In a choking voice he said, “Fall on your knees, yes. Offer what you have to the Lord, yes. Offer the misery and the scarediness and the hate and the rage, yes. Lord!” he cried, his voice reedy and broken. “We here are scared to death. We are miserable. We are filled with hatred. Take these putrid products and like the water you changed into wine, like the loaves and the fishes you enhanced to feed a multitude, change, enhance them, until they are transfigured in the fire and love of your being into a faith that will sustain us. Help us, Lord! We cannot help ourselves.” He leaned so far forward it seemed he might pitch off the platform onto the ground.
With a struggle he righted himself. His body slumped. He forced air through nearly closed lips. Drew a rattling breath.
“Ay, Jesus,” he whispered. Silence. People looked from under lowered brows. The silence extended like a dark and steady wing over the congregation. Delvin could hear the wind rustling in the trees. At last the young preacher spoke.
He staggered to his feet. He slumped before them, held up by what they could not tell. His exhausted face looked as if he was no longer behind it, as if he had been taken by an imbecility, a loose dumbness.
Cries began to pass through the assembled.
The minister Rev Munch rose and grasped the younger man’s arms from behind. He drew Rev Wayne to him and slid his arm around him and they stood together, eyes closed. Both prayed outloud and no one in the congregation was sure of what either said. Their prayers mingled and coiled about each other in the sun-filled air aswim with motes and drifting bugs. As the prayers ended the choir started in on another song.
Soon they were all out in the cemetery grouped around the big green canvas awning above the yellow hole in the ground. The air smelled of the dusty cotton plants. A warm breeze as if idly looking for something lifted the leaves of the gum trees and set them back. All around them at other graves bouquets of phlox and jacob’s ladder and yarrow and wild carrot and even the yellow blossoms of the humble dusty miller plant gave the scumbly ground a festive and mournful air.
A tall gaunt man stepped forward and began to sing the jubilee song “Before I’d Be A Slave.” “O freedom. .,” he began.
From the corner of his eye Delvin saw a bright shawl of fire shoot incredibly high over the roof from in back of the church. Before the fire became a thought, he heard the thunderous explosion and was pushed against Mr. Oliver’s broad belly.
People screamed.
A siren somewhere off in the woods behind the church began to wail.
Another explosion, black and lithely red, hit the retired church across the yard, seeming to lift and set it momentarily back on the ground before it split apart and collapsed into burning boards and shingles.
The people, until this moment weighed down and nearly immobile, were suddenly roused. They cried out. Many ran crying and screaming into the fields and toward the road that was empty now of the police cars that had trailed them to this site.
A green glass bottle flew through the air, landed beside the side wall of the main church and exploded in fire.
Delvin, shaky but still upright, crouched under the open awning. The coffin perched on narrow boards above the grave. The older preacher, Rev Munch, lay in collapse across a couple of wooden folding chairs. Some people back in the crowd thought he’d been shot and this was how that story started. The younger preacher, partially recovered from his struggle, knelt beside the coffin. At the explosions he had winced and leaned away as if blown by their wind and looked up with an anguishing face and gone back to his praying. The singer held tightly to one of the brass tent poles.
The siren that had provided a back noise to the occurrence keened higher and faster, rushing until its noise became a wheezing sound like a giant trying to scream through a madness.
More fireballs, sputtering like sparklers, rained down.
Delvin and Oliver and Willie Burt helped the clerics and the singer and those knocked to the ground by the suddenness and noise to get up and get away from the grave.
Some people were crawling on their hands and knees. Others ran full out. Others, dazed or in shock, stood doing nothing.
A man with a smoking back ran by. A woman stumbled along fanning herself with a punctured derby. Little girls screamed.
There was nothing to do but leave the coffin where it was.
Fire caught in both church buildings, rose thickly from the remains of the old church and licked around the corners of the new structure
