Origin of the Brunists (19 page)

Over one grimy brick office building, a wind sock jabbed rigidly. A northwest wind, and it pierced her thoroughly. The sock poked its signal at the nearby rise, which lifted its nubbed crest just over the fretwork of denuded trees to the east of the buildings. Too squat for a hill really: a hummock, a soft knoll. On a concrete wall, next to a steel door, she found a sign that read: CAUTION! N
O
S
CUFFLING
OR
P
LAYING
! NO SMOKING!
This is a Closed Light Mine—Smoking in or Carrying Smoking Materials into This Mine is a
VIOLATION OF THE LAW! Scratched on the wall with coal was:
Look!
This Means
You!
with an arrow aimed at the word “Scuffling.” A few adolescent obscenities, cartooned nude women, male genitals, no clues. In red: JE$U$ $AVE$!
Why don't you? 1st Nat'l Bank
. She counted the words on the printed sign: twenty-eight—it meant nothing to her. Four sevens. Well, so what? The first five words, true, contained a certain meaning applicable to her: to be careful not to become childish about this crisis, nor to seek unnecessary trouble; but, given the rest of it, it was probably merest accident. What was a “closed light mine”? She didn't know. Were the lights enclosed, or was the mine defined somehow as “light”? Perhaps there was, in a sense, light trapped in the mine that needed now to be released. But all these directions seemed futile. And then, suddenly, beside the steel door, as though it were materializing, appearing there now for the first time, she saw a telephone! So certain was she that she had marched this bitter way to receive a message, that she impulsively lifted the phone off the hook and put it to her ear.

“Excuse me, lady, can I help you?”

She nearly dropped the phone in fright, fumbling returned it to its cradle, apologized to the tall miner beside her. “No, no! I'm sorry! I was only curious, and—”

The miner smiled. “Oh well, go ahead and listen, if you like.”

Eleanor calmed. “Thanks,” she said, “but I'm just getting in your way, I'm afraid. I hope you'll pardon me.” They exchanged smiles, and she walked away.

Unexpectedly, she came upon a Salvation Army canteen, still operating although the two women inside were packing things away into carton boxes. There was coffee, though, steaming hot against the chill in her, and they seemed delighted to have a customer. They apologized that the doughnuts were from Saturday, but, suddenly hungry, Eleanor accepted one anyway. It was rubbery and tough, sugarless, but sweet to her. When the women learned she was not herself a widow, had lost no one out here, they grew talkative, but Eleanor was too weak to listen. A sense of displacement was overtaking her; exhaustion threatened to buckle her knees. She sat on a wooden folding chair. She could never walk back again. The women told her that all the bodies had been recovered and were being prepared by morticians at the high school gymnasium. They described the hideous condition of some. Funerals tomorrow and Wednesday. They produced anecdotes of rescue, which Eleanor pretended to attend. Their hollow voices clucked and moaned at the horror. Well, did they think they would escape it? Sensational slaughter made people count death exceptional.

The two miners who had offered her the ride entered, and she asked if they might be going back soon; she would like to take them up on their offer. They laughed and said Sure, introduced themselves as Mr. Ferrero and Mr. Bonali. They had coffee first, and Eleanor received an account of Mr. Bonali's escape from the disaster.

The ride back into town was surprisingly brief. On foot, it was a healthy hike, of course, but the cold wind had distorted the distance. She told the two men that she was a teacher at the high school, and Mr. Bonali, the driver, said he had thought so when she had told him her name, because he had a daughter, a freshman this year, who had mentioned her. Angela. Angie. Eleanor said, oh, of course, Angela Bonali, but she couldn't bring the girl's face to mind. Mr. Ferrero said it must be a tough job, he wouldn't have the courage to face up to a pack of teen-age monsters every day. She replied that she enjoyed her work, but regretted the absence of spontaneity and receptivity in today's youth. Of course, she didn't mean Angela, she was only speaking generally.

“No, I know what you mean,” Mr. Bonali concurred. “She's a wise kid, thinks she's pretty smart. They all do.”

“Well, we weren't angels,” observed Mr. Ferrero, and Mr. Bonali, laughter booming, agreed with that.

Eleanor explained to them that she had to pick up some papers to be graded in her office at the school, so they dropped her off there, although of course her purpose was to visit the gymnasium.

The mine company guards at the gymnasium door would not allow her to enter. Beyond their bulked shoulders she could see the dark cadaver lumps on the floor under army blankets, fewer than she had expected, white light raying in on them from the opaque windows back of the bleachers, dust hovering gloomily. On the basketball scoreboard:
WEST
CONDON
14,
VISITORS
11
. Eleanor rarely thought about numbers—she respected the numerologists, but the ever-present prime numbers were too vague to satisfy her—but, out of an old prejudice from childhood, multiples of seven always caught her eye. Seven, fourteen, twenty-eight, thir—well, yes! of course! the toll!
incredible!

As though on cue, Colin Meredith appeared before her, a tall supple-limbed boy with guileless eyes and perceptive brow whom Domiron had led to her. His long blond hair, soft and silky, flopped loosely on his pale brow. He seemed extremely excited. Colin's discipleship, if it could be called that, had thus far disappointed Eleanor faintly: he was too playfully interested still in flying saucers and green men from Mars to grasp the profounder truths of essence, transience, emanations, and reabsorptions. Nonetheless, the soil was fertile, his was an aristocratic spirit, and, though cautious (she suddenly thought of the sign at the mine!), she entertained large hopes for him. Now, he said he had been looking for her, had come here hoping to find her. “Mrs. Norton,” he gasped, once they had slipped out of earshot of others, “do you remember the message you gave me, the one from, from …”

“Domiron.” It was not to tell him, for he knew it well; only he feared yet to speak it aloud.

“Yes, the one that said about the long uphill struggle one must endure, out of—do you remember?—
‘out of the abyss of darkness,'
you said!”

She nodded, accepting his child's awe, and saw that his true growth had begun. “I received perhaps the most important messages of my long life over this past weekend,” she told him solemnly. “Cosmic purposes of enormous significance are to be revealed to us soon. Can you visit me later this week?”

“Sure! Would Friday be soon enough?”

She smiled. “I hope so,” she replied.

Eleanor and Wylie returned home from the Tuesday mass funerals, depressed and, for her part, confused. So many deaths at once, the irregular and paradoxical messages she was receiving, the bitter weather—Eleanor was frightened, felt weak and light-minded before the challenge, but could not resist its excitement. She had tried to visit the rescued miner, Mr. Bruno, yesterday, but was told he had not awakened from his coma. She would try again tomorrow, if he lived still. Yet, she was sure he would. She understood at this point all too little, but she was convinced that Giovanni Bruno was somehow a part of it.

She hung up her coat, fixed sandwiches for both of them, but finally didn't eat her own, decided first to read the evening paper. Wylie sank sleepily into the armchair. She felt a kind of peculiar dizziness as she reached for the paper. She glanced at the headlines—and started up, her heart pounding: not only had Giovanni Bruno recovered from his coma,
but he had announced a visitation by what he called the Holy Virgin during his entombment!
She had appeared to him, he said, in the form of a …a white bird!

A white bird!
the image of the soul, the volatile principle,
life itself!
messenger of peace and prodigies! symbol through man's story of spiritualism and sublimation! of thoughts and of angels! the color and creature of mystic illumination!
ecstasis
out of time and freed from space!
“Oh Domiron!”
she cried, and fell to the floor.
“Let me have light!”
She rolled onto her back, and the chandelier above her lit, swayed, expanded, burst into flame like a skyrocket.

She was on the couch. Her head throbbed. Wylie was leaning over her, patting her hand. She breathed as though against resistances. He withdrew the thermometer from her armpit, shook his head as he read it, gazed compassionately down upon her over the pale rims of his spectacles, his round chin doubling. “Over a hundred,” he said. “You've got to slow down a little.”

“Wylie … what happened?”

“You were reading the paper. Then you … you cried out, and, well, you sort of passed out.”

“Did you read about it?” He nodded. “Wylie, what did I say?”

He hesitated, looked away from her. “You said, first you said, ‘Domiron,' and then, ‘Let me have light.'“

“Yes …?”

“And then you said: ‘Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.'“

“Ask and thou shalt be confirmed.”

“That's right.”

“What do you think … what do you think it means, Wylie?”

“I … I don't know, dear.”

“I do.” It had been on her mind since Sunday night, since Thursday, perhaps even before. “I must see Mr. Bruno tonight,” she said.

“Eleanor, please! You have a fever!”

“It doesn't matter. Nothing else does.” As she sat up, a chill vibrated through her. “I have to go, Wylie.”

He pressed his lips together, his eyes pained, but then he smiled. “All right,” he said. “I'll go with you.”

The heated rhythm of fever disturbed the uniformity of Eleanor's perceptions, and what happened at the hospital had afterwards to be reconstructed. People, there were many, though she noticed few in particular. The clocking knock of heels on the marble floor. Whiteness, the antiseptic odor. A fat dark priest was there, old women. One of these, wizened and brown, gnarled with misery but not with great wisdom, was the rescued miner's mother; she spoke no English. Eleanor, impelled by forces far greater than herself, had reached his bedside. He was gaunt and spectral, high-browed with hollowed eyes and fragile as she had known he would be, still passing, thought Eleanor headily, into substance. There were other women outside, a coarse mulelike woman named Mrs. Collins, whose husband, Giovanni Bruno's working partner in the mine, had been killed by the disaster. One of the seven, Eleanor learned, and another chill rattled through her. Other widows, the Collins child—Eleanor knew the girl from school, a shy and weak-minded student. And Giovanni's sister Marcella—when their eyes met, Eleanor discovered a friendship already eons old. “Wylie!” she had whispered. “The girl! She is one of us!” A remarkable innocence, so profoundly seated it could never be excised, opened wide her brown eyes, taught delicacy and gaiety to her ready smile, graced the motions of her limbs. The old woman said her boy had died and come back to life! Marcella translated it, her warmth transforming it, elevating it to essential truth. Marcella, like Eleanor herself, lived, she saw, in a responsive universe. By his bedside, Eleanor contemplated the strange and inexorable processes that had transported her here, suddenly envisioned the confused complex of her past as a series of concentric circles, each smaller and pulling toward the center … and wasn't this the very sense of aspects?

Shards of old prophecies broke kaleidoscopically on her mind, as memories of old conflicts, old conquests, streamed out into pattern, rationally ordered. He opened his eyes and looked at her. A sudden terror gripped her: he was Italian, a Roman Catholic, a stranger, she knew nothing about him, a laborer in the mines, would he find her mad? Hostile faces of old crises appeared, floated, rippled over his gaunt face like watery masks, and if she were wrong …?

And, indeed, hadn't Mrs. Collins all but confirmed it? That message had excited Eleanor, even though a reading of it was disappointing. A simple Christian admonition finally, which the Collins woman with equal simplicity equated to stale dreams of a Last Judgment. Eleanor could not help becoming impatient with the Christians and their adolescent clubbiness, their absurd dualities, concern with the physical body, their chosen-people complex … even though the Bible itself, before Domiron, had been her chief guide. Now, the woman believed that something—perhaps even the Second Coming—must happen on the eighth of February, finding this implication in her dead husband's note, and she was bullish and tense and she had power. She led a group called the “Evening Circle”; Eleanor was invited to attend the Sunday night meeting, but, for the moment, on the pretext of precarious health, Eleanor declined. She understood clearly, in spite of her feverish state of mind, the threat that the Collins woman posed: it was the threat of ignorance. But, in any case, she had to agree with the woman, events of supreme importance were in the air, although the function and date hardly appealed to her, especially since they had never been mentioned by her own sources. Of course, Mr. Collins had been a preacher, it was quite natural that his imagery should be lower-class Christian (and misspelled at that!), he could not be blamed, and there was above all a prodigious, an awesome, coincidence of interest in Giovanni Bruno.

In that brief moment beside his bed, before they discovered her there and ordered her away, in that instant when he looked up at her, through her terror she drove the question: “Are you the One who is to come?” His eyes burned through her. His breath came shortly. He nodded. They found her leaning against the foot of the bed, eyes closed. Wylie explained calmly to them about her fever, and she apologized, saying she had come in here looking for a place to rest.