The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (119 page)

Out on the Mount of Redemption, the self-appointed Brunist Defender Dot Blaurock feels woozy with hunger. Breakfast didn’t amount to much. It’s getting hot and there’s no proper place to relieve yourself out here, though many have been doing so behind the backhoes or their cars or on the backside of the Mount or wherever. Young Darren Rector, still getting a lot of mileage for striking down the false prophet on this very spot two days ago, feels certain that they’re here for a purpose as yet unrevealed, a purpose that may be thwarted if they desert the Mount, and he suggests they open up the mine building restrooms as they did on the anniversary of the Day of Redemption. A good idea, but no one has the key. That guy McDaniel, Mr. Suggs’ strip mine manager and newly appointed deputy acting sheriff, says they should stay here. They could get trapped in the camp, and they’re better off holding the high ground. But what if those helicopters on the horizon should come this way? They’d be sitting ducks on this open hillside. No, Dot is one of those who is ready to call it a day. They’ve made their point, they’ve achieved the summit, they’ve held their memorial service—better to go back to the camp, try to find something to eat. Besides, she has squatter’s rights to the camp sickbay cabin and she doesn’t want anyone taking that away from her. “Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on,” the preachers say, quoting Lord Jesus, the Son of Man, the one they’re all waiting for, “for is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” Sure. But they’re starving, and they can’t hold it much longer. The Son of Man never talked about what to do if you can’t find a restroom. There’s not much food left at the camp, but they can harvest the rest of the garden, eat it up before the Rapture comes. The camp is full of birds and animals that can be hunted. God will provide. One of her fellow Defenders says they could take up a collection and go pick up some hotdogs and buns and soda pop at the highway supermarket. Several of the women volunteer to do the cooking. Spirits rise. Then some terrified people arrive down on the mine road, jump out of their cars, and come running up the Mount to join them.
“It’s the end of the world!”
they wail.
“It really is!”
Sobbing and blubbering, they tell them about the demons on motorcycles, the bombs, the guns, the fires, the slaughter, the destruction.
“They’s hunderds of them!” “They’re everywhere!” “They’ve blowed up all the churches!” “Ours is burnt plumb to the ground, Abner!”
People start praying in earnest. It looks like a long day. Maybe even an endless one.
“Now is the judgment of this world!”
cries Abner Baxter. “Mom, when is Jesus coming?” Mattie asks. “Soon,” she says hopefully. And then He does.

With the improving weather, Glenda has taken the children—hers, Hazel’s, Wanda’s and a few others temporarily abandoned by people who arrived at the camp this morning—down to the garden to collect fruit and vegetables for their lunch and do a little weeding. Hunk has killed and gutted a chicken they will all share, hoping that the others over on the Mount of Redemption do not come back before they are done. Not even Jesus could stretch a chicken out among so many, and anyway, he’s not yet around to work such marvels, were he able. She also has some canned and packaged goods that Ludie Belle Shawcross gave her before she left, but Glenda intends to save them for the hard times ahead that she foresees. This is not prophecy or fortune telling, it’s just the stone truth they face. If Hovis or Uriah had come back, she would have had someone to drive the Dunlevy caravan and they might have left with the others, but those two fellows never showed and their house trailer is still parked in the lot. They both seemed more befuddled than usual this morning and they have probably ended up over on the Mount without knowing how they got there. She oversees the children’s little harvest, making sure the plants themselves are not pulled up with the weeds, and leads them in singing while they work—children’s hymns and nursery rhymes and popular songs like “Mairzy Doats” and “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?” When she hears the roar of intruders coming up the back road, she hurriedly shepherds the children into the garden shed and closes the door and tells them they’re all going to play the quiet game while she reads their palms. Everyone wants to be first and they all start shouting and she has to shush them, telling them that there is a little voice she listens to when she reads their palms and they have to be very quiet so she can hear it, and if they listen very very hard, they may hear it, too. She does not tell them what she really hears in here: rustlings of the flesh. For here the two of them were found naked with the bullet holes in their heads and here something of them remains. As Glenda examines the children’s plump little hands, she whispers all the happy wonderful things she sees there. She sees dark things, too, but she keeps these to herself. Even if there’s sadness ahead for them, they’re only children and need not fret over it. And then, just as she hears the intruders sputtering along on the old two-track road on the other side of the creek, then pausing ominously, only yards away, one of the little ones starts to howl. Wanda’s oldest, Davey, a boy not all there. He is hungry and thirsty and has made a mess in his pants and there’s no stopping him. She claps her hand over his mouth and then the others start. Would God approve strangling one to save the rest?

Why did you bring us out here? Wasn’t once enough?

It’s my suffering Christ side. Being reviled we bless, being persecuted we rejoice, and all that. But now that I’m here, seeing this great multitude sunning itself on the hillside, I feel some more blesseds coming on.

Oh no. You’ve done that already.

I know, but I’m doing a rewrite. I shall open my mouth and teach the many, for it is my task to bear witness to the truth.

They’re beyond teaching. Look at them. They’re not sunning themselves. They’re out of their minds with fear and religious frenzy.

They stand—their shared arms outstretched in iconic embrace—on the cusp of the mine hill above the chalky cross trenched into the side, gazing down upon the astonished followers of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno, the pale plump Jehoshaphat fellow sweating in his brown suit at their side, excited children scurrying around their feet like foraging rodents. Some of the cultists have fallen to their knees in the greasy mud in frenzied prayer, tearfully repenting of their sins, which are no doubt multitudinous and unforgivable, and begging for admittance into the kingdom of Heaven, while others, more skeptical, draw together, scowl and grumble. “What’s goin’ on here?” the one in the wheelchair asks, peering virulently up at them from between his hunched shoulders. They fear most those on their knees. And the children. That troublemaker dragging the filthy pink slipper, for example, who is at this moment describing for all her pals what she saw last time when she crawled under their robe.

“Can we go now?” the quivering creature at their elbow asks, sotto voce.

“In a moment, Mr. Jenkins. First, I have some devils of false expectations to cast out.”

“Devils—?”

Well, if you’re going to insist on acting out this mad charade, we should stop standing here with our arms out like a scarecrow and sit as Jesus sat.

As I sat, I know. But there is no place to sit here unless you offer me your knee.

My knee is your knee.

Sometimes in nightmares young Reverend Jenkins has found himself standing before a great throng in his underwear, obliged to give a speech or a sermon he has forgotten. Though he is now dressed in a handsome if slightly stained three-piece corduroy suit, he feels as naked and lost as in his nightmares. It seems a lifetime since his bus ride into this crazed community—crazed with religion, true, but in some ghastly medieval or else futuristic way, not at all the peaceful-valley pastorate he had imagined, more akin to his happy days back in his hometown Sunday School Brigade. Unimaginable catastrophe has followed unimaginable catastrophe like the turning of pages in a horror novel, with footnotes by Jesus’ lady friend, who on the drive out here explained to him, among many other improbabilities, that Jesus, as he is known now, whoever he was before, is one of the true megalopsychoi of the world, and though Joshua didn’t know what that was, he did know that “mega” meant big, so it probably meant something like a great huge psycho, a total raving lunatic, and that made complete sense even if it did cast a shadow on Jesus himself—in his own time, that is—especially when she drew the comparison.
“Blessed are those who learn by unlearning! who make by unmaking!”
the fellow is crying now, stirring devotion and hostility in equal portions among the cultists like contending fires.
“Who have faith in faithlessness and believe in unbelieving!”

“Hallelujah!”

“What did he say?”

“He said, have faith and believe!”

“I
do
, Lord!”

Joshua knows this is not going to end well. He did not want to come out here, but everything was blowing up and people were shooting at him and there were thunderous crashing and booming noises, so he was grateful that they spied him chasing after the car and stopped to let him in, no matter where they were going. By then he was crying, couldn’t help it. He is a modern man with modern beliefs who does not believe in Leviathan or Behemoth or the Whore of Babylon, much less the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, beyond their usefulness as metaphors (when engaged in that mode of discourse), but back in that town he felt as if literally pursued by all of them, and he feared worse ahead. The woman did not want to come here either, and on the ride out she begged the man to drive away to some safe place, but the man seemed not even to hear her, singing loudly that he was going to go tell it on the mountain. When they arrived, he jumped out and commenced to climb what turned out to be the malodorous back side of the cultic hill, Joshua and the lady following, because what else could they do? Joshua’s heart was in his mouth or else sunk in his sweaty new brown oxfords (blisters on both heels!), his terrified gaze taking in everything and nothing at the same time. As they drew near to the summit, they could hear people on the other side loudly reciting the Lord’s Prayer—barking it out, really, like at a football pep rally. The lady gave a little cry as though she suddenly had a pain somewhere down where she was holding herself and ran back down to the car. Joshua tried to follow, but the Jesus fellow had an iron grip on his elbow, and arguing with himself all the while as if there were someone alive inside him, he dragged Joshua on up to the summit. And there they were, the infamous Brunists, spread out below them in the blazing sunshine, a kind of vast holy bedlam, hundreds of them, many in glowing white tunics sticking wetly to their bodies and belted with ropes, the wildest of them clustered behind a wet trench dug into the hillside as though penned up there. And guns, guns everywhere. As the helicopters clattered overhead, a preacher ranted about the children of the kingdom being cast into the outer dark with weeping and gnashing of teeth (
he
was weeping,
he
was gnashing his teeth!), and the Jesus person next to him, against whom he leaned, shouted:
“Blessed, my friends, is the outer dark!”
Whereupon there was a gasp of recognition, or else of alarm, and people fell to their knees in the mud, and there were howls and hallelujahs, and shouts of anger and disbelief.
“For it snuffs out the illusions of the inner light!”

“Yea, Lord, punish the wicked!”

“Bring the light!”

“No! Cain’t you hear? It ain’t him!”

“Yes, it
is!
Praise Jesus!
He’s come back!”

“Just like He promised!”

Joshua was introduced to the gathered ecstatics as friend and disciple Jumping Jehoshaphat—“His father was a king!”—and his knees turning to jelly, he cracked his lips in a quivering imitation of a smile, pleading with his tearing eyes not to shoot. The man had released his elbow. He could run, but he couldn’t run. He could only hold on. “Can we go now?” he whimpered into the man’s armpit, but the man, after waving off the doubters and announcing to himself and the hillside what he is going to do—devils are part of it!—began unleashing his mad beatitudes. The language was familiar, but in the way nonsense in dreams is somehow familiar, and Joshua found himself grasping once more at the hope he might still be sleeping on the bus ride in. When the fellow in plaid shirt and suspenders who was riding the bus with him (so long ago!) removed his billed cap, stood his rifle on its stock, and started singing, “God sees the little sparrow fall, I know He loves me, too!” the man in the robes sang back (his singing voice was
not
divine),
“Damned are the fallen sparrows for they shall be eaten!”

“Lord, save us! Don’t let us be eaten!”

“Shut up, you fools!”

“Hear me now! You must leave this wicked place! Go forth, be fruitful, and multiply!”

“He said we are leaving this wicked place!”

“Save us, Lord! Take us to the Promised Land!”

In the distance, smoke rises from where the town must be—or have been—as warplanes swarm and explosive thuds resound, and it occurs to Joshua that the man beside him might really be who he says he is, that the Christian end times he always believed in—or
believed
he believed in—are really upon them in all their monstrosity after all, and that he is standing amid the Holy Remnant. But then the man says:
“Verily, I say unto you, blessed are ye that have seen, and yet have not believed!”
and though he can’t think why—he can’t think at all!—Joshua feels certain this is not right. He knows all the songs (that scary Sunday School tune “Too Late, Too Late!” is now pounding through his tormented head), but he has never been good at quoting the Scriptures. Understanding the varieties of human discourse is something he
is
good at, and he knows that, at such a critical moment, he should be employing—and
urgently!
—the analytical one in search of efficacious action but that mode has abandoned him and all others—even prayer!—as well. He is paralyzed with fear, fear and confusion, his mind turned to a hot burning coal (he is standing on black chips of coal, the whole hill may be made of nothing but coal; his feet are burning, too), even as his belly turbulently liquefies. Once able to hold several contrary notions in his head at the same time and act separately on each, Joshua can no longer hold one thing in his mind at the same time and could not act on it if he could.