The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

  Not only was the Billy Don murder case against Junior Baxter apparently all but watertight, Junior himself had in effect confessed, changing his plea to temporary insanity, the unfortunate tactic used by his court-appointed defense lawyer when things started to go against them. He was scheduled to be electrocuted in November. He did blurt out in his confused and inconsistent testimony that Darren Rector gave him the gun and told him to go guard the camp. Darren denied this, and the jurors chose to believe the one without “LIER” scarred on his forehead. But if Junior was telling the truth, when did that happen? Billy Don called her around eight that morning—that was in the trial record. He was probably killed soon after that. If it could be shown that Junior was at the mine hill at that time and for some time after, the verdict might have to be reconsidered. Might he have stayed behind in the camp earlier while the others marched over to the hill? No, he would have gone wherever his father went; no choice. Also, Billy Don was shot in the forehead from close range. No bullet holes in the car’s front window, so he was unlikely to have been shot while driving. Where, then, did the murder take place? If not at or near the ditch, how did the car get there?

  She sat up abruptly with the uncomfortable realization that this was a story she had to write. If for no other reason, because she owed it to Billy Don. He was coming to see her that dreadful morning. And that may have been the reason he was shot. It would also be a way of paying her dues to the literary tradition while yet making it a story of her own. Even as she sat there, bony elbows on bony knees, her bottom sweating on the leather cushion, the basic structure revealed itself to her. She has often described this moment in interviews, leaving out the dope and the sweaty butt. She would name everybody, risking whatever legal actions, while exploring each character, each scene, imaginatively, as if they were characters and scenes in a novel, trusting that her imagination would tell her more than the “facts” alone could. There would be invented characters, too, filling out the religious typology and enriching the story content. She would relate it in an exploratory first person, moving as author from darkness to light, while keeping Darren and Billy Don center stage, as in “Jan.” The Baxters would be there, but backgrounded as part of the story of the cult. The Killing of Billy D was becoming a reality. Her body meanwhile had forgotten its appetites, overtaken by a mind on the boil. You think too damned much, she said irritably to herself, as she pinched out the roach and pulled her underwear on.

  Mind erosion: the dust storms of daily excitement and triviality that blow away the sensitive topsoil of the spirit—the idea that attention-power is finite and precious, and that unless the individual is obstinate and cunning, this power may be dissipated, conventionalized. A note inspired by all that’s presently eating up her life, the spent storms of birthday parties, poolside yatter, boy-chasing, and pop culture immersion now displaced by travels on behalf of the book, TV and radio talk shows, newspaper and magazine interviews, book and film proposals, teaching offers, rallies and protests, the daily froth of news and chatter, sex. Unless such notebook jottings as this be counted, Sally hasn’t written a creative word of her own since the book came out.

  Of course, to be fair, she has also been trying to save a few lives. The first routine appeals against the death penalties were turned down at about the same time she reached the writers colony, and she has spent most of the time since then fighting those judgments one way or another. They were what drove her through the research and writing of The Killing of Billy D, and at such an accelerated pace; forget the publishers’ nagging deadlines, for her it has always been a race against the executioners, hoping to use the book as a circuit breaker. Not an easy one to write. Not only was it a different sort of writing than any she’d done before, she realized as soon as she’d settled into her cozy little cell at the writers colony just how much research she needed, and almost none of it in books. There were so many people she should talk to, now scattered around the country, so many places to visit, images to collect. But she had no car and was saving her book advance and West Condon earnings for when the writers’ colony gig ended, so to get started she had to trust her memory and imagination. As a warm-up exercise, she developed character files for Darren and Billy Don, pouring into them all her memories and speculations, and then similar files for the Baxter family, the orthodox cult leaders, their opponents, all the secondary players in her drama. Who tended, threateningly, to multiply. Putting characters in was not what was hard, she realized. It was keeping them out. Moreover, her agent had, with difficulty, managed to sell her newest concept to the same publishers as before, and they continued to demand the full and true story of the cult, even if only as background, giving her a contracted deadline of six months for submitting the entire manuscript.

  When her books arrived from home, boxed up with her notebooks, photos, drawings, and the Brunist files and newspapers she’d snitched from the Chronicle office, she was able to patch together a few paragraphs about the cult, its beliefs, its growth, its schisms, its relation to similar millennial movements of the past. All that was fine but, except as suggested by her “Jan” story, her book still wasn’t on its way. She had always resisted that workshop bromide, “write about what you know,” but she had no choice; not to be forever treading water, she launched the first rough draft with her own experiences that day in the culvert, the fall from the tipple being told in flashback as she lay there. Little research required, though it meant she was also, against her own outlined intentions, becoming a point-of-view character in the story. This character, she decided, would be somewhat like herself and yet not exactly herself. For one thing, she pasted an earlier version of the historical Sally on the fictional Sally, not the childish one who still believed, prayed, and fantasized an afterlife, but the one who lived unthinkingly in a world saturated with religion as one lived with air and water, using the Billy Don drama then as a way of freeing this character from a passive acceptance of the unacceptable, in much the same way that her imagined Sweet Betsy goes from innocence to bawdiness in her western epic idea, such that by the time she is cowering in the culvert she has come to understand that the real criminal that day was Christianity itself. Or, rather, the human mindset—in part, a susceptibility to made-up stories—that gives this dangerous nonsense such terrible power. Thus, a spiritual journey, after all, a remark she often makes in interviews or talk show conversations while explaining why that was not the book she ended up writing, each repetition gradually hollowing it out until soon she’ll be free of it.

  Some people at the colony were writing their socks off; for others, it was just a free-sex exercise pit. Sally allowed herself to get laid when the opportunity arose, for now that she’d got the hang of it, sex had become important to her, but she didn’t let it get in the way of the writing. She had launched hundreds of stories over the previous year or two and had finished almost none. If this was going to be her life, she knew, she’d have to stop playing the dilettante. She had a book to write. She dedicated at least ten solid hours a day to the writing. Reading and writing. Plus two of hiking or roaming the hills on one of the colony’s bicycles—another kind of writing. Or unwriting. She clocked herself, kept a chart, made sure there was no cheating. For the first couple of weeks before Billy D took over, she seemed to have time to do it all, work on the book, write new stories, revise the old, read voraciously, fill more notebooks. She felt good, as good as she’d felt in years. She smoked less (though always a butt lit while fingers were on the keys, even if left to burn itself out in the tray), immersed herself in the beauty of the surroundings, reveled in the meal-time conversations with other writers. Many of them came from money, had been to the best schools, had had lots of literary mentoring and friends who were editors and publishers; but they didn’t intimidate her. She knew she had something they didn’t. Coaltown grit, for one thing.

  But she was facing a deadline, and there were things she had to know before she could continue. She described her research needs to a writer at the colo
ny one evening, a somewhat older man with suave moneyed ways, and in particular her desire to interview Junior Baxter on death row somehow, there being some things she had to know that only he could tell her, and he said he might be able to help. He loaned her a car to take wherever she wished, a fast road-hugging foreign sports car unlike any she’d ever been in before, much less driven—she felt hot in it—and he introduced her to an activist lawyer friend from the city, Simon Price of Price & Price, whom she was able to convince to help her fight the Brunist death penalties. The other Price was Simon’s wife, a lawyer who specialized in human rights cases—women’s rights, in particular. “Looks a lot like Haymarket all over again,” Simon said after studying her typed-up notes. Several routine gestures had not yet been made, so he was immediately able to get all the November and December executions delayed another six months while he prepared legal briefs and affidavits, and she brought this good news the next time she saw her wealthy friend at the colony. Though he seemed to know everything about literature, he didn’t seem to be much of a writer, usually just smiled when she asked him what he was working on. When not talking about her book, they discussed music, art, literature, politics, and in provocative engaging ways she’d not enjoyed before. He was the coolest man she’d ever met, and he seemed to like her, too. He laughed generously when she was being funny in her wiseass way, listened carefully when she got serious. He liked her enough that he invited her to his house one evening, promising to get her back in time not to disrupt her writing rhythms. They drove for an hour or so through thick forests to a luxurious home with beautiful views, a lot of art on the walls, thousands of books, a grand piano in the middle of a room set aside for it. Everything in its place, but as though unused. Like Dracula’s castle, she thought, but she didn’t say it. The sex on satin sheets was easy and good—maybe not passionate, but fun—the wine he served her sensational. It turned out he was one of the writing colony’s principal benefactors (an expensive dating club for him, she imagined) and a U.S. Congressman, wealthy enough to pay for his own campaigns, but a guy with a serious agenda, an agenda she mostly shared; she would vote for him. Much of the forest they had driven through was his, he said. They drove through it at least once a week after that and he always got her back to the colony by her usual bedtime. She was quite ready to stay over, to hell with the discipline, but he seemed to need her Cinderella hour even more than she did. Maybe there were other wives and lovers awaiting their turn, she thought, and her time was up.

  Meanwhile, the writing rhythms he was protecting she was disrupting by note-taking travels through Brunist country, consultations with Simon, meetings with her agent and editors, prison visits, yet even so she managed to work on the book every day wherever she was, even if only for an hour or two. She had to. The days were dropping away like those calendar pages in the old movies, and she only had half-starts so far and a messy heap of loose notes. And the end of her fellowship loomed. What then? The peace of her studio and use of the car were each hers for only a short time longer, and she needed them both. So she drove back and forth a lot, reserving at least three days a week for her studio at the writers colony, the evenings with her wealthy friend unless he was in Washington—and once she met him there while traveling, and he seemed pleased, showing her off proudly (she felt proud) to his colleagues.

  Her leash wasn’t long enough for her to reach Florida or Alabama or congregations to the west, but she managed to visit over a dozen Brunist churches along the eastern seaboard, large and small, attending services for the first time in years, taking notes, keeping her mouth shut. In one of them the preacher stopped her as she was leaving and said she looked familiar, hadn’t he seen her somewhere? She didn’t think so. Possibly at the Mount of Redemption? Oh, maybe, she said, and he continued to stare at her, his eyes narrowing. She eventually learned where Clara Collins-Wosznik and her friends from the Brunist camp were living, but she was refused permission to speak to them or even get near. She was told that Mrs. Collins was quite ill, and prayers for her were often a part of the services she attended. She didn’t know the name of either of the boys’ hometowns, but she had a rough idea where Billy Don came from and spent some note- and picture-taking time in several small towns in the area until she grew uncomfortable with the grim, thin-lipped attention she and her jazzy sports car were drawing. She did know how to find the Bible college Billy Don and Darren attended and spent one of her best half-weeks there. The staff and faculty were aware of their former students’ notoriety and were chillingly unhelpful (maybe her hair put them off; definitely not part of the local culture), but she was able to capture some of the school’s atmosphere, became acquainted with several students, some of whom later entered her narrative pseudonymously, and located many of the places Billy Don had described. Which in turn triggered her first completely satisfying book chapter, in which, sitting in the student cafeteria (which really did have homemade lemonade and boiled peanuts, just like Billy Don said), looking out on an autumnal campus (how she saw it, what her camera recorded), Darren lays out, in his riveting soft-spoken way, his vision of the approaching End Times, and Billy D’s life begins to change.

  Simon had obtained all the trial transcripts and was studying them, and he passed on to her those of Young Abner’s murder trial. A close read turned up a few minor notes, not themselves very significant, but possibly useful in conjunction with more substantial evidence. The arresting officer, for example, declaring that the accused, found hiding in the nearby woods, was sullen and only resentfully cooperative, said that when he handed over his weapons, the officer remarked: “Let’s see if this gun matches the one that killed that kid in the ditched car,” and Junior, who said very little, said: “What kid?” The officer and prosecutor used the exchange as evidence of Junior’s duplicity—“He was just playing dumb,” the cop said. “You could tell by the cold-blooded look on his face.” The defense attorney did not argue with this. Simon was enraged at the lawyer’s obtuseness and the stupidity of the temporary insanity plea—“That sonuvabitch should be dragged into the dock on the same grounds!” he said—and by now, hoping to secure a retrial, had a list of some eighteen to twenty examples of ineffective counsel if not gross incompetence, including outright procedural errors by both lawyers. The unchallenged use of hearsay evidence, for example, as when a witness remarked that Junior was “a pal of the bikers, they raped a kid together,” the judge, too, failing in his duty. That rape scene had become important to her after her rescue of Carl Dean Palmers from ignominy, and she was convinced and had convinced Simon that Junior was as much a victim as the girl was. “I suppose it’s a problem with court-appointed lawyers,” she said to Simon, and he replied: “Nah, I’m often one. He’s just a shit lawyer. Maybe a chum of the prosecutor, doing him a favor. Probably how he got appointed an administrative law judge after the elections.”

  There were a lot of cultists still imprisoned back in her home state, many of them sentenced to twenty years or more, and most of them were eager to accept Simon’s offer of free legal help in exchange for answering a few questions. Simon sent in a team of young legal volunteers with a list of thirty such questions for the first round, some of them meant to draw their cooperation by giving them a chance to explain themselves, others focused on what happened that day, with questions about Billy Don, Darren, and Junior Baxter mixed in, trying to pin down times and trace the movement of the handgun. When the answers came in, they compiled a list that suggested possible leads, and together they flew out for further interviews. By then she was married—a private civil ceremony in December, a brief ten-day honeymoon in San Francisco (they went to a lot of concerts) and wintry Yosemite—and was well installed in her new study, with the book finally taking shape. She had an outline for it, meaty yet succinct, which she was able to send to her publishers a week ahead of schedule. They were pleased, excited even, and began talking about jacket designs and book tours.

  During the prison interviews, disguised as Simon’s secretary, she
filled notebook after notebook, not only with information, but also with character descriptions and sketches, idiomatic novelties, odd personal anecdotes and histories, but if she was somewhat duplicitous, Simon was not. He inquired into their individual stories of that violent day, listened carefully, took precise notes of his own, and indeed has managed to get many of their sentences reduced and some of them freed. It was decided that, with her reputation, she would stay away from the initial meeting with the two Baxters, but even so, Simon said, they were uncooperative, Abner ranting in his Old Testament style, Junior sullenly impassive. The only moment he showed any emotion at all was when Simon asked him about the torn tunic with his name stitched on a label at the neck, found on the backside of the mine hill, and that emotion was only momentary surprise and an embarrassed flush. At his trial he had first said that Darren gave him the gun and sent him over to the camp, but now he wouldn’t speak of it at all. One prisoner told a volunteer that he did see Darren carefully cleaning and loading a handgun that might have been the one in the picture he was shown, though he didn’t know what Darren did with it, and he said he told the defense lawyer that, though it never got mentioned at the trial. But when she and Simon interviewed him, he was adamant that he would not testify in court. If they dragged him there, they wouldn’t get a word out of him. Never wanted to see the inside of a courtroom again until the Final Judgment, he said, and spat defiantly into a tin cup. After her own day in court, even if only as a witness, she was sympathetic. A weirder place than Wonderland, where the least thing you say can change your life forever. In the end it was a lot of work, and though she got material for her novel from it, it yielded little they could use in the capital cases. But she and Simon grew fond of each other on these travels, casually slept together in shared hotel rooms as though it was what grownup people always did, knew without having to say so that they’d be loyal friends for life.