The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (67 page)

“Well, I think Dad’s offering her a one-way ticket, telling her that after the miracle she can swim back,” Tommy says.

“It’s that bad?”

“No, it’s that cool. He’s thoroughly pissed at what Mom has done and fed up with her religious yo-yoing, but he can see the humor in it, too.” They are talking about Irene’s fantasized pilgrimage to Lourdes. Sally wonders if they’d see the humor in his mother’s organizing an afterlife affair with one of her old college beaus. The Christian illusion of spending eternity with one’s nearest and dearest: it’s such a smalltown idea. As Grandma Friskin says, What’s wrong with Heaven is your damned neighbors. They are sitting at the bar in the country club’s Nineteenth Hole after the disastrous Jester-and-Goose-Girl-on-the-Links Day, her dad, barely able to stand, having been whisked away by her mother. Archie and Emily Wetherwax offered Sally a ride home later if she wanted to stay, and she did. One place Angela Bonali will never show up. Babs Wetherwax and her gum-popping high school friends are at a table by the window drinking Shirley Temples and casting long giggly glances their way, but they’re no threat. “And he’s pretty sure he’s going to get it all back and send a few people to jail at the same time.”

“I know. Your dad’s being awfully hard on Aunt Debra.”

“The preacher’s wife? Well, as I understand it, she sold church property and kept the money for herself. Most everywhere you go, that’s a crime.”

“I think she gave it to the cult.”

“Same difference.”

That she’s drinking beer at a bar alone with Tommy Cavanaugh is both fortuitous and the result of strategic planning. She borrowed the family car while her parents were at church and drove past the Cavanaugh house. Not only was the tangerine junker in the drive, the new college graduate himself was on the front porch having a late breakfast and listening to something with a big beat coming out of the living room. Babysitting his mom. Though Tommy’s welcome was underwhelming, he didn’t chase her off. In fact, he had a favor to ask. When his dad gets back from church, could she follow him out to Lem’s garage to turn in the rental, give him a ride back? His dad’s buying him a red Corvair convertible with white sidewalls as a graduation present and as consolation for not being able to travel to Europe this summer with some of his fraternity brothers, and he’s picking it up on Tuesday, the Lincoln available to him meanwhile as his dad has little use for it after tonight until an out-of-town business meeting on Thursday. Sally was feeling pretty grotty, still wearing the tee she slept in—her
THERE’S
A
SUCKER
BORN-AGAIN
EVERY
MINUTE
shirt from her last ice cream parlor meet with Billy D—but she didn’t want to lose the opportunity. Anyway, they say that cleanliness is next to godliness, and she doesn’t really want to get that close. At the garage, after a ceremonial visit to the remains of Tommy’s mother’s wrecked station wagon, being harvested by Lem for parts, he and Tommy had a conversation about Carl Dean Palmers, Lem showing them Carl Dean’s burned-out van he’d been asked to haul away. “Fucking insane,” was Lem’s judgment about the burning of it. Yes, Lem said, he’d heard from Bernice the rumor about Carl Dean joining the bikers and doing bad shit at the camp before taking off, but he didn’t believe it. Not Carl Dean. Tommy said he didn’t believe it either, but later, riding back with her, he said he did. He also said he’d agreed to join his father in a round at the club this afternoon, which explained her own father’s gloomy gin-and-juice breakfast, he evidently having been bumped from his usual Sunday foursome slot by Tommy. So she decided it was time to do the father-and-daughter thing and ask him to teach her how to play the game, making him promise to stay off the sauce long enough to make it around the full nine—a promise he of course never kept. She showered, changed into shorts and a crisp white shirt—one of her dad’s old ones, only partly buttoned, no bra—and after the abbreviated golfing tragicomedy, here she is. “Well, a crime maybe. But not immoral.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Sure. Crimes are defined by lawyers and politicians. In some societies, ripping off the rich and institutions like churches is not a crime, it’s a public duty. Morality’s a private choice. The custom is to obey the law, but to defy the law can be a moral decision.”

“You think she did the right thing.”

Sally laughs. “No, a moral decision can also be a pretty stupid one.” She has been thinking about morality of late. The pursuit of aesthetic truth as a moral act. Concern with the trivial as immoral. Writing faults as moral failures. She’s aware that some people think of golf in the same way.

Tommy excuses himself to go, as he says, drain the radiator, leaving her with her notebook. She adds his expression to her
scheisshaus
list along with “shed a tear” and “squeeze the lemon.” On the way back from Lem’s garage this morning, Tommy wanted to know what the bad shit was, and though she probably shouldn’t have, Billy Don having asked her not to, she told him about the bikers and what they did. That was probably a moral lapse. What Tommy wanted to know when she told him was what was the girl doing there in the first place? You think it’s her fault, you mean? she snapped. She loves this guy? What’s going on? Of course, to be honest, she had wondered the same thing and asked Billy Don. He didn’t know.

Billy Don was more upbeat when they last met, another two-sundae lap-up day. Still a lot of gloom and apprehension in the camp, but he also had a funny story to tell this time about the night Darren discovered he was sleeping with a prairie kingsnake. He screamed and ran out of the cabin yelping that the Devil was after him, and that set off Colin next door, and they soon had the whole camp in a stir. One of the men killed the snake and then the camp cook calmed everybody down with milk and cookies. This happened just after they moved into their new cabin, which has given Billy Don a little more breathing space, for Darren now views himself as a prophet and is very full of himself, more obsessed and bossy than ever. Aunt Debra is evidently now helping Darren with his prophesying career, having come up with some quirky notions about the bikers and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse that people are taking seriously, and Darren is now treating her as something of a seer like Colin, who Darren believes is, in effect, specially wired for divine transmissions. Why it is that dangerous schizophrenics are so frequently taken as holy prophets, she replied, is one of those timeless mysteries of the fucked-up human race. She likes to use expressions like that because they always make Billy Don grin sheepishly and duck his nose in his ice cream, glancing about the drugstore nervously from under his brows to see if anyone else has overheard her. She showed him the invitation she’d received to Franny Baxter’s wedding and he said it was news to him. About all he knew about the Baxters was that they are said to be living in a field somewhere.

Babs and her friends have stopped lifeguard Tommy to ask him when the pool will open. Memorial Day weekend, everyone knows that, it’s just a ploy to get his attention. It works. Maybe she has underestimated the lure of Babs’ boobs. One of the girls drags a chair over and Tommy joins them. Babs glances over at her. Someone laughs. A schoolgirl titter. Who’s going to pay for these drinks? she asks herself, rising. She’s not.

III.2

Friday 29 May – Sunday 31 May

“She was dreaming that she was playing tag with other children. I didn’t exactly recognize none of them, but you know how it is in dreams—especially someone else’s dream. I was one of the other children and I almost hardly didn’t recognize myself. Whenever she tagged someone, they fell down dead. Really dead. Their flesh melting off. I didn’t run away, the one who was me. I said I wanted to be tagged, but she couldn’t do it. She said that wasn’t the way the game was played. If I didn’t run, I couldn’t be caught. Only it was like
I
was saying that to the person who was me, and I was impatient that she—I mean, me—didn’t get it.” The country and western singer Patti Jo Glover is telling them the dream that Marcella Bruno dreamt one night inside her own dream. Everyone in Mabel Hall’s caravan sitting room is completely spellbound. Lucy Smith has never heard anything like it before, but the way Patti Jo tells it, it seems completely natural. Thelma Coates is sitting across from her and her jaw has literally dropped. Her bottom teeth are showing. Thelma had said she could only stay ten minutes, but it has already been much longer than that. Her husband Roy has forbidden her to come here, so what she does is hurry up her grocery shopping and dash by on the way home, hoping word doesn’t get back to Roy. He’s a mean man. She has a dark bruise on her cheekbone, and she probably didn’t get that by bumping into something. Lucy’s husband Calvin, who was upset at the way Reverend Baxter and his family were made to go out and live in the fields like animals, would also rather she stayed away from these people, but she always has lots of things to tell him when she gets home and he appreciates that, so he has not put his foot down. He only scowls when she brings him the news, even when it’s funny, to let her know he doesn’t really approve. When they first got married and she did things he didn’t want her to do, he would turn her across his knee and spank her, and though it hurt and sometimes made her cry, it was also kind of fun and often ended better than it began. After a while he stopped doing that, but he can still be pretty severe and occasionally lashes out in a fit of temper that’s not fun at all, though he always apologizes afterwards and they pray together, and when she asks him if he loves her, he says yes.

“Then everything changed,” Patti Jo says. “She was still dreaming and she was still in my dream, but I wasn’t in hers anymore. A man was. I could feel how happy she was at seeing him, and I wondered if it was Jesus she was seeing, but I don’t think it was. For one thing, he didn’t have clothes on and you could see everything and that didn’t seem like something Jesus would do, even in a dream. He was standing in water, or else he stepped into it, and although I was enjoying her dream without thinking too much about it, I could feel Marcella begin to worry. The man dipped his hands in the water, like as if to baptize himself or her or someone, and when he raised them, they weren’t there anymore, just the parts of his arms that hadn’t touched the water. And then
I
started to worry on top of Marcella’s worrying. The man stepped deeper in the water, or else the water rose up, and you just knew he was losing parts of himself. The business between his legs dipped into the water and when the water went away for a tick you could see that half of it was gone just like you drew a line through. The water got deeper, or else he sank into it, until there was only his head on top. He closed his eyes and his mouth gapped opened and the head floated away like that. And then Marcella woke up crying and I woke up crying.”

There is a moment of absolute silence as they all watch that floating head, and then Thelma Coates puts her jaws back together and says, “That man musta been that newspaper feller.”

“Or else her brother,” says the beauty shop lady Linda Catter. “I mean, if all she felt was just only happiness, and not, you know…”

Bernice Filbert says it was like a dream of wasting away with only the head remaining like a kind of blind repository for the soul, what you might call a rapturing by water instead of by air, and it may be the sort of experience the Prophet’s sister had when she died or else what she was afraid of. It’s always interesting what Bernice wears, and today it’s a one-piece dress that looks like it might have been made out of an old thin blanket, hanging loose in front for carrying things—the sort of thing women might wear in the field when they’re gathering—with a sash around the waist and a scarf over her head.

“Losin’ his hands like that,” says Hazel Dunlevy, the palm reader, “that man in the water, whoever he is, it’s like as if he’s losin’ his future, and I reckon that’s how it turned out.”

“But in dreams things are always the opposite from what they seem, aren’t they?” Lucy reminds them. “So, maybe he’s
finding
his future. Though it’s not like it’s a happy ending. Unless that’s an opposite too. Crying meaning like she’s really laughing, I mean.”

“In some dreams that’s true,” says Mabel gravely, looking down upon them. “And in some it’s not.”

The others nod solemnly at this, and Hazel says: “As fer a naked man bein’ Jesus, though, accordin’ to what Glenda says, Jesus often takes his clothes off in people’s dreams. Sometimes it’s more like a halo down there and that’s bad news, and sometimes it’s only ordinary, like as he’s one of us again, and that’s good news. If Jesus makes love to you in a dream, she says, that’s the best news of all.”

“Well, I hope that never happens,” says Corinne Appleby flatly. She rarely speaks at all, but when she does it’s deadpan and straight out and always makes everybody smile.

“I guess we need Glenda here to explain it,” Lucy says with a sigh. Glenda Oakes is watching the children, including Lucy’s own, taking them on a nature walk along the creek bed to the beehives and vegetable garden and back, though she’ll switch with Hazel and join them later when Mrs. Edwards arrives, because Glenda is the dream expert and Mrs. Edwards wants some help understanding her boy’s nightmares.

“Actually, I told Glenda my dream of Marcella dreaming,” Patti Jo says, “and she said possibly it was an old dream Marcella dreamt when she was still alive and she was only remembering it. But it didn’t feel like remembering, it felt like it was happening right then for the first time. ‘Well, how do we know what remembering is like for the dead?’ Glenda said. ‘It might be like dreaming.’ She said that a head without a body could mean that Marcella no longer saw that person like she saw him before, so, if the man was Jesus or her brother, it could be saying she was losing her faith, and for that matter the naked man could have been both Jesus and her brother at the same time and others as well and not only men. Maybe her haunting days were ending and the man was just everybody, the head floating away signifying her own growing distance from this world, and she was crying about that. But Glenda said she couldn’t be sure. She’d never interpreted the dream of a dead person before.”