The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Page 5

  Do something! It is time to wake them from their sleep! It may be your last chance!

  A collection plate reaches the aisle up which he walks, threading his way through the added folding chairs. He takes it up, stares into it a moment as though trying to decipher its contents, his pipe clamped between his teeth, then he heaves it across the church, coins and bills and pledges flying. “Woe to you, hypocrites!” he bellows, coached from within. “You desolate whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones! Woe!”

  That’s my good man! Brilliant! Truly, I say unto you, there will not be left here one stone upon another…

  “I tell you, there’ll be no fellowship hall, no church either! There will not be left here one stone on another that will not be thrown down!” He gestures to indicate this wholesale destruction and strides, pleased with the exit he is making (but brick, he corrects himself, not stone), on out of the church and into the waters of chaos awaiting him outside.

  Later, he finds himself walking in the downpour at the edge of town along a small gravel road, lined by soggy patches of hardscrabble farmland, a few scraggly sassafras, black locust, and mulberry trees drooping skeletally over the roadside ditch as though contemplating a final exasperated plunge, and, in the near distance, scrimmed by the sheets of rain, the strange combed disturbance of a strip mine, looking like a field harrowed by giants, black water pooling in its long deep furrows. He seems to have forgotten to return to the manse. Perhaps he dreads it. A site of much suffering. He is still clamping the pacifying stem of his pipe between his teeth, though its contents have long since been doused by the rain. His hat is gone, who knows where. Why is he out here? It is not Jesus Christ who asks this question; he asks it of himself. An unconscious return to his boyhood on the family farm? If so, he is being presented with a desperate parody of it—bleak, wasted, lifeless. These muddy yellow plots with their mean little shacks and their collapsing unpainted tin-roofed outbuildings bear no resemblance to his hardworking father’s well-kept acres with their rich fields and orchards, red barns, bright white house and sheds, groomed lawn, well-oiled equipment and healthy flocks and herds, except to suggest the inevitable decay and death of all beauty. No, encouraged by his mother, who was not born to a farm, poor woman, Wesley left happily and took up his faith as career to his father’s and grandparents’ great disappointment, he being not only first-born but also only-born, and never looked back. If he feels nostalgia for anything it is for the comforting old certainties—as embodied in his father’s sturdy hickory fences and the black family Bible with its notched carmined edges—to which, all too effortlessly, he has since clung.

  No longer. Although his faith was always more an occupational convenience than a mission and tainted from early days by irony (he and Debra were both whimsically amused children of The Golden Bough, Eastertide in the early years of their marriage their most ardent season), he had felt at home in it. The routines of it filled his life quite amiably, its language playing on his tongue as easily as that of baseball or the weather—until that Ash Wednesday Rotary Club luncheon forty days ago when everything, with dreadful simplicity, changed. He was asked to give the usual benediction and, in the middle of a prayer he had routinely delivered hundreds of times, he was silenced by the sudden realization: My God! What am I saying? I don’t believe any of this! He blinked, cleared his throat, bit his lip, apologized, finished as best he could, fearing with good reason that nothing would ever be the same again. For a month, he plunged into an introspective frenzy, scribbling out page after page of justification for his faith, his calling, his life, his very being (there was no justification), rereading all his old course notes and desultory diary entries, his infinitely tedious sermons and lectures, and poring through all the old books that had once meant so much to him, from Augustine and Abelard to Kierkegaard, Kant, Buber and Tillich, books he hadn’t looked at in years, not since he moved to West Condon, realizing in his wretchedness that he had never understood any of them, nor would he ever, he wasn’t smart enough, or good enough, the Mystery was forever denied him, he was nothing but a hapless dunce living an empty meaningless life. Only Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death” made sense to him. He lost his appetite, developed a sniffle, as much of self-pity as of a cold, suffered sleepless nights and so felt only half-awake by day. He wore the same clothes every day. He stopped taking his vitamins. He didn’t want to think about such things. It was actually convenient that that manic orphan boy had returned to keep Debra entertained, he had no time for her or for anything else beyond his most unavoidable pastoral duties and the impassioned soul-searching that possessed him. Who was he? What did he really believe? He found he could not reject God entirely, the world seemed unimaginable without Him, but he no longer had the dimmest idea who or what God was or might be or might have been. God as a kingly father figure had vanished years ago along with Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, but his longheld notion that the universe was something like the Spirit expressing itself through matter, the resurrection story a kind of sublime mythology, now seemed vacuous and dishonest. It was too much for him, really. He’d never figure it out. He’d been a poor student, the Bible his only refuge, and now that refuge was denied him. When he tried to explain all this to Debra, she said God had simply found him unworthy. In short, He had turned His back on Wesley. Speaking anthropomorphically. But God owed him more than that, he felt. Wesley had after all, in his fashion, devoted his life to Him. When he’d prayed to Him, he’d always felt God was listening, they were having a kind of conversation. But it was too one-sided. It was time for God to speak to him. If God would only speak, he thought, all would be well. Was that too much to ask?

  So on Passion Sunday, known also as Quiet Sunday, he made his appeal during the scripture reading and opening prayer (“O God, do not keep silence; do not hold Thy peace or be still, O God! Wilt Thou restrain Thyself at these things, O Lord? Wilt Thou keep silent, and afflict us sorely?”) and then stood motionless throughout his notorious “Silent Sermon,” head cocked toward the rafters, listening intently. Naturally, there was a lot of restlessness among the congregation. He raised one hand to shush them, cupped the other to his ear. A quarter of an hour passed. Nothing. He lowered his head. Not in prayer, as those in the pews probably thought, but in abject despair. He had no choice. It was not that he would forsake the pulpit; the pulpit was forsaking him. He attempted to express all this last week on Palm Sunday—a day for irrevocable decisions—in his sermon of the “Parable of the Holy Ass,” in which, speaking as Jesus spoke (“Is he not a maker of parables?”), he told of all the neglected mules and donkeys of the Bible, from those of Absalom, Abigail, and Abraham to the mounts of Moses and Solomon, and then imagined for the somewhat amazed congregation the fate of the ass that Jesus rode into Jerusalem the Sunday before his execution, after the Prophet had dismounted and gone on to glory, no longer interested in the beast that had served him so humbly and so well. “Jesus rode me, but he rides me no more,” he declared, speaking for the abandoned donkey, thus imitating the dumb ass that spoke with human voice and restrained the false prophet Balaam’s madness—or, rather, parodying that ass, for here no restraint was at hand. What can one do with a rejected donkey, too clumsy and stupid to make its own way in the world? Rent it out as a circus animal perhaps, a caricature of itself. Come see the ass the Prophet rode, a creature for children to ride, adults to mock and abuse… As ever, he was misunderstood by his congregation. They called it his “funny donkey sermon,” and few if any grasped in it his intention to abandon his calling. Or his dismissal by it. Most thought it might be some sort of Sunday School story for the children, as there were many in the audience, waving their little palm branches, and at least he said something, which was better than the nothing of the week before. The organist flashed him a look of wrenching sorrow, though it was hard to know what she meant by it. It was a look she wore as if born with it. At the door he was either avoided or complimented with the usual platitudes. Another failure. Debra was no
t there. She had left in the middle of the service, looking aggrieved.

  Debra, too, has been changing over the years, but in a contrary direction, finding resolve and purpose—one might almost say character—in her intensifying commitment, not just to the Christian ethic (that’s easy, they’ve shared this) but to the fundamental message, the spookier side of the hung-Christ story and its cataclysmic place in human history. Their bed was no longer a frivolous playground, it was a place of prayer. She was increasingly dissatisfied with him, accusing him of smugness and hypocrisy and of playing to privilege (she was right, all this was true), ridiculing his sermons and his pious banalities and his meaningless little pastoral routines, insisting on some transcendent vision alien and inaccessible to him. Back on the Sunday before Lent and that fateful Rotary Club meeting, as if to taunt her—she was totally obsessed by that crazy suicidal boy, Wesley wanted her attention—he used a frivolous golfing metaphor, suggesting that approaching Jesus was like approaching the green in a game of golf. One should “make straight paths for your feet” and strive to enter by the narrow gate that leads to life, but whatever else happens along the way from first tee to journey’s end, he announced solemnly, it’s all won on the approach shots. You can power your way recklessly down the fairway toward the ultimate goal, knowing that even if you get caught in the devil’s sandtraps, slice sinfully into the rough, or hook into a waterhole, there’s still time for redemption if you approach the green’s blood-flagged tree at the end with the right irons and with sensible and measured swings. He’d hoped Debra would recall their myth-and-folklore days, green the symbolic color of the Risen Son as emanation of the Green God and all that, but though his parishioners loved it, grins on their faces at the church door afterwards, she was furious and she did a very strange thing. She dumped all his golf clubs out in the driveway and drove the car back and forth over them, the mad boy Colin cheering her on, both of them laughing hysterically.

  Well. Those two. Wesley traces their marital problems back to the moment during the Brunist troubles when the Meredith boy spent a wildly distraught night at the manse and tried to kill himself. Cavanaugh and his so-called Common Sense Committee had persuaded Wesley to help them try to break up the cult by luring away its weakest members, and consequently he had participated (he is ashamed of this now) in the hotboxing of young Meredith, a vulnerable unstable boy, easy to confuse and persuade, but an unreliable convert. Colin, weeping, agreed to renounce the cult and moved that same night into the manse, under Wesley’s protection. It was Debra who found him later, lying naked in the bathroom with his wrists slashed. He was rushed to hospital—Debra managed this, Wesley feeling about as stable as the boy at that moment and facing police and television interviews—and he was released a few days later to the same mental institution the brain-damaged coalminer Giovanni Bruno was later sent. Colin is an orphan. Someone had to sign the committal papers, and Wesley did. Enraging Debra. “We could care for him!” “Oh, Debra, he’s very disturbed. He needs professional care.” Cavanaugh’s phrase. Debra never forgave him that. Nor for what happened after…

  You don’t want to talk about that.

  I don’t want to talk about that. Where have you been? I was rather hoping you’d left.

  Just resting. Seventh day and all that.

  What right do you have to rest? You’ve created nothing. A bellyache.

  Jesus acknowledges this with his silence. A cranky vindictive silence. The turmoil within brings Wesley to a temporary halt at the edge of the road, clutching his stomach. The miserable farms are behind him, now nothing but the bizarre extraterrestrial landscape of inundated strip mines, reminders of this morning’s ignominy. God is dead. And has left His Only Begotten buried in him like a gassy tumor. When did this happen? Thursday night, probably. Debra left him that night after offering to prepare for him what she bitingly called a last supper. “It’s our anniversary,” he said. “Oh, is it? Well, I’m sorry, dear Wesley. Shall I make you an omelet before I go?” “No. What thou doest,” he said, quoting his own traditional Thursday sermon on the theme of the betrayal of Judas, one of those annual replays Debra finds so despicable, “do quickly.” He wanted to break her neck, but instead accepted her chilling bye-bye kiss (“This is forever, Wesley…”) on his forehead. After she’d left, he decided to commune with Jesus’ body and blood, consuming the True Vine and Bread of Life, as was the evening’s custom. He ate an entire loaf of sliced white bread, washing it down with a half gallon of jug wine, and when that was done, emptied the gin and bourbon bottles, too.

  He woke up the next day before dawn on the bathroom floor where he’d fallen, suffering from a splitting headache, his sacred head as if disfigured and crowned with piercing thorn, as someone has said. “O blessèd Head so wounded, reviled and put to scorn…” Thus, deep in hell, he mocked himself. He even had (the passion of Wesley Edwards was complete) a pain in his side and his hands were numb; he worried he might be coming down with multiple sclerosis, though it was most likely due to sleeping all night on the floor. He seemed to remember a crashing tile, but maybe that was himself crashing on the tiles. Had he been throwing up? He had been throwing up. He was lying in the evidence. It was Good Friday. He had more services to face, hospital calls, who knows what all. What a season. It never stops. He stripped and crawled on all fours into the shower and scourged himself with stinging lashes of ice-cold water, which woke him up—but he was still desperately sick, and he threw up again, this time finding the great white throne, praise the Lord. Left a sour vinegary taste in his mouth. In the mirror, he saw a skull with some pale greenish skin stretched over it, eyes red like the devil’s, its tongue out. He did not stay to study the ghastly apparition, but pulled on his bathrobe, the silky lavender one given him one bygone Christmas by Debra (how she longed for her own little manger event, oh yes, failure upon failure!), and staggered into the kitchen, hoping to find she’d come back and cleaned up his mess. No such luck. It was not a pretty sight, the walls decorated with the eggs he’d thrown at them, milk spilled and sour now, chairs and table overturned, though it was not so bad as the bathroom. He leaned into the sink and drank straight from the tap, consumed by thirst. There were puddles of pale wax here and there. He must have lit some candles. Might have burned the manse down around him. Might have meant to.

  In the bedroom he found Debra’s old wedding nightgown with the hand-embroidered scarlet hearts ripped to shreds. In grief? Rage? Horror? She’s grown heavy, it no longer fits, so maybe just in humiliation. A more intimate grief. Or maybe he found it and tore it up himself. Everything else of hers was gone. All her clothes, shoes, hats, toiletries, personal papers, scarves and kerchiefs, adornments. Her red-rimmed reading glasses. Address book. Her sunflower alarm clock and her makeup mirror. Probably the stuff had been disappearing for weeks; he hadn’t noticed. Empty dresser drawers hung open like jaws agape, her closet stripped out like a vacated jail cell, door mournfully ajar. Though he hadn’t slept in it, the bed was unmade. A spectacle of hurried flight. No matter. Good riddance. Those who marry will only have worldly troubles; it would have been wiser not to have married in the first place. Which was something not thought so much as heard. It is better to live in a desert land than with a contentious and fretful woman. I know, I know. Wesley, like his mother, often held inner dialogues with himself, responding silently, more or less silently, to his parents, his grandmother, his professors, his coaches, his old girlfriends, Debra, people who challenged him in any way. But who was this? There was a man here in West Condon some years ago with whom he’d had the first serious conversations about religion since seminary. Justin Miller, the newspaperman. An atheist and romantic rationalist. A fundamentalist in his way, infuriatingly aggressive and blockheaded, but smart and well read. Debra liked to say in her damning faint-praise way that Wesley was more interesting when Miller was in town. Miller had departed about the same time the Brunists did, having launched that madness largely with his own perverse evangel and having thereby made h
imself unwelcome around here, and for some years after, Wesley had continued his conversations with the man in his head, worrying his way through all the arguments Justin had thrown at him. This was not a one-sided dialogue. Wesley often won the point, or convinced himself he did, but sometimes the Miller within was cleverer than he—or, more accurately, closer to a truth Wesley was reluctant to acknowledge. These inward exchanges had eventually faded away, Miller having been dead to him for some time except as an occasional television image from one international war zone or another, but now, during this Lenten crisis, he had arisen once more in Wesley’s thoughts like unattended prophecy. Not so much the things Miller had said, but the things he himself had said in reply. A brief period of creative thinking, hinting at dramatic changes in his life, quietly snuffed out with the newsman’s departure. On the floor, crumpled up, lay Debra’s pithy farewell note: Dear Wesley. I’m leaving you. Love, Debra. Two of her seven last words were at least words of endearment. But used more as nails to the heart than as balm. Never mind. Forget her. Those who have wives should live…? As though they had none, Wesley said aloud, completing the thought. A text he’d never preached upon except in private to himself. So, was this Miller? No. He knew who it was. He had a white-bread Jesus inside him.

  The revelation was sudden and explosive. Almost as though the floor were heaving. Wesley flung off the robe and lurched to the bathroom, where he emptied out violently at both ends, adding to the mess in there and to his despair—a thorough purging, his quaking gut gushing out as did Judas’ bowels. As he sat there, letting it rip like the tearing of a veil, he thought of this immediate ordeal, somewhat hopefully, as ridding himself of the invasive Godson, but in fact it was only the debris he expelled, as it were. The residue continued to speak above the eruptions. Hah, it declared. Let the temple be purified! A voice more distinct than ever, as if freed from the muffling crusts and dregs. Whereupon, Wesley, his belly relaxing at last, came to understand the communion service in a way he had not done before.