’t know if she loved him (what was that?), but she really
liked
him and felt inclined to say yes, but first he wanted to show her another room. In this one, the Dracula image returned. Bluebeard’s Chamber. It was windowless and full of instruments of torture: stocks, cages, velvet whipping stools, leg and arm cuffs in the walls, glass cases full of canes and belts and whips and paddles, elaborate ropes and pulleys meant for dangling victims, iron maidens, plus film screens and projectors and dance studio mirrors on the walls. “Scary!” she said. “Not for me. I’m just an old-fashioned squeamish all-American girl.” “Oh, it’s not for you. I wouldn’t enjoy that. It’s for me. And other men…” It took her a few moments to take it all in. She remembered his eagerness to show her off in Washington. This room would not win him a lot of votes. “You want me for cover. A kind of job.” “I guess you could look at it that way. But what marriage isn’t? This one’s just a little different. And I do love you, Sally. Love your mind, your wit, your good heart, love your young body.” It probably helps, she was thinking, that it’s on the boyish side. “In a sense I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, just as in conventional romances. And you can step out of it whenever you want.” Well, it was pretty weird, but somehow it made a certain sense to her, enough anyway that she smiled and said okay, why not. Try it out. Was the Chamber soundproofed? It was. While she was back in her home state with Simon, she remembered to call her parents and tell them she was married to a nice guy, a bit older, rich, a U.S. Congressman, and when she was more settled and the book was done, they could come visit. “Oh, why don’t you come here?” her mother said. “You know your father doesn’t travel well.”

The perfect study with the postcard views was waiting for her when she returned from the prison interviews (an immaculate snowscape: she couldn’t resist, she ran out and
wrote
on it), and for the first couple of weeks everything seemed to be going brilliantly as she typed up her notes, papered the walls with clippings and photo blowups, revised her outline and the five completed chapters, and launched a sixth—well over half the book done, according to her outline. It was the legislative season and her husband was away in Washington most of the time, which meant that—though she found that she
missed
him—every minute of every day was her own, her meals and the house and laundry cared for by a French Canadian woman who came in five days a week and who sometimes regaled her with funny family stories, often remarking, “You should write it in a novel!” They were indeed the sort of stories most novelists feed upon, but Sally was determined not to do that; just get through this one obligatory project, then back to the good stuff, already developing under her left hand, so to speak.

And then, suddenly, two months before her deadline, everything under her right hand fell apart. It was a mere patchwork of lists and fragments, she saw. Nothing held together. The writing was pedestrian, her digressions were tedious and for the most part stolen, the characterizations fatuous and condescending. The only chapter worth keeping was the one set in the Bible college cafeteria. The two before that, the personal narrative of her afternoon in the culvert and an imaginary reconstruction of Billy Don’s beer-drinking high school days were irrelevant and would have to be thrown out, and the one after it—an account of the boys’ missionary travels with the cult—was totally unconvincing. As for the later chapter based on her “Jan” story, she could see now that, shorn of its climax, it was as trivial as any other conventional fiction. And hordes of new characters had come piling in, some real, some fictional. She was completely bogged down in the new chapter she’d begun—their arrival at the camp and its reconstruction—which she realized she knew almost nothing about, having only a fuzzy childhood memory of the church camp and having been banned from seeing what changes the Brunists wrought, all that now lost to the fire. Worse: what lurked just beyond it was the centerpiece Day of Redemption chapter, which she knew in her abysmal ignorance she could never write—what happened after the old lady died? she had almost no idea—and then the climactic holy war chapters and the murder. Impossible. And what if she were wrong about Darren’s guilt? She was toying with a young man’s life. In the trial transcript, Darren says: “I am a religious pacifist. I have never had a gun in my hand all my life and I never will.” Numerous witnesses confirmed this about him. She was wrong. Junior did it. The “LIER.” She had no story. The whole sorry project was a shabby, witless, rickety, undisciplined mess.

When her husband called, as he did almost every day, she told him, laughing, the latest of the maid’s comical tales of family feuding and inbreeding, and said that she had decided to polish the Bible college chapter as a story and send it around and abandon the rest. He heard the panic in her voice, hired a plane for the weekend and flew home. He gently dragged her out of the trash heap that her study had become, first opening the windows to let out the sickening miasma of stale cigarette smoke, and led her into the bedroom, undressed her, and made love to her in a profoundly affectionate way of the sort rarely shown and then generally only after a punishing evening with his friends in the Chamber, leaving her crying softly on the pillow while he crafted a mushroom risotto with shaved truffles and cheese-flavored croutons in the kitchen. He tossed a green salad with garlic and lemon juice, opened a Barbaresco that even she with her nicotine-stunned palate could recognize as a serious wine, and put string quartets on the stereo system. Brahms? Mozart? She wasn’t sure, her musical education only just beginning. She started to explain herself; he put his finger to his lips. “Just listen to the music,” he said with a smile. After dinner he replaced the string quartets with big band music from the swing era and they danced for a while like lovers in an old movie and then went back to bed for another round of sex—slow, almost meditative in nature. “You’re really good at this,” she said, as he studied her from within and from above. “It’s like a skill you have. I suppose you could do it equally well with old crones or chimpanzees or trained seals.” “Probably,” he said, smiling down on her. Appreciatively, she thought. “I do have quite a lot of sex. But only rarely the opportunity to make love.”

She woke to find breakfast awaiting her and her study locked from the inside. Which frightened her. Perhaps, fearing for her sanity, he was destroying it all. She raised her fist to bang on the door, thought better of it, returned to her breakfast, hit the on-switch on the coffee-maker. Eventually he joined her, kissed her gently on that nice place behind the ear (she rather hoped he’d nip her lobe, but he didn’t; what he might call consistency of style), and said he’d spent some time with her typescript, he hoped she didn’t mind. She did, but at this moment she was too fond of him to say so. He praised it, found it “vivid, provocative, dark yet funny,” etc. He had something else to say. She could wait for it. “I especially loved the high school beer party and the flagellation scenes.”

“You would. But I’ve taken them out.”

“Really? Also, I didn’t find the cemetery story.”

“It’s gone, too. It didn’t seem to fit in anywhere and I’d have had to explain too much if I used it.”

“A pity. When you told me the story I remember laughing a lot and at the same time feeling a gathering anxiety, not so much because of the setting, but because of increasing apprehension about the blond boy. He seemed quietly and dangerously crazed. Not someone you’d want to be alone with in a cemetery or anywhere else. I think it would make a good first chapter. It sums everything up while keeping it all intriguingly mysterious.”

“I have a first chapter.” He smiled, sipped coffee, said nothing. “You don’t think I have a first chapter.”

“You have a kind of foreword. Or afterword, maybe. Not in the voice of ‘the girl,’ as you call her, but in your own. It is too argumentative for a novel chapter, but it works as a way of explaining how you got involved with this story and why you decided to write it. It’s a place where you can summarize the cult history as you came to know it and comment on it in your own voice, and that saves you having to do that inside the novel itself. You’re going to want to end the novel much like you ended the story, and you can use the afterword to fill in the rest of what happened that day and to report on the trials and sentences that resulted, which are part of the book’s motivations. Also, in our very first conversation at the writers’ colony, you unleashed some of your pet theories about cognitive dissonance and collective effervescence, and the afterword would give you the opportunity to indulge yourself a bit.”

“Not my theories, I’m afraid.”

“I know that. But they fit. Credit them if you think you must. But help us see what you see.”

“This is going to take forever.”

“Won’t be easy, but you may be further along than you think.” By now they had their coats and boots on, caps and gloves, and were entering the woods on a winter walk. About a mile further on, she knew, having been there before on her own, the land fell away and he or someone had built a rustic outlook with rough-hewn picnic tables for the summer. Always a surprise when one got there because neither the overlook nor the valley could be seen from the house. On the way, as they shuffled through the snow, stirring up creatures on either side of them, he pointed out that she already had enough for a book, though only half was probably worth keeping, and he encouraged her to rethink her removal of the flagellation and rape scene, because she probably wanted the boys with their alternating points of view to think more about Young Abner. When she protested he wasn’t her character, Darren and Billy Don were, and besides he was totally unattractive, a stupid, sullen boy, he reminded her that Young Abner was the one on death row and said maybe she could try to make sullenness and stupidity interesting. “Make room for plain, ordinary ugliness. The everyday tragic drama of the impoverished spirit.” She was thinking about this. She was resisting it. But he may be right, she was thinking. He
is
right, damn him. They emerged from the woods and reached the overlook. The air was exhilaratingly cold and clean. As they talked, the book settled into its new shape. It was as if she were gazing out upon it, metamorphosing before her eyes down in the snowy sunlit valley: the cemetery openers, the Bible college cafeteria meeting with some background bits cannibalized from the high school chapter, the two friends drawing together during their travels and establishment of the camp, their falling apart after the attempted seduction scenes of her short story, Darren moving toward the Baxterites, Billy Don staying loyal to the Clara Collins people. The cult schism: way to talk about that.