The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (81 page)

“Stop the car, please.”

“What—?”

“I wish to get out.”

He opens the door while the car is still moving, perhaps trusting those ministering angels more even than did the Christ in the Bible, and she skids to a stop. Ah. She sees now. They are at the backside of the old mine, the tipple and water tower appearing up there through the scraggly trees. He is already clambering down into the ditch and back up the other side. By the time she has switched off the engine, grabbed up the raincoat she always carries in the car, and gone chasing after, he is striding toward the big yellow earth-moving machines parked on that infamous hill. All she can hope is that it is unoccupied and remains so until she can get him down off it. Whatever made her take this road? She hopes God isn’t punishing her for her latest routines. Perhaps (look on the bright side) He is only giving her an unanticipated opportunity to devise a new one. It is a warm day, and even in her dishabille she is sweating by the time she catches up with her erstwhile dance partner and feeling somewhat light-headed. Undivided Christhood has given him new energy, but she is no longer undivided. Does he understand her delicate condition? She has danced her dances, but he has seemed oblivious to their import. Well, it’s something that has never before happened to him—to either of them; one might expect a certain male obtuseness. She must learn to be more direct. Sometimes a simple two-step is more effective than an arabesque.

“But, Wesley,” she gasps when she reaches him.
“Jesus
, I mean!” She feels like she’s swearing all the time. “This is not a wilderness!” Strange trenches have been dug here on the hilltop, like mass graves lined with chalk, and she stumbles in and out of them, feeling exposed and vulnerable. Can they be seen up here from the church camp? There is a dance she must do, one that will get them back to the car, but she’s too frightened to think how to start it.

“There’s a tree. It will do. Anyway, I was not thinking of a dance exactly. The place inspires me to something more like a sermon.” He spreads his arms like the beckoning Christ on mountaintops and in cemeteries. “Blessed,” he declaims, “are the free in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven!” There is a resonance in his voice she has not heard before, not even when he was in the Presbyterian pulpit. Maybe least of all then. Though of course this is a different he. “Blessed are the pleasure givers for they shall receive pleasure! Blessed are the demoniacs for they shall be invited to the dance!” Prissy realizes he is composing a love song for her and her heart softens and her fear subsides and she draws near. Perhaps this one tree
is
wilderness enough. They can use one of those backhoes for the pinnacle of the temple, whence Jesus is asked to leap but is restrained by angelic love. Her dance is taking flight. “Blessed are the lewd at heart for they shall see God! Blessed are the wanton for they shall not want! Blessed are the love makers for they shall produce the sons of God!” He knows. She is so thrilled she wants to cry. Her dances have not been in vain. She reaches for him, but he stays her hand. Something is happening down below. An old pickup truck rattles up on the dirt road, spewing black fumes. The doors fly open and a fat lady rolls out with a child in her arms—three other children scramble out of the truck bed. They come running up the hill. “Wait, Jesus! Wait for us!” the woman shouts. Prissy, shrinking behind Jesus, wants to flee, but he smiles down upon them. “The salt of the earth,” he says and extends his arms in greeting.

“Soon as we seen you, Jesus,” says the enormous woman fallen at his feet (“Rise with my blessing, my daughter,” he told her, but she said it didn’t seem right), “we run right over. We didn’t wanta get left behind. It was Mattie spotted you from up on Inspiration Point, the little sweetheart should oughta be made a saint. I couldn’t find my husband, but you can just reach out and bring him here. Isaiah is a righteous man and should not miss out. It wouldn’t be fair. You know, like how you say anyone who follows you has got to throw off everything and live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field? Well, he done that, Lord, I done that. These four children here they done that. You got six bona fide flat-broke disciples right off, Master, ready to go where you go.” The three little ones have accepted his invitation to rise and are now circling him curiously, eyeing with suspicion the woman huddled behind him. “There was a whole bunch of us waiting for you up here a coupla months ago. We were dead sure you were coming then—we prayed like all blazes—but we musta got the date wrong. Forgive us for that, Lord. Those two college boys try hard, but they don’t quite have it.”

“Remember the parable of the self-righteous train engineer,” he says, “for whom the timetable was his holy bible and as a consequence of his faith in it he ended up in a notorious wreck.”

“I didn’t know you had trains in your time, Lord.”

“My time is all time.”

“Let’s see if it’s really him, Mom,” the older boy says. “I’m gonna fall in the ditch. If he’s really Jesus, he’ll save me.” The boy stands stiffly at the lip and tips over, yowls when he hits bottom. “See?
See?”
he wails. Then his brother starts to cry too, and that sets off the baby.

“I had no intention of stopping you in your brazen foolishness, young man,” Jesus says, having to shout over the racket. “For as it is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, or me either. Take it as a lesson learned.”

“You heard Jesus, Mattie, get your little heinie out of there and stop your bawling or I’ll box your ears so hard you won’t hear for a week! You too, Markie. Look how you’ve got Johnnie going! Shut up now or we won’t let you fly to Heaven with us!”

“Mom, he’s not wearing any underpants!”

“Luke, you come out from under there. That’s trespassing and you can go to hell for that!”

It is in his tradition to suffer little children, but there would seem to be exceptions. “If Jesus is God, Mom, shouldn’t he have the biggest one?”

“Luke, I ain’t telling you one more time! We been waiting all our life to get raptured, praying so hard our knees is half ruint, and I ain’t gonna let you go and spoil it!” She drops the squalling baby and bounds forward on all fours, reaches under, and drags the girl out—dirty pink-slippered foot first—and then she has to grab the one called Markie, who wants his turn, and that one starts up again. The little girl hangs on to his ankles with both hands as her mother pulls and were it not for the woman behind him, he would be taking what in this unholy age in which he has landed is called a pratfall; he knows such things because he is all-knowing, but it’s true, he has been slow yet again to appreciate the risks in mixing with the salt of the earth. “Forgive her her trespasses, Lord. She’s a bit wild but—let
go
, Luke!—she was born that way, so it must be God’s will.” She pries the child’s fingers away and he is free at last, though he has lost his sandal.

“I think it’s curtain time,” the woman behind his shoulder whispers anxiously.

“So, c’mon. Let’s get going, Lord. Can’t hardly wait to get there. Some folks didn’t expect you until after the tribulation began, but I was always a pre-trib dispensationalist, except sometimes when it seemed like the tribulation had already started up, and then I was more like a mid-trib believer. But I was never a post-trib believer—you can ask anyone. I always said it would be like this. And I know everything about the four horsemen and the seven seals and seven trumpets and seven bowls and the abomination of desolation. Just ask me. Those other sinners back there, they didn’t believe me when I hollered out you were over here, so it looks like we’re all the holy remnant you got left.”

“The perfect candidates, my daughter, given the fusty nature of the Heavenly Kingdom, so called,” he says, speaking inside her own metaphors. The unmaking of those metaphors is at the very heart of his new mission. But they can be undone, he knows in his omniscience, only from within. “It would be interesting to see what your daughter made of the angels if she got inside their choir robes. But I’m afraid the time is not now. There is more yet to happen.” He would like now to simply fly away, as the song goes, to vanish suddenly and reappear elsewhere—in the studio, for example—but he has received no favors from above nor does he expect any. Instead, they will have to step behind the backhoes as though into the wings and slip away down the hill behind them. “I must leave you now. But I shall return after a certain time. You must deliver that message to your fellow believers. Go forth, my daughter, and prophesy. Go! Go with my blessing!” It’s a hard pitch and a tough house, but it works. He and the woman make their exit when all their backs are turned so that when they look back from the truck, they will be gone as if they never were.

The truth is, most of Priscilla’s dances are improvisations, their design appreciated only after they have been performed. Because that’s what life is. You visit your minister in his office for counseling and the next thing you’re dancing the Second Coming with Christ Jesus, and suddenly a little self-enclosed pirouette en dedans becomes a grand jeté. You have to stay fit and supple and open to the unexpected. They haven’t got around to the temptation of Christ today as they’d intended, and now they’ll just have to skip past that. Her plan for the morrow, has been all week, is to create an erotic celebration of the summer solstice (the summer solstice
is
erotic), a “Dance of the Wedding of Heaven and Earth,” with its story of the victory of sun and light over darkness and death while haunted by the simultaneous birth of the Lord of Darkness, and not coincidentally Jesus’ cousin John, followed by the descent toward the winter solstice. At which time her own child is due—a little lord of light—and everything starts up all over again. All this she has meant to script in, while turning the studio into a kind of symbolic forest, celebrating the unconscious, mother womb of dance itself, with Wesley and Jesus each playing their parts, their art their very artlessness. But now with the events of the day, she is having to make adjustments. What they do tonight will be a kind of rehearsal for tomorrow, but she will call it the “Dance of the Transfiguration” in recognition of Jesus’ rise to the surface (but where did Wesley go? she has to admit she already misses him, the dear befuddled man), focusing on the element of radiance—“And his face did shine as the sun” is the text she has chosen—something transfiguration shares with the fires and fairy dances of midsummer. They will anoint their bodies with fragrant oils and use special gels on the spots and dance, after adagio preparations, to the summer storm of Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. She hopes only that she’s up for it. The day has taken something out of her.

Before returning to the studio they stopped at the shopping center on the highway to pick up some chop suey, Jesus complaining that he’s had enough carryout pizza for an eternity—why can’t those damned Romans leave him alone? She has never mastered the Dance of the Culinary Artist unfortunately, leaving most of that up to Ralph; she’s too easily distracted, never getting past the burnt frying pan jig. Her contributions to the church Christmas bake sales have always been packaged doughnuts topped with pancake syrup and sprinkled with red and green colored sugar. And there aren’t many carryout choices in West Condon; in fact, there’s only one. They weren’t dressed for a shopping trip, but she pulled on her car raincoat and dashed in to place their order, Jesus waiting back in the parking lot, shouting after her to ask for extra chow mein noodles. When she returned to the car he was gone. Can’t leave him alone for a minute. She found him preaching to some lounging beer-drinking teenagers who laughed and made rude remarks as she led him away, but they can go to hell and almost certainly will.

She finds her appetite has vanished, the very smell of the chop suey making her somewhat nauseous, but nothing wasted, Jesus is ravished and eats both portions himself. The day’s adventures have enlivened him. She had hoped he might be ready to go into retreat for a while, forty days and forty nights, for example, but he is already making big plans, reminding her that she told him his time is tomorrow. I think I was mistaken, she said, but he has paid no heed. Shedding Wesley has given him a new boldness; he is brusquer, more impatient, more demanding, but also more exciting, and a more eager and appreciative dance partner. Wesley was always polite and never took her for granted, but because of his natural diffidence, he often had to be coaxed into the more experimental aspects of the dance, Jesus urging him on from within. Now Wesley is gone as if molted (she has a serpent in her transfiguration dance, too, it’s one of her best movements, and it tumbles neatly into the succulent uroboros position), and the dances are freer and more direct, but she will miss the playful complexities of their old ménage à trois. Jesus, spooning up the last of the chop suey, announces that tomorrow they will revisit Main Street and pass through city hall and walk the various neighborhoods, and he will bring his message to the swimming pool and playing fields and address the foursomes at the country club, and on Sunday they will visit all the churches, that the preachers and their flocks might look directly upon the subject of their hypocritical prattle. Dear Christ, she wonders with a shudder, how will I get through all that?

He looks up and grins around a mouthful of crunchy chow mein noodles, rice and bean sprouts ornamenting his beard, and asks: “Were you speaking to me, dear lady?”

“Oh dear. Was I speaking out loud? I am so confused and exhausted. And I think I may be about to throw up.”

When the woman described her “Dance of the Incarnation” this morning as one of her most abstract (something is happening you can’t quite see) and least abstract (flesh is flesh), she was closer to the mark than she knew, for this paradoxical coincidence of opposites is the very essence of the Incarnation, a moment when the unimaginable ineffable supposedly coincides with its material expression. Videlicet, yours truly—he smiles at himself in a mirror and picks some grains of rice out of his beard. The creator identifies with his creation even as he simultaneously transcends all creation, becoming both part and whole at the same time, a mathematical conundrum. Whimsical amusements of the millennia of theological charlatans who have imbedded themselves in this preacher whose poor carapace he occupies, leaving him with this riddling residue. They also came up with the notion of learned ignorance, which is a kind of unlearning, and there is something to be said for it, if taken seriously and starting with that ruinously falsified history which is the Bible.