The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (51 page)

Should he open another beer? He shouldn’t. Only half a six-pack left and no easy way to get more. Not much money for buying it even if he should break out of this place for a time, and as long as he helps out here with the building, no way to earn more. He has at least been well fed. Wayne Shawcross and Ludie Belle invited him to stop by their house trailer after the prayer meeting for something extra to eat. She’s in charge of the camp kitchen and has a well-stocked fridge. She probably keeps a bottle somewhere, too, but he didn’t want to ask. Not yet. Same with telling them about Elaine. They are good people, and he wanted to talk with them straight out about his feelings—they’d seen what he did after the prayer meeting—and he even thought he might show them his tattoo, but when they asked him what he was doing here, he told them what he’d told Elaine’s mother. Which is also true. He
has
been lonely. And both of them seem like pretty serious believers, Wayne especially, so he has to be careful.

The lights have gone out in the Collins trailer, which looms imperiously over him, aglow in the light of the full moon. In his imagination she sleeps in her Brunist tunic. The one she was wearing on Easter night all those years ago. When he thinks of her, that cotton fabric is what his fingers feel. Tonight, when the prayer meeting ended, he got up his nerve and walked over to her, his hands in his pockets, to say hello. It was an awkward moment with everyone watching and he knew his acne was flaring up. When he was actually in front of her, he couldn’t think of what to say. He found it difficult to look into her eyes, but when he dropped his eyes, there was her body draped in the thin tunic, and that confused him all the more. Finally he just nodded and said, “Hi, it’s me.” Elaine only stared at him as if he’d just threatened to kill her, and without saying a word, left immediately with her mother. Well, he thought, at least she didn’t tell him to go away. It’s only his first day. He can be patient. Meanwhile, he has opened another beer. It’s Easter night, the moon’s filling up the sky, and they’re in his car again. She’s trembling, but she has been through this before, and is ready now. “Stay the fuck out of this,” he says to Sissy. “Go take a walk and don’t come back until I blink the lights.”

II.3

Sunday 26 April – Wednesday 29 April

“Come on, Billy Don, how can you
not
hear it? It’s right there, clear as a bell!”

“Well, that bell is just not ringing for me.” Yet again, for the umpteenth time, Brother Abner Baxter says: “…cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light.” “Honest, Darren, all I hear is a kind of hissing sound.”

“Exactly!”

“But it’s not anybody saying anything. It’s just a kind of noise. Might even be part of how Reverend Baxter is saying ‘darkness.’”

“No, it comes
after
, Billy Don. It’s her! I’m
telling
you!”

“Maybe you got better ears than me.”

“Maybe I have.” Sometimes Billy Don seems plain stupid. “But there’s more!
Listen!”

Listen!
That’s the whispered word Darren hears behind the powerful bass tones of the preacher:
Listen!
It is she. He knows it. The voice in the ditch. Marcella. They both have trouble saying her name. It is as though she has passed beyond the nominal, is mysteriously just “she.” Less than she. Or more. An aura. The displaced voice of the mystical figure pointing to Heaven in the painting in Reverend Clegg’s Florida church. A voice in pain. The recording, dated and catalogued, as are all their tapes, is the one from a week ago down at the foot of the mine hill during the arrival on the Day of the Sacrifice of Reverend Baxter and his family. Billy Don was holding the microphone, his own flat, ugly voice blocking out the others until Darren shushed him (maybe that’s the sound Darren keeps hearing, Billy Don thinks: his own shushing). “Do ye likewise, my friends, while there is still time for your souls to be saved!” Abner Baxter is urging on the tape. There’s a tiny pause between “friends” and “while,” and Darren backs it up and plays it again. “Do you hear it, Billy Don?”

“Sure. Reverend Baxter wants everybody to put on the armor of light.”

“No, I don’t mean that. Pay attention!” He plays it again, growing impatient with Billy Don. He’s doing this on purpose. It’s that evil girl. She’s corrupting his soul. “Between those two words, that girl’s voice, saying ‘to me.’ It’s just a whisper, but you can’t miss it!”

“Yeah, okay, I hear it now.” On the table between them is a blurry photograph of all the people on the mine road taken from the top of the hill, Darren having appropriated the dead woman’s box camera before anyone noticed. The old lady’s lens had been amateurishly aimed toward the sun and Darren presumably sees a ghostly presence in the consequent flare of light. “But why do you think it’s a girl’s voice? It’s most likely one of those old women standing around, but you can’t hear her except when Reverend Baxter stops to catch his breath.”

“No, listen again. No one at the camp has a weird breathy voice like that. No one alive, anyway.”

“‘Do ye likewise, my friends…’ (…to me…) ‘while there is…’”

Okay, it’s there. But so what? Ever since they met, Billy Don has shared Darren’s scientific quest for eschatological truth, and he was just as curious as Darren was when Patti Jo said she could hear the dead girl speaking to her from the ditch that day, but Darren is losing him on this one. Darren has played and replayed these mine road tapes all week, hoping he might have picked up her voice, pressing on long after Billy Don had given up. At the Sunday service this morning, after Brother John P. Suggs had confirmed for everybody the final acquisition of the Mount of Redemption and the anonymous gift that will make possible the building of their temple on it, setting off a burst of rapturous praise-giving, Patti Jo got up with her friend Duke to lead everyone in singing “Higher Ground,” and Billy Don, humming along in his tuneless fashion, found himself thinking about the way Patti Jo said she communicated with Marcella’s spirit. “Marcella doesn’t use words exactly. It’s more like she’s just thinking and I can sort of sense what she’s thinking. I know that sounds weird, but it feels completely natural.” So nothing really said, just a kind of shared thereness, and if that’s so, he wondered, watching Patti Jo’s breasts bob about under her white blouse (when they interviewed her, the poor woman had a lot of sad stories to tell—she’s had a tough life and it shows on her face—but she still has a lot of bounce and it’s fun to watch her sing), why did Darren think they would hear a voice when she didn’t? We’re not all mediums, Darren said. If it’s important, like Patti Jo says the voice says it is, then the spirit has to get through however it can.

It’s how he thinks. There’s no answer, just belief or damnation. Like now, when Darren replays the “still time for your souls” bit and says, “If you listen close, you can hear her struggling to be heard while the others are carrying on, like a kind of strangled squeaky sound.”

“I think that might be the little Baxter kid. He was having a fit or something.”

“I don’t think so, but even if it were, as I’ve tried to explain, Billy Don, that would only mean she might have been trying to reach us through him and it wasn’t quite working.”

“You mean like he was sorta possessed.”

Darren sighs irritably.

Billy Don gazes out the window of their church office, which is still also their bedroom, the Baxters having commandeered their designated cabin with no signs of giving it up. No matter. Mr. Suggs has promised them a camper, which is a better deal anyway. It’s woodsy and late-April green out there, a jean-jacket getup-a-ballgame day, not a day to be stuck in here. Darren is growing exasperated with him, he knows, but though Darren is smarter than he is and he’s usually right, he’s trying too hard to make something out of nothing. It’s not just these mine road tapes. Darren has been puzzling through all their interviews and their field recordings of conversations picked up on the Mount and around the dogwood tree and everything else he thinks might contain secret messages. He had Billy Don set up the tape recorder in the ditch, where they left it overnight, hoping to pick up the ghostly whispering they could not hear by day, but the tape ran out and the battery died before they got anything. Darren claimed to hear strange rustlings, but when Billy Don said, “Rabbits probably,” Darren just got mad. Darren has also been counting all the words and letters in the original sayings of the Prophet, as well as those in the slightly different versions preached by Sister Clara and the others, subtracting one from the other to see if there is any pattern in what he is calling “the residue of corruption.” Darren is not as hot on Sister Clara as he once was. He has turned all the letters of each of the seven prophecies in both versions into numbers, has asked Billy Don to do a lot of adding and subtracting and averaging and figuring out ratios and square roots, then converted the numerical values of the differences back into letters again, and he has performed the same kinds of operations on Ely Collins’ final death note, focusing especially on the words with improper capitals and misspellings. “If this message comes from God, Billy Don, and I believe that it truly does, for a great religion has been born from it, then we have to assume God makes spelling mistakes only on purpose!” Darren calls it the ancient Greek science of isopsephia, dating clear back to the Sibylline Oracles, which exactly predicted the birth of Jesus Christ centuries before it happened. This was amazing; Billy Don was impressed.

Now Darren is replaying “while there is still time for your souls to be saved,” and at the end there is just enough of a pause to hear the word “week” or something like it. Billy Don has less trouble with this one, he just isn’t so sure where it’s coming from. Before he can say so, though, Darren has already moved ahead to the next break. Oh oh. Billy Don gets it now. “You hear it, Billy Don?”

“Yup.”

“‘Of Sundays!’” There’s a kind of glow about Darren when he gets excited. His blue eyes seem to grow bigger behind his little round spectacles and it’s like you can look right through them into the sparkly cavern of his head. He backs up the tape and plays it again.
“‘Listen… to me! …A week…of Sundays!”’
Darren whispers, imitating the voice. “That’s what she was trying to tell us, Billy Don! Just like the Prophet!”

“Wait. Let me hear that again. Are you sure it’s Sundays? Sounds more like it’s got an ‘m.’ Like ‘some days.’”

“Don’t be dumb, Billy Don! What could that possibly mean? This makes complete sense. You can even hear her say ‘again’ a moment later.
‘Listen to me!A week of Sundays…again!’
Hear it?”

“But, well, that’s not exactly what her brother said. He said, ‘Sunday week.’”

“That’s right. ‘Coming of Light, Sunday week.’ But it turned out to be a week of Sundays, or seven weeks after the Day of Redemption.”

“June the seventh.”

“June the seventh. The Midnight Coming. When everybody gathered together five years ago all around the world. It was even bigger in terms of numbers than the Day of Redemption.” Darren’s voice has begun to sound like the wheezy voice in the ditch.

“Six weeks from today.” Billy Don tugs on the end of his moustache. Could it be? Was the spirit of the dead girl really trying to reach them? It’s possible. And scary. It means the Rapture might be even closer than they have been supposing. Nothing was to have happened for another couple of years at least. If it’s true and not just something Darren is making up, he doesn’t have much time to acquaint himself fully with the ways of the world and find a partner for eternity. It’s like he’s aged suddenly from twenty-two to eighty-two overnight. He pushes these doomsday thoughts aside and concentrates on the Prophet’s sister instead. Though they never knew her, and she’s a saint and completely dead, whenever Billy Don thinks about Marcella Bruno it is not her spirit that comes foremost to mind, or even the beautiful painting in the Florida church, but her radiant nude body in their secreted photos of her on the leather couch, photos he peeks at ev ery chance he gets—as God’s disciple and exegete, of course, seeking truth and understanding. As soon as Darren leaves, he’ll get them out again, examine them for further revelations. And use the new office phone, give Sally Elliott another call. He wants to ask her about all this. And thinking about the end makes him feel bad (he’s
not
eighty-two, darn it), and she always has something funny or smart to say that cheers him up. “So what do you think? Something’s gonna happen that day?”

“I don’t know, Billy Don. I’m kind of scared. I need your help.”

When Darren asked Clara what happened to Marcella’s body, she didn’t know. “When things settle down here, we can maybe ask.” Though some believe the Day of Redemption was the beginning of the Rapture and Marcella was transported directly to the Kingdom of Light, Clara, while allowing that it could be so, doubts it would have happened unwitnessed. Well, she is a good woman but she has a more naïve view of God’s transparency than they do. “But why was the girl out there on the mine road all alone in the first place?” Billy Don wanted to know. “Why wasn’t she with everybody else?” “She’d took sick, bless her soul. We was planning to take her out there the next day with us, but it was only the day before and we didn’t want her to worsen. We probly oughter left somebody to watch over her, but I guess they was too much else to think on.” “What kind of sick?” Darren asked. They didn’t get an answer to that, though before she went back to Florida they overheard Betty Wilson Clegg say she believed the poor child really died of heartbreak. They feel fairly certain, after seeing the forbidden photos, what she meant by that, but they also think that Mrs. Clegg is something of a simpleton, and Darren in particular believes that such banalities trivialize God’s operations among humankind. God is not a ladies’ romance writer. They have conducted sit-down interviews with many of the Brunists in their effort to capture the early history of the movement, but Sister Clara is always too busy for long conversations, so Darren has made a habit of simply leaving the recorder running whenever she’s in the office, and maybe she knows that and maybe she doesn’t. She has said some things about Abner Baxter that suggest she doesn’t, or else she forgets.