The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel

  As do many men in town, guided up through the blasted and gaseous Deepwater mine workings by Osborne that night of the disaster that killed ninety-seven, Dave the night manager at the time, a miners’ miner who had begun at the face and risen through the ranks. He knew Old Number Nine like the devil knows hell, as Cokie Duncan puts it, smoking and spitting with fellow miners out in the street in front of the store, squinting into a sun they still mostly avoid. Cal Smith’s boss, Sheriff Tub Puller, now pushing grimly through the milling crowds to confer with the town police, is another who reached the surface that night thanks to Osborne. As is wheel-chaired Ezra Gray, who made his wife Mildred push him all the way here as fast as she could in hopes of a free pair of shoes, Dave’s kicking of the window like a kick in the teeth. That’s how Mildred would put it later to Thelma Coates. Some years back, before he was night manager, Dave was Ezra’s faceboss, best he ever had. Ezra resented Dave becoming a downtown businessman, a kind of betrayal of his own kind, and now just see what it has come to. By the time Thelma Coates gets the phone call from Linda Catter, her sons Aaron and Royboy have already run back from town with the alarming news, and she and Roy set off for Main Street, the boys running ahead. Thus the word spreads and scores of others turn up in front of the shoe store, though the body is gone and the store is locked, the broken windows taped up with flattened cardboard shoe boxes. Witnesses of the suicide detail the event to the newcomers, and some who were not witnesses do, too. It’s Ramona Testatonda who brings the sad tidings to the Bonali household in a call to her friend Angela, who in turn carries them to the front porch, where her father is sitting with Carlo Juliano. Mortgage foreclosure has been their bitter theme, the Juliano family also walking the edge, and is now more so, Carlo arguing that it’s that which has brought Dave Osborne to such ultimate despair. “That goddamn bank is killing this fucking town,” Vince says, biting clean through his well-masticated cigar. As his daughter runs back in to call Monica Piccolotti, his son Charlie comes out, digging at his crotch as though that’s where the problem lies buried, and tells Carlo he plans to do something about the way things are and they should talk about it on the way to Main Street to see for themselves what has happened. There they run into Nazario, Ange Moroni’s boy, with his hangabout pals, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their sullen lips. Moroni compliments him for busting the banker’s son’s ugly honker, and Charlie fills them in on the persecutions he and his family are suffering as a consequence from the bank, the city, the county, not to mention all the fucking heretic churches, including that maniacal god squad out at the church camp who once tore up St. Stephen’s with mine picks. He pops his knuckles, and working a toothpick around in his teeth, nods his head toward the sheriff and his deputy, now in a huddle with the banker and the mayor, and says, “Look at them racist pricks over there bunched together. Dreaming up some new shit. See? The sheriff’s eyeing us. They’re all in cahoots. Fucking Klan all over again. We gotta do something about it before we’re all mulched garbage.” Moron grins icily under his rumpled fedora and nods at his pals. Moron’s mother, Concetta Moroni, was here earlier, but is gone. She had slipped away from the Cavanaugh house for the shoe sale, witnessed the shocking scene in the store window, which she feared was some kind of divine admonishment for her own sinful greed, then fled when her employer showed up at the store and kicked the window in, and she is now, having told poor Mrs. Cavanaugh all about it, showing her patient, who is a bit dopey today from all the drugs she is taking, how to pray with the rosary she has given her—an old one that her husband Angelo received from his grandmother but rarely used, though it was in his jacket pocket when he died. She hopes God will perceive this gift of a family heirloom as penance and compensation for things she took and cannot give back. Later, she will call all her friends and they will meet after working hours in someone’s kitchen to talk about this strange event and what it means to their sad little town and their own uncertain futures. At the hospital, Concetta’s out-of-favor predecessor in the Cavanaugh household, Bernice Filbert, has heard the ambulance wheel in, and after she gets the news from Maudie, she hurries down to Elaine’s room to let Clara know. Clara is still as woeful as those two wailing Marys outside the tomb of Jesus and she only half registers, but Ben has arrived and he takes the news sorrowfully. “He was a friend,” he says in his tired rumbly voice, “and a good man. I’m mighty sorry to hear it.” When she calls the camp, it is young Billy Don Tebbett who answers, and he promises to get the word to others, especially people like Willie Hall, who worked in the mine with Dave Osborne. The first person Billy Don calls, though, is Sally; her mother answers the phone and tells him Sally is not home, is there a message, and though he is somewhat confused by this unexpected connection with someone he has not ever really thought about before except in the abstract, he blurts out the story of the shoe store owner hanging himself in his own shop window, as understood by Bernice Filbert, who wasn’t there. In Bernice’s version, he was found hanging in the window with a closing down sale sign pinned on him, and it is that version that Susanna Elliott carries to Main Street and shares with others.

  “His sidekick, Dirty Pete, is a thick-bearded docklands thug, dumb as a rock, as you might say, and Big Mary I see as a kind of badass guerrilla leader of the right, organizer of monks, nuns and popes, violent, ruthless, intransigent. A giant. Indestructible, but heartbreaking in her lonely grandeur. The real power behind the Sweet Jesus Gang.” Far from the Main Street buzz of West Condon and ignorant of it, Susanna’s daughter Sally is describing for Stacy, over Cokes and sandwiches, one of her new story ideas. They are sitting in the Two-Door Inn, a mawkish imitation of an English tea house with exposed beams and wall lamps with fringed red shades, paper placemats shaped like crocheted doilies and plastic menus—if you ask for tea, which is not on the menu, you get a grocery store teabag and a cup of hot water—but, silly as it is, it is dear to Stacy’s heart. “Her krypton is her virginity: if she loses that, she loses all her power, so she is brutal in preserving it. I’ll call the story ‘Christian Love.’”

  “You think that’s the sort of person Mary really was?”

  “I have no idea, but neither did the clowns who wrote the Bible. They made up one character, I can make up another. If she catches on, it’ll change a lot of church art. A whole different comicstrip.”

  Stacy is laughing again, has been all through the drive and lunch, worrying only that it might edge into hysteria, for she’s feeling quite giddy, unable to stop thinking about the time she was here with Ted and all they did and said that day. Today there are crowds of tourists with small chattery kids, but that day they were alone, or at least that’s how she remembers it, the world around them little more than a painted backdrop, with the prettified melodies of old love songs tinkling away on the sound system, a kind of charm bracelet music she seemed to hear even when they were standing out on Lookout Point, hand in hand, staring dreamily down on the rich muddy river ripe with spring, and feeling the surge of it. Probably the same songs are playing now, but they’re lost in the noisy chatter. She has had to fend off Sally’s curiosity about life at the bank and outside it, about the amber necklace she is wearing and how she spends her weekends, and when they came in here Sally remarked that the place seems to have some special meaning for her, so Stacy made up a story about a teenage love affair consummated in this village, the amazement of discovering sex for the first time, partly based on a forgotten true story that actually happened at a ski resort, and she even found herself describing the boy’s body, which was not at all like Ted’s body, yet somehow reminded her of it. Just because it had all the relevant parts probably—all the “bits and bobs” as English tea house habitués might put it. She was tempted to tell Sally the real story, or something like it, especially when she realized Sally jealously suspected the young boy she was describing might be Tommy Cavanaugh—it would be the fastest way to disabuse her of that idea—and she so longed for someone to talk to about it, but she couldn’t risk the
scandal. It would end everything. So she has bit her tongue all day and kept changing the subject. It is how she has learned all about the Brunists—more than she ever wanted to know—but as told by Sally, it has been mostly an entertainment, full of amusing and horrifying and insane incidents. The terrible mine disaster, the lone survivor, the cult that formed up around him, made up of over-educated occultists and ignorant evangelicals possessed by the Jesus demon, their shy privacy shattered by the cynical local newspaperman who infiltrated the cult and then exposed them to the world, their naïve prophecy about the Second Coming and end of the world taking place out at an old slag heap which they called the Mount of Redemption, all of it becoming a huge international media event—a bizarre carnival, really—and ending in catastrophic failure. Out of which has grown this new religion with scores of churches and thousands of believers, while the little town itself, which purified itself by chasing everyone off, including the newspaper editor, has sunk into what Sally called the slough of terminal despond, probably quoting some book or maybe Shakespeare. “It’s all so depressingly predictable,” Sally said. “Round and round. It’s like living inside a palindrome.” Stacy already knew some of this, though not so pessimistically, for Ted is a market optimist and always has a positive outlook, but the story that was new to her was that of the prophet’s sister, which Sally described in intimate detail, based on secret photographs she has seen, admitting to having found the couch of the girl’s apparent deflowering and stretched out on it and felt the fire of that ill-fated romance. Stacy, who couldn’t help but imagine Ted as the ravisher, remarked that it all sounded like the makings of a good novel, but though Sally agreed that it probably was, it was not, she said, the sort she’d ever write. Whereupon she began describing some of her story ideas, which have struck Stacy as sometimes pretty funny, but mostly way too weird. Stacy says she likes more realistic stories.

  “Like those ladies’ romances you read, you mean,” Sally says with a grin, picking at her teeth with a fingernail. “The conventional way of telling stories is itself a kind of religion, you know, a dogmatic belief in a certain type of human perception as the only valid one. Like religious people, conventional writers follow hand-me-down catechisms and look upon the human story through a particular narrow lens, not crafted by them and belonging to generations of writers long dead. So conventional writers are no more realists than these fundamentalist Rapture nuts are. The true realists are the lens-breakers, always have been. The readers, like your average Sunday morning churchgoers, can’t keep up with all this, so the innovators who are cutting the real mainstream often go unnoticed in their own time. It’s the price they pay. They don’t make as much money, but they have more fun.” Sally brushes some crumbs off her chested slogan, causing GOD to wobble as though calling for attention. Or nodding his agreement. “Tight-assed little paragraphs laid out in order like snapshots in a photo album are not for me. I don’t want a life like that either.” Sally has been fumbling edgily with her pack of cigarettes. She needs to get out into the open air. Stacy asks for the bill. “Recently I went to visit Tommy’s mother who’s dying of cancer and is pretty much bedridden, the poor woman. We spent a lot of time looking at her photo albums. You know, the usual parade of bygone days lying like corpses against those funereal black pages: childhood, college, family, kids, travels, and so on. I’m in some of them, playing with little Tommy in the park, making him cry, that sort of thing. What’s odd, though, is that she’s mutilating them. Ripping people out of photos, trashbagging whole albums. As far as I could tell, it’s mostly images of Tommy’s dad that are getting edited out. Who knows why. Maybe she feels he isn’t paying her enough attention, or she thinks he’s playing around, or she’s just mad that she’s dying and he isn’t. But, whatever, the more damage she does to them, the more interesting they get. They’re an ugly mess, but there’s passion now. Art.” Sally is smiling. Stacy isn’t, though she’s trying. “I asked her if she had three wishes, what would she wish for? I expected her to say something like not to have cancer or maybe the end of all cancer in the world or else something vengeful to go along with what she is doing to the photo albums. But instead, she said she wished we were all better prepared for the disappointment that life is.”

  “Oh…! That’s so sad…”

  On West Condon’s Main Street, the lunchtime klatch has reconvened at Mick’s Bar & Grill. Georgie, tagging along with the fire chief, needs a drink badly after what he’s just seen, but so far, no one has offered him one. Whatever made Dave off himself like that? Georgie can conceive of doing things that might leave him with limited chances of survival—he’s seen all the old war movies and has imagined his own ill-fated heroics (after a consolatory fuck or two with the village darlings)—but jumping forever into the night like that for no better reason than love or money makes no sense to him. Old man Beeker of the hardware store, munching away, says if things don’t get better on Main Street, he’ll be the next to tear up his ticket, and others echo him, though Burt Robbins says the problem was that Osborne was just another blue-collar meathead who couldn’t make the class jump. His snarling remarks always piss Georgie off, the more so when aimed at a solid guy like Dave, his body not even cold yet, but he keeps his peace and probably, because he can never turn it off, even has a stupid grin on his face. Is it bad luck to see a guy swing like that? Probably, but so is everything else.

  The mayor, who dumped the shoe store on Dave in the first place, comes in and lights a cigar and orders up a soup and a club sandwich, looking both solemn and pleased with himself. They ask him what he was talking about with Cavanaugh, and Castle says in his booming, cheek-blowing way that the banker has been pressuring him to lock up Charlie Bonali for busting his kid’s nose in a squabble over a girl, and he suggested to the banker if he wants to have a wop war he should get Puller and Smith to be his hired guns, knowing what they think of dagos. People laugh sourly at this. Just what is being laughed at is unclear, though Georgie has the idea it might be his own kind, so he orders up a plate of bacon, cinnamon toast, and three easy overs, and figures it’s the mayor’s treat. Stevie has told him that since old man Suggs’ brain burned out on him, his manager has taken over and might be hiring again, and he might not share Suggs’ grudge against the Roman church. McDaniel is an outsider, hopefully ignorant of Georgie’s history, so maybe he’ll go check it out, though it does sound too much like work.

  The imbecilic spugna on the floor has been blabbering something about Jesus Christ being nothing but a deadbeat freeloader, so finally Mort Whimple asks Mick what the hell Elliott is talking about, and Mick confirms that the crazy preacher who thinks he’s Jesus had been in earlier and polished off a sandwich and a few glasses of gin on Jim’s tab. Earl Goforth says he saw Prissy Tindle out in front of the shoe store, running around frantically in the street looking for the preacher in nothing but a raggedy nightshirt and showing her ass out a rip at the back, and there are further remarks from other witnesses, not all complimentary, on this remarkable sight. Georgie, tucking into his eggs, wonders how he missed that. “In case she comes in here looking, Mick,” Robbins says, “lemme have a slice of that lemon pie.”

  Who does come in is Elliott’s wife. Nice-looking lady in a crisp lemony frock who knows everybody and gets friendly greetings. “Come on, Jim,” she says, trying to haul her husband to his feet. So much dead weight. “Give me a hand, Maury,” she grunts. “Whuzz happenin’?” Elliott asks. “Whereza party?” “It’s naptime, Jim. The party’s tonight. You have to sober up so you can start over again.” Georgie pops the last bite into his mouth and helps the lady get the dipso off the floor and out to the street and into her car—a lot of people still wandering around out there in front of the shoe store—then just drifts off, figuring on a little sonnellino of his own somewhere in preparation for tonight’s big stag party for Stevie. Maybe his old lady would trade him an hour on the sofa for the story of Osborne’s suicide.

  “I don’t think you go anywhere,” Luke say
s. “I think they just stick you in the ground like they did Gramma and you stay there forever. I think it’s a big mistake to die. I don’t ever want to do it.”

  “That’s stupid, Lukie,” says her big brother around his jawbreaker. “What about the Rapture? Mom’s gonna get really mad if I tell her what you said.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll tell her you thought Jesus is just some man in a fake beard.”

  “Like Santa Claus, you mean?” one of the other kids asks.

  “Yeah,” says Mattie. “But meaner.”

  “Well, Santa Claus can be pretty mean, too,” Luke says, and some of the other kids agree with that.

  “He gave Ma a black eye last year,” one of them says.

  Markie starts to cry and his jawbreaker pops out and lands in the gutter. Mattie wipes it on his cutoffs and gives it back to his brother to stop his crying. The three young Blaurocks are sitting on a curb in Chestnut Hills under the midday sun with all these other kids, peeling the rubber off their sneaker soles and sucking on the all-day jawbreakers given to them by the shoe store man who has just gone off to the other world—even if that world, as Luke would have it, is only a hole in the ground. Meanwhile, their mom is traipsing from door to door in Chestnut Hills with little Johnny in her arms, telling everyone about Jesus and the hanged man. Mattie is skeptical about these Jesus sightings, but Luke says their mom is seeing him because she wants to, and because of who she is, that makes it so. “If Mom wants something to happen, it happens.” No one argues with that, not even Mattie. There are always people in and out of their house now. It’s almost a kind of church, whichever house they’re in, changing houses being about the most fun thing they do now. Most of the kids know that Luke is completely mistaken about what happens after you die. When some glad morning the roll is called up yonder, they’re all going to fly away, fly away, to join the angel chorus and rest at Jesus’ feet (won’t it be so sweet), joyfully carried on the wings of that great speckled bird to gather at the river in that fair land where the soul never dies, at a better home awaiting over on God’s celestial shore up in the sky, Lord, in the sky, where the silver fountains play upon the mountain high and the milk and honey and healing waters flow cleft for me. They know that. They have sung all the songs and heard all the stories and they know the truth. And Lukie does, too, she’s just being contrary, as usual.