The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (83 page)

Her daddy was a miner, nicer than her mother, but easily bullied like Mary’s Joseph was, and not much help when Bernice was being scolded. When he died of the black lung, her mother went to live with
her
mother, a crotchety old thing even bossier than she was, but by then Bernice was already a licensed practical nurse and married to Tuck Filbert, so she stayed here in West Condon. Tuck was an older fellow who knew her daddy in the mine and always admired the contents of his lunch bucket. She was well past the marrying age and no one else was interested when her daddy, who was already ill with the black lung, suggested it, so without much ado it happened, and there she was, like Ruth and Esther and so many ladies in the Bible, the young bride of an old man, arranged by another old man. Tuck did his duty by her a time or two, but he wasn’t enjoying it and neither was she, so they stopped it, and that was it, and it was enough. Tuck was not much of a husband or even a friend, but leastways he never took hickory to her as she had feared, being forewarned, though she has sometimes said he did, speaking in parables as she often does, for even if he never actually hit her, all those Filberts do lash about fiercely with the tongue, and enough to draw blood. At least to the cheeks.

Her dowry was the wardrobe of Tuck’s mother—who had gotten the flu one winter and passed away without anyone noticing until it was Sunday dinner time—together with a lot of old curtains, table cloths, and other frills the Filbert men had no use for. Bernice adapted all these things to her
Illustrated Bible
styles, creating interesting collars and puff sleeves and velveteen bodices made out of old pillows. She lengthened the skirts with decorative borders and used beaded cloth belts high up under the breasts with corset-like laces up the front of some of them, and added sashes and brass bracelets and head scarves and an abundance of simple flowing shawls and sashes, often cut from old bedsheets and dyed in primary colors. Her patent leather shoulder bag doesn’t exactly fit, but she needs it in her career, just as she now needs her reading spectacles, which dangle on a plastic chain—an accessory Rachel and Ruth probably did without; at least, it’s something you don’t see in the pictures. Because sandals are not appreciated in this part of the world, she has mostly worn high-top nurses’ shoes, though last week she found a pair of sandals in Mr. Osborne’s shoe store and he was so surprised to see them there he gave them to her for a quarter each. She has been trying them out from time to time, watching the reactions of others. Won’t do when winter comes, of course; in the Bible, it’s always summer.

“So, whatcha reckon, old fella? Am I justified? Ain’t we taught to hate evil and cleanse the world of it and ain’t them biker boys worse’n devils?” In the past, when troubled, Ben Wosznik always talked things out with Rocky, and sitting alongside the dog’s grave on the backside of the mine hill, having hiked over here from the camp as the midsummer dawn opened up the sky, he is doing so now, his dog as good a listener dead as he was alive. Though he misses the reassurance of Rocky’s wagging tail. I love you, it had said. You are right. You are always right. But is he? He’s not sure. Hating is one thing, already a sin, but acting on that hate? Doing something that can’t be taken back? Even if it feels like a holy thing to do? “Catholic folks has a halfway place t’go, Rocky. Maybe they’ll let us in and you’n me’ll meet up there.” He gazes affectionately at the grave and then notices that the small wooden cross he carved for it is standing there all right, but at the foot instead of the head, where he put it. And sideways. He gazes off past the big earth-moving machines (they went away for a day and came back again; old man Suggs must be getting better) toward the old tipple and mine buildings, thinking about this, and sees something he hasn’t noticed before. A bone. They ate a lot of chicken up here, but that’s not a chicken bone. His heart sinks. He knows he is going to have to open up the grave. He might be able to claw it away with his fingers, but if Rocky’s still down there, it’s not really something he wants to get his hands into. He wanders over to the mine buildings to see what he can find and under the tipple, where the old rusty railroad tracks pass through, leaning up against a timber, he comes upon a shovel. New one, still shiny. Like the ones he bought for the camp. He already knows what he is going to find.

“Yo, wake up, little Suzie. Let’s think about livin’…”

“I am awake, Duke. And already thinking. You reckon we could maybe pay a visit to the old Bruno house?”

“Now that’s a early mornin’ cogitation t’stir the dust in the attic, Patti Jo. What’s sparked it up?”

“A dream I just woked up from. Or else I woked up first and then I had the dream. It was about playing with Marcella in her bedroom, like we used to do. And there was something she couldn’t find. She wants me to go look for it.”

“Well, bless her little phantom heart, what was it?”

“I don’t know. Just something. I guess I’ll know when I get there. Since your fire chief friend told you where she was buried, it just seems something I gotta do. We can take it and put it on her grave.”

“But didn’t you tell me that Bruno place was fenced off?”

“Yes, but I don’t think the fence is in very good shape. You can see people have been in there, messing around, wrecking stuff.”

“So, a out’n-out burgle, y’mean. You kin tell what day a the year it is by the craziness it sets off. My ma useta keep me home such days. Said it was the day of the swamp demons. But, heck, why not? Sonuvagun, sounds like fun, so long’s nobody don’t start shootin’ at us. Tonight though’s our big night. The live recordin’ session. Don’t wanta die before we’ve played this ballgame to the last out.”

“I know. Maybe afterwards, if we’re on a high and feel like it. Or after Franny Baxter’s wedding tomorrow. We still gotta choose our songs for that, too. Whaddaya think? ‘A Stranger in My Arms’?”

“I was figgerin’ on ‘You Ain’t Nuthin but a Houn’ Dog.’”

“That should do it. Or how about ‘Face on the Barroom Floor’?”

“‘Sixteen Tons’?”

“Oh my! You do know how to hurt a girl. But we shouldn’t make fun, I guess. Not everybody’s so lucky as you and me. You know, I do admire this pretty thing of yours, Duke. It has always stood me in good stead, as you might say, reliable as the old Orange Blossom Special and quite a ticket when it gets up a head of steam. But it’s got appeal when it’s soft like this, too. Like a hank of warm rope.”

“Won’t stay thataway, you keep tryin’ t’knot it.”

“Mmm, yeah, look a-yonder comin’. Whoo-whoo! Up you go! The rush of the mighty engine! These eggs are something, too. Look at ’em! Never seen any hung so low and mighty.”

“Don’t know why them things should hang at all; never did find a pair a pants t’hold ’em right.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t ought to wear pants, honey. Just let ’em swing free like those Scottish mountain fellas do.”

“Well, that’s okay, I reckon, providin’ it ain’t freezin’ out nor not mosquita season. But awright, all aboard, little darlin’. Ready t’git rollin’ down the line. You tell your friend t’close her eyes now…”

Bride-to-be Franny Baxter has asked Duke and Patti Jo to sing “My Happiness” at her wedding tomorrow because it best describes the mood she’s in, except for the lines in it about evening shadows make me blue, for her lover is lying at her side and she is not blue at all. “Whether skies are gray or blue, any place on earth will do, just as long as I’m with you,” that’s her happiness, a happiness she never thought would be hers. She was unlucky to be born a Baxter, unlucky to be fat and homely and redheaded and kept ignorant all her life, unlucky to grow up with God against her, humiliating her and whipping her for reasons she could never understand except maybe she had just been born bad and because she was a she. For a long time Franny did not think of it as suffering because it was all she knew, but you have to be as mental as her sister to stay dumb forever. And now her miserable Baxter life is over. Though she didn’t think so at the time, coming back here to West Condon was the luckiest thing that ever happened to her. She doesn’t believe in fate, doesn’t believe in anything, but she almost could, so perfect has everything worked out. “I never knowed I could ever be so happy.”

“Me neither, sweetie,” says Tessie Lawson, and she squeezes where she has her hand. “Now all we need is a baby. Let’s see if we cain’t make us one. Startin’ tonight after the stag party. I’ll help out.”

The Honey Moon—the full moon of midsummer—has just begun to wane and is still plainly visible in the early morning sky. Will they see another? the Applebys ask themselves on their way to their hives. Whether they do or not, Cecil says, he is certain the bees will; for what would the Heavenly Kingdom be without honey? Isn’t that the Gospel promise: milk and honey? “I wonder,” Corinne wonders, “if they will still have their stingers there?” It is the time of year when the hives are rich to overflowing, which is how the moon got its name. The camp table can use only a small portion of the bounty, so they sell the excess at local markets, tithing to the camp from the profits. Their hand-lettered labels this year say “Wilderness Camp Honey,” and there is a simple line drawing of a cross in a circle. Cecil’s artwork. Corinne has added her usual line from Proverbs: “Eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste.” On their way to the hives, holding hands as they often do, they come upon Mrs. Edwards, looking somewhat woebegone, poor thing, though she greets them cheerfully and they wish her God’s blessings. When she has passed, Cecil remarks on her devotion to the camp and to the Brunist faith and the price she is paying for that. “Not all devotion is holy,” Corinne says mysteriously.

For an interpreter of dreams to wake from a dream in which she is dreaming of the present reality—that her children are playing on the floor of their house trailer, building a toy church camp with blocks and sticks and scraps of paper and cardboard, and that her husband is brushing his teeth in the shower room, as each are—means that the interpreter’s mind is rejecting the efficacy of symbols and her powers of analysis are fading. As she rises and pulls on her bathrobe and pads to the kitchenette to start breakfast, she realizes she has been dreaming about rising and donning a bathrobe and reaching for the skillet that she is now reaching for. It’s as if she were still in the dream, though she knows she is not. It does, however, make her feel like she is living simultaneously within two realities, which are nevertheless the same in all respects except that they exist in two different places—one inner, one outer—and are running at slightly different speeds, neither more real than the other. This is not like double vision (she has only one eye, after all) but more like a single vision with two surfaces. And Glenda Oakes knows that she will be living in these paired realities all day, the longest and most testing of the year.

Welford emerges from the bathroom in his shorts and undershirt with a good-morning smile on his face, humming an old church tune, one learned in childhood, and she finds herself thinking about it as if it too were from a dream and not really happening. An omen of some sort… And He walks with me, and He talks with me… Perhaps it will not be a good day. But then, few are.

Stacy Ryder does not confuse dreams with reality any more than she confuses Alaskan goldmine stock with blue chips. Nevertheless, she is aware that dreams can leak into the real world and warp it the way that intangibles can infect the balance sheet, color investment. God is such a dream; a nightmare, really, an inherited liability from the infantile origins of the race. But love, too? A culturally sanctioned delusion layering raw unlovable instinct? Reason says it may be so, but maybe reason is the real dream stuff, the vaporous detritus of instinct no less than love is and of less intrinsic value. Such are her thoughts as she awakes alone on a sunny Saturday morning in the tower in which she is kept by love. Her dream was about loneliness, as is her waking. After the disruptions of the past two days, they will at last be together again tonight, though she knows her lover’s presence, even here in this bed, will not completely take the loneliness away. In anticipation of his imminent absence, it may even make it worse, though there are moments—of tenderness, of sexual union—when love’s illusions seem almost like realities, moments when time pauses, and the loneliness evaporates. Such a state, only partly made of orgasm but rarely without it, is what she strives for. Except for these ephemeral moments of ecstatic communion, however, love and the objects of love do not quite coincide but exist only as tantalizing possibilities. This, roughly, is her theology.

She is grateful that, in spite of everything, he kept his Thursday date. Even if only for an hour. He was in need of comfort, and though she felt the abyss between them (so much of his life she can never share), this was good, too, as he unburdened himself of his sorrow and fury, while, straddling his chest, she kneaded his brow and temples. The lovemaking that followed was more of consoling empathy than of passion, but sweet in its aching intensity, and she felt blissfully at one with her circumstances. Though her lover lives a life from which she is largely excluded—their own love less like life than theater, this generic motel room its principal stage, they two gifted strangers cast for parts in a show destined only for a short but brilliant run—she has grown accustomed to it and sometimes wonders if entering into his larger life would deepen their love or end it. If love is a fantasy, better that it be played out in fairytale spaces in allotted patches of time apart from time.

That Thursday morning had begun alarmingly. Her boss and lover had met her young friend Angela at the bank door, and handing her a final check, had brusquely dismissed her. Only later, called in for a brief “business meeting,” did Stacy learn why. “The doctor said he’d only seen nasal trauma that serious after car wrecks, and then the vic tims were usually dead.” Angela’s vengeful brother Charlie. Wearing brass knuckles. “My son said the sonuvabitch was in his police uniform, fully armed, driving the squad car.” He was soon on the phone to his lawyer, the police department, the mayor, pounding his fist on his desk as he spoke to them. His rage was understandable, but it unsettled her for the rest of the day, and only when he embraced her that evening and whispered that he loved her and needed her did her anxieties begin to fade.