Origin of the Brunists (14 page)

Sarah had taken four of the children home, while Abner, a terrible and inexplicable tension crowding his red brows, had with Junior followed the others out to the mine. She had telephoned the Collins place, and Sister Mary Harlowe, poor woman, answering, had confirmed that Sister Clara was waiting at home. She had left Franny with the three younger children and had gone to sit a spell with Sister Clara. Many had come: poor Tessie Lawson, Mabel Hall, Betty Wilson, whose Eddie had died in the hospital, almost all the women from Sister Clara's Evening Circle. She had learned then that Sister Wanda Cravens' husband might also have survived. They had cried together a great deal there. Worried finally that Abner might return out of temper and find the children untended, Sarah had left before any word had come.

Arriving home, she had overheard from the front porch the two youngest, Amanda and Paul, taunting Frances in the kitchen with the hateful chant Junior and Nat had started last summer:

Sarah had slammed in and upbraided them unmercifully, shouting at them that they would hear from their father on that score that very night. Franny had insisted shyly that she didn't mind the teasing, and had begged her not to tell their father, but Sarah had replied she was anyway mad at both of them still for the way they had carried on at breakfast. Then Franny had told her that Nat had run off, presumably to the mine. Franny was less charitable toward Nathan. They all were. Sarah had heard before Nathan even came about the curse of the third child, and certainly that boy was the devil's own. Well. She was wearied of whipping the child, and now he was so grown, husky for an eleven-year-old, it usually took both her and Franny holding for Abner to manage it. And Lord, it did no good. Abner would not admit it, but that was the plain truth of it. Nathan could not be saved.

Franny had dragged about all faint and teary, so Sarah had told her to go lie down until her father came home, she would finish the kitchen and get Sunday dinner. The girl hadn't argued; behind her glasses, her eyes had been red-rimmed, her round cheeks flushed and feverish. Poor Franny! Such a good girl, and to suffer so! And then the other children humiliating to make it worse. Franny was fifteen, she shouldn't have had to endure that trial, but what more could Sarah have done to stop it? It had been Abner that hot summer night who had judged the girl's refusal to tattle on the little ones an act of disobedience, and all Sarah's wailing had not constrained him. Abner had not thrashed Franny for a long time, so he had laid the razor strop to her. Tears had spilled and Abner had sweated, but the girl had not complained. And the others, witnessing the scourging, had discovered what now they sang about. How could they be so dreadful, those children? It grieved Sarah. Junior, who had started it, no longer mocked, of course: Sarah had noticed, giving him his baths recently, that he must sooner or later fall prey to his own malevolence. Her poor white goose, he was such a soft one. They were all redheads, all but Amanda, and that was probably why she was her father's favorite.

Abner and Junior had come home shortly after noon, Abner somber and uncommonly gentle. Ely Collins was dead, he had told her softly: horribly dead. She had wished to weep then, but had been unable. Now, he had said, much work lay ahead. Had he meant for her, too? The vague foreboding of ordeal had dismayed her. They had eaten Sunday dinner in virtual silence, all but Nat who had not returned home and who had not been seen by Junior at the mine. When Abner had retired to the front room, Junior's plump white face had turned to her and he said, “He was frightening out there! Everybody cried! He
made
them!”

More omens of disruption had touched her during family worship. Abner had passed the afternoon studying the Holy Bible, and by evening he had fallen strangely meditative. He had listened with curious patience as the children had recounted their evil doings, and instead of administering the usual castigations, had spoken solemnly with each of them about duty and led them, individually, in prayer. “The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge,” he had told Franny, “but the foolish despise wisdom and instruction.” To Junior, he had explained proverbially: “He hath made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made; his mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violence shall come down upon his own pate.” And he had instructed Junior how the ruthless avarice of the mine owners would bring disaster upon their pates, just as vice and waywardness had brought retributive death to many miners. Nathan, typically, had refused to say where he had been all day, or what it was he had brought home in a paper sack, would not even answer his father. Abner's face had contracted darkly. “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother,” he had rumbled ominously, and for a moment the familiar thunderheads had seemed to be forming and Sarah had breathed easier, “the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young vultures shall eat it!” But he had pursued the matter no further, had turned to little Amanda to receive her admission of mocking her sister Franny that day and disobeying her mother, and had, with alarming tenderness, lectured the confused child on love, admonishing her to make love her aim, and to “desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy!” What had he meant by that? Unnerving portents everywhere! Praying with Amanda, Abner had cried upwards to the Lord: “Oh deliver not the soul of thy turtle-dove unto the wild beast! forget not the life of thy poor forever!”

The children, disoriented by their father's altered manner, had gradually grown more unruly, testing the new limits, and Sarah had feared for them. Only little Paul, whose turn was last, had remained wanly mute, apparently too young to perceive the shift. Once Nathan had whispered something in the boy's ear, and he had begun to cry softly. That Nathan! She could have beat him herself! Abner had turned then to Paul, and whimpering, the boy had repeated what Amanda had revealed just before him. And then the doorbell had rung, bringing Sister Clara Collins and her tagtail daughter into the awry room, and Sarah had commenced to weep.

Abner invited Sister Clara to join them in prayer, but she impatiently thrust her note into his hands, saying, “I need your guidance, Abner! It's from Ely!” Sarah wished to see it, but feared Abner's rebuke if she asked; Sister Clara determined the matter by snapping it out of Abner's hand the moment he glanced up and planting it in Sarah's. In tortured script, it read:

Even before Sarah finished it, Sister Clara was demanding: “But what can it mean? What do you take it to mean?” Sarah was too confused even to hook the words of it together sensibly. She waited anxiously, staring hard at the note, for Abner to remove the burden of that response from her, and at last he did: “I think it means that it's better, if the will of God should so will, that ye suffer for well-doing than for evil-doing.” The words touched Sarah familiarly: she had awakened to them. They were to have been a part of Abner's sermon this morning.

“Maybe, Abner, but it ain't all of it, it cain't be. I know, God was tellin' him to leave the mine and go preach, and Ely he didn't do it, and so in a way he done wrong. Maybe. But what is troublin' me so, Abner, is what does he mean about listenin' to the Holy Spirit and standin' together—”

Abner, interrupting, growing nervous, explained that the Holy Spirit was the inspired word of the Holy Gospel; we must study it in our hearts and abide in Christ Jesus, so that our consciences will be clear when we must stand before Him “that is ready to judge the living and the dead—” The children were growing restless and noisy, but fell silent instantly before Abner's sudden buffeting glare. “The living and the dead,” he repeated, then added, though his mind seemed to be on the children: “For the end of all things is at hand—”

“That's it, Abner!”
Clara cried and Abner's white face spun toward her, pinched inward in consternation. “The end of all things
is
at hand! Don't you see—?”

“Now, Sister Clara—”

But the woman was in a frenzy and wouldn't be hushed, though Sarah saw that Abner's temper would not long be contained. “We will stand together before the Lord the eighth of—the eighth of when? Of
when
, Abner?
That's
the point of it, don't you see?
Ely was tryin' to tell us that God's final judgment is near upon us!”

A tremor of dread convulsed Sarah's heavy body, iced her spine:
the end!
“Oh, Abner!” she cried, and reached for him. He shrugged her off sternly. The children had stood, stirred, and tears floated now in Franny's eyes.

Abner calmed them. He reminded Sister Clara that the accident had happened on the eighth of the month, that Ely had probably only meant to date his note to her.

“Maybe,” Sister Clara said, clearly not convinced. “But ifn he died today, why did he put the eighth? And they ain't a period there before. God's signs to Ely seem terrible urgent to me, and I—Well, anyhow, I wanted both you folks to read it and meditate on it. Me and Elaine, we been showin' it around tonight to all the friends. I mean to bring it with me to Evenin' Circle next Sunday night, so's we can all talk it over together. I hope I kin count on you two bein' there.”

Sarah nodded, of course, she always went, but glimpsed Abner's sudden reprehensive glower—and understood then what it was he had been demanding of her all day—and why he must hate her, knowing she wasn't able. “Yes,” he said, for them both.

Sarah thought, as Sister Clara and her daughter departed, that the family worship would be considered ended for that night, but Abner shoved shut the door and spun enflamed on little Paul. “A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass,” he recited thunderingly into the now-recognizable terror-riven room,
“and a rod for the back of fools!”
His freckled white hand, pinked with fine red hairs, grasped the razor strop and cracked it across his thigh.

“No, Abner!” whispered Sarah. “Please!”

With frightened fingers, Paul dutifully unbuttoned his pants. Abner, twitching with impatience, reached to tear them from him just as, in terror, the boy made water. It sprayed out in frantic spurts on Abner's hands and knees—reflexively, Abner's right hand whipped and the razor strop cracked like a rifle shot into the child's wee fork. Paul screamed. Sarah cried, “No!
Abner!”

Abner, implacable, gripped the boy's frail shoulder. “If thou beat a child with the rod,” he blustered, “he will not die!”

But Franny, sobbing, covered Paul's body with her own like a mother hen. “Beat
me!”
she cried.

Abner was in a froth. Paul shrieked insanely under Franny's shield. Sarah saw a horrible smile flirt at the corner of Junior's mouth. She stood. Though terrified, she would not allow it again!

But then Abner did a wonderful thing: he ordered them all out of the room but for Franny. Sarah wouldn't even let them hear the flogging, she sent them straight to bed. Paul's peewee was strangely flushed, but he had quieted at least, and she could hear him talking with Nathan in their room. Alone, outside the door, Sarah listened to the blows fall.

When Abner came to bed, his anger had abated. She was fearfully disturbed, but he was disinterested in her explications. She lay awake hopelessly, not knowing what it would all come to. In spite of Abner, Sarah had been cruelly penetrated by the prophetic vision in Brother Ely's deathnote, and only one sinister mystery still vexed her: Why had the Lord chosen to take Brother Ely just the second before he would have completed the terrible message?

Until the lightness passes off, she sits on the edge of the bed, as though at a beginning place. Then she slides to the marble floor and pads in bare feet into her brother's room. Withdrawn he lies, absorbed into the bed, one with it, dark etching on the immaculate sheets. “Giovanni!” she whispers. No sign is given her but the determined pulsing of a vein in his neck. His skin has shrunk taut over his high skull, exaggerating the recession of his hairline. His black hair is long on the neck, feathers dark and wild on the pillow. He is … somehow … changed: yes, a new brother must come of it. She fears for him. So white! The dried blood she'd seen on his face seems to have sunk beneath the surface, now mottles with rose the flesh's pallor. For the first time since the night of the disaster, black doubts peck at her
.

Miller was met on Monday midmorning arrival by an officeful of comedy and the miner Willie Hall, who'd been waiting there since eight, Lou Jones having left for “Mick's Dispensary,” leaving the message that the doctors advised complete rest and not to expect him for a week or two. His prank had been a complete success, and the wirecopy which he retrieved from the wastecan testified to UP's subsequent panic. Someone had run over to the bus station to buy up the early morning editions from the city, and all but one carried it, one of them happily subheading the prayerbook episode. Miller equipped his ad force with copies to entertain the businessmen they called on that morning, and wrote up a boldface box for that night's front page on “this strange and inexplicable lapse in East Condon journalism.” He wondered if the UP rep was still in town—man! the dumb bastard had even embellished his cribbed account with praise of Jones'“long and worthy experience” in the mines and his “model Christian fatherhood”! Such are history's documents! He laughed. Miller had been seeking this vendetta ever since Jones had jockeyed through his latest typo a couple months ago on “the new
Chronicle
subscription rates, announced this week by publisher and editor Justin Milker,” which eventually made
The New Yorker
. He'd been burned more than once by Jones' propensity for the rigged typo, his worst being when Mrs. Ted Cavanaugh, wife of the banker, was named “Lay of the Year at the Presbyterian Church”—Only by the grace of Ted's fear of court publicity had they escaped being sued. Now he had squared it and had twitted the sloppy East Condoners as well.