Origin of the Brunists (62 page)

Amens were shouted and songs were sung and people wept and embraced one another and his own tears, he saw, were dampening the shoulder of Sister Clara's tunic, and for just that moment he felt a boy again and wished to fold himself forever in her embrace, but then it was Brother Ben Wosznik whose arm was around his shoulders and then a pale stout man named Brother Hiram and he saw his own wife Sarah come running down the ditch and into Clara's arms—“Oh Sister Clara! God help us!”

“Children!” cried Sister Clara. “It is the last hour! God has called us to redemption! The battle lines is formed and the last struggle is commenced!”

“Destroyers are come upon all the bare heights in the wilderness!” Abner cried out then through his tears, finding voice. “For the sword of God devoureth from the one end of the land even unto the other end of the land!
No flesh has got peace!”

“The darkness is passing! the hour is at hand! and the dead they shall hark to the White Bird of Grace and Glory and them that hear shall live!”

“Amen!”

“We shall live!”

And the stout man raised his hand and lifted his soft chin, tears streaming down his round cheeks, and Sister Clara cried, “Brother Hiram Clegg!”

“And henceforth,” he proclaimed, “them that have wives may be as though they had none, and them that weep as though they wept not, and them that rejoice as though they rejoiced not, and them that use the world as though they used it not, for the fashion of this world, it is passing away!”

And then up rose the woman who had so newly reviled him, and she cried out, “Go! says the prophet. Stand on high! Look thee toward the east! It comes!”

“Now!”

“Christ Jesus!”

“March!”

“Repent!”

“It is coming!”

“Save us!”

They lifted up the body.

Mid-Sunday dreams. Not all peaceful. Races against old deadlines. Missing trains and planes. Bags, badly packed, falling open on busy platforms. All of them lucid, but disjointed. Trying to straighten them out, he woke. Then back down again. Sounds from the television, Happy's adjacent body, daylight squeezing past the blinds, the twisted sheets, all these entered in, and though he was always conveniently far from this place and time, there was still a nagging need to be doing something he was neglecting, to get somewhere before it was too late, all of which, during semiconscious spells, he understood only too well. Once he was racing on a bicycle on an old dirt road. Then it was a car. Hairy turns, torn-up roads, horrible precipices, tremendous speed he couldn't seem to control. As though in the sky above there were parenthetical comments being made by a television announcer, who called him “His Eminence Justin Miller” and once “His Promontory” just for laughs. The situation of this announcer was peculiar and he woke finally in the aura of that peculiarity: for the announcer, while ostensibly describing the race, if that's what it was, neither explained accurately to the audience what “His Eminence” was doing, nor did he reveal to Miller the precise structure of the race, or how or why in fact he'd got into it. Perhaps it was night. Certainly, later, it
was
night. He was in a church-camp, having driven there perhaps, though this part was not distinct. Now he was at Inspiration Point with a blond-haired girl. Large full moon, which, however, was a bit unstable, occasionally startling him with its sudden oscillations. The girl was crying, yet they were both quite happy. They suddenly remembered the prayer meeting, raced, feeling guilty, through a dark forest, arrived late for it. Inside the church, there was crying and singing and impassioned preaching. The girl got drawn into it, soon was weeping emotionally with all the other boys and girls. He realized, within the dream, that all this had happened to him when he was in the seventh grade, and he had forgotten about this girl entirely. Her name, he recalled, was Mary. She was still the same, but he was now a grown man. The women who worked in the camp kitchen bawled and shrieked, their skirts always hiking up somehow over the roll of their stockings on their beefy thighs. He was dismayed that Mary, who had just wept for him (though exactly what he had done, he could not remember), now wept the same tears for Jesus. He turned to a companion, a large somber man whom he had brought here to show this sort of behavior, perhaps a father figure of sorts, and explained: “She has been seeking God, you see, but has never found him. I have been the victim of transcendence.”

He woke repeating this, correcting the last word to “transubstantiation,” and, opening his eyes, found himself vis-à-vis Happy's magic Bottom, a scant six inches from his nose. She stood at the edge of the bed, his robe half on, lighting a cigarette. He leaned forward, nipped one cheek with his teeth.

She squeaked, dropping the smoke, then twitched like a mare flicking a fly. “I've been standing here for three hours waiting for you to do that,” she complained, covering it up now with the robe and stooping for the cigarette.

“The cross in the circle,” he mused, singsonging it to a tune that seemed to be running through his mind.

“How's that?”

“The cross in the circle.” He turned her backside toward the full-length mirror on the back of the door, lifted the robe. “The circle,” he indicated, swooping his hand through an oval whose extremities were the small of her back and the back of her knees.

“That's an egg,” she corrected.

“And the cross.” He started between the knees and plowed up through the vertical that would have ended at the sacroiliac, had she not got ticklish where the thigh-wrinkle crossbeam cut across it.

“That's not a cross, either,” she said. “That's a highway intersection.”

He laughed and pulled her toward him, but she resisted. She looked toward the television, and he guessed what was eating her. He fell back, pretending indifference. “What time is it?”

“About two,” she replied. “There they are again.” She turned up the volume and left without smiling. Phony fussing noises in the kitchen.

Miller sat up and pulled on his shorts, listening to the announcer recast once more the story of the goddamn Brunists and their march to the Mount of Redemption. In the background: the thumping strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which accounted for certain parts of dreams now coming to mind. He felt groggy from having slept too long and too hard, and he wondered what he and Happy could do this afternoon to get away from this thing altogether. Unlike the little old lady, he didn't even want to watch it on television. Room seemed dark—must be cloudy out. He smiled, thinking of the night just past, and turned toward the set to watch the Brunists advancing toward him, tunics aflutter and banners high. Looked to be Locust, about the 1500 block. The street-level angle of the camera prevented him from seeing any but the front rank, but they seemed to have grown some. What woke him up was seeing Abner Baxter: there he was, he and Ben Wosznik flanking the lean prophet at the very front of the tramping column, both carrying banners. “Hey!” he said out loud, and then the next thing he saw was Marcella's body on a kind of stretcher.

“… Of the prophet. We still have no definite explanation of her death. Members of the cult with whom we have spoken insist only that she met her death through an act of divine providence, but refuse to release further details.” Cut from Marcella to Ben Wosznik in a living room. Miller couldn't believe it. His heart pounded. Ben said, “Well, now, I don't think it's proper for me to say. I will say that it seemed as though her tragic passing from this life, just so short a time before God's Coming, before the Coming of Light, why, it did strike all of us like a message from above, not a punishment so much as an act of mercy, a kind of sacrifice, you might almost say, which brung to pass that a lot of good people who weren't getting along suddenly found that their fights was foolish, and against the Will of God.” Miller crouched, in his shorts, gripping his T-shirt, before the set.

Announcer:
“Excuse me, Mr. Wosznik, but do you mean to say that she met her death by some sort of sacrificial ritu—”
Wosznik:
“No, I don't mean nothing like that! What kinda stories are you boys trying to scare up?”
Announcer:
“Why has no one been permitted to examine her?” But now it was Clara Collins who replied: “Well, we got a doctor with us. He done what he could, and now his word is good enough for us. We're takin' her with us to the Mount of Redemption so's she can be received bodily unto the Lord, there to be raised from the dead. We ain't takin' no chances, deliverin' her over to the powers of darkness.”
Announcer:
“Do you mean to say that you expect her to be brought back from the dead?”
Clara:
“Of course, I do. Don't
you
believe in the resurrection of the dead?” Cut to procession. Tremendous crowd, all right. Far as you could see.

Not knowing when he'd begun, Miller now was nearly dressed, frantically buttoning his shirt, stuffing his feet into shoes.

Announcer:
“Earlier today, Mr. Mortimer Whimple, mayor of the city of West Condon, issued a brief statement in which he deplored the Brunist aggression against several West Condon churches this morning and the consequent increase in violence and hysteria, but discounted a persistent rumor that the girl might have been ceremoniously sacrificed or might have offered herself up in self-immolation, observing …”
Whimple:
“We understand it was some kind of accident. Maybe a fall or something. I think it's all too easy to jump to wild conclusions. You gotta remember that her health had got, ah, pretty precarious by going such a long time without eating, and, ah, there are none of the usual signs of violence like you might expect in a, a sacrifice, let me say.” He looked shrunken and persecuted.
Announcer:
“Mr. Mayor, has any official autopsy been conducted or ordered?”
Whimple
(hesitating): “Uh, no comment.”
Another voice:
“Mr. Mayor, are any arrests in connection with her death being contemplated?”
Whimple:
“Not now.”
Announcer
(while Whimple talked silently on the screen to reporters): “We learned about an hour ago through sources close to the mayor, however, that the governor is being kept in touch by telephone with the situation as it develops, and that elements of the state police force have been dispatched and are now on their way to West Condon.” View of the Brunists, sound of their marching hymn in the background. Nearing the edge of town. “We return you to the network program now in progress.”

Miller looked up from tying his shoes, saw Happy Bottom in the doorway. “Get your clothes on! Let's get going!”

“I think I'll take a shower,” she said. “I'll come out later.”

“We just had three showers,” he argued, but he saw she was near to tears, or her equivalent of them which was a kind of bleak wintry absence of all anima.

Announcer's voice broke through the network program again with a sudden bulletin, accompanied by a newsclip of the Brunists standing on a hill—already!—but this hill was rocky and unfamiliar. Didn't recognize any of the cultists either. Good reason: they turned out to be a group in Beirut, where, the announcer explained, night had already fallen and the end of the world was expected momentarily. Quick bulletins then of similar groups gathering in Germany, in Great Britain, in Rhodesia, Greece, Australia, Peru, Canada, and all over the United States. In Guatemala, a popular astrologist who had rightly predicted the end of the last war and the deaths of three world leaders now claimed to have verified Bruno's prediction of the Parousia, and was at this moment leading twenty-seven fat Catholic ladies, including the President's sister—all shown from the elephantine rump in the newsclip—up the side of the volcano Acatenango. Cut to Eleanor Norton reading heaps upon heaps of telegrams in the Bruno living room from people who said they were either on the way to West Condon, or were organizing similar marches to hills or mountains in their vicinity. Interview with the Arizona invalid-hitchhiker, who had made it. Cut to a film of a small Cessna arriving at the county airport, its two occupants emerging dressed in Brunist tunics. Back to Eleanor and more telegrams, many of them requesting that she repeat all details over the television networks, which she willingly did. “We wish to emphasize that the exact … content of the Coming of Light is not known, what precisely it will be or how it will … take place. We do know that, whatever shape it takes, it will take place today, barring of course unforeseen obstacles caused by the powers of darkness. We are also reasonably convinced that it must take place here, in West Condon, on the Mount of Redemption, to where God, Domiron, all the higher forces of the universe, and our prophet Giovanni Bruno, the One to Come, have directed us to march. This does not … does not mean it will not occur simultaneously elsewhere, and we encourage all of you, elsewhere in the world, too distant to be able to reach us here … that all of you follow to the best of your abilities your own inspiration and sources. Those of you near enough to come, we urge you to do so, being unable to certify that this … this event will indeed occur in any other given place, but assured for those reasons I have so often repeated that it must surely occur at least at this Mount … this Mount over the Deepwater Coalmine.”

Clara Collins came on, a sudden dynamic contrast: “Yessir, we are
very
excited! This sudden response around the world to our message, or messages jist like ours, why, it certainly is another sign we're on the right track. You cain't say it's jist coincidence. And you cain't say we done any missionary work. It's jist spontaneous-like, and I believe all this activity, all this here zeal for the Lord, well, it jist has
got
to
mean
something!”