The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (41 page)

“He beats you a lot?”

“Not like before. Nat sorta tamed him.”

“Your father’s skeereda Nat?”

“Everbody is. Junior’s setting hisself up to take over, but Nat’s the one with our father’s fire.” Ben doesn’t say anything, so she says, “I think it’s awful what they done to your dog. Junior is telling everyone you must of hid your gun in Nat’s backpack to make us all look bad and get us moved out, and that made Nat mad.”

“Well, it ain’t so. Maybe Junior’s trying to hide something.”

“That’s what I reckon.” Pulling out of the camp gates, they had to thread their way through the crowds of people milling about, coming or going, and the fields they are passing now are littered with tents and trailers. The mine hill, too, only partially cleared, new smaller tents popping up there. The life she has known, wants to know no more.

“Your ma’s looking poorly. She was crying a lot yesterday.”

“This place gives her the creeps. After what happened, having a dead baby out there in the storm with nobody to help her but me, she didn’t never want to come back. She should of stayed home in bed that day or gone to hospital, but my father drug her out there, saying if they was all transcended she would not wanta miss out, nor not the unborn baby neither. She was sick for a long spell after that, really sick, and she just never exactly got well again.”

“That’s too bad, Franny. Must be a burden to you.”

“It can be.”

“So why is it y’mean to go see Tess? Y’reckon they’s a chance she’ll come back to us?”

“Maybe.”

“She knows you’re coming?”

“Nope.”

They are passing an old derelict farmhouse that would seem to be Ben’s, but, after slowing down, they roll on by. Ben doesn’t say anything, except a soft little grunt, but she saw what he saw: the wheel of a motorcycle sticking out at the back.

“We baptized it and raptured it, Mom, all at once,” says Mark. “You ain’t God, kid,” Dot says, cuffing his big stuck-out ears. “I’ll rapture your little britches if you try anything like that again. Now you and Matty get down on your knees over in that corner and pray for an hour that you don’t get sent to hell for putting on airs and messing like that with God’s handiwork.” “Oh Mom, that’s where the sandbox was!” “We didn’t
mean
to rapture the cat, Mom,” Matthew wheedles. “We was only wanting to baptize it.” “I
told
you not to put gasoline on it,” says Luke, and Dot sends her to the corner, too. They have been sharing this unfurnished prefab in Chestnut Hills with a family from Alabama, who left in a huff when her kids burned their cat, no doubt heading straight out to the camp to tattle on them. Well, good riddance, she couldn’t stand the stink of their homemade kitty litter dug up out of the back yard and the Blaurocks now have the place to themselves, though they don’t plan on staying long. That family was just a bunch of ignorant, drawling rednecks who knew nothing about the latter days and were always complaining about keeping the place clean and about her kids bullying their kids and about little Johnny’s dirty diapers and his whiny crying and about her loud snoring and Isaiah always hogging the bathroom. Well, her husband can’t help it. He has a nervous stomach, and did they think they didn’t snore, too? If God wanted her to snore, what could she or anyone else do about it? Not sleep? Get serious.

Dot and Isaiah Blaurock know everything there is to know about the Rapture and the Tribulation and the Last Days. They have been members of at least a dozen different churches and have been through what they went through yesterday any number of times. They believe in the general prophecy and whenever they hear about another specific end date, they try to be there. They find that they always cheer the other people up just by turning up and they get a lot of hugs, and that always makes them feel good. They first heard Clara Collins preach and Ben Wosznik sing in North Carolina, where Isaiah was working as an itinerant house painter, and they’ve been following them around, off and on, ever since. Not much Isaiah can’t do. He has been a farmer, a blacksmith, a roofer, a factory worker, a ditch and grave digger, a miner, a garbage collector, a construction worker, a cook, and, even silent as he mostly is, a sometime faith healer. Other things, too, probably. Hard to keep track. He doesn’t do any of these things particularly well, though his ability to keep their old Dodge on the road is a miracle by itself, but he’s done a bit of everything and so he’s valuable to any community like this one. Doesn’t have much to say, her Isaiah, but God gave him a mighty engine and she’s grateful. Clara has expressed her personal gratitude that they have come here to help out and she says there is a lot for them to do; Isaiah has lent a hand in putting the tents up on the mine hill and Dot has already showed that jellybean preacher’s wife a few things about gardening. Dot grew up on a farm in upstate New York; she knows what she’s talking about. They will be moving out to the camp this noon during the farewell luncheon for the busloads of old bluehairs from around the country, knowing they cannot be refused. They are penniless, and except for essentials, without possessions, having given up all for Christ, and they will be needed out there. This little house is something of a mess and doesn’t smell good, but that’s at least half the fault of the rednecks and no reason they should have to clean up after them, so they will just gather up their things and leave it as is, glad to get out of it. It’s owned by some rich guy named Suggs who has bought the Brunists their camp and is building them a new church, so it’s just pennies out of his pocket to get the place spruced up. In fact, maybe Isaiah can get the job.

Ben asked them to come out early this morning and help strike the tents and clean up the camp after what the bikers did to it, but you can’t do everything, not when you have four excitable kids and a husband who can’t get off the can until noon. Dot understands the rednecks’ complaints—Isaiah is sometimes a nuisance to her, too. At least the camp has separate outdoor privies for ladies and gents, though she has trouble getting through the skinny wooden door. She and Isaiah like Ben better than Clara, who is a bit bossy for their taste, though she has a big church to run, so you have to give her credit, and both of them are two of the flat-out sincerest people she’s ever known. They believe. You can feel it in everything they say and do. It was what most drew her and Isaiah to them. But they’re both missing something, too, something that lets you know they are in touch with final things. They are, to put it plain, too down-to-earth. They are not
possessed
. That’s what this group is mostly, a lot of sincere dedicated people, full of conviction, but without much pentecostal fire. They can do things like build camps, but they can’t lift off. They’ve assembled a good team, though, with singers and preachers and bookkeepers, plenty of hard workers and even some prophets—those two boys don’t look much like prophets, but that’s probably what they are, and they’re smart as a whip. Or two whips. Dot always thought there must be a scientific way to get at this mystery-of-all-mysteries, God being the master scientist after all, and if anyone can puzzle out when the Rapture is like to strike, it’s those two, whatever might be their private ways. Dot looks forward to being interviewed by them as she figures she can set them straight on a few matters. That woman Mabel Hall seems like she’s on to something, too, though it’s not completely Christian. More gypsylike. Old Goldenthroat from Florida has a great gift of the tongue and can really wind up the faithful, but he is something of a smoothie, you can’t quite trust him. He was trying to do some faith healing out on the Mount yesterday but it was a complete washout. Isaiah has had better luck at that, and he can hardly string three intelligent words together. Still, old Hiram has gathered a real churchful around him and they pay their own way, so you can’t complain. As for the rich man Suggs, he is like a kind of Joseph of Arimathea, more just part of the background plot than a main actor. He won’t even wear the tunic. He might or might not get taken aboard when the Rapture happens.

The nearest thing to a man possessed she has seen is that short, jowly preacher, Abner Baxter. The women around him are pathetic and Young Abner is a spongy dimwit, but Abner Senior is full of beans; or, better said, full of fire. Holy fire. He knows the Bible forwards and backwards and has a voice that could knock down the walls of Jericho. His commie background is worrying to some, but it only shows he has always been on the side of the poor, even before his Christian conversion. He has raised some hard questions out there, questions that still need answering. Just why they are spending all that money on building a church, for example, when the end is coming anyway and there are needy persons who must be fed while they wait for it. He gets people’s backs up with his rage and bluster and his biker boys are an embarrassment (Dot understands wild kids, he shouldn’t be blamed for them), but he’s a man driven by his calling and someone you have to listen to. That’s what she and Isaiah think, and a lot of other people are thinking the same way.

Abner Baxter is also the one, even more than Ben and Clara, who seems most set on keeping Bruno in Brunism. His last conversion was a hard one and it has stuck. It’s the words of their Prophet that makes these people different, but they don’t all get it. Brunism is otherwise like a lot of the evangelical churches Dot and Isaiah have been members of: the Bible as the infallible word of God and its prophecies as future history, the creation of the world in a day by the hand of God, the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ with direct access to Him through prayer, the fall and salvation of man through adult baptism following the repenting of sins, speaking in tongues, faith healing, all that sort of thing that no one can argue with, plus of course a focus on the Rapture, the Tribulation, the millennial reign of Christ, and the Final Judgment, all announced by God in the Bible, all imminent. What Bruno delivers is a step past that. He has announced a whole new era, betokened by baptism by light (Isaiah and Dot favor Abner Baxter’s reading of this as baptism by fire and have signed up for it), as though to say, this is it, it’s coming now, get ready. And he has opened up a new window onto exactly when and where it’s going to happen. You have to believe God is going to get some advance word out to the faithful, and that’s what seems to have happened here. It’s what the Mount of Redemption and all these dates they’ve been learning are all about and it’s why Dot and Isaiah have come here. Jesus may turn up any minute.

Just who or what Giovanni Bruno was is more of a mystery. A man of the people, yes, from a humble family, who fought his own priests as Jesus did his, and was martyred. Above all, a man filled with a messianic fever—you can see it in the eyes of the pictures of him. But it seems like the real father of this movement was Clara’s first husband. Ely Collins had the Holy Spirit in him, saw visions, converted a lot of these people, and was about to prophesy the end of the world, when he suddenly got killed in the mine as if the Antichrist were after him to shut him up. Before he died, though, he apparently passed the Spirit on, or God did, to his younger partner, who people said was like a son to him, so Johnny Brown, as many are calling him, wasn’t really Johnny Brown, or Giovanni Bruno either, but more like a living transmitter for the voice of Ely Collins, and through him, of the Almighty Himself. Some say, especially those around Abner Baxter, that their Prophet, whom they call simply Bruno—
Bru-no
—actually died in the mine, too, but that his body, which still had both legs, was allowed to stagger on long enough like a kind of holy zombie to carry Ely Collins’ spirit and message to the world. They say there was a bird did all this. Pretty weird, but Dot has known weirder and she likes the story. It adds up, and right now, it suits her.

It’s time to get ready to move out to the camp. They’ll be doing lunch out there in a couple of hours and there’s nothing to eat here, all the food they hauled back from the buffet yesterday having long since vanished, so they can’t be late. There will be crowds of hungry people; they’ll have to fight for a place at table. No problem. She’s good at that. The three kids have left the corner when she wasn’t looking and are probably out terrorizing the neighbors’ brats again. There aren’t many toys in this slummy neighborhood, but they have managed to break or steal just about every one there is, what can you do. There’s no tub out at the camp. She’ll have one last hot bath and then pop all four in her bathwater for a quick scrubdown before leaving. Maybe she can get Isaiah to take a bath, too, though he doesn’t often. She sniffs the air. Little Johnny’s filled his pants again. The kid eats like a horse and poops like one, too. At least, when they get raptured, praise the Lord, there’ll be no more dirty diapers.

While loading the food they have bought—for the second time—for today’s big farewell luncheon into the trunk of Mrs. Edwards’ car in the highway supermarket parking lot, the woman asks Clara if she’s aware that her daughter may be practicing some form of flagellation. Clara knows what the word means and what this is all about, but the question has caught her by surprise and she asks anyway, and the minister’s wife says it was the ancient religious practice of being whipped or whipping oneself as a purification rite. Clara has read about it and heard preachers preach about it. Punishment of the flesh as the corrupt prison of the spirit, the imitation of Christ’s own sufferings, the flogging He took from Pontius Pilate, and so on, a kind of extreme penance. Sometimes not just to purge one’s own sins, but those of the entire world. But she is skeptical. For the poor, Ely used to say, life is penance enough; we don’t need to heap more pain on it. And there’s something downright unhealthy about it. It’s supposed to be an act of humility, a rejection of the body, but it’s mostly just the opposite. And it can be something nastier. Ludie Belle Shawcross has stories. “How do you know about this?” she asks.

“Well, you asked me to speak with her and…”

“Yesterday morning Ben seen her coming from out the woods with Junior Baxter in their tunics and they was blood on them.” There. It’s out. Since Ben told her about it, she has been trying not to think about it, and therefore thinking about nothing else. She found the tunic before the girl could wash it and it was true. She has tried to talk to Elaine about it, but the child just ducks her head and says nothing. Clara felt herself growing angry—angry and fearful—and she had to back away and try to figure things out, but there was no time to do that; this weekend has taken all her time. Which has been true for too long. She is not the mother she used to be or ought to be. She has become instead the mother of a whole movement, something more important than just any one person, though she never asked for that, and her life is full up to the brim, often leaving her at the outer edge of her energy and abilities. “She sometimes does it to herself. In her room. A belt, I think.” Clara is finding it very difficult to talk about this. Her chest feels like there’s a big stone in it. She had not meant to tell anyone, but if it has to happen, it’s probably best it’s Mrs. Edwards. She has experience with young people’s problems and maybe can help. “Do you…do you think they’re doing anything they shouldn’t oughta? I mean, taking their clothes off or…?”