The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (35 page)

The town banker, arriving now at the foot of the mine hill with the West Condon mayor, the police chief and officers, the Chamber of Commerce secretary, his own bank lawyer and other official personnel and civic leaders, speaks of Pat Suggs, often his business adversary, as an own-bootstraps sort of fellow, ruthless, decisive, shrewd, frank, unfriendly, an aggressive loner who accumulates all he can while contributing nothing to the community he is exploiting, a man he opposes on just about all issues: his countryside-destroying strip mining, his divisive anti-unionism, his unorthodox banking and investment procedures, his inflammatory white supremacist rhetoric, his simplistic but vicious anti-communism, his militant Puritanism. The feelings are mutual. To John P. Suggs, Ted Cavanaugh is an immoral liberal humanist, a country-clubbing hypocrite who uses religion cynically as a power tool, a legalistic destroyer of basic civil liberties who makes the rules convenient to himself that others have to play by, an unrepentant sinner and unscrupulous manipulator and usurer—in short, a damned banker like all bankers. He associates the persecution of the Brunists with atheists, Jews, Romanists, lawyers, politicians, and humanists like the banker, and would have needed no further reason to take up the Brunists’ cause than to do battle with him, even were he not motivated by his faith.

What the banker has come now with his team of city authorities and legal advisors to announce, is that the city is purchasing the mine property, including this hill, and that all these people are therefore trespassing on private property. He presents various documents and demands that the sheriff ask everyone to leave. Immediately. The sheriff glances poker-faced at the sheaf of legal-sized documents while the strip mine operator produces documents of his own: a written permit from the sheriff’s office and a limited but binding two-day lease agreement from the absentee mine owners. The banker insists that, with the purchase, the circumstances have changed and the agreement is no longer valid, but John P. Suggs, whose own bid, unbeknownst to the banker, is also still on the table, only smiles icily, his thumbs hooked in his suspenders. He’d thought, from the astonishing earlier news, that the banker might have had an inexplicable change of heart, but he sees now that the reality is more amusing than that. The sheriff notes that he sees no deeds or purchase agreements amid the paperwork, and as the registry office is closed on Sunday, they will have to wait until tomorrow to present their case. Meanwhile, this is unincorporated county land under his jurisdiction. With a sneer aimed at the police chief, whom he regards as an ignorant foreigner, he suggests they not complicate his crowd control problems with their further presence, and some of his uniformed men arrive to back him up.

“What do you mean?” the outraged banker demands, jutting the jaw that intimidated a generation of state high school football players. There are news cameras focused on them now, and the crowds are pressing round, drawn here in hopes of a repeat of the entertaining events of five years ago. “If we don’t leave, you’re going to arrest us?” His demand is met by strategic silence.

“Well, I think this is absolutely ridiculous,” says the Chamber of Commerce secretary.

The West Condon chief of police, one of the more flourishing members of the extensive Romano clan, and the principal supporter on his meager salary (and whatever else comes along) of eleven of them, had never thought that this would work and said so before reluctantly agreeing to haul his sad ass out here, dragging all these others with him. Chief Romano is uncomfortable around overheated evangelical types, so arrogantly full of false certitude, every man his own prophet and pope, and he is fully aware of the racist anti-Catholic biases of the likes of Puller and Suggs and that vicious firebrand Baxter, desecrater of St. Stephen’s Church, who is standing off to one side and seems about to explode, damn his tormented soul. But, though he has no authority here, he had no choice. He likes to say that all the people of West Condon are his boss, but Dee knows from whose imperious hands comes his paycheck, and he knows the kinds of games they play, the cunning and meanness in their hearts. If truth be told, there’s not a person in their party here not deserving of imprisonment if not hanging, himself included. But what can you do? Life is a crap shoot. He had one throw and this is what he got. “There won’t be no arrests,” he says flatly, fixing his gaze not on the sheriff but on his troops. Who are not, he knows, completely legal. Tub Puller’s ambitious little warlord fantasies. The way Monk Wallace explained it to him down at the station, Puller is amassing this vigilante army and hoping for disturbances—even if he has to create them himself—that will justify this unit enough to draw state money to finance and arm it. For the present, the volunteers—no Italians among them—are not only unpaid, they even have to supply their own uniforms and weapons. In it for the action. They can’t arrest anybody, though of course neither can he. John P. Suggs catches his drift. “If you want to stay,” he says finally, “be our guests. Just don’t stir up trouble. Last time, you let a mess happen. People got hurt. We’re not going to let one happen today.”

The West Condon mayor puffs out his fat cheeks and says in his booming voice, “We been told a woman was took to hospital. What’sa particulars?”

“She is Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” Puller says, consulting his notes.

“But what’s her problem?”

“Like I say, Mrs. Harriet McCardle from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.”

There are hoots from the crowd. “That ain’t what the man ast you, Tub baby,” yells one of them. The sheriff knows him. A scrawny loudmouth coalminer named Cheese Johnson who sometimes worked his shift in the sheriff’s own mining days, if what that ugly fuckoff did could be called work. The strip mine operator knows him as Chester K. Johnson, a ne’er-do-well whom he hired at one of his mines after Deepwater but who lasted only a week. Chief Romano as a drunken jawbox he has picked up off the street from time to time, a regular client in the free flophouse he runs at the city jail. The banker as the uncontrollable wiseass who horned in on his original Common Sense Committee and nearly wrecked it, beating up old Ben Wosznik in his own house. No one’s happy that he and his shiftless pals are here. “No more stonewallin’, my man,” Johnson shouts in his nasal twang. “The ole girl’s gone tits up, ain’t it so?”

Clara Collins is watching apprehensively from a discreet distance. It was just such trouble that thwarted their gathering here five years ago, when it seemed certain that the Rapture was really going to happen, and she is afraid something like it might ruin her plans today. She tells Ben and Wayne to go get on the public address system with some good old-time gospel singing. “Let’s loose the Holy Spirit on them and drown out all this ungodly bickering!”

Reverend Abner Baxter, seething with injured pride at having been excluded from all these exchanges and emboldened by the return today of some of his closest followers—including Jewell Cox and Roy Coates, standing beside him like stone pillars—now lets go his daughter’s hand and, striding toward the banker and his minions, cries out:
“Enough
of these puffed-up babblings! Your deceitful words are
a loathsome abomination!”
Is he referring to the banker or to all parties present? Let them read it as they will. “There is no
truth
in your mouth, your soul is
destruction
, your throat is an open sepulcher!
Do you hear?
Look around you! Your land has become a desolation and a waste and a curse, your town an unholy emptiness!
Do you not see?
You have brought this evil upon yourself through your own sinfulness, and your unlawful persecutions of the just, and now
nothing shall never live here again!”
Old boss Suggs is looking unhappy. Good. Let the old sinner have ears. “Even him who led us to the Coming of the Light through his foreknowledge of God ye have taken away and by evil hands have ye slain him!
Ye are viler than the earth!”
“Amen!” calls out Jewell Cox, and Roy and Roy’s boys and Ezra Gray and his own son, Young Abner, echo him, and others, too. It is spreading. The hillside is becoming
his
hillside, and the cameras are watching.

“That’s enough now,” says Tub Puller, hands on his gunbelt. But it is
not
enough. The Brunist bishop of West Condon is rediscovering his own lost self. The long, hard years on the road have taken their toll, but he is home again. He can feel within him once more the power of God, and that power, he knows, is of indignation and wrath. He brushes past the sheriff, raising his fist at the town dignitaries, just as Reverend Konrad Dreyer of the Trinity Lutheran Church, perhaps having hesitated a moment too long, touches the brim of his straw and steps forward to attempt to speak on behalf of the West Condon Ministerial Association.

“But WOE unto the wicked! Your day of reckoning is come! That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of ruin and desolation! Your blood shall be poured out like dust, and your flesh like DUNG!”
Reverend Dreyer, who fully understands these apocalyptic yearnings and is eager to reassure the cult of the Association’s basic support for the freedom of all Christian religion, and indeed other religions as well—the Jewish faith, for example—nevertheless finds himself somewhat overawed by Reverend Baxter’s fiery passion and clenched fist (good Heavens, does he mean to strike someone?), and he staggers back into his own footsteps, banging into a cursing cameraman. It might have been better, he thinks, to have expressed the Association’s views in a written letter.
“In the fire of His jealous wrath, all the earth shall be consumed, for a full, yea, sudden end He will make of all the inhabitants of the earth! As the whirlwind passes, so will the house of the wicked be no more! But the tabernacle off the upright shall flourish!”
Reverend Baxter gestures up the hill behind him, hearing the murmured “Amens” roll like ripples of subdued thunder as several drop to their knees. There are many new people here today, they have large expectations, he is speaking to them, telling them what they have been waiting to hear, he is
of
them, and they of
him
. He raises both arms like a conductor, whereupon strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” can be heard, as if on cue, like a call to arms—though it is not “The Battle Hymn,” it is one of the Brunist songs:
“O the Sons of Light are marching…”
Reverend Dreyer, who has been called here by his banker friend as a Christian leader, understands much of the present moment’s dynamics, at least all that regarding religion, for he has made a study of sectarian conflict, which he believes to be due, at root, to a small but specific set of irresolvable philosophical paradoxes that need to be accepted as conundrums and not be allowed to divide men on the basis of what cannot be differing truths but only differing opinions—or, rather, like most seeming paradoxes, single truths identified by the very contraries they contain. This does not seem to be the right moment to explain this, however.
“For, verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall LIVE! All that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of DAMNATION!”

“Sounds as how Red here is fixin’ to dump us all down the bottomless pit!” declares Johnson. The volume on the P.A. system has been cranked up too high and he has to shout over the screeching feedback.

“I done worked that shithole,” calls out one of his companions, the ex-miner Steve Lawson, weaving about on his big feet.
“We shall see the cities crumble and the earth give up its dead!”
the Brunists are singing over the shrieking P.A.
“For the end of time has come!”
A state police helicopter, which has been coming and going all day, is back again, clattering overhead. The banker points up at it and speaks in the mayor’s ear. “And, hell with it, boys,” Lawson shouts. “I ain’t a-goin’ back down!”

That draws whoops and loud ay-mens from the drunken hecklers, but these fools are of no concern to Abner Baxter. Soon enough they will grovel. Nor does he have time for paradox or conundrums, did he know of such speculations; in fact, he has never used either word in all his long life, rich in high-minded rhetoric as it has been. His eye is fixed firmly on the end time, on the coming day of glory and of retribution, and thus on eternity. Has been since the day he abandoned godless communism—redemption not displacing justice, but simply redefining it.
“Hark ye to the White Bird of Glory!”
the Brunists are singing. Those who know the words are shouting along.
“Hark ye to the White Bird of Grace!”
There is less feedback now, but the helicopter is swooping lower, chopping up the sung words. Mouth-filling “glory” gets through the racket, “grace” does not. Abner does not have Hiram Clegg’s silver tongue or Ely Collins’ quiet persuasiveness, but he does have power. He has exhorted the multitude in vast open spaces and has been heard. He knows what they want to hear, because it is what he wants to hear: Blessed are the true believers for they shall enter straightways through the gates into the holy city, while outside the gates are dogs, and sorcerers, whoremongers, murderers, idolaters, and blasphemous foulmouthed imbeciles such as these, and do not doubt it, they shall know eternal torment! He raises his fist and cries out: “And
I heard a great voice outa Heaven, saying
—
“
but he is interrupted by another loud roar, this time on the mine road: it is his banished son and leather-jacketed friends, and little Paulie, too, and they stop him cold.

The motorcyclists, led by the redhead, leave the road and, heads down over their handlebars, dip into the ditch and up again as if rising from the bowels of the earth, then come gunning straight up at them over the patchy grass, as though to plow suicidally into their midst. None of them wears a helmet, except for the wildly grinning boy on the back of one of the bikes, his arms locked tight around the driver, an older man with a gray braid. The panicking crowds at the foot of the hill scatter in all directions, believers and nonbelievers and those who don’t know what to think. Abner’s daughter Amanda, squeaking in fear, has squeezed up behind him and is clutching his hand again. “Is that your son?” demands John P. Suggs.
“Whoopee!”
howls Cheese Johnson, grinning his wide gap-toothed grin, as his pals abandon him at full boozy lope, Steve Lawson confusedly on his hands and knees.
“Hammer down, boys!”
And Cheese extends his arms to one side as though dangling a bullfighter’s cape. “Those are the bastards who attacked me!” shouts the banker to the sheriff and police chief, pointing, while backing away and bracing himself.
“Hang on, Runt!”
shouts the biker with the gray braid, and all five hit their brakes simultaneously and skid into a screaming two-wheel slide, kicking up clouds of dirt, spraying the fleeing onlookers with shrapnel of slate and cinder, the short hairy one with the tiny face stopping just inches from Johnson’s planted feet.
“Fucken A!”
Johnson laughs, and pumps his fist in front of his crotch, and the hairy biker returns the grin, but as if in miniature. The redhead rights his motorcycle and with a wide swing of his arm flings the head of a dog at Abner Baxter’s feet. They all scramble out of the way as though the ghastly thing might explode—all but the impassive John P. Suggs and Abner himself, who is frozen to the spot, staring in horror at the bloody head his son has hurled at him. Ezra Gray, nose down, screaming at his wife to push faster, is being wheeled uphill, where the mayor and fire chief, wheezing heavily, are already standing amid the Brunist faithful in a state of dumb amazement. Two of the other bikers take aim and throw the decapitated carcasses of a pair of white doves like fluttery little footballs. Their wings open in flight and they come more to resemble tattered paper airplanes. “Help!” squeaks the Chamber of Commerce secretary, ducking, though ducking the wrong way and, as he falls, he catches one of the headless birds square in the face. “Gosh Almighty! What the heck is happening?!” The other dove lands in Ezra Gray’s lap, a perfect throw.
“Touchdown!”
whoops the wild-eyed biker with the blue headband and the haloed skull tattoo on his bare shoulder. “Oh dang it to
shoot!”
Ezra cries and starts yelping hysterically, his wife Mildred plucking the dead bird from his lap and calming him down while he curses her bitterly. The Lutheran president of the West Condon Ministerial Association, who finds himself already some distance away from all these happenings and still moving at some speed across the open field, decides that, though he has contributed little to the day’s proceedings, he will contribute no more, while behind him, back at the hill, the banker is yelling: “These are the sorts of people you have brought here, Suggs!” “They are not of us,” replies the mine owner coldly. And then, with diabolical howls and raised fingers, the bikers roar away, Chief Dee Romano firing over their heads, to what purpose he does not know. Not to stop them, to be sure, maybe just to make them go faster. And as quickly as they came, they are gone, just a distant hollow rumble lost in all the other noise. John P. Suggs, turning to the sheriff, growls, “I don’t care how you do it, Puller, but I want those hoodlums locked up or run out of here. And I want this hill secured. Now.”