The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (90 page)

“Hello, Nick. Calling from home. Here checking on Irene before heading out to the club with Tommy.”

“Terrific day for it, Ted. Do you need a fourth?”

“Thanks, but Tommy and I have things to talk about.”

“Is Irene—?”

“About the same. Concetta’s here. But, Nick, I just heard that, after everything else that’s happened today, the bank has been vandalized.”

“Yes, graffiti painted across the east wall and window. Something from the Bible, I think. Getting someone to clean it up now. They’ve arrested a man named Johnson.”

“Johnson? Chester Johnson, probably. Bad seed. In and out of jail so often he should be paying rent.”

“That’s him. But he seems all but illiterate. Everyone says it was really your mad preacher who did it.”

“Edwards?”

“He must have sprung his cage. That dancer has been running around all afternoon like a headless chicken with her feathers up and tail showing looking for him.”

“I think I caught a glimpse. Are we ready to make those arrests?”

“There are still some jurisdiction issues, but, yes, the warrants are prepared for our boys to enter the church camp and we know where the minister is being kept.”

“So what’s holding things up?”

“Well, I was going to do it early next week.”

“Do it today.”

In the melancholic penumbra of St. Stephen’s, waiting for Father Baglione to turn up so she can take confession, Angela Bonali prays silently to the Virgin Mary, asking that the Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, intercede for her in restoring Tommy Cavanaugh’s temporarily lost affection. He is confused and frightened, O holy Mother, and does not understand his true self. There are many different images of Mary in the church—the pious Virgin, grieving Mother, triumphant Queen of Heaven; Angela has chosen to pray before a more voluptuous and youthful Mary, smiling sweetly, the curly-headed Baby Jesus at her ample breast. The sight of the infant nuzzling his mother brings tears to her eyes. I live my life in sorrow, she tells the Virgin, calling upon the White Dove song she shared with Tommy. Darkness hides me where I kneel to pray. I thank you, dear Mother, for your promise to help me in my need today.

Mary knows of course about the anal and oral sex and the dirty pictures and all the rest of it, and Angela can only hope that the Blessed Virgin in her Heavenly wisdom, for all her lack of experience, can understand and forgive. When she sees it through the Virgin’s eyes, it does look a bit sordid. But from deep inside herself, when lost in his embrace, suffering shivers of delight, it is mysterious and beautiful. Cosmic. It helped us feel so much part of each other, O holy Mother. We became as one person, it was really divine in the true meaning of that word, and I felt closer to God than I’ve ever felt before. She can see how Mary might not be convinced. It’s just so hard, she whispers, feeling a pain in her chest (and also in her rumbling tummy—she is starving!), to be a woman. Please don’t let me fall back into my dark ages. You remember how awful that was. I couldn’t bear it!

Gazing at Mother Mary looking down upon her so lovingly, no matter how sinful she might be, Angela is reminded of her own mother, whom she misses terribly. They came here often to pray together, though the last time she prayed alone. It was the day of her mother’s funeral, the loneliest and saddest day of her life. Her dad always barks a lot and stomps around the house like the most important person in the world, leaving his cigar butts and ashes all over the place, but her mom, big and warm and kind, was just quietly there for her. Someone to talk to, to lean on. She let Angela know just how she felt but she never scolded her. Now Angela is the woman of the house, cooking and cleaning for a sullen old man and a despicable bully of a brother, earning until now the family’s only steady income, and all her brothers and sisters expect this of her, so long as the old man is alive. A woman! It’s hard to believe she’ll soon be twenty! She crosses herself, feeling Death’s chill blowing past. Sancta Maria, Mater Domini nostri, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

In catechism class, Father Bags always insisted on learning the Latin prayers; Angela was good at it and still remembers them. Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum… I am sorry for my sins. Which, in Latin, seem less personal, less shameful, more like just the way the world works. One night, when Tommy caught her crossing herself before making love, he asked in his joking way if she thought that would make the sex better. She said she was only asking that their love be blessed. But wasn’t she sinning? No, not really, she said, gazing upon him, feeling almost feverish with desire. It was okay because she loved him with all her heart and would love him forever. That made him grin and blush, which was pretty unusual for Tommy Cavanaugh. His erection dipped slightly, so she knelt and kissed it as she might kiss the toes of a saint. And then, because one thing usually leads to another, not as she might kiss the toes of a saint. His manliness always thrilled her. Well, his whole beautiful body did, his handsome face, his excited gray-blue eyes, his smile of pleasure, his strong long-fingered hands and the way they gripped and stroked her. “His searching hand seared a path down my abdomen and onto my thigh.” She has written that in her diary. Should she tell Father Bags that in confession? How would you say it in Latin?

She realizes that her thoughts have drifted away from prayer and she tries to return to it. Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae. Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve… But she is too hungry. Ad te clamamus, she cannot. All day she has been suffering a wild desperate craving for a banana split with scoops of strawberry and chocolate ice cream, hot caramel sauce, maraschino cherries, nuts, and whipped cream. It would be the worst thing ever for her diet, but these mad cravings happen to expectant women and she is almost certainly having to eat for two now, isn’t she? And she hasn’t had a bite all day—the refrigerator was empty, Charlie having cleaned it out—no wonder she’s hungry. She could devour a pizza, too. With double cheese. But after the banana split. Father Baglione has arrived and is shuffling about by the altar with his shoulders above his head and his big nose in his cassock like an old buzzard. Perhaps this is not the best moment for confession. She begs the Holy Virgin not to let her monthlies come—not yet, anyway—whispers another Salve Regina and prays that her father’s house be saved, and leaves the church. Was the old priest scowling? He always scowls.

Father Baglione is known for his scowling sobriety. The scowl is a gift from his Lombard forebears; the sobriety he has acquired in consequence of it. If a playful spirit came naturally to him, as to most children, it did not sit well on his countenance and inspire playfulness in others, except at his own expense. He was known derisively from a young age as Bags and was often the victim of bullies and practical jokers. He therefore abandoned the playground and withdrew into scholarship—which he was not very good at, never having mastered his new language—but as a poor immigrant boy, he had few other options, and soon enough, relying on diligence, he found himself in seminary, where jollity was less of a virtue, memorization more useful than reason, and Latin closer to his mother tongue. His face was there deemed a pious one and he adopted that reading as the true one, achieving a reputation for humble self-denial and implacable orthodoxy. His father was a New York cobbler, but he had immigrant uncles who had taken up coalmining, and so willingly accepted a parish in coal country among natives of his own country, supposing it to be the first step into the ecclesiastical hierarchy. But Latin, he has come to learn, is not the persuasive language of accession in the American church, nor is humility its channel. So here he remains, dear old dour old Father Bags, a living portrait of the communal gloom. He knows that others, gazing into his face, sense that he has seen into the very depths of their sinfulness and is appalled by it, and they are intimidated by that, and reveal more than is probably their intention. Today his scowl is deepened by his sense of the impending danger posed by the cultists at the edge of town. The church must be protected against further criminal assault, and these deluded madmen operating under the guise of religion must be stoutly resisted. Resistance requires unwanted meetings with representatives of other local churches, who deem themselves—though unrepentant schismatics and heretics and ignorant beyond belief—to be Christians, and having to listen to their nonsensical pieties and tedious Biblical quotations. The translation of the Sacred Scriptures into vulgar tongues and thereby its transmission to the uneducated and inflammable masses, as Father Baglione has often remarked, was one of the great calamities of human history.

“Do you hear it, Colin? Listen! Tea-kettle-tea-kettle-tea-kettle-tea! That’s a little wren calling. It’s hard to see them because they’re mostly down on the ground, hopping around in the tangle, looking for insects. But showing off up there, making sure you
can
see him, is what looks and sounds like a bunting. See? High up in that maple? Dark as a little ink spot but purply and gleaming in the sun. An indigo. That pretty warbling song, do you hear him?”

“I want to go back to the camp.”

“I know. We’re going back. But first we’ll walk through here and see how many different birds we can find, and then we’ll have a picnic by the lake. It’s our little holiday. I’ve fixed your favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and have brought potato chips and cold sodas and chocolate chip cookies for dessert that Ludie Belle baked just for us and even some marshmallows to roast if you want to.”

“I want to go back to the camp.”

It has been his litany since they drove out through the camp gates, but it is so peaceful and beautiful here in the lakeside bird sanctuary, more like the church camp used to be before it got so civilized. Debra feels certain that if she is patient he will warm to it and begin to enjoy himself and be grateful afterwards for their little midsummer treat, and they may be able to talk a bit about what might happen next. He could even like being away from the camp so much he’ll be willing to think about leaving it for good, just the two of them. The golden age of the camp has passed; it’s time to leave. They can go somewhere where no one knows them and she can get a teaching job, or work as a social worker or a librarian, and take care of him for as long as she lives.

“Can we go back to the camp now?”

“Are you afraid? Don’t be afraid. You’re here with me.” He only glares at her as if at a stranger. “Oh, look, Colin! Don’t move!” she whispers. “A hummingbird!” She nods toward a coral honeysuckle shrub where the little ruby-throated bird with its hypodermic beak, hardly bigger than a June bug, hangs in midair, its pale wings an invisible blur, its tiny heart pounding away over a thousand times a minute. Success at last! Colin watches it with awed fascination. Her own heart is pounding, too. She so much needs today to go well. Colin reaches out as if to touch the bird and it darts away.

“I want to go back to the camp.”

“Oh, Colin…” But he is already halfway to the car. She has to run to catch up. Overhead, a single bird sets off in alarm, arousing a flock and causing a ripple through the trees like a shudder down the spine.

“Help me, Lord. Show me what’s wrongful and what’s needful and what to do if something’s both.” Thus, under the shower, the penitent sinner, Christian songsmith, and unassuming man of peace, Ben Wosznik, weighed down with fury and awe and despair, pleads for illumination as the cold spray needles him. He has done what he can. He has run his errands and he has crafted the caps and fuses, saving the crimping of the fuses for such time as they might be needed. The old sticks are sweating their nitro and are dangerous, telltale crystals poxing some of them, but everything is buried safely out of sight and reach. The hard face they’re to be used on is not a wall of coal, only history, but it’s just as black and impenetrable and just as likely to blow out on you.

The camp’s communal showers have a new electric hot water tank that is turned on for six hours each day. The tight little shower in their house trailer has no elbow room, so after the hot water is off and the others have gone, Ben sometimes likes to come up here for a cold shower on his own. Sometimes, on good days, he thinks up new songs here, sometimes he just hums old ones, listening inside them for the grace he seeks. “The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide…” He’s humming that now. In the deepening darkness of a bright afternoon. A darkness poor Dave Osborne jumped into. Ben occasionally finds the young, curly-headed office fellow in here at this time as well, but the boy never stays; if he comes in while Ben is here, he always apologizes shyly and leaves immediately. That’s what has happened today. Darren is a strange boy with strange ideas, but also smart in a way Ben is not, nor could ever be. Consequently, though Ben respects him and listens to him, they never have much to say to each other. Ben gets on better with the other one, Billy Don, who is also a good Christian boy with some Bible college ideas but more down to earth. Thinking about those two boys, he is reminded of Carl Dean Palmers and the last time he saw him, that terrible morning, just below Inspiration Point, wearing his leather jacket, ball cap, and red boots, the lad’s beard still wet from a predawn shower. It was when Carl Dean said he wished Ben was his dad, filling Ben’s heart, and then to Ben’s sorrow he said goodbye and they hugged. Ben wishes now he knew how to reach him. He might be able to talk with him about this thing he’s thinking of doing. Maybe even get some help. He wonders if he will see Carl Dean again if those biker boys come back. He does not think he will.

Elaine is taking food again, only a bite or two of dry toast and a swallow of milk so far, but it’s a change of attitude, so they’ve agreed to release her today after the doctor makes his afternoon rounds. After his shower, Ben will take Clara to the hospital in the truck so she can ride back with Elaine in the ambulance. But the girl is not well. She does not look like she will ever be well again. A cruel punishment for such a pious child. And for her pious mother, too, who is near broken by it. About Bernice’s idea of trying exorcism, Ben doesn’t know. The child does not seem to be herself, it’s true, and anything is worth trying. But it’s not amongst his notions of how God works in the world and tends His souls, notions learned mostly from Elaine’s father, that gentle righteous man who set Ben on the true path all those years ago and brought him home to Jesus. “Grace is not something you die to get,” Ely used to say in his sure quiet way, “it’s something you get to live!” Ben has been working for some time on a song with that line, to the tune, loosely, of the old church number, “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go.” Another melody he has been humming of late: “I’ll do Your will with a heart sincere, I’ll be what You want me to be.” He may introduce the song tonight at prayer meeting, if he can get the second line right.