The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (14 page)

“Ho, Rocky. C’mon, boy.”

In the flickering candlelight, the snow-white tunics of the Brunist Followers, assembled for their Easter night prayer meeting, cast a rippling otherworldly glow, adding to the awe and grandeur of this day of Christ’s Resurrection. There is a divinity present here in the Meeting Hall tonight, and it is they. Ben Wosznik leads them in the singing of their traditional baptismal hymn, “I Saw the Light,” his sweet country voice lifting their own—
“No more darkness! No more night!”
—and then the Brunist Evangelical Leader and Organizer beams the lamp of her dead husband’s mining helmet upon the head and shoulders of their kneeling benefactress and newest convert and says that baptism in the Spirit, as Ely Collins always preached, is the outer sign of what’s happening inside, going from being dead in sin to being alive in Christ, and Mrs. Edwards says, “I am a terrible sinner seeking salvation,” and Clara replies that whosoever repents and believes on the Lord Jesus Christ is justified and regenerated and saved from the dominion of sin by the grace of entire sanctification, and Mrs. Edwards, who is beginning to weep, says, “Oh dear God, I
do
believe and I feel
so
sanctified! Thank you with all my heart for allowing me to join the saints in light and for delivering me from the dominion of darkness!” Willie Hall shouts,
“Colossians 1:12-13!”
and the others hug the new Follower and commence to weep and wail joyously and to give testimonies of redemption and of the infinite mercies of God and, led by little freckle-faced Hazel Dunlevy warbling away like a bird in the trees, to sing in the Spirit, accompanied by Ben on his guitar as best he can follow the spontaneous eruption. Willie’s wife Mabel drops to her bony knees and, eyes closed, raises her hands toward the rafters as if grasping for something, then lowers them to the floor, doing this over and over, touching different spots on the floor each time as though setting a table or laying out cards, and others do the same or similar, waving their hands about ecstatically, slapping the floor and themselves, even as they continue to sing in their medley of voices. “The Lord He has warshed away my sins, warshed me in the blood a the Lamb, I been born again!” declares Wanda Cravens in her soft nasal whine, barely audible in the noisily prayerful hall. “I been livin’ for Him ever since in glory hallelujah freedom!” Wanda’s husband Hunk Rumpel is minding the little ones tonight, but the plumber Welford Oakes is here and he responds with “Glory! Hallelujah!
Freedom!”
and others echo him and Willie Hall declares: “And Paul he said, But I was free
born! Acts 22:28!”
“Amen, brother! Born free! Hallelujah!” Travis Dunlevy barks fiercely. “God is light and Bruno is His Prophet!” Whereupon his wife Hazel goes under the power, falling to the floor and speaking in tongues, which the plumber’s wife Glenda Oakes, her glass eye reflecting the myriad candles, interprets as a prophetic utterance about the horrors of hell awaiting all unrepentant sinners. “I want so much to be part of you! I’m so sorry for who I am!” Mrs. Edwards bawls, heaving to the floor next to Hazel and rolling about (she is wearing nothing but her flowered underpants underneath the white tunic, and some approve of that and some don’t), “I
love
you
all!
I truly do!” The West Virginia coalminers Hovis and Uriah, rocking back and forth, separately confess to unclean thoughts, while balding Wayne Shawcross grips the straps of his bib overalls and, eyes closed and head tipped back, bellows out: “I hear ye, God! I kin hear yore trumpet soundin’!” Which is another cue for Willie Hall: “And he’ll up’n send his angels off” with a great sound of a trumpet, and they’ll go and gather his elect from out the four winds, sweet Jesus! from one end a Heaven t’other!
Matthew 24:31!
” “Ay-men, Brother Willie! From outa the four winds! We was lost but now are found!” They can feel the Spirit stirring. Clara Collins is on her knees, praying for guidance and strength and talking quietly to her first husband, her daughter Elaine beside her, hand at her mouth, whispering a plea to her father that he not forsake them. “I’m sorry, Pa! It’s important! I know you can see me. But I have to do it!” Mrs. Edwards is sobbing and gasping and thrashing about and words are coming out that is likely some kind of speaking in tongues, like in all baptisms, though there’s something about her husband and Easter eggs that is probably not. “Sin crep up on me, Lord,” Wayne hollers, drowning her out. “Tell us about it, Brother Wayne!” shouts Welford Oakes. “Tell us about your rassle with sin!” “I was cattin’ around and cuttin’ shines sumthin awful, Lord, but You walked with me and You talked with me and You even come along unto a house a sin and led me to my lady and my salivation!” His wife Ludie Belle, who has been shouting and crying and dancing and shaking like all the others, though perhaps with more abandon, now commences to recount the story of her own fall into sin and timely conversion, which has been often heard but is always appreciated and is never told the same way twice. “I was jist a harmless split-tail thing and I thought my frolick-some carryin’s on was jist only doin’ my do, but my body it misfooled me with its carnical desires and carried me off down the Devil’s black alleyways!” As Ludie Belle traces her passage through the diabolical regions, her husband Wayne, eyes closed, nods at all she says and leads a chorus of “amens.” Hazel Dunlevy, emerging from her holy trance, commences to clap rhythmically to the beat of Ludie Belle’s story, the others clapping with her in unison and singing out phrases that catch their fancy. Clara claps along absently, but her head is down and her eyes are closed and her lips are moving in private dialogue. “But I never left off a-goin’ t’meetin’ nor beggin’ off to the Lord for all my sins!” Ludie Belle exclaims.
“My body it belonged to Satan but my heart belonged to Jesus!”
All are aroused by this to a fever of prayer and repentance, and the newest Brunist Follower, still tossing about on the floor, cries out: “O dear God! Help me!
I don’t know who I am!”
Ludie Belle, standing legs apart and arms out among the shouts and slapping of palms, pauses to gaze down sympathetically upon this suffering sinner. “It’s the question I useter ask myself when I was a unsaved working girl!” she declares, just as young Colin Meredith, calling for his mother, comes through the front door behind her with the office workers Darren and Billy Don, all three of them with wet heads. “I was that nameless lamb what went astray, but Jesus He found me when Wayne done! And now I
do
know who I—
Oh no! It’s him! It’s Satan hisself! Look out!”
She throws her arms up as if to ward off an attack, tumbles to the floor, goes rolling about, bowling into people and knocking over folding chairs, screaming:
“No! Stop, you mizzerbul fiend! I know you’re jealous a Jesus, but I ain’t a-comin’ back!”
It’s as though someone has grabbed her in a private place and is dragging her violently around the room and she is trying to tear his hands away. Hazel Dunlevy screams and ducks as if under attack herself, and others cry out as well as the chairs and hymnbooks fly. Billy Don, eyes agog, watches, he watched in turn by his coworker and roommate Darren, hands pressed prayerfully, palm to palm, before his face. Colin, seeing his adoptive mother bouncing about on the floor in such agitation, commences to shriek madly and dash about the room as though possessed, banging into the walls and furniture and other worshippers. Ludie Belle grabs a table leg as if hanging on for dear life, shouting:
“Pray for me, brothers! Pray for me, sisters!”
She is ripped away and tumbles along as though falling into a pit, grabbing at ankles and reaching hands.
“I feel it! I feel it! I feel the ecstasy!”
comes the other voice from the floor, still sobbing.
“Law sakes!”
exclaims Ludie Belle, clutching the leg of a folding chair and dragging it along with her. She struggles to her feet, but falls again.
“He’s wild as a rollicky boar in a peach orchard! Halp!”
She is on her back, squirming, twisting, her fists flying. Oh no! The Devil seems to be having his way with her! It’s terrifying! Wayne strides through the room, swatting at the air, and snatches her up. Ludie Belle, clinging to him, kicks out at her attacker.
“Git outa here with yore ugly ole hoe handle, Mr. Satan!”
she hollers.
“I been saved!”
Clara emerges from her deep reverie and says sharply: “Stop that boy, Ben! He’s gonna hurt hisself.” Her husband captures Colin as he comes flying by and brings him, yipping and trembling violently, to his mother, now getting confusedly to her feet and blinking as if returning from some vast unearthly distance and pulling her tunic down. Clara announces with a brief closing prayer that the Sunday night prayer meeting is concluded. Wayne picks up the fallen chairs and Ludie Belle snuffs the candles, as the others, with a chorus of amens and goodnights, turn to make their way back to their trailers and caravans. At the door, Hovis remarks to Uriah: “Ifn that ain’t the beatenest! You think Ole Nick was really there?” “Shore he was. I seen him.”

I.4

Wednesday 1 April

On his way over to Lem Filbert’s garage to hunt down some wheels after a fortuitous cheeseburger and beer at Mickey DeMar’s Bar & Grill, Georgie Lucci stops in at Doc Foley’s corner drugstore to check out the centerfolds in the magazine rack. It is a glorious April day, first of its kind, the sun’s popped at last, he has money in his pocket, the birds and flowers are doing their hot-ass spring thing—it is a day in short for draining the old coglioni, for having one’s ashes hauled, as they say in the Land of Oz, and Georgie is many moons overdue. His last fuck wasn’t even one, just a tired blowjob in the front seat of his city taxi by an aging whore—
una troia turpe
, as his long-gone old man used to call his mamma while belting her about—which he had to pay for. He’d even make a play for the scrawny snatch behind the soda fountain, but he’d probably have to order something and he hates anything with cow milk in it and has a philosophical objection to spending money for coffee. He loosens the staples and slips the centerfold out of the magazine (if he wins a pot some day, he’ll buy a camera and take up photography), tucks it under his jacket, and with a wink at the big-eyed jugless kid who has been watching him, strolls out into the sunshine.

It has been shitsville since his vomitous predawn return on Sunday,
un merdaio di merda
as his dear babbo liked to put it when speaking of his beloved family, but things have at last turned around. For the past two days he has been mostly slopping around in the cold wet weather looking for a job, getting nothing better from it than a sore throat. The post office, the lumberyard and iron works, the strip mines, the bowling alley, the flour mill, the power stations, the bars, the gravel pits. Niente. Main Street is like Death Valley. That scarred-up war vet who runs the bowling alley and talks out of a hole at the side of his mouth could be elected its beauty queen. Shops boarded up, jobless guys hanging about in the pool hall and barber shop trying to stay dry, the streets potholed and littered with garbage. No trains, few buses, newspaper now just a print shop, the old hotel looking like a war casualty. Even the bus station pinball machines have been permanently tilted. His old mine manager Dave Osborne apparently got suckered into buying the shoe store from the new mayor when he got elected, and Dave, gone gray, looked twenty years older. Georgie figured there were worse things to do than tickle young girls’ feet and peer up their thigh-high skirts, but Dave just shrugged when he asked and gazed off into the wet gloom beyond the shop window. He looked in on his late cousin Mario Juliano’s widow Gina at the mayor’s office in city hall, and she snorted when she saw him and said he must be crazy, no one who leaves this town is ever stupid enough to come back. At the Piccolotti Italian Grocery Store, the kid now running the shop laughed in his face. “Fucking highway supermarket’s killing us,” he said. “Go try them.” He did. Offered himself up as a stockboy, bagger, delivery boy, whatever. The manager wouldn’t even talk to him. He stole some razor blades and a candy bar and left, wondering what the fuck had dragged him back here. He should have got back on the overnight bus the same day he arrived. Nothing has happened here since he left, nothing good anyway, and nothing ever will.

His mother was startled to see him when he turned up back on Easter morning in his filthy wet rags, as big a surprise as Christ crawling out of his tomb and about as fragrant. “Where have you been, Giorgio?” she asked. “I thought you was dead.” She fixed him some breakfast after he’d showered while he rattled on about the high life in the big city, but then when she saw he was broke and jobless, she started putting everything back in the refrigerator and cupboards again and cursing him for being
un imbecille, un testone stupido
, same way she used to curse his old man. Another hand-me-down of a sort, his life story. She had shrunk up some since he had last seen her and had retreated into widowy black, though when Georgie asked if the old fellow was dead, she just shrugged and curled her lip and said she had no fucking idea, or Italianisms to that effect. Georgie was just a teenager when the evil old bastard took off, heaving a few chairs around and giving his mammina a thorough walloping on his way out the door. Except for his kid sister, all his other brothers and sisters had by then vanished over the horizon, and his sister was soon to follow, running off with a stock-car driver, but Georgie, pulling on his old man’s abandoned boots, went down in the mines and was still there a dozen years later when Deepwater blew up, convincing him it was time to change careers. The only brother Georgie knows anything about is the one who became a priest and who still sends his mother a little pocket money now and then. Georgie saw a lot of stag movies up in the city, his favorite being one about monks and nuns having an orgy on the altar in a monastery chapel, and watching it, he couldn’t help thinking somewhat enviously about his brother, though as best he remembers him, he was never very interested in ficas. Georgie discovered that his mother, poor thing, still distrusted banks and hid her money under her mattress, which helped him get through the next couple of days while he beat the streets like a puttana, looking for work. The old lady makes him feel guilty all the time anyway, he figured he might as well give her cause. And it’s just a loan; he’ll put it all back with interest when he hits a lucky streak.