Origin of the Brunists (67 page)

Elaine was thinking a lot about her Pa these days, not just because he had become a Saint and Martyr, or because she and her Ma sometimes talked to him, or because she might go to Heaven and see him soon, but because she had a new Pa now, Mr. Wosznik, and she couldn't help comparing. She loved them both, but the truth was, if she could choose, she would stick with the old one. Ben was very kind, but her old Pa was even kinder. Her old Pa was smarter, too, she thought, and dressed better. Ben always smelled a little bit like a farm. Of course, one thing about Ben, he sure could sing. Their ballad with him singing it was number three on the Hillbilly Hit Parade, and they were making lots of money, which Ben was giving to the movement because they had a lot of expenses now. Just what they spent on postage was something hard to believe. Of course, as her Ma said, there wasn't any need to choose: we were all God's children and, in a way, were all married to each other. Ben sometimes made Elaine think of her brother Harold who was killed in the war, and who always used to play a banjo and sing religious songs to her when she was little, and she wondered if maybe her Ma wasn't thinking of Harold when she married Ben. Her Ma kept her old name so people would always know who she was, calling herself Mrs. Clara Collins-Wosznik.

Elaine was a much bigger help to her Ma now than she used to be. Her Ma even remarked on it several times. She wasn't afraid anymore and people looked up to her because she was one of the First Followers and might even be a Saint someday. She took up collections and typed envelopes and helped organize meetings and even gave instruction in the Creed sometimes to the younger people at Junior Evening Circle. Like everybody always agreed, the Creed was very beautiful; it was based on the Seven Words of Giovanni Bruno and Saint Paul and the Revelation to John, and contained wonderful new ideas about Mother Mary and Spiritual Communication and the God, not of Wrath or Love, but of Light. It changed from time to time because, as her Ma said, it was a
living
Creed: Domiron wasn't mentioned in it anymore, for example, though he might come back, now that Mrs. Norton's book,
The Sayings of Domiron
, was out. She and Dr. Norton had become the first Bishops of the whole state of California, and her Ma would always say how she admired that lady and still to this day wore the medallion, but as Bishops the Nortons were not very active. They seemed too inclined to go their own way and forget they were all children of the same God.

Some of the younger people Elaine instructed were boys and they paid her a lot of attention, but regardless of what her Ma said about all being married to each other, she never let things go too far. It wasn't just because she had her mind on being a Saint, but because she was going steady in a religious kind of way: ever since Carl Dean had gone to jail for trying to kill all those policemen, she had been writing letters regularly with Junior Baxter. Junior had stayed in West Condon with his folks in spite of the terrible Persecution still going on there, and they were meeting secretly now—Junior wrote “underground” and Elaine actually thought they were meeting in the mines or something until her Ma explained. Her Ma didn't seem too happy about her writing to Junior, but she didn't say not to. Elaine didn't show her Ma all the letters either, because sometimes she and Junior had to discuss pretty grown-up things, considering they both wanted to be Saints.

All day long that Sunday that they went to the Mount, the Day of Redemption, she and Junior had been staring at each other. Elaine didn't know at the time if it was because they still hated each other or what, but she didn't like it. Her tunic felt funny on her all day. She even thought of asking Carl Dean to make him stop, but she was afraid of causing trouble just when everybody was so excited about all the Baxter people joining them in the Spirit. And they were so tired. Elaine thought she'd drop, and it made her kind of dizzy all day—she kept getting the funny feeling she was floating in and out of all those other people. They had been up all night watching over poor Marcella whom she loved so—Elaine had cried and cried like a baby, and once had even kissed the cold mouth and nearly died doing it, it just didn't seem possible. All the next day, she kept waiting for Marcella to rise up and take her hand and smile. And then all the baptisms there before they went out to march, just at dawn, because Giovanni Bruno, who was heartbroken, opened his mouth in that special way of his when he wanted to say something important and said:
“Baptize … Light!”
It was the last thing anybody ever remembered him saying before they took him away from the Mount. Her Ma and Reverend Baxter and Mrs. Norton all agreed right away: he meant they were supposed to have a new kind of baptism, a baptism with light, and so they gave him a flashlight to hold and everybody walked under it, sniffling and bawling to beat the band. Her Ma still baptized with light in the same way, she had a special lamp for it, but Junior said his Pa had changed it a little, using real fire, and they couldn't wear anything on their shoulders. That made her Ma a little mad when she found out, just like she got upset at Mrs. Norton for saying out in California that “light” meant “television.” It seemed like her Ma was always caught in the middle between those two.

But Elaine's commitment, the strangest and most important moment of her life, happened out there on the Mount of Redemption. Holding hands with Carl Dean, praying and singing and crying, Elaine had watched the lightning flash and the rain come down, had watched the terrible forces of evil gather like dirty clouds below them, had watched the worshiping multitudes rolling and dancing and beating each other, and she could tell that Carl Dean was pretty excited and not just about the End of the World. He kept looking around nervously and saying they might never see each other again after today and once he even asked her to go down in the trees with him so they could be alone a minute. But she was afraid and praying all the time, because she really believed, she really was
sure
it was going to happen and right
then
, and she kept looking for her Pa. She held on to Carl Dean's hand because she was scared, but all the time she kept feeling miles away from him: suddenly the only thing that counted was that
moment
and Carl Dean couldn't get his mind off what would happen
next
.

But then somebody came running up the Mount and he wasn't in a tunic or taking off his dark garments of the earth and they saw it was Mr. Miller and Elaine felt a great terror because he seemed to be headed right for Marcella and everybody started screaming like crazy and Carl Dean ran away, left her all alone on the top of the Mount, ran to get Mr. Miller, and Elaine saw him hit him and everybody was hitting him and it was raining something awful and Marcella seemed to get right up and throw herself into the mud and Saint Stephen went tumbling down and Elaine was on her knees in the mud and bawling and calling for her Pa and terrified to be all alone and just then something hit her—
whack!
She spun, falling into the mud, scared to death, and she saw it was Junior Baxter. He was cold white in his tunic and his head seemed like on fire. He had a long greenish-white switch and he looked very serious. Nobody had ever switched her before, her Pa, her Ma, nobody. She looked around for her Ma, but everybody was over by Mr. Miller.
“No!”
she gasped.

But Junior didn't hit her again. He looked around on the ground, found another switch somebody had dropped—the little tree there was nothing but a barbed pole now. He handed it to her. Her heart was pounding like mad, and she could hardly hold onto that greasy thing, could hardly see through the tears and rain, could hardly hear him in the rain's roar when he said, “Hit me!” His voice was soft, almost like a girl's. He turned his wet white back to her. She stood up, her knees shaky, but suddenly she wasn't afraid anymore, the conflicts were gone, the strange sense of sin she felt for not being
within
was lifted, and at last the moment was whole. She swatted him lightly. She still didn't know quite what she was doing and she was still bawling, but the sky seemed brighter even though it was still raining pitchforks and it seemed like they were suddenly all alone in the world and she thought: It's coming!
Now!
And Junior's switch whistled and bit into her side. She cried out, but the pain was a joy, strangely a joy, and the rain was right and the lightning and the frenzy, and everything was
right now:
she swung, hard—
crack!
Under his wet red hair, he smiled a little. She closed her eyes. His whip stung her legs. She lashed his legs. He whipped her tummy. She swung at his face. Faster and faster they slashed away and now the blows fell all over, on her face and chest, down her back, they didn't take turns, just gave and took with all their hearts, and she couldn't even see him, never knew when she hit him, just felt him out there, felt everything at once, and maybe she was singing, or maybe she was screaming, but it was coming, she grew a giant and lashed the world to her heart and her Pa was smiling down and the world was on her back, she stretched out her arms and dug her nails into its flesh and the rain was in her face and mud in her mouth, but she could still see Junior somehow, looking down with that serious face, the switch in his hand, and he had blood around his eye and trickling from his mouth, his hair red in the gray sky, and she stretched her limbs, north south east and west, stretched to embrace it all:
NOW!

But when she looked again, Junior Baxter was on the ground and Carl Dean Palmers was on top of him, yelling that Junior's Ma had just had a baby in front of everybody, though it turned out it really wasn't a baby but a miscarriage, and he was hitting Junior with his fists, hitting him and hitting him and hitting him. And that was when it happened, when Elaine chose between love and sainthood: for one pitch-black moment she swooned away into the earth, to the very pit, then exploded up again into light, and the next thing she knew she was scratching and clawing Carl Dean, and screaming at him to stop, and when he did she fell down on top of Junior, all bloody and suffering, so Carl Dean couldn't hit him again, and she screamed at Carl Dean to go away,
go away!
At first, she thought Carl Dean was going to cry, but then, instead, he sort of just went crazy. He called her what Junior had called her—he didn't understand at all!—and right in front of her own Ma who had just come running up to say they had to get going because the Persecution was starting, and then, hollering like the Indians do in the movies, he went running right at all those policemen with their big white clubs. She never saw what happened because her Ma pulled her away, they had to run, they didn't have time.

Later, she learned that Carl Dean had been sent up to detention for six months to a year for nearly killing three policemen. She thought that was awful, yet she sometimes wondered if he wasn't the closest he ever got to real salvation right at that moment. He never wrote to her because of course he didn't know where she was. That suited her okay. She never saw Junior Baxter again either, but they wrote letters. Sometimes they talked in the letters about what happened that afternoon on the Mount of Redemption. They both agreed they had “grown up” that day and had taken the whole world into their hearts. In the days that followed, things got broken up again, and they lost the complete feeling, but to help them remember, they agreed to touch each sore place every night when they said their prayers. The last mark to go away was one he had made across her heart. He said he believed that was very significant, for it meant that her heart was God's, and she agreed. They both looked forward to the real and final Coming of the Light when they'd all be together in absolute union again.

Her Ma and his Pa also wrote letters, but not about the same things. Her Ma was worried, because Reverend Baxter kept insisting about having his own way on everything, and she thought maybe he tended to carry things too far sometimes. Like the baptism business, for instance, and some of the rules about the tunics. Her Ma liked to think of their Prophet as a great new spiritual force unleashed upon the world, a renovating force for all Christendom, she said, but it didn't seem like Reverend Baxter even thought of himself as a Christian anymore, and he was more excited about the way the Prophet spit in the priest's eye than in the way her Ma was helping the movement grow. Still, she went ahead and made him the Bishop of West Condon, mainly because nobody else was there anymore. Brother Willie Hall, who was
supposed
to be the Bishop, wasn't able to stay on account of the Persecution, and so he and Sister Mabel became Traveling Missionaries for the movement. Elaine followed all this very closely, for she had a very strange feeling about something: she wondered if maybe she herself hadn't come closer to Redemption that day on the Mount than her own Ma.

One very sad thing happened the Day of Redemption: Sister Emma Clegg died of a stroke. She was a very holy woman and some said afterward that God had taken her away as a Sign of his keeping his Word. Nevertheless, it was a terrible shock for Brother Hiram, who was such a nice man and loved his wife so. At first, he was put in jail with all the other menfolk, but they let him right out again to take care of burying his wife, and they never came back to get him again. For a long time, he was very depressed, and he didn't want even to think about making a new life. But her Ma, who had suffered so herself, had restored his spirit and made him get active again in the movement. He became the Bishop of Randolph Junction and, on that Sunday morning of the seventh of June, the day of the possible Midnight Coming—though by then nearly everybody was expecting it on the eighth of January, possibly next year, but more likely either seven or fourteen years from now—had married the widow Sister Betty Wilson, her Ma and her new Pa Ben standing as witnesses. As her Ma said at the little party after, it was a very poetical arrangement. A lot of people were there from all over the world, and most of them cried to think about it.