The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel Read online

  The heavy rain, which washed out their sunrise service up on Inspiration Point, is still rattling steadily on the roof of the caravan when there’s suddenly a loud knock on the door, as if it were the bridegroom knocking, which makes everyone jump, and when Mabel opens the door, there standing in the downpour are those two elderly ex-coalminers who drove in from West Virginia a few days ago in their camper. For some reason, one of them is carrying a raincoat instead of wearing it. Mabel invites them in, but the one with the raincoat says, “No, ma’am. We’re jest soppin’, we’d puddle up your place. We only come a-lookin’ for Willie.” “Tell him we’re here,” the other one says. “He’s anticipatin’ us.” Mabel pads in her house slippers to the rear of the caravan, then pads back. “He must of forgot. He’s dead asleep.” The two old fellows look perplexedly at Mabel, at each other, at the sky, at her. One of them consults his fob watch, nods, thanks her, and they trudge off into the storm.

  Those two old miners asked to be baptized by light this morning in the Brunist way, their church’s most beautiful and particular ceremony. Wanda’s man Hunk Rumpel had built a roaring fire in the great stone fireplace to stand against the damp morning chill and, though thunder cracked and rain pummeled the new roof high overhead and lashed the windows, there was much rejoicing as they prayed and sang together, snug and safe from the storm—from all storms—for they were met together to undertake a grand enterprise, a blessed enterprise, and the success of that undertaking could be seen all around them. It was Clara Collins-Wosznik herself, their Evangelical Leader and Organizer, who conducted the baptism with her martyred husband’s mining lamp, using the occasion to recall the white bird that appeared to Jesus at the moment of his own baptism, and the white bird that came to her dying husband Ely in the mine to inspire his last words, the founding document of their young church, now hanging on the chimney wall, and also the white bird witnessed by all the early Brunist Followers on the Night of the Sacrifice, perched on a telephone cable over the ditch where the poor saintly girl lay dying, now the subject of a famous painting. Clara reminded everyone there in the lamplit morning dark of their late Prophet’s commands to “Baptize with light!” and of Paul’s admonition: “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light.” “For the children of light,” she declared in her clear strong voice, honed over the past half decade of missionary travels, “they won’t have to die!” “Praise be to Lord Jesus!” the others shouted back and the thunder rattled the windowpanes. “This is the Easter message, it is Christ Jesus’ message, it is Giovanni Bruno’s message, it is Ely Collins’ message, and it is our message! Give thanks to our Father, who has brung us together here into the wilderness, outa the wilderness—has brung us home!” And then her second husband, Ben Wosznik, stood up, his guitar strapped over his shoulder, to sing his glorious new Easter song, “When Christ Rose Up Death Died.” “And when the tomb was opened/Lord, it cannot be denied/There poured out the purest light/When Christ rose up, death died!” Their hearts were wrenched with the beauty of it.

  Now into their midst once more comes Mabel’s husband Willie, suspenders dangling as before, shirttails out, his eyes swollen with sleep. He clears his throat and, scratching his narrow chest, declares, “And the Lord God a hosts is him what touches the land, and the land it’ll melt’n rise up like as a flood! Lord Jesus! It’s him what calls for the waters a the sea, and pours ’em out ’pon the face a the earth: The Lord is his name, ay-men! Amos 9:5-6!” When he is done, Mabel tells him that the two fellows from out east were here looking for him, and he nods and returns to the back, drawing up his suspenders. “Oh dear. Maybe I shouldn’t of told him. Now he’s gonna go out there in that rain.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Ludie Belle says. “It’s easin’ up.”

  Glenda and Hazel glance over their shoulders through the wet windshield and see that the rain has stopped and the men have come out in their heavy boots and are inspecting the channels they’ve dug for the underground wiring, tracking them through the mud up toward the Meeting Hall. The plumber Welford Oakes turns and sees his wife Glenda staring at him through the caravan’s front window with her good eye, her glass eye catching the hazy light from the brightening sky, and he grins and blows her a kiss and she turns away. Hazel Dunlevy, sitting beside her, shrugs and waves at her husband Travers when he turns around, and then the two men continue on up through the dripping trees along with Ben Wosznik and Wayne Shawcross to see what the storm has done.

  “I got tangled up with the pillow and waked up this morning from a nightmare in which Wayne here was a-tryin’ to rip my head off,” Welford says. “I made the mistake a sayin’ so when Glenda asked what I was yellin’ about, and she said that only means I got a way a dodgin’ the truth and I act afore I think, and I said well, maybe, but it hurt more’n that.”

  “Your Glenda got Hazel in a tizz,” Travers says, “by tellin’ her that a dream about gettin’ to Heaven and flyin’ around with the angels was really about her knowin’ down deep she ain’t never gonna get there, and then she told her some scary stuff about them angels which Hazel won’t even tell me about. Dang near ruint her. She ain’t been able to sleep good ever since.”

  “My lady can be a trial and a terror,” Welford says. “Basically, she don’t believe in happy dreams, it’s bad news whatever, somethin’ her ole lady laid on her early. So I’ve learnt to shut up ‘ceptin’ when I forget.”

  They find that some of the trenches they’d dug for the underground wiring but had not yet sealed up are running with water, like canals seen from the sky, and the uncovered lantern bowls have pooled up, but, though the ground is soft and soggy, all the lamp posts seem to be standing true and nothing has shifted. Welford asks after Hovis and Uriah, and Wayne says he sent the old boys over to his house trailer for hot showers. “They wandered out into the rain and got lost somehow. Their rags was stuck to ’em like another skin. But it seems to’ve let up. Figger we can sweep out the trenches and carry on?”

  “Whatever you say, Wayne. Sure as heck don’t wanta get my head tore off.”

  The camp’s new system of streetlamps is Wayne’s pet project. He has installed circuit boards inside the janitorial supplies closet off the Meeting Hall entryway, fed with power from the old Deepwater mine, accessed by over four miles of underground and overground cable, crossing county roads, ditches, and wooded land; a massive challenge, but, thanks to Mr. Suggs, they have had outside help for that from his own strip-mine crews and their heavy equipment as well as from members of the private militia he sponsors, the Christian Patriots, who are mostly the same persons. The Meeting Hall with its kitchen, office, and spare rooms has its own circuit board and there is another for all the cabins, the carpentry shop, the new laundry room, and whatever comes next. But incoming cables have also been directly connected to a separate distribution board and from there they have laid wire underground through these foot-deep trenches to new tubular steel streetlamp posts, donated to them by their Florida congregations and set up throughout the camp. Wayne has strung wire through the posts and they have dug three-foot holes for them with a post hole auger borrowed from Mr. Suggs and planted them squarely on the bottom on beds of gravel and staked them there in their upright positions. When the lanterns are in place on top, it will be possible to turn the lights on all at once or by sections or from inside the lanterns one at a time. All that remains before tomorrow night is to pack the post holes tightly and pull the stakes, empty out the bowls and attach the lanterns to the tops of the columns, and finally test all the switches and circuits, and if they don’t finish it today, they still have all day tomorrow before sundown. They are all looking forward to this camp-lighting ceremony with great excitement, amazed at their own accomplishments. It will seem like a regular little city then, bright shining as the sun.

  In her cabin next to the old lodge, the minister’s wife, watching them work with such enthusiasm, understands their excitement and that of all her other new
friends, but she does not fully share it. She loved the camp just as it was. Just as it was ten years ago, that is. She is grateful that circumstances have made it possible to rescue her favorite place on earth from what had seemed terminal ruin, and she is infinitely happy here in their little cabin, far from the outside world, with Colin safe and under her constant care, but the camp that was wholly hers is no longer hers. When Wesley first took up his ministry in West Condon, they were still holding summer church camps, and she was out here year round, making it ready, welcoming young campers, overseeing its rentals to other denominations, cleaning up after they’d gone. Debra cared little for most church duties in town, though she got used to them, but she loved the camp, and she often came out on her own at this time of year to air out the lodge and cabins, clean up the litter of off-season intruders, do some weeding and painting and creosoting of the cabins and tidy up the picnic areas, feeling more at home here than in their own home, which was really not theirs at all but more like an annex of the church. She liked using the outhouses and bathing in the creek and picking berries and chopping wood for the fireplace and the old wood cookstove and, above all, just walking through the campgrounds, day or night, often wearing nothing but her working gloves and mosquito repellant. She even loved the rain, the chattery patter of it on the cabin roof, the thin tinny sound it made when falling on the creek like insects walking on glass. And the insects, she loved the insects, their hopeful abundance, the chittery songs they sang. She felt closer to God out here, and though in town she could be quite skeptical and lighthearted about ultimate things, out here she knew she was a true believer. And Wesley, too, seemed to love it and love her in it. He was so passionate out here—the way he looked at her then, all over!—she was sure they were going to have a baby. They bathed together in the creek, soaping each other up, and sometimes made love in broad daylight among the flowers in Bluebell Valley, the sun beaming down on them, warming their bodies with its excited gaze. Even peeing together thrilled her, walking naked hand in hand under the stars did. Of course she still had her figure then, and her nakedness thrilled her even when he wasn’t with her. Well, it still does.

  Wesley lost interest in the camp when he lost interest in her and that was when everything started to fall apart. The generator broke down, a fungus invaded the communal shower. Vandals toppled the outhouses, left a scatter of broken beer bottles. She did what she could, but he rarely helped, paid little attention to the work she did, and he looked away when her clothes came off. When he complained to the Board of Deacons about the malodorous unappealing condition of the collapsing camp and requested a complete renovation, she sensed that it was she he was describing. He was disappointed; she was also disappointed. They refused to meet his budget request and he peremptorily closed the camp. On health and safety grounds, he said. She got angry about that, but he just puffed on his little pipe and went off on his pastoral errands. For a time she continued to come out on her own to care for the camp, but it grew away from her and she gradually lost heart. She never stopped loving it, though. And now at last, in an unexpected way, if it is not exactly hers again, she is, as before, its residing spirit.

  In her love, she mapped the entire campgrounds in her head and learned the names of the trees and flowers and when they budded and bloomed, and became acquainted with the songs and calls and plumage and even the migration patterns and nesting habits of the birds that pass through or live here, using their calls as her own clock, and she has that back again. The world, someone has said, is a book written by the hand of God in which every creature is a word charged with meaning; she believes that and lives by it, a devoted reader. There is everything out here from little wrens, finches, and song sparrows, to redwinged blackbirds, whistling bobwhites, woodpeckers, and the family of great horned owls, who have been here for years, helping to keep the vermin population down. Goldfinches, cardinals and bluejays have already been customers at her new bird feeders, painting the gray days with their primary colors, and on Good Friday she spotted a little tail-pumping silvery phoebe down by the creek.

  On the excuse that she hopes to enlarge it and eventually turn it into her longed-for halfway house for troubled teenagers, Debra has appropriated for herself and Colin the old camp director’s cabin on a slight rise overlooking the lodge, a bit larger than the others with a small extra room, though she told a little white lie and said it had been the cabin for the janitorial staff and their tools, not to seem too greedy. It is the cabin that she and Wesley always used, and that was her home out here, whether or not he was with her, he often feeling like her guest as she was his guest in the manse. She has paid for the restoration and furnishing of her cabin completely out of her own pocket, hers and Wesley’s, has bought all the paint, tools, insulation materials, window glass, the space heater and linoleum, even the electric plugs, and has done much of the work herself. The men helped her replace the rotted steps and roof of the little front porch, built to accommodate the slope, and Welford Oakes has promised to plumb fresh water in straight from the cistern when they do so for the Meeting Hall, so she has also bought a small sink unit and faucets. “Get you connected up proper,” he said with a wink. She scraped away the old mud dauber nests under the eaves, oiled the hinges of the awning window frames, tacked up insulating plastic over the window screens to keep out the cold and allow a little privacy, and hung all her favorite pictures from the manse on the walls. Not religious pictures, not in the usual sense, but pictures of rivers and mountains and fields, a robin on a tree limb, a toad at the edge of a creek, a shimmering lake hugged by a pine forest. Religious to her.

  The rain has let up. Perhaps Colin will come home now. If he is still too restless to stay inside, they can put their boots on and take a walk down by the creek, which must be leaping its banks. They can see if the little phoebe is safe in her nest. The rain for Debra is like an extra cloak wrapped around her private space; for Colin it’s more like a strait-jacket, poor child. Except when sleeping, he is in constant motion, as though to escape the constraints so cruelly imposed upon him during his imprisonment in the mental hospital, and storms particularly unsettle him. “I’m sorry!” he cried after one thunderclap, and ducked as if warding off a blow. His anguish sometimes makes her cry. This afternoon he has dashed out through the mud and rain to the church office in the Meeting Hall to be with Darren and Billy Don, dashed back to make sure she was still here, then back again to the office, and here again and back, giggling faintly, but terrified, too. Everything so new, so exciting, so delightful, so frightening. It is certainly the strangest Easter she has ever spent, but she knows she has done the right thing. A new beginning, just what Easter means. She hid chocolate eggs this morning for Colin, but had to put them in obvious places for he quickly lost interest in the game. He bit into one of them, left the rest on her bed, was out the door. He was back in time to be cleaned up and dressed for the morning church service, which was beautiful, as was the Easter dinner which followed—intimate, warm, festive. She’d bought and baked the hams for it and had let Colin supply the dessert—his abandoned chocolate eggs—and they all gave him a round of applause, which so pleased him.

  Though they have only been living in the cabin for three days, they have been part of the community all month. She and the boy greeted the first arrivals on Leap Day’s Night with food and water and medicine, and since then she has brought them carloads of linens, blankets, pots and pans, brooms and dustpans, toilet paper and paper towels, bugspray, air fresheners, all the things she has collected over the years for the manse and no longer needs there. The day after they drove in turned out to be the anniversary of the Night of the Sign, “when six became twelve,” as she was told (so much to learn!), and she attended her first Brunist service. She came out to the camp every day after that, Wesley too self-absorbed even to notice her absences. She worked feverishly on her own cabin so as to be able to move out as soon as possible and rescue Colin, who was temporarily sleeping on the office floor with Darren and Bi
lly Don, but she also helped the others in every way she could, showing them around the grounds, explaining what things were for and how they were named, helping Clara with the composing of letters to the Followers, and making shopping trips, often with her own money. She has almost singlehandedly taken on the task of cleaning up the entire campsite after years of neglect and desecration, removing litter and rubbish to the dump in the trunk of her car or in Ben Wosznik’s pickup, pruning bushes and dead tree limbs, raking the leaves and small branches out of the creek, clearing paths, and she has created a new vegetable garden on the sunny south side of the camp near the creek, which she has taken on as her own special responsibility. The ground was very hard—before it can be worked, clay soil rained on and baked in the sun has to be smashed up just like smashing a pot—but Mr. Suggs came in with heavy machinery to churn it all up and even moved in a load of rich bottomland dirt dug up from the edge of the creek below the camp and plowed it in, and she and Colin have taken over from there. She bought an ample prefab cedar toolshed for it, spades and shovels, forks, a hoe and wheelbarrow. She sketched out a design with paths and borders, set out rows with stakes and string and surrounded the plot with bean and pea trellises as a kind of fence, and this week she and Colin began the planting, starting with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers, with such things as cabbage, radishes, beets, and squash to follow. There are some old fruit trees on the west side and wild blackberries and blueberries, and she has added raspberry and strawberry patches at the edge of the garden near the woods and planted a flower and herb garden outside their cabin. All of it has received a good soaking from the rain; though others have complained about the rain, she has not. In fact, if she were out here alone, she would have taken off her clothes and walked around in it, her face to the glorious downpour.