The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (34 page)

“Well, that’s great, Auntie Debra. I mean, I guess it is. You’re sure looking good. But Mom says your husband has turned kind of weird.”

“I was slow to wake up, Sally. He was always kind of weird. And he knows nothing at all about true religion. He’s a showoff without substance or faith or beauty. Like a strutting jay among meadowlarks.” Do jays strut? She knows nothing at all about birds. “But,” Aunt Debra adds, glancing skeptically at the tee and trenchcoat, into which she has hastily buried the notebook, “these people are very serious about their beliefs. You must be careful not to offend them.”

“I am. But I have to be me. I saw that orphan boy before, Colin, is he…?”

“I’m taking care of him. I’m establishing that halfway house for troubled young people out here I once told you about, and he’s like my first case. He’s hanging onto life by his fingernails, Sally. He’s been through a lot, more than you and I can even imagine, and I’m sort of keeping a grip on him, not letting him let go.”

She wants to ask more about that, but Billy Don joins them, slouching up, hands in pockets. There’s a red patch on the side of his face where he’s been catnapping on it. “Are you staying?” he asks cheerfully.

“I think she needs more time, Billy Don,” Debra says. “She was just leaving.”

Well, she’s ready to go. The cramps have subsided, but she desperately requires a cigarette, and she has had about all of this holy mania she can take in one go.

“Colin seems very frightened about something, Sister Debra. Darren’s talking to him, but he probably needs you.”

“Oh dear.” She turns and gives Sally a brief but affectionate hug. “I love you, Sally. Come see me any time,” she says, and hurries away, holding up the hem of her tunic, slapping along in her sandals.

“I better go help,” Billy Don says. “Do you want me to walk you down first…?”

“No, downhill’s easy, Billy Don. Like sin. Who’s that mopey fat girl over there? I think I know her.”

“That’s Reverend Baxter’s daughter.”

“Right. Baxter. Frances Baxter. I was in school with her.”

“Listen, if you change your mind…” He takes her hand in both of his and gives her a deep gaze through his sunglasses, at least with one of his eyes.

“Thanks, Billy Don. You never know. I may come out to the camp to see Auntie Debra and we can talk more about it.”

“That’d be great.” He squeezes her hand tenderly and leaves, pausing at the tent opening to toss her a wave.

Franny Baxter remains slumped in her chair when she passes, gazing up at her sullenly when she introduces herself. She’s already looking like an old lady, bloated at the belly, round-cheeked, bespectacled. “Hi, Franny. I’m Sally Elliott. I used to see you at WCHS. I was a year or two ahead of you, but I think we had a history class together.”

“What are you doing out here?” Her voice is flat, like it’s been ironed.

“Oh, I’m just trying to figure things out. What do you think is going to happen?”

“I dunno. Nothing probably.”

“You look pretty sad, Franny.”

“What’s it to you?”

“Oh, nothing, I guess. Sorry. But, hey, if you want to talk things out sometime, let me know.” She tears a blank page out of her notebook, writes her name and telephone number on it, and gives it to her, Franny accepting it with a dismissive shrug.

At the tent portal, she pauses to add a note. Life’s a story, she writes, and you either write it or get written. Accept somebody else’s story and you’re the written, not the writer. She smiles at that. That’s me, she thinks.

“Pardon me, my child. Could you please hand me my cane?” It’s the old lady sitting stiffly just outside the opening. Mrs. Mc-some-thing. On the Florida bus with those cute Jesus children. Sally shook her frail blue-veined hand on coming in here. “It seems to have fallen.”

“Sure. Are you all right?”

“All right? Well, for my age, I suppose I am.” There’s a mischievous knowing look on the old lady’s face. “That boy’s sweet on you, I do believe.”

“Maybe. But I think it’s only my soul he’s after.”

“You’ve been writing. Are you a writer?”

“Well, not yet. I want to be.”

“What sort of writer? Love stories? Whodunnits?”

“Sort of both, I guess. I mean, I want whatever I write to be about finding out about things, you know, the way a detective solves a case. And love, well, everything’s about love, isn’t it?”

The old lady smiles at this, showing a pretty good set of teeth, assuming they’re her own. Her skin is mottled, loose on her bones, her jaws are sinking inward, hands trembling slightly, but she’s still clear-eyed and sitting up primly, straight as an arrow. “Yes, it is. Even when ‘love’ means zero.”

Sally smiles back, imagining a tall trim debutante with bobbed auburn hair in white tennis clothes. A classic beauty. “I bet you were really something in your time,” she says. “You’re really something now.”

“I was a bit wild.”

“I’m a bit wild.”

“But then, after a while, it all became something else. I started playing bridge.”

“I don’t want to do that. I want to stay wild.”

“I think you probably will,” says the old lady, and blesses her with a sly wink. And then she sort of blanks out, her expression goes flat, her eyes dull. “Ma’am?” There’s a little windy sound. Oh my god. Time to go.

I.11

Sunday 19 April

The discovery of dear pious Harriet McCardle, sitting bolt upright in her folding chair just outside the food tent, staring down as if in judgment upon the multitudes gathered below her on the sunswept Mount of Redemption with eyes blinded by life’s cessation, augments the probability in the minds of many that there will indeed be no tomorrow. As Brunist First Follower Eleanor Norton, presently a professional Spiritual Therapist on the West Coast (she now refers to herself as Dr. E. Norton) and the author of
Communing with Your Inner Voice
and
The Sayings of Domiron: Wisdom from the Seventh Aspect
, once famously announced on what in Brunist church history is known as “The Night of the Sign”: “Death as a sign can mean only one thing:
the end of the world!”
A pronouncement absorbed by First Follower Mabel Hall (she was there in the Bruno house that night and heard it herself, saw the dead man in the living room) into her own systems of divination, which accounts for her solemn nods now to her friends on the hill who nod back.

Although Dr. Norton, seeking transcendence from all earthbound forms, is no longer an active Brunist or even a Christian and so is not present today on the Mount of Redemption, her influence on the early days of the movement was profound and has shaped the thinking of many here, not least her young acolyte and fellow First Follower, Colin Meredith, who, upon the discovery of the body, shrieked,
“I saw her! I saw her! The Antichrist!”
and, tearing wildly at his tunic, set off running at full gallop, pursued by his mother, all over the hillside. Since the Antichrist is generally presumed to be male, the boy was probably mistaken; perhaps he meant the Whore of Babylon, for the person he was referring to was the snarly haired young woman in the tattered trenchcoat (the Judas who betrayed them wore just such a garment!) who was the last person seen with Harriet McCardle when she was still alive and who then vanished as though she never was. A matter of concern to the church scribes, Darren Rector and Billy Don Tebbett, who were responsible for inviting her up and who now face intense questioning from their fellow believers. Was she wearing an inverted cross? Was that a picture of a writhing serpent on her T-shirt?
Was
it a T-shirt, or her very flesh? What was she writing? Did they notice any peculiar body odors? A burnt smell? Her figure was not particularly feminine—was she even really a “she?” They answer truthfully, describing her as, by outward appearance at least, a sensible Christian girl with a healthy curiosity, while at the same time acknowledging, while poor Colin goes clattering by, that, yes, the devil is a crafty dissembler, one cannot be too cautious, for they are serious open-minded students of redemptive history and are willing to consider all opinions and eventualities. Billy Don, for example, had watched her descend the hill until she reached the bottom, so she didn’t really “vanish,” not in his eyes, though he has to admit that what he witnessed may have been a diabolical phantasm since no one else shared in his witnessing.

On the original Night of the Sign, the Brunist Evangelical Leader and Organizer, Clara Collins, now Clara Collins-Wosznik, still distraught at the time over the recent loss in the mine accident of her husband Ely, was utterly undone by the sudden death of the Prophet’s aged father in front of the TV set, and she fell to the floor sobbing and praying in the manner of many of those in and around the food tent now. But this afternoon her emotions are held in check by a more practical concern. To wit: What is to be done with the remains? What might be the ordinary passing of an old woman elsewhere is an extraordinary event here on the Mount of Redemption today, open to a variety of unwelcome interpretations by the civil authorities. The church has, in the past, been maliciously and unjustifiably accused of bizarre Satanic practices, and it could be again. Had she been privy to the notebook entry of the Elliott girl (she does not think that child is the Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, or any other otherworldly creature—just a spoiled unkempt brat with more book learning than is good for her) about a city set upon a slippery hill, she would have understood it as an almost literal expression of her present anxieties. Sister Clara is tempted at first to conceal the death and, as Brother Hiram suggests, to try and get the body back to the motel, somehow, to be discovered there under less problematic circumstances. But one glance down at the foot of the hill, where reporters and gawkers still mill about in threatening numbers, tells her this would be impossible, even dangerous. Nor, as it’s God’s will, would it be right. She and Hiram and Ben talk it over with Mr. John P. Suggs, and together with the mayor of Randolph Junction, they inform Sheriff Puller. The sheriff, conscious of possible crowd trouble, says that he will call an ambulance and have her removed, announcing simply, if asked (of course he will be asked) that she has fallen ill and is being taken to hospital. They will take her to the Randolph Junction municipal hospital, not the nearby one in West Condon, but he will not say so. He will arrange for the usual county coroner’s cause-of-death report and will not announce her passing until after the Brunists have safely left the hill. Or whatever, he adds, aware of the expectations of some. Meanwhile, they are to keep her out of sight and to turn off the public mourning and do something about that hysterical boy. The Randolph Junction mayor adds that, if her surviving husband agrees, she can be quietly buried in their city cemetery. “I am afraid,” says Brother Hiram, “that the gentleman’s youthful alacrity has abandoned him. He lacks the mental competence to understand even that she has died. With your permission, as the official leader and pastor of this pilgrimage, I shall, with the assistance of a lawyer in my congregation, secure power of attorney and sign the necessary papers on his behalf.” And thus, thanks to her wise friends, a crisis is avoided.

Who is John Patrick Suggs, and what has led the wealthy coal baron and property developer, never known for his largesse, to become the Brunist movement’s chief benefactor? Well, his hatred of the local old-family power elite with whom he has been at war all his life, for one thing. The movement’s enemies are his enemies. For another: His view of redemption as a straightforward negotiation in the soul market. He is, as he thinks of it, buying into after-death shares. Does he believe that the End is imminent? It might best be said that, near the end of his own life and without heirs, he is betting on it. But above all, he is motivated by his loyalty to the late Reverend Ely Collins, who effected his conversion, and whose last prophetic message to the world as he lay dying in the scorched depths of the earth here below their feet launched this new evangelical movement. In his early days, Pat Suggs was known as a hard-living, hard-drinking, two-fisted hell-raiser. He has injured and known injury. Existence as a bruising contact sport: when young he lived such a life. Though his family traces its roots to Northern Ireland, he has always spoken of himself as an American patriot, a Calvinist, and a libertarian, and it was the Calvinist side of his nature that emerged as a consequence of a tent-meeting conversion upon hearing Ely Collins preach, he himself being the landlord of the field rented for the occasion. Though the pastor of a church with pentecostal tendencies, Collins himself was not an overtly emotional man, nor is John P. Suggs. Ely simply spoke from the heart and made good sense and Suggs felt an immediate rapport with the man and thought of him as wise and holy. He supported the Church of the Nazarene liberally while Ely was its minister, but loathed that smug hothead Abner Baxter who succeeded him after the mine disaster (he can see the man, standing not far off in his ill-fitting tunic, barefoot, glowering like the devil himself), a former communist labor organizer and unprincipled rabble rouser, a man who deserved to be shot for his radical anti-Americanism alone, and he abandoned that house of fools. He found no other church that suited him and eventually sought out the widow of Ely Collins who was, as he’d heard, carrying her husband’s torch and had important tidings to tell. Clara Collins is no Ely (she is a woman, to begin with), but she is honest and forthright and devoted to the memory of her husband and the movement his vision has fostered. Sometimes Ely seems almost to be speaking through her, and perhaps he is. John P. Suggs did not think he would like this fellow Wosznik, with whom she took up so soon after Ely’s death, but he has come to respect him, a simple man but arrow-straight, a true believer, hardworking, beholden to Ely Collins in the same manner as himself, and a valuable helpmeet to Ely’s widow in the task of spreading, on what may be the very eve of the Apocalypse, this urgent new gospel. As he gazes about upon the activity on the hill (that stupid boy has thankfully been collared and removed from view), he feels good about what he has done and knows that Ely would be pleased.