Origin of the Brunists (46 page)

As soon as Vince and Etta arrived at the Friday night meeting they found themselves surrounded by the people they'd contacted, wanting details, wanting to find out what the pitch was going to be, wanting in on the center of things and apparently figuring Vince was the route. The little auditorium was packed, must have been more than two hundred squeezing in, Jesus, it was just as good as he'd said it would be. And here in St. Stephen's, Vince and his people felt right at home. He left Etta with a gang of them, told her just to talk and keep their interest up, while he looked for Ted.

He knocked into Chester Johnson, who asked him, “Hey, Bonali! We gonna have a lynchin', baby?”

“Yeah.” Vince grinned, barely pausing as he moved through. “We're gonna clean out the lousy pitch players in this town.”

He worked his way over toward where some of the town politicos were buzzing around Mayor Whimple. Felt a tug on his arm, turned: Ted Cavanaugh. “Come with me a minute, Vince.”

He and Ted shouldered their way through the crowd, a lot of eyes on them, respectful mumble, stepped into a little room just outside the auditorium proper. Couple businessmen in there. Vince recognized them, but had never met them personally. They turned toward him. “Maury, Burt, this is Vince Bonali. Maury Castle, Vince. Burt Robbins.” Vince greeted them, gave them a hard handshake. They said they knew him. Joe Altoviti and another guy stepped into the room. Altoviti was alderman from Vince's part of town. The other guy was introduced as Jim Elliott, Chamber of Commerce secretary. “Man, Ted, that's a real crowd out there!” Elliott said.

“Vince here had a lot to do with it,” Cavanaugh said simply. They all turned and looked at him. He pulled out a cigar, clamped it in his teeth, reached for matches, but Castle lit it for him. “We don't have much time,” Cavanaugh went on. “I'm going to get the thing underway by stating the main purposes, telling what I know of Bruno's group and the trouble that Reverend Baxter is causing, but we'll need motions to actually get the committee set up and really functioning. Burt, Maury, can you take care of that?”

“Sure.”

“Who should we make chairman of it?”

The guys in the room looked around at each other. Vince didn't see what was wrong with Ted's idea. “Why not the mayor?”

Ted seemed to think about that a minute, like he'd forgot. “Okay. Will you take care of the nomination, Vince?”

Again the eyes. Vince nodded. Castle drew the second.

Cavanaugh: “Of course, this is as much a religious problem as a civic one. Maybe we ought to have a couple vice-chairmen. Father Baglione, for example. One of the Protestant ministers maybe. How does that strike you fellows?”

They assented, settling finally on Reverend Edwards of the First Presbyterian, since he also headed up the Ministerial Association. To emphasize it was all nonsectarian, Elliott was charged with nominating Baglione, Altoviti with naming Edwards.

On the way out, Elliott whispered in Vince's ear, “Say, I hate to seem stupid, but what's Father Baglione's first name?”

“Battista.”

Elliott grinned, clapped Vince's shoulders. “Thanks.”

Vince was thinking over what Ted had said. This was a town of Christians. Catholics and Protestants. We all believe in bringing up our children in our own faith, seeing to it that they get properly oriented to the life ahead of them here in this Christian country, that they learn what's good and bad, right and wrong. It was true. That was what held them together. It was West Condon.

Back in the auditorium, Vince felt all the eyes on him. He felt a little nervous about the speech he had to make. They all seemed to sense he had some key part to play. Etta winked soberly from across the room. Turned some phrases over. Youngsters of this town. Our young people. Threat to our community and its welfare. Our Christian community. Morals. Immoral. City's leading citizen. We all know him, know we can depend on him. Sense of responsibility. Vince nodded at Sal Ferrero and Georgie Lucci. Those of us who have grown up here. Has taken us a long time to come home. Home. West Condon is our home. Our lives are a part of. He saw a lot of his mining buddies. Taken chances. Invested our lives here. Bad situation. Explosive situation. Have to put down a little rock dust. Yeah, that was it. Your first blast can set off secondary ones. Depends on the effectiveness of your rock dusting. Contain the effect. Cavanaugh thumped him on the shoulders, moved his big frame up toward the front of the auditorium to call for order. Over left tackle. Vince ground the cigar out under his heel. Teamwork.

Mayor Mortimer Whimple's West Condon Common Sense Committee burst upon the scene with unexpected force. Its impact was felt in every corner of the town, and its repercussions carried even beyond. The West Condon
Chronicle
, still silent on the activity that had sparked the Committee, nevertheless headlined the Committee itself, printed the texts of all speeches, reported all that it did or said it meant to do, and the wireservices and city papers picked a lot of it up. Old-timers could remember nothing quite like it since the long-gone days of prohibition and the interunion wars. It was like the town had been slowly dying of blackdamp and only a good sharp blast could really clear the air. As the Committee grew, its meetings were shifted from the Catholic auditorium to the high school auditorium, and finally to the gymnasium. “If something like this can happen here in West Condon,” the Italian coalminer Vince Bonali said during his famous “rock dusting speech” before that mass assembled on March twenty-seventh, “something is wrong! It's up to us—you and me—to find out what it is, and
set it right!”
There was a thunderous burst of cheering and applause, and then the Presbyterian minister Reverend Wesley Edwards rose to read from the Bible:

The minister paused, gazed out upon the crowd, closed his Bible with a resounding snap.

Solidarity was the theme, but it was not complete. Some abstained, others were effectively barred. The embarrassing fantasies of the coalminer Giovanni Bruno were flouted, but no less so were “opportunism” and “extreme and fanatical fundamentalism.” Neither the
Chronicle
editor nor any loyal Nazarene follower of Reverend Abner Baxter could fail to recognize he was not exactly welcome. A famous proverb became the Committee's unofficial motto, and no one doubted which West Condoners were therein being rebuked….

The mayor and certain business leaders urged prudence and restraint, emphasizing the Committee's potential for positive constructive activities, and set up a program of community renovation, which, hopefully, would establish a base of Christian fellowship and prosperity here that would make “these other sentiments” seem silly and inconsequential. The Ministerial Association together with the Roman Catholic Church issued a joint resolution on the first day of April calling all citizens to join them in a renewal of basic Christian faith and to make this Easter season an occasion for recovering those values and aspirations that had made this nation great and brought justifiable honor to it. It all made sense, good old-fashioned American
common
sense, and the townsfolk of West Condon went for it, few doubting the while that things would be so dull as the mayor and the business leaders seemed to think. Subcommittees were set up, plans made, responsibilities given.

Meanwhile, attacked on one side by the violent powers of darkness, reviled on the other by a thickening mass of ignorance and prejudice, and even, as some feared, threatened from within by subversive or weakhearted elements, the followers of Giovanni Bruno decided it was time, as the former coalminer Ben Wosznik put it, to brattice themselves off, to retire entirely from public view. “When something goes off,” he said, “your first impulse is to beat it for the nearest exit. But you can't tell from where you are just where it happened, and you may end up running right into the middle of the worst of it. It's almost usually better to find you a safe place, wall it up, and wait there.” Domiron concurred:

They determined to avoid all conflict, to vary and keep secret the time and place of their meetings, to seek for the moment no new members, and to prepare quietly, each in his own way, for the personal test that awaited them all on the nineteenth of April.

“Those who are ready will come without our seeking them,” Eleanor Norton told them all, and they were quick to agree. “Let us only be certain to be prepared for them.”

The lawyer Ralph Himebaugh introduced hand signals and special tunics to go with the White Bird password and, with Mrs. Norton and Mrs. Collins, redesigned the altar and developed a meeting format. His new tunics, which the women made and which they all wore at their gatherings now, were white (the White Bird, the Coming of Light) with brown (Bruno) ropes at the waist, and, embroidered in brown on the breast, a large circle (Evening Circle, a Circle of Evenings) enclosing a miner's pick, stylized to resemble a cross. The dimensions of this pick/cross were numerologically determined: seven units each for the arms and head, twelve units for the post or handle, totaling thirty-three, the life in years of Christ, not to mention an entire history of secondary meanings derived from important ancient writings. A banner was designed with the same emblem as the robes with the addition of a white bird flying above the embroidered cross and circle.

Mr. Himebaugh also designed a secret cross, utilizing the new secret name suggested to the group by their scribe and secretary Mr. Justin Miller, the “Brunists,” in which the
T
of the name was the cross itself, with
BRUNI
across the top of the crossarm and an
S
on each side of the post under the arm. The
U
, being the middle letter of the five on top, had the effect by enlargement of turning the cross or
T
into a trident, suggesting the Trinity and other significant trichotomies, as well as the horns of the Ram, with
BR
to the left and
NI
to the right. Giving these letters their alphabet value in numbers, the number of the cross itself became 20; across the top, the numbers read 2—18—21—14—9, with two 19's below, on each side of the cross. The U's number of 21 on top and in the middle was identified not only as three sevens, with all that meant, but also as 21 March, the first day of the sign of rebirth and the night Mrs. Collins' house burned, marking mystically the commencement of this their final trial; similarly, the 19's, repeated as though for emphasis, were quickly accepted as heralds of the 19th of April, the last day of the sign of Aries and the night the end of the world—“the ultimate transformation”—would come. Mrs. Collins, it was true, still clung to the notion this could happen, as her husband's note implied, on the 8th of April, but even she was admittedly prepared to accept Mrs. Norton's date fully if nothing did happen on the 8th. The most important number, of course, was the initial 2, which symbolized everything from the cosmic combat between the sons of light and the powers of darkness, to the two figureheads of the movement, Ely Collins and Giovanni Bruno. The number 18 was generally accepted as representing the first month and the eighth day, the day of the mine disaster, but some, including Mrs. Wilson Hall, feared it omened a significant event for 18 April. The 14 and 9 of
N
and
I
also possessed a hierarchy of meanings, but the approved ones were those originally proposed by Mr. Himebaugh: the 14 stood for the number of weeks between Bruno's rescue and the end of the world (a “week of Sundays” plus a “circle of evenings”), while the 9 represented the number of the coalmine, and thus the Mount of Redemption where they would gather for the end. But Mr. Himebaugh also added and subtracted all these numbers, introduced 7 in different and intriguing ways, gave the letters Greek and Hebrew alphabet values, superimposed elements on his own graphs and vice versa, and even integrated the birthdates of each of the members for personal interpretations. With so much to learn, there was little time left for making foolish quixotic charges upon the hostile and ultimately damned world, and in their prayers they asked only for the peace which would permit them to remain together unto the end.

And then, on the evening of Palm Sunday, the fifth of April, a surprising message was received from Domiron in the presence of all members:

All were stunned. Mrs. Norton, as though in disbelief, looked up from what her hand had written at Mrs. Collins. Mrs. Collins turned pale. Mrs. Wilson began to tremble. “Oh, Clara!” she wept. “That's just three days!” said Carl Dean Palmers. “Friends,” said Mrs. Collins, standing tall now in her white tunic:
“Prepare!”

Idly, contentedly, Marcella stitches his white tunic. Dust, like a microscopic Imitation of the universe, floats and revolves in the shafts of sunlight that penetrate the room through the south windows. Hanging up the phone this morning, she felt the gray unnamable anxiety that has shadowed her these last weeks let go its grip, lift, fade like a bad dream. A paradox has apparently resolved itself, and now, with her discovery of its resolution, comes a great calm. The discovery encloses a decision, yet it is so easy a decision to make—in fact, it is already made
.