Origin of the Brunists
Robert Coover
Respectfully for Richard P. McKeon
And see that you make them
after the pattern for them
,
which has been shown you on the mountain â¦
“Write what you see in a book and send it to the Seven Churches.”
âR
EVELATION
TO
J
OHN
1:11
Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. What did he really expect? The Final Judgment, perhaps. Something, certainly, of importance. What he did not expect was to find himself standing on the night of Saturday the eighteenthâthe Night, as it turned out, of the Sacrificeâin a ditch alongside the old road to Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine, watching a young girl die. He had been prepared, as only a man of great but simple faith can be prepared, for profound and terrifying events, but he had not been prepared for that. He couldn't even remember much of it later on, so squeezed had his mind been by plain awe. The crowd all came out of their cars and stood around, some up on the lip of the ditch, others, like himself, down near the girl, down where the long grass threw black spiked shadows. Some stared as though not seeing her. Some wept hysterically, knelt to pray. None, surely, were unmoved. He recalled seeing Mrs. Eleanor Norton at one point lying in the roadway as though dead, her husband fanning her desperately with the hem of his white tunic. Yes, oddly, Hiram retained that pointless detail: Dr. Norton's fat knees planted painfully in the ruts and cinders of the old mine road, revealed like a secret signal with every flap of the tunic hem. But the rest of it remained forever obscure to him, lost in the mad crisscross of headlight beams, a dreamlike conjuring of happenings that whirled in a fantastical circle with neither beginning nor end.
They had anticipated, on arriving that afternoon at the home of the coalminer-visionary Giovanni Bruno, a small group of believers, such as they had seen witnessing on television, but they encountered instead literally hundreds of people milling about. At least half of them, Hiram noted, were newspaper, radio, and television people: many cameras, much light, an unbelievable excitement. He went looking immediately for Sister Clara, found her speaking animatedly with a group of people, like himself dressed in streetclothes, yet with the unmistakable quality of the Church of the Nazarene about them. “Sister Clara!”
“Brother Hiram!” Clara cried, and hurried toward him to take his hand in both of hers. “How wonderful! You've come!”
“Yes, after all you told me, Sister Clara, I could hardly stay away.”
She introduced him to the group, friends of the faith from New Bridgeport. Hiram had never seen Clara so inspirited. She spoke glowingly of all their plans, of all the wonderful people who had answered the call, of this great moment that was gloriously upon them. Hiram, in turn, told her he had brought five persons with him, including his wife Emma.
“Well, we still don't have tunics for everybody,” Clara said. “We plain didn't expect so many folks, Hiram. But I can give you two now for you and Emma, and maybe we'll get enough more done by tomorrow for the rest.” She led him to a bedroom close by and presented him with the tunics, took a moment to explain some of the marvelous things that had transpired in that room, that very room, in the turbulent fourteen weeks just past.
“It is so ⦠so humble, Sister Clara,” Hiram remarked. “So appropriate.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “This house has been like our second home.” She paused, her strong face sunk for a moment in memory and grief. “I lost my own home, you know, mine and Ely's.”
“Yes, so you told me. And yet it is, as you yourself said, Sister Clara, but one more sign among the many, one more assurance in the contest with doubt.”
“Yes, but I got to admit, it hurt me, Hiram.”
“It would have hurt any of us, Clara. You have borne the strain of these awesome months like a true saint.” She did not reply, seemed absorbed in her own thoughts. “These tunics, do we just put them on over ourâ?”
“No, but see Ben about that. He'll direct you where to change and all.”
And so then he led Clara over to where Emma and the others were waiting. He was deeply impressed, observing the widow Clara Collins. She stood so tall in her tunic, so strong and self-possessed. He had heard her speak on other occasions at tent meetings and in company with Brother Ely, but always then in that great man's shadow, and he had never before observed such eloquence in her, such candid poise, such great personal magnetism and contained power; she was as though possessed by the Holy Spirit Itselfâand, indeed, was this not precisely the case?
More of Clara's friends arrived, groups from Wilmer and Tucker City and a couple from Daviston, distracting her once more. She pointed toward where Brother Ben Wosznik could be found, and Hiram led his people over there, explaining elements of the movement as he understood them. Ben greeted them warmly, recognizing Hiram and Emma from his visit with Clara the previous Monday, and calling them by their first names. He informed them of the regulation regarding the wearing of only white garments under the tunics, and shepherded them upstairs to show them where the bathroom was. On the way, he interpreted for them the meaning of the design on the tunic, the cross that turned out to be a sort of coalminer's pick, the enclosing circle, the use of the color scheme of brown upon white, and they talked about their expectations of the Coming of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of Light. As for the wearing of white underneath, he said that one of their members had gone to town this very afternoon to purchase a wide assortment of white underclothing for those who, in understandable ignorance, might have come without. Hiram had liked Ben immediately, upon the very first encounter, and now, climbing the narrow staircase in this strange house, below him a most strange and disturbing excitement, confronting the strangest event in Hiram Clegg's life, he all but loved the man. Ben Wosznik breathed humility, compassion, loyalty, warmth. Wherever Clara Collins and Ben Wosznik are, Hiram thought that moment, there I belong.
Hiram, suffering from a mild seasonable cold, had dressed that morning in his old white longjohns, though the spring weather hardly called for it, and now he was glad that he had done so. The tunics were lightweight and it was easy to get a chill. Emma, on the other hand, was wearing her black brassiere, and the other articles were pink. “I feel so undressed, Hiram,” she confessed, once into the tunic and the underthings removed. Her breath still came quickly, irregularly, as a result of the climb upstairs, poor womanâher weight had become a severe problem to her these last years.
“I'll try to find some things for you,” Hiram said. “I certainly don't want you to have any pulmonary problems now, just at a time like this!”
“Oh, now, don't worry, Hiram.” She smiled, panting a little. “It's not the exertion, it's the excitement.” And that was true. All that day and the next, it seemed impossible for Emma to catch her breath, even while sitting quietly.
Ben showed them where to hang their clothes, and they descended then, all together, returning to the turbulent event, and now to the very heart of it, for by their tunics they had announced their commitment. Ben led them to the altar, where, surrounded by such relics as white chicken feathers, the Black Hand of Persecution, a Mother Mary with her heart exposed on her breast, and, in a gilt frame, the famous death message of the beloved Ely Collins, the teacher Mrs. Eleanor Norton was discoursing to newsmen. Ben left them there to guide others up the stairs, and when the journalists, in their nervous and inevitably insulting manner, had moved on, Hiram introduced himself and his people to Mrs. Norton. Hiram found her every bit as gracious and wise as Sister Clara had foresaid. Her gray eyes were cool, but her friendship, once given, Hiram knew, was given forever. Around her neck, unlike the others, she wore a gold medallion, and Emma observed that the circle sewn around the cross on Mrs. Norton's tunic seemed to have straight edges, instead of being a true circle. Mrs. Norton explained that it was in reality a dodecagon, and then she elaborated briefly upon some of her private views, which Hiram found a bit complicated, but extremely interesting. Addressing herself to the uppermost segments of the dodecagon, she indicated that which pertained to ascent and descent, and, in some fascinating yet obscure way, to the disaster and the rescue. The succeeding terms were those of “illumination,” “mystic fusion,” and, finally, “transformation.” Mrs. Norton gazed up at them, smiling gently, her eyes a-twinkle.
“Tomorrow!”
she whispered. And for the next thirty minutes, Emma could hardly catch her breath again.
Before the afternoon had passed, they met all the other original membersâMrs. Norton's husband, Dr. Wylie Norton, the worldfamous lawyer Mr. Ralph Himebaugh, the Willie Halls, the widows, and so onâeventually even the prophet himself and the prophet's mother. Emma and the widow of the martyr Edward Wilson, a charming yet pious lady, like Emma heavyset and softspoken, became fast friends upon first encounter and were seldom seen apart in the hours to follow. With Sister Clara so occupied, Sister Bettyâfor that was her nameâbecame a kind of patron to his Randolph Junction people, and through her who had seen it all they felt yet more nearly drawn to its true center. They learned of the severe fast and the pledge of silence that the prophet's sister, Marcella Bruno, was keeping in her room alone, measures taken, Sister Betty implied, to expiate the evil brought upon them by the hateful infiltrator from the Powers of Darkness, Mr. Justin Miller of the West Condon
Chronicle
, who, against his own dark purposes, as it were, had, through announcing and exploiting their presences, strengthened and augmented the Army of the Sons of Light. She was said to be very weak, but her decline seemed almost to provide a balancing curve against the upward drive of the Brunists, the two destined to meet in final consummation, it was believed, tomorrow on the Mount of Redemption. As for Giovanni Bruno, he was a most imposing man, lean and austere, with long hair and cavernous eyes, and Hiram, in the prophet's presence, was uncommonly wonderstruck. He spoke not at all, for of course, as both Sister Clara and Mrs. Norton had observed, his purpose was unique and precise: to announce the Coming of the Light. He had done so. Further speech was superfluous. His only mission now was to lead them. And this, with sober poise, he did faultlessly.
Hiram himself was interviewed on one occasion. He had stepped out onto the front porch a moment to catch a breath of air, and there had been photographed in his tunic. A man asked him, “How long have you been a member of the Brunists?”
Hiram meditated but a moment, then replied, “Perhaps all of my life.”
“I thought this thing just got started this winter,” the man said, scribbling furiously in a notebook.
“Yes,” mused Hiram, “a man's physical life is numbered by days. But the life of his soul is rooted in the centuries!”
“Oh, I getcha,” said the man, cracking chewing gum between his teeth. “You only meant that figuratively.”
“No, son. Nothing that is true is merely figurative.”
“Unh-hunh. Well, whaddaya think is going to happen tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow will see the conclusion,” Hiram replied, “of an historical epoch.”
“Yeah, but I mean, is there gonna be spaceships, or what?”
“My boy! Did Christ foresee the crown of thorns, the shape of the cross, the rolling of that certain stone? We march to meet God's call, prepared to suffer what we must. Your questions are like those of a child who asks his parents what he'll be or when he'll die.”