Free The Brunist Day of Wrath: A Novel by Robert Coover Page A

Just…disappointed.
    Wesley feels wobbly through the middle. Is Jesus laughing? He’s probably imagining all those eggs splattered against the kitchen walls. Easter hilarity. The expulsion of unclean spirits was one of Jesus’ best tricks. Wesley needs a similar sort of exorcist to rid himself of the indwelling Christ, buried within him for three days now with no sign of rising. Anyway, it’s not just that stupid boy. The decline of the egg game has been going on for some time. Though Debra has continued to hide Easter eggs for him each year till this, she had already stopped—well before that end-of-the-world carnival over there—hiding the last one between her thighs. Hiding and revealing. The World-Egg, she used to call it. As was their youthful fancy, her wishful thinking. He didn’t object to her withdrawal. It was becoming all too testing anyway. Over the years, she had become less warm to him, more impatient, was adding a chin, her eggnest thighs were spreading, the enticing little gap in there had closed. The bloom, as they say, was off the rose.
    The bizarre events of that Sunday gathering of the cult on the mine hill five years ago happened without him. He did not go out there and did not watch the coverage, retreating to his office in the church. He had a sermon to deliver, even if to a half-empty auditorium. No doubt another pretty piece of his trademark nonsense. Maybe he looked up “delusions” in the church encyclopedia. The Brunists embarrassed him. He felt exposed by them, as if his faith were being mocked by their nutty extremism. Miller in fact made a comment to him much to that effect. Debra was irritable with him—she still hadn’t forgiven him for the Colin Meredith episode a few days earlier, would never—and stayed glued to the television after the service, finally going on out to help care for the injured. Fulfilling her Christian duty, as he thought of it at the time, though in truth, the rift between them was opening; she was finding a cause and he was not it. She visited Colin in the mental hospital every week or two thereafter, close to a hundred-mile drive each way, exchanged letters with him between visits, his being mostly protestations of his sanity and complaints about his treatment, sent him packets of food and clothing. Finally, after a year or so, she secured his release and brought him back to the manse, making it clear there was nothing Wesley could do about it. She openly mothered the boy, cuddling him in her soft bosom when he cried or got hysterical, feeding him when he seemed not to want to eat, washing his clothes and buying him new ones, reading to him from the Bible and saying his bedtime prayers with him, all of which Wesley indulged with Christian forbearance while expecting worse to come. Inevitably, it did, and it was back to the mental hospital for Colin. Debra tried to shield the boy, but Wesley had seen all and said no. The hospital visits resumed—“They’re torturing him up there,” Debra protested tearfully—but when Colin was released once more, Wesley put his foot down. In front of the front door. Debra was furious, screaming at him that he was worse than the Antichrist. Colin assumed his familiar pose of the sorrowful martyr and promptly vanished. Debra blamed Wesley for a catalog of imagined horrors, though, as it turned out, Colin had simply hitchhiked to California where some of his fellow cultists had settled. The letters resumed.
    If Wesley’s own fate has brought him here today like a severed head on a platter, whither now is it taking him? This dirt road may lead to the camp. Is he meant to follow it? To what end? Does he want her back? He does not. She took the car when she went. Does he want it back? It would be useful right now, it’s a long walk back, but wet’s wet, it hardly matters. But how is he going to fulfill his pastoral duties without it? He is not going to fulfill them, with it or not.
    How will you get food and drink?
    If I get