The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

  Does she know he is here? Probably. Scuttlebutt gets around quickly in shut-up places like this. A lot like a prison, he has been thinking since he was led in through that barbed-wire fence. Maybe she’s hiding from him. Well, he can wait. He learned from the two boys that she and Junior Baxter still have something going, though they have only just got together again for the first time this past week, when the whole Baxter clan turned up for the anniversary celebrations over on the mine hill. Elaine is a very private person, they said. She and Young Abner, as he’s called now, are often seen together, but they never hold hands or even talk to each other. It’s more like a religious thing. It was the one called Billy Don who told him that, a talkative guy with dark shades, a ponytail, and handlebars; Darren is the more cautious one, a smart kid with blond curls and the bespectacled bright-eyed intensity of a zealot. The Baxter family are living in an unfinished cabin and were supposed to have left several days ago but haven’t. They passed it on the path leading up here. A tent up at the back. Two of the Baxter boys have already been kicked out of the camp, he learned. Something about a motorcycle gang, a robbery, a gun. In retaliation, they came back and vandalized the camp when everyone was over on the mine hill praying, which explains the beat-up look of some of the cabins. But Junior and his two sisters are still here. One of the girls was pointed out to him as they passed the cabin. Cute. She was staring at him, and when he glanced back a couple of minutes later, beginning the climb up here, he saw she was still staring at him.

  On the walk up to the Point, the boys filled him in on the years of the Persecution, the international following they now have, Mrs. Collins’ plans for a tabernacle temple to be built on the Mount of Redemption. There was a lot of money being spent here, much of it apparently coming from a local rich guy named Suggs. But they were able to acquire the camp in the first place, they said, thanks to the Presbyterian minister’s wife, Mrs. Edwards, who arranged for the sale and then became a Brunist Follower. This was unexpected news. Reverend Edwards was the guy who helped kidnap his friend Colin Meredith and kept him away from the Mount on the Day of Redemption. Pach’ remembers him as a klutz in a porkpie. With a nervous smirk. All day on the hill, Pach’ kept worrying that Colin would miss the Rapture. He learned later that Colin tried to kill himself in their house. “Mrs. Edwards is one of our most important converts,” the boys said. “She’s now the camp director.” He remembers Mrs. Edwards very well. Nature girl. Fantasy stuff. When he asked, they told him she was probably working down at her vegetable garden with Colin. So Colin’s here, too: also news. They offered to walk him over there, but he told them he knew the way.

  Pach’ once tried to kiss a girl up here on the Point when he was about ten, but she didn’t like it and didn’t kiss him back and told the camp counselor. Which ended his summer camp that year. He hasn’t had a lot of luck with kissing. Elaine was always more a hugger than a kisser, being self-conscious about her bad teeth. But she’s a good hugger. The most intense hug he ever got was over there on the mine road at the foot of the hill the night before the supposed end of the world—the night Bruno’s sister was killed. He’d got turned on watching people in front of the bonfires they’d built to sing and pray around, the way their bodies were silhouetted inside the thin flut-tery tunics when they passed in front of the flames. He was jealous of Elaine and hated it when she walked in front of the fires so others could see, but it excited him, too. Those were sinful thoughts, and on the very eve of what might well be the Last Judgment, so he tried not to look, but he couldn’t stop himself. Not until Elaine’s mother stood in front of the flames and he found himself staring at something he knew he shouldn’t see. He turned away feeling hot and confused, as if his acne were erupting all over his body. Then the lights on the mine road, the rush to the cars, the awful thing that happened. He stood at the lip of the ditch, hugging Elaine, watching that poor girl die. Her smallness, her lips slightly parted, eyes closed, her fragile broken worried look. How many had hit her? Had he? Wrecked cars everywhere, lights pointed in all directions, some straight up into the sky as if trying to get someone’s attention up there, his own car ditched somewhere behind him. Where it stayed until the county hauled it out weeks later and sent him a towing bill up in detention. Seeing his schoolteacher Mrs. Norton lying in the roadway as though dead, her fat-kneed husband fanning her face with his tunic hem, scared him even more than the struck girl. Was everybody suddenly dying? Was it really happening? Elaine was sobbing in his arms, her back to the ditch, and while he was staring down at Marcella over her shoulder, the poor girl’s eyes suddenly opened and a red bubble ballooned out of her mouth, popped, dribbled down her chin. And that was it. His knees began to shake. Her brother stooped to kiss her lips and rose up with blood on his mouth, that’s what he remembers, though his vision was pretty blurry, his head may have been playing tricks on him. Elaine wrapped her arms around him tight and held him close, close, dressed in almost nothing as they were, and whispered in his ear that she wanted to be in Heaven with him forever. Brought tears to his eyes as he, chastely, except for the club pressed against her tummy, couldn’t do anything about that, hugged her back. Forever turned out to be less than a day.

  He turns his back on all that shitty history and takes the path down to where he supposes Mrs. Edwards’ vegetable garden to be, a trail somewhat overgrown, evidently not much used, in spite of the heavy traffic in the camp. Still a beautiful walk. Flowers, birds, trees, all kinds of sedges and grasses. Some of them pink now, this time of year. They all have names; he’ll never learn them. Though, if he stays here, maybe he’ll try. Mrs. Edwards had a thing for nature, as he recalls, she could teach him. She was a frequent visitor to the camp when the Baptists rented it. Came to see if they were taking proper care of it, he supposed, but always in a nice way. She was slim and pretty and dressed casually and he had fantasies about her, wishing for a mother like her, and sometimes he followed her around. One day, down in the wild place on the other side of the creek, she took her shirt off to sun her tits. He scrunched down in the weeds, stunned by the amazing sight, waiting and praying (yes, he was praying) for her to take the rest off. She never did, though over the years he saw other things. He used to wonder: What if he made himself known? Couldn’t be done. She was from another world. It was like trying to step into a movie. There was only the watching.

  The vegetable garden is amazing. A little farm. Mrs. Edwards is seeding a newly hoed patch when he arrives and introduces himself. She’s older now, has a baggier look and a double chin, but there’s still something fresh and girlish about her. She seems glad to see him, lights up with a cheerful smile. “Colin! Look who’s here!” she calls out. Colin comes over from where he has been setting out stakes alongside a small freckle-faced woman. Colin was always odd looking, but now he’s weirder than ever. Sickly pale and skinny with a wispy Chinaman’s beard, wearing a floppy straw sun hat and rose-colored shorts, his silvery blond hair fluttering about his shoulders like a mad woman’s. The way he moves reminds him of Sissy. Of course. Why hadn’t he realized that before? Didn’t understand any of this back then. A complete greenass. “It’s Carl Dean, Colin!” Colin stops dead in his tracks, his eyes popping, his face twisting up like he’s about to have a fit. “No! It isn’t!” he cries and then runs away, screaming wildly for help. Mrs. Edwards throws down her garden gloves and starts after him, turning back just for a moment to cast Pach’ a dark scowl. “Who are you really?” she demands, then returns to the chase. He shrugs at the freckle-faced woman, who only stares back at him. Well. There went his gardening career.

  His building career shows more promise. With help from Ben and the others, all strangers to him, Pach’ has been able to step right in with the crew this afternoon and work beside them. The cabin they are working on, which used to house eight kids in bunk beds, is being remodeled for use as a medical treatment room and two-bed sick bay. There are scores of people hanging about, most of whom seem to have come for last Sunday’s ceremonies and just
haven’t gone home again. When they offer to help, Ben sizes them up quickly, assigns tasks to those who seem they might actually contribute something and sends the others off on pointless errands to get them out of the way. Even unskilled as he is, there’s a lot Pach’ can do. The cabin has already been wired up for electricity, and Wayne Shawcross, the overalled guy who let him in here, is showing him how to install wall plugs and light fixtures. Ben has also taken him on as a kind of apprentice carpenter. He’s strong, and that’s appreciated, too. He’s enjoying it, more than any other work he’s done since he got out, and in spite of the luncheon blow-up, he can already feel the urge to want to stay and work with all these guys whom he’s quickly come to like. Get the job done. Be part of something bigger than himself. How much of religion, he wonders, is about this feeling?

  At the luncheon earlier, over baloney sandwiches and potato salad, they made a big fuss over him, treating him as a kind of returning hero. It was embarrassing, given his intentions, and he only wanted out of there. Clara made a welcoming introduction and led them in prayer, thanking God for Carl Dean’s safe return, and then prayed for all the other things they wanted. Darren Rector, reciting a little church history, praised him for his brave attack on the powers of darkness, which he said helped many others to escape arrest and carry on with their evangelical work (he didn’t know that), and expressed everyone’s sympathy for his suffering on behalf of them all. Which Rector compared to the ordeals of Daniel and Samson and Paul. Not at all how it was, of course. He supposed Rector was just buttering him up for the interview. Elaine wasn’t there—still avoiding him, maybe—but just as well. He was glad she didn’t have to listen to all that horseshit. Mrs. Edwards wasn’t there either, nor Colin. The word about what had happened in the garden had evidently gotten around; the hero worship was not unanimous. There were surly mutterings here and there, and Junior’s glare was so fierce it could have cut through steel plate, his short-cropped red head looking like it was on fire from inner rage. He’s younger than Pach’, but he’s already getting an old man’s soft heaviness in the jowls and belly and now wears a little red tuft on his upper lip. His kid sister, on the other hand, gave Pach’ a sweet lingering smile. Somewhat vague. It just sort of stayed on her face. Her food had to be cut for her. Not all there.

  Then an old fart in a wheelchair rolled away from the Baxter table and wanted to know in a loud voice if he really was Carl Dean Palmers like he said he was. His friend had not only not recognized him, he’d screamed like he’d seen the devil, scaring the whole camp. They’d all seen pictures. He didn’t look like the pictures. So who was he really? Ben said he was Carl Dean, all right. They’d had a long conversation, talking about the last time they were together, couldn’t be anyone else. “The devil is a great dissembler, Brother Ben!” Then Bernice Filbert, the widowed sister-in-law of the guy who owns the garage where he fixed up his van, the lady with the penciled eyebrows and the fancy way of talking who dresses up like Bible characters, vouched for him as well. “He has put on more beard and forehead since he stayed with us, but you can tell by his appetite he is who he is,” she said, trying to lighten things up. “He has just put away his lunch quicker than Ezekiel could eat a scroll, as like I told him then.” She’s the camp nurse and is something of a celebrity today for having got fired a couple of nights ago as the home care nurse for the town banker’s wife. All in some cause or other. Whatever, Pach’ is on her side. It’s enough just because the chump’s a banker. Bastards who rule the world by making money off other people’s money, a kind of legalized theft. They ought to be hung. Or sent to work in the mines. But also because the banker’s dickhead son and his fatcat pals were the ones who laid the nickname of Ugly on him back in high school, getting rid of it being one of the few positives of his prison stretch. “That woman cain’t talk ’thout lyin’,” someone said, and someone else mumbled something about his driving the “devil’s van.” “What I’m asking,” the guy in the wheelchair insisted, “is can he prove it?” Pach’ tossed his driver’s license out on the table and the cripple said that didn’t prove anything, and then everyone started shouting, accusing the geezer of spoiling Carl Dean’s homecoming and trying to sow discord in the camp. On the one hand, Pach’ agreed with the old fossil; he sure as hell wasn’t Carl Dean Palmers anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. On the other, if the cantankerous sonuvabitch hadn’t been in a wheelchair, he’d have popped him. He got up to leave, but Ben put a hand on his shoulder and reminded everyone of their Christian obligations to one another and then put his guitar around his neck and led them all in singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” After a moment, Abner Baxter stood up and joined in, and then, reluctantly, so too did the others at his table. All except the guy in the wheelchair, who spun it around, turning his crooked back on them.

  Now, while Pach’ works with Ben on the new sick bay, Baxter and his pals across the way are trying to hang a front door on their cabin, and neither crew is talking much to the other. People aren’t getting along, just like before, and trouble is brewing. Ben sees him watching them with a frown on his face and says, “Let them be, Carl Dean. They ain’t much good to us anyhow, so we at least get some work out of them for the time being. But that cabin has got other purposes. They ain’t staying there.”

  Could he, he wonders? Stay here? Stay in this camp where he’s always felt most at home, here with all these friends, more like family than his own family? Could he go all the way, put a tunic on again, win Elaine, help defend Ben and Mrs. Collins against the abominable Baxters and the local establishment, build something that will last? While he’s asking himself that, Clara Collins comes rushing out of the lodge with big news: Mr. Suggs just called. The mine owners have accepted their offer for the Mount of Redemption. Papers are being drawn up. There are whoops and cheers and Wayne throws his painter’s cap in the air. Time to bring out the beers! But, no, not here. Mrs. Collins falls to her knees there in the woodchips and closes her eyes and lifts her hands and launches into her full-throated God howl and all the others drop to their knees too and join in, waving their arms about and praying to beat the band. An old coalminer from out east declares it’s a miracle, and that is noisily amenned. Mr. Suggs is grandly Godblessed. Nothing Pach’ can do but follow suit, get down on his knees, take off his cap, and tuck his chin in, anything else would be an insult to these people, but he’s feeling awkward as hell, a total hypocrite, the devilish reprobate they have taken him to be. Fuck. He could never do this.

  When Pach’ reaches the flowering dogwood tree a little before sundown for Saturday evening prayers, she is already there. Standing beside her mother. All these years gone past, mostly thinking about her, and suddenly here she is. He’d thought, after so much buildup, he’d probably be disappointed, and he’d arrived, hands in pockets, talking to others, trying not to look her way, staying cool. That lasted about a minute. She has grown up some. Taller now than he is. Gangly, but not big-boned like her mother. She’s staring straight at him in a forthright way he has not seen before. He doesn’t know what that stare means, but it cheers him to see her there beside her mother and not by Junior Baxter. He nods to her as though in recognition, and when she doesn’t nod back, he looks away.

  “Looks like you brung us luck, Pach’,” Wayne Shawcross says with a grin, passing by with his wife, Ludie Belle, and Pach’ grins back, feeling a kind of twitch in his cheek (the grin’s too wide, it’s not something he does often), and says, “I can give it to others but I never keep none for myself.” Ben and Clara still speak of him as Carl Dean, but he introduces himself to people as Pach’, which is his name for his new life. “You mean like what you got there on the knees of your jeans?” Wayne asked this afternoon when told his name. “No. Like Apache.” “You part injun?” “That’s what they told me.” “I think my granmaw was probly half Choctaw, but she wouldn’t never admit it. It was like being half nigger back then.” He’d got the new handle in prison. He’d lied and told them he had Indian blood, partl
y just to set himself off from the others, partly to shuck off the old life, be someone other than the self he’d come to hate. And who knows, given his old lady’s careless habits, maybe it was true—didn’t she like to claim when she was drunk that she’d got pregnant with him off a toilet seat? He was the only virgin in the men’s prison, where rape was part of the new-boys break-in rituals, and he meant to stay that way (didn’t quite), but he had to fight for it. Five guys, including a couple of trusties, grabbed him and ripped his pants down and the biggest of them said, “Bend over, Tonto, I’m gonna stick it to your holy huntin’ ground.” He was able to tear himself free and laid into the lot of them, starting with the fat asshole who called him Tonto, leaving him with less teeth in his mouth than he had before, and he was still holding his own against all five, even with his pants around his ankles, when the bulls finally showed up and broke it up with chains and truncheons. Lost him any hope for parole that year, but it earned him the nickname of the Crazy Apache, which over time got shortened to Pach’, which most people hear as Patch. Whatever. Just so it’s not Carl Dean. Or Ugly.

  Elaine is still staring at him. He tries a smile this time. Same result. He has showered and laundered his rags in the new camp laundry, trimmed his beard, put on a T-shirt with only a couple of holes, and a denim vest. Combed his hair, even. Ben dropped a Brunist tunic by for him, but he decided not to wear it. There are others without tunics, so apparently it’s okay. Two of those are a country singer and his woman, who are said to be famous singers from Nashville, though he hasn’t heard of them. They’re first on the program, because they have a gig after. At the bar in the old Blue Moon Motel at the edge of town. Can’t be too famous. But a place to escape to maybe for a beer. What he misses most this time of day. They seem cool. The guy, anyway. The woman is mixed up with the fortuneteller, Mrs. Hall, and her flock of gossipy widows. Came to the prayer meeting in their company. She’s said to be in touch with the dead.