The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel (52 page)

Reverend Baxter is one of those who believe the Prophet’s sister and First Martyr was taken up bodily into Heaven. Billy Don has speculated that’s because it relieves his guilt about the accident, but that just shows how earthbound Billy Don still is. The plain fact is that Brother Abner is a pre-Tribulation dispensationalist and Clara Collins is more post-Trib, so he would naturally expect Marcella to be taken immediately into the presence of the Lord, whereas Clara would suppose she’d have to wait for everybody else. It’s as simple as that. Darren doesn’t like Abner Baxter any more than Billy Don does, but he never lets personal feelings interfere with his pursuit of absolute truth, an attitude much like Reverend Baxter’s, though Darren is more of a searcher, while Reverend Baxter is, well, a preacher. Darren and Billy Don are, as they like to say, dialoguing with history, but Billy Don believes there are as many histories as there are people and all of them are true, history being made up of memories and the recording of memories, which is why he is enthusiastic about their project. It also means the real truth will always elude him. Darren knows that they live in two kinds of time at once: human clock time and cosmic eternity. And though any understanding of the mysteries of eternity demands an accurate knowledge of clock time—history being a kind of obscure reflection of metahistory, as he likes to call it, having learned the word in Bible School—the seeming paradoxes of clock time are resolved only when absorbed as unities within timeless eternity. Reverend Baxter, in his blustery way, seems tuned in to that. He also adheres strictly to the original sayings of the Prophet, to the extent that they were written down or could be remembered. Darren is impressed by this faithfulness to prophetic utterance. Sister Clara has freely reinterpreted them, which is, frankly, disrespectful and a kind of corruption. Thus, Giovanni Bruno’s “Circle of Evenings” is no longer even a prophecy but only a kind of blessing upon her Evening Circle church group. Sister Clara is thoughtful and caring, a deep believer utterly devoted to evangelism and the Brunist vision, and the sincerest person Darren has ever known, but she is also a stubborn pragmatist, a compromiser and a builder, her apocalyptic message watered down by personal beliefs in charity and brotherhood and the establishment of a new faith. He understands her motivations but finds something impure about them. Well, he is not himself a proselytizer. The truth is the truth. If only one person grasps it and is saved, that is enough. Brother Abner, contrarily, is more of a revolutionary, radically committed to the truth as it has been revealed to him, even if it is a terrible truth. Sins not expurgated by fire, he has preached, will be punished by fire in the life to come. If the Brunists are, as they call themselves, “the Army of the Sons of Light,” Abner Baxter is the Army, Clara the Light. Darren is afraid of Brother Abner and loves Sister Clara but knows in his heart he belongs in Abner’s Army.

Clara and Ben have also talked in a frank way on the tapes about First Follower Carl Dean Palmers, who turned up at the camp unexpectedly last Friday, calling himself Pach’, or Apache. A strange, beardy, tattooed fellow in a tattered ball cap and engraved red boots who keeps to himself but is not afraid of hard work and who may or may not still be a Brunist believer. Ben mostly argues for him, but Clara seems full of doubts. Because of her daughter probably. Pach’ seems to have his eye on Elaine, who is homely and spindly and a half foot taller than he is. Hard to figure, though he’s no beauty either. He has been a wild and disturbing presence for many, seen as an apostate and a dangerous interloper, an ex-con with criminal ways, but Darren and Billy Don have found him something of a godsend—Darren because he is potentially a fount of information about the earliest days, Billy Don simply because he has needed someone like him at the camp his own age to talk to. They have seen his dark side in the somewhat obscene photos taken on the Day of Redemption, but Darren argues that his frenzy was a kind of divine frenzy. A hero who took a lot of punishment for others. And his arrival proved a good omen. The very same day he entered the camp, they received the amazing news that they were suddenly the new possessors of the Mount of Redemption and other lands about, and many credited Pach’ with bringing them this miraculous good fortune by his return to the fold. He has been slow to open up and says he can’t remember what the Prophet actually said, but he has told them some very vivid prison stories and what it was like down at the city jail the night after the Day of Redemption, and Darren is eager to learn more.

When Billy Don attempts to explain the Marcella tapes to Sally Elliott over a cherry-chocolate sundae in the Tucker City drugstore (she’s buying as usual, knowing he’s penniless), he is a bit disturbed by how funny she thinks it all is, but he appreciates the relief from Darren’s fierce humorlessness, so he smiles his embarrassed smile and goes along. They are sitting at one of those old-fashioned wrought-iron marble-topped ice cream tables that he associates with the town he grew up in. He feels at home in here and is happy to be with this girl again. Sally wants to know how the voice ended up in the ditch, so he tells her the story of how the girl got left behind when the Brunists gathered on the Mount with box suppers the night before the Day of Redemption and how she came running out there all alone just at the same time that the Brunists’ worst enemies, the followers of Reverend Abner Baxter, came driving out there to attack them, and how the Brunists, seeing the lights on the mine road and hoping to avoid the confrontation, jumped into their cars and with their lights off went charging down the hill toward the Baxterites, hoping to get past them before they could get turned around, and how there was a terrible pile-up (Sally is laughing again, but this is serious) and the poor girl got struck by six or seven different cars and died there in the ditch.

“That’s
terrible
, Billy Don!” says Sally, still giggling. “And her voice just got stuck there and can’t get out?”

“No, it’s not like that. If she’s God’s messenger, she might be heard anywhere, any time, and even by different people in different places at the same time. But it was such a key moment. Reverend Baxter was converted and became a Brunist that night at the ditch, and there was a great reconciliation and they all marched together the next day to the Mount of Redemption, and that’s really how the church was born. Right after that came the Persecution and everyone got split up and wandered about. And that Saturday last week was exactly five years after the Night of the Sacrifice, and it was when Reverend Baxter and Mrs. Collins and all their followers finally came together again, right there beside that same ditch. It was just natural something unusual might happen.”

“That’s what it’s called? The sacrifice?” Sally plucks another cigarette from her pack, offers him one which he again turns down. “I only chew the stuff,” he said shyly the first time, then worried she might have found that too hicksville and laughed it off as a joke, or tried to. “You know,” she says, lighting up, “I remember my dad saying something at the time about her maybe being killed in a ritual sacrifice.”

“That’s an insane rumor. These are all just ordinary people like you and me. They don’t do stuff like that. Your dad must have got mixed up with the Powers of Darkness.”

He expects her to smile at that, but instead she turns melancholy. “You’re not far off. My dad’s in the dark all right, always has been. Less light in there than you can get out of a used sparkler. And mixed up? Absolutely. But power? He’s had the stupidest job in the world and he just got fired from it. Now he’s going to be filed away in some corner down at city hall. They’d make him the janitor, but he can’t stay on his feet long enough to push a broom.” She blows a long plume of smoke and watches it rise toward the tin ceiling of the old drugstore, then gets out her notebook and jots something down. He’d only meant to joke in his clumsy way, but he obviously touched a sore point, and he’s sorry. Sally doesn’t have all that much in the way of a bosom, just two soft bulges, but it’s hard not to stare because she always wears T-shirts with funny things printed on them. Today there’s a flying star and it says:
IF
YOU
GET
HIT
BY
A
SHOOTING
STAR,
YOU
’
LL
METEOR
MAKER
. That’s probably sacrilegious, but he likes it that she gives him things to read there so he doesn’t have to keep looking away. Maybe he should say he’d like to bookmark it and take it home with him. If he only had the nerve. As far as he can tell (she has a kind of shameless way of scratching herself), she doesn’t wear a bra either. “So, the poor girl. Just bad luck, hunh? Went for a jog, wrong place, wrong time?”

“Well, we don’t think it was just luck.”

“Oh right. God’s secret designs. Kill a kid to kickstart a new religion. And so now you guys are trying to crack God’s code. Don’t you ever wonder, Billy Don, why any god, if there were one, would want to play such silly games with people? If he wanted something, why wouldn’t he just come out with it?”

“He did that. It’s called the Bible. It’s up to us to read it and understand it and live by it.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the thing. Most of it. Skipped some of the dumber parts. If God wrote it, he’s a crummy writer. He didn’t, of course. A bunch of beardy guys with tight assholes did.”

He knows he’s gone red again. She’s trying to provoke him and he should probably get up and leave, but the sundae is like the most delicious thing he’s ever eaten and he can’t help but linger over it. The sort of thing he has had to do without while traveling unpaid with the Brunists. If he or Darren need money for anything—new jeans or a pair of shoes—they have to ask Clara for it; no way they could ever ask for ice cream money, though Sister Ludie Belle sometimes buys tubs of commercial ice cream for the Sunday camp meals. Sally, watching him, says, “Hey, Billy Don. Would you like another?” He stares down into his empty bowl. He wants to say no thank you, but Satan (maybe she really is the devil incarnate like Darren says) has him by the whats-its and he can’t.

And it’s not just the sundae. Sally mostly makes fun of him, he knows that, but he likes to be around her and he finds himself confessing things to her he’d never tell anyone else. All his doubts, for example. How he still prays every day but feels more and more like he’s just talking to himself, as if his involvement with the Brunists has cut him off from God and Jesus (“Well, there’s
something
to be said for them, then,” Sally said). How he wanted to get on that bus with the kids from Florida—they were a lot more fun than the crowd at the camp, and just as Christian—but how hard it would be to let down Darren and Sister Clara and Brother Ben. About how he woke up one night and Darren was touching him and how it scared him but he let it happen. In fact, maybe that was the scariest part. He didn’t know what else to do until it occurred to him he could just roll over. The next day Darren told him about a dream he’d had about a beautiful woman who turned into Mabel Hall when he touched her and he wondered if it was some kind of omen. Billy Don believed him and didn’t believe him at the same time. Mostly he didn’t believe him, and it made him wonder about the wet dreams he’d had recently, though he didn’t tell Sally that part.

And now these obsessions with words and numbers. When he told Sally about Darren’s code charts and “sacred calendars” at their first meeting here last week, Sally said, “Numbers always have these weird magical properties—but it depends on where you start counting from, right? To add a millennium, you first have to locate zero and one.” “I think we have worked all that out,” he said with a smile, and she smiled right back at him and said, “I think we have not,” and she told him about all the different calendars through history and how there have been thousands of prophets of apocalypse and all of them obviously wrong, the first being Jesus himself. “Well, Jesus was a special case,” he said, “because Jesus didn’t die. As for all the others, we can learn from them, and where they failed we can get it right.” But a seed of doubt had been planted and he knew she could hear it in his voice. When she shook her head sadly and said, “Oh, Billy Don,” he felt like he wanted to hug her and be hugged by her, and he worried then that he was succumbing to evil, and he wondered if he should just stand up and walk away as fast as he could.

It has been especially hard for him not to stand up for Darren. Becoming his friend was a turning point in Billy Don’s life. He was morally adrift until then, confused, more interested in baseball than religion and in the opposite sex more than either. He ended up in Bible college because it was cheap and said to be easy and full of friendly girls. And because he needed to get on the wagon and stay there. He and Darren met in a New Testament seminar taught by an old fellow with soft dewlaps and a soft brain who dug at his scalp while lecturing as if trying to dip his fingers in it, and they started meeting outside of class for coffee or lemonade and boiled peanuts. Darren introduced him to the scarier side of religion—what it was all about, really—and opened his eyes to the underlying patterns of things, which are not really hidden so much as just not visible on the surface. Billy Don was always good at puzzles—Darren said it was a gift from God and at the heart of his calling (he’d not even
thought
about having a calling)—and Darren proposed some new ones of a seriousness beyond anything he had imagined before. Darren was the smartest and most intense person he had ever met, and when Billy Don was around him, he felt connected to the world—not just the world, the
universe
—in a way he had never known. But now, well, he’s not so sure.

Today, when he brought up the Sibylline Oracles and how they prophesied the birth of Jesus, thinking to impress her, she only looked pained and told him they were a well-known sixth century fraud. Could this be true? “Such a desperate human thing,” she said, “to look for mysteries where there are none.” She often says things like that and it both thrills him and dismays him. That she treats him so seriously; that she mocks him so. But he likes to hear her laugh, so bold and free. He’s never heard a girl laugh quite like that, and he sometimes plays the fool for the simple reward of it. Now he has been telling her more of the Marcella legends, about the heart-shaped bloodstain on her tunic, about how when she died she pointed to Heaven and kept that pose all the next day (the belief of many being that she was raptured straight to Heaven), about the white bird that flew overhead and some said right out of her mouth, and the crosses of blood that appeared on people’s foreheads after. “Raptured? But there was a body. What happened to it?”