The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (9 page)

“But how did you get in? I thought the door was locked.”

“It was. I came in the back door. The garden gate was bolted, but it’s easy to scale. Are you all right? Somebody has thrown eggs all over your kitchen wall.”

“I know. I did. I was trying…to understand something…”

“I didn’t mean to intrude, Wesley. But I had to warn you. I heard Ralph talking with Ted Cavanaugh. They’re going to send you to a mental hospital. They plan to ask Debra to sign the committal papers. They’re also recruiting the entire Board of Deacons as backup witnesses. That’s why they talked to Ralph about it.”

This is not a surprise. He and Jesus have surmised the same. Even now, Jesus is saying: Have I not so prophesied? All the same, it is an alarming prospect. He remembers Debra’s tales of poor Colin. Electric shock treatments: What do they do to you? And what if that’s not all? Is her signature enough to authorize a lobotomy? They will destroy his creativity and thwart his mission. How can he prophesy from inside a mental institution? Who will take him seriously? “Tell me. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No, Wesley. You’re different. But I believe in you. You’re the most sane man I know.”

“Who do you say,” he asks speculatively, “that I am?”

“You are a saint, Wesley. A noble and kind and wonderful man. A teacher. When I came to you for help, you told me about the megalo-psychoi. The great-souled ones. You are one of those.” She is standing in the room now and removing her wet clothes. Jesus is remarking on her lithe, interesting body. She and her husband Ralph were both once dancers and she is still in good shape. When she came to him for religious counseling (she confessed: “I don’t think my husband is completely a man…”), it somehow got a little too personal. Perhaps because he had tried to explain to her, in his best pastoral manner, the nature of the male erection. He remembers standing in his office in the middle of this well-intended disquisition, gazing meditatively out the window onto the church parking lot where some boys were playing kick-the-can, with his pipe in his mouth and his pants around his ankles, Priscilla passionately hugging his bottom, his penis in her mouth, and though he wasn’t sure just how it had got in there, by that time it didn’t make much sense to take it out again. The affair, though brief, was sinful and it pained him, but it was also hugely satisfying and was a deeply loving relationship. She really understood him in a way that no woman had before. I know what you mean, Jesus says. “I’m ready to do anything for you,” Prissy whispers, peeling down her leotards. Jesus makes an Eastertide remark about hot cross buns that is not entirely in character. “I adore you, Wesley.”

She steps into the tub and kneels between his feet and commences to wash them, one at a time. And then she lifts them and kisses them. “You are so beautiful,” she says. “You are the most beautiful man I have ever known.” When she says this, she is gazing affectionately past his feet at his middle parts, which are beginning to stir as though in enactment of the day’s legend. It is not hard to prophesy what will happen next. Is he being tested? Be anxious for nothing, Jesus says. As it is written, no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. She has a car, she can be helpful to us. I, too, have known the company of helpful women of dubious morals. So, accept her gift with a willing heart, do not disparage it, for every good and perfect gift is, as they say, from above. Remember, as it is written in the scriptures, she who receives a prophet as a prophet should receive a prophet’s reward.

I.3

Easter Sunday 29 March

The sumptuous baked-ham Easter feast at the International Brunist Headquarters and Wilderness Camp Meeting Ground has long since been consumed, but the rain, which has done what it could to spoil their morning, is still thundering down in the afternoon. There was talk at the meal about carrying on with the electrical work in spite of the rain and even though it was the Sabbath and the Easter Sabbath at that (but working for the camp is not working, as Ben Wosznik always says, it is a kind of devotion), and now the two recently arrived ex-coalminers from West Virginia, Hovis and Uriah, waking up in their camper from their afternoon snooze, are trying to remember whether Wayne Shawcross said that if the rain stops they will start working again, or if he said that they will start working again even if the rain doesn’t stop. Certainly they still have a lot to do before tomorrow night’s big ceremony and maybe Wayne is waiting for them. Wayne is a good man and they do not want to let him down. “I’ll go ask him,” Uriah says, and he leaves the camper. After he is gone, Hovis notices that Uriah left without his raggedy old rain slicker, so he takes it off the hook and goes looking for him. He finds him standing in the mud and rain, all alone, up by the darkened Meeting Hall, but when Uriah, surprised by his arrival, asks him what he’s doing here, Hovis, with a puzzled glance over his shoulder, says he doesn’t know. Uriah, peering at him through the curtain of cascading rain, admits he doesn’t remember why he’s here either. “I’m lookin’ for somebody, I reckon,” he says, peering about, “but they must of left. That my slicker?” “Yep. That’s right, Uriah. I brung it to you. It’s rainin’.” “But where’s yourn?” “Shoot. I must of forgot it.” “Then you better wear mine.” “No, you’re older’n me, you git it on.” “But your rheumatiz is worse’n mine, Hovis, you wear it.” They argue about that, passing the slicker back and forth in the rain, until Uriah pulls out his gold pocket watch and gazes at it quizzically and says: “I recollect now. We was agoin’ to see Willie Hall.” “We was?” “Yup. Come along now. And put this old slicker on, Hovis, afore you catch your death.”

The man they seek has just left the bedroom at the back of the Halls’ mobile home and stepped forward into the lounge and kitchenette area, his suspenders hanging loosely from his belt loops, to announce to the ladies gathered around his wife in there: “And it come to pass meantimes, that the Heavens they was black with clouds’n wind, and they was a awful great rain!
First Kings 18!”
Then he returns to the bedroom. The women acknowledge this intrusion without remark, for they are well accustomed to Willie Hall’s quirks and talents. The little fellow knows only one book, but he knows it well, as well as anyone, and, as it is God’s book, they all agree he needs no other, nor for that matter do they. He also reminds them in his way that, although the things that happen in the Bible happened a long time ago, they are also, being eternal things, like those contained in Mabel’s cards, happening right now.

It is Sunday and Mabel Hall does not, by a rule admittedly often broken, read the cards on Sundays. But yesterday, the day of the Harrowing of Hell—when the Lord, gone underground, is not among them—she did so, using the simple five-card spread she prefers when considering less personal questions. Yesterday’s was, “What will happen three weeks from now on April 19th, the fifth anniversary of the Day of Redemption?” And there was much there on her card table to feel cheerful about—the upright Sun appeared right off, smack dab in the middle, proud as punch, and the happy communal Ten of Cups showed up last as the wild card of the far future, boding well for their growing church—but there was also, inevitably, a hovering darkness (visible in this case in the figure of the Knight of Wands standing on his head), because, as Mabel often remarks in her quiet little girl’s voice, the future, however rosy, always casts a dark shadow, that darkness into which all must descend, even if, hopefully, to ascend thereafter into glory.

A shadowed joy is how one might describe all the long month they’ve been here. When they first arrived—just six couples and their children in house trailers and caravans and the two office boys in their car—there was snow on the ground and the trees were black with ice and there was nothing here but utter ruin and desolation. The old summer camp cabins full of rot and excrement and vermin and broken glass, a main lodge with its roof half caved in, its old generator wrecked, no phone or proper toilet facilities, thick dead overgrowth and mounds of frozen rubbish everywhere. There was well water on the premises, but the pump handles were broken, and the cisterns and creek were frozen up; until they could get the pumps working, water had to be brought in in gallon jugs and old milk cans or melted from snow and ice. The abandoned camp had apparently been used for drinking parties, judging by the litter, and there were obscenities and blasphemies scrawled on the lodge and cabin walls and there were rotting mattresses on the floors and all the windows were busted out, even the screens. Its sorry state did not dismay them; they just set to work making a home for themselves in the wilderness. For, if anyone asks you to go one mile, as Jesus said, go two. They have done so. They had no end of volunteers wanting to come stand with them and help them build their new world center, but they feared drawing attention to themselves in a place where Satan’s power is strong and people, so cruel to them in the past, hate them much as Jesus was hated. For sinners, the truth is a dreadful thing, as Clara has often said, and they will attempt to crush it by any means at hand. With Mr. Suggs’ offer of extra workers, they have been able to keep their core group small and secretive and, except for the two Bible college boys managing the church office, limited to skilled construction workers with their own campers or mobile homes, for as it’s said, with the help of God, few are many. Ever since they pulled in, they have been working from before dawn to after dark, working so hard it has sometimes been hard to stop and recollect what it all means that they are doing this. It was like something had got hold of them and wouldn’t let go, and they supposed it must have been like that for the early settlers when they first came through.

They were met here at the camp on their Leap Day arrival by the West Condon Presbyterian minister’s wife, Mrs. Edwards, who, working quietly with Mr. Suggs, had made it possible for them to acquire the campgrounds in the first place, bless her soul. She was not alone that night. It was the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Night of the Sign, the night that their Prophet set everything in motion—exactly seven weeks after his miraculous rescue from the mine disaster, seven before he led them up the Mount of Redemption; Willie has often recited Bible passages to let them know why this was so and how thereby it was prophesied in God’s word—so it was like a sign from Heaven that Mrs. Edwards, her conversion itself a sign from Heaven, had in her company young First Follower Colin Meredith. He was, like Mabel and Willie, Clara and her daughter Elaine, one of the twelve witnesses of that fateful night (the Sign was a death, it was very sudden and very frightening and made Mabel’s knees shake, nothing in her cards had ever alarmed her so), a boy unseen since his brutal kidnapping the week before the Day of Redemption and rumored to have been tortured and killed. Mrs. Edwards and the boy, holding up a gas lantern, were waiting for them at the front door of the old wrecked lodge with a hot cooked supper in a picnic basket, a trunkload of groceries, extra dishware and utensils, spare flashlights, linens and blankets, cleaning supplies, aspirin and cold tablets, and even a fresh-baked cherry pie. They looked like angels there under that lantern in that dark place. The little advance guard of Brunists had been traveling all day and they were cold and tired and a trifle dismayed by the camp’s state of ruin as they entered it, but the affectionate welcome warmed their hearts and turned gloom to festivity. Willie loudly recited verses from the Moses story about getting fed manna in the wilderness, and Clara hugged the woman and the boy and found herself near to tears because everything she’d dreamt of was coming true and her gratitude was overflowing. Mrs. Edwards showed them where to park their motorhomes down on the old baseball playing field and they all feasted together in great joy.

All this they have been explaining to Bernice Filbert, visiting from town, who has inquired about the presence among them of the rich folks’ preacher’s wife and the boy. “I know them Pressyb’terians is a biggity lot,” says Ludie Belle Shawcross, still wearing her stained apron from preparing and serving the Easter dinner, “but that lady she works like a slavey and she’s all heart. The boy he is a orphant and she has took him in like her own youngun. He calls her his mama, first he ever had.”

Bernice nods but she does not seem satisfied. She is dressed, as she usually is, like a lady from the Bible. Because today is Easter, she has told them, she is wearing the same clothes that the Other Mary wore on the day the stone got rolled away and she witnessed the Miracle of the Empty Tomb. It is a simple sepia wrap with a hair clip pinning up one shoulder, a brown sash at the waist and a headscarf to match. Bernice has left her muddy galoshes and medical bag by the door, not part of her Other Mary getup. Her painted-on eyebrows are arched like she’s just had a big surprise, like the surprise the Other Mary must have got when she stuck her nose in. “I was wondering if something was ailing the boy,” Bernice says. “He seems all skittery, like as he might have some mental virus.”

“He is strange,” Mabel says softly, her fingers twitching faintly as if laying out cards, “but he is a chosen one.”

“Chosen?”

“He knows things.”

“His thin little hands is near as smooth as unwrote-on paper and a mortal task to cipher,” says Hazel Dunlevy, the wife of the carpenter Travers Dunlevy. Hazel is a palm reader, small and pretty with a drowsy way of speaking. She always seems to be just waking up. The driver’s seat of the Halls’ caravan and the seat beside it swivel to serve as extra chairs in the tiny sitting area, and she and Glenda Oakes are perched up there, their backs to the streaming windshield, Glenda’s gold tooth gleaming in the shadow of her face. “They ain’t a line on neither palm that’s whole nor straight, just little choppy wiggly bits you cain’t almost see, crisscrossing into each other like ghostly stitchery,” Hazel says with a soft yawn. “The pore thing is purty ghostly hisself and don’t seem hopeful to live long.”

Bernice nods again, more satisfied. Her being among them is an exception to the rule about outsiders, as they have mostly avoided their friends from hereabouts so as not to give out too loud that they are here, but one day one of the little Dunlevy boys stepped on a rusty nail and needed a tetanus shot and when Hazel told Clara, she said: “Ask Ben to go find Bernice.” Bernice is a practical nurse who works part-time at the hospital when she’s not caring for sick folks at their houses. Like so many of their friends, like Clara herself, she is a woman widowed by the Deepwater mine disaster, and for a short time she was a Brunist and maybe still is, though it’s hard to tell. She is what Mabel calls a trifle enigmatic. She gave the little boy his lockjaw shot, washed the nail puncture, painted it with mercurochrome, and dabbed it with her miracle water, and though you could hear him yowling all the way to the other side of the Appalachias while she was doing that, he was soon up and running around as if hunting out more nails to step on. Bernice comes out to the camp regularly now to treat cuts and bruises and the common fevers of the little ones, and to bring them gossip from town, which likely travels both ways. They try to be cautious in what they say but probably they are not. Bernice still goes to their old Nazarene church Bible readings, dressed usually for the reading of the day, and so almost certainly their secret is out. She also works as a home care nurse and at present is attending the critically ill wife of the town banker, whom all remember as the evil one who was the powerful cause of so many of their troubles. Bernice says Mr. Cavanaugh is truly a mean bully as wicked as Holofernes, but Mrs. Cavanaugh is an abused and pathetic creature with an aptitude for true religion, and they should pray for her.