The packed dirt parking lot of white clapboard, dollhouse-sized, Greater Consuming Holy Fire Tabernacle was dotted with a few cars. I parked beneath a canopy of moss-draped oaks.

     A spare cemetery relaxed inside a marshy copse behind the church.

     I scowled at the flame-slim steeple. This tiny backwater house of worship contained ten pews at best, and most likely, no air conditioning; we'd wave makeshift paper fans on Popsicle sticks in order to survive. Sweat would bead my skin before I even slammed the car door.

     Something stirred in the shadows. I stared into the darkness until I saw her: a naked woman crouched in the reddened earth; head bowed, as if in prayer. Hair matted and wild. She lifted her eyes toward mine.

    I startled. Vincent beckoned from the other side of the glass.

    When I turned back, the woman was gone.

     "Coming," I mouthed.

     Dank, impenetrable air trailed us once the plain-timbered double doors swung wide. Beyond the vestibule with its altar table offering guest book and bullion-colored pen, loomed the murmurs and inquietude of dark-clad folk scattered amongst two modest banks of seating. Tall, arched, opaline windows filtered early evening light through stained green-gold panes. A star-shaped porthole chiseled into the red roof filled the white-walled room with even more brightness. An ancient black piano rooted one side of a spare wooden pulpit and a crude choir stand anchored the other. A gargantuan wooden cross, draped in purple cloth, adorned with a crown of thorns, was nailed to the wall. A spray of white lilies with assorted greenery flanked the lectern.

     A sausage-fingered hand gripped my shoulder.

     "Ms. Simmons?"

     I turned from the portrait of ebon-skinned Jesus. A strapping, thick-bodied man leaned my way.

     "Reverend Veal."

     He had a large squarish clean-shaven head with round cheeks. Confessional eyes. Jug ears and a protruding upper lip rimmed with gray and white-specked hair. A gap between oversized ivory teeth. He clasped my hands.

     "So glad to see you."

     "Thank you, Reverend," Vincent said. "No one could do this thing justice but you."

He smiled. I studied the cloth gladdening the neck of his robe.

     "Well," he began, then extended his arm toward the sanctuary. "I guess one is never really ready—"

     The polished shoes beneath Reverend Veal's holy garment propelled him deeper into the sanctuary. He left a foresty scent in his wake.

     Vincent quick-stepped behind.

     I tried to shadow him, but my legs wobbled and I felt myself sinking into a mud

sucking dismal swamp. There was too much sweltering perfume and no air. I grabbed hold of Vincent. My lungs stalled. I held tight, tighter. He quivered beneath my grip.

     "You all right?" He patted my temples with a pristine white hanky.

     "Please God," I mumbled into his shoulder.

     The heat was a cord around my throat, tightening.

     "It's going to be all right," Vincent whispered.

     I slumped, but he lifted, then hoisted me until we were the two still standing, lurching down the red-carpeted aisle into the unbearable future.

    A lone white-gloved usher in an ankle-length dress led us to the front of the church. Christopher Patterson, perched in the corner of his pew, cut his eyes our way.

     I returned his fire.

     Reverend Veal gripped the lectern, a grave countenance on his dewy face. He

moistened his lips, scanned the congregants. A massive bible with gleaming gilt-edged pages, rested on the pulpit. He tugged a handkerchief from the folds of his robe and wiped his neck.

     I braced for the worst: a soliloquy about the unrepentant spinning on God's rotisserie, a spit of fire and brimstone.

     Reverend Veal dabbed his forehead, cleared his throat. He leaned in our direction then dropped his head back.

What a friend we have in Jesus

All our sins and griefs to bear

And what a privilege to carry

Everything to God in prayer

     Vincent gripped my hand. Behind us, sat many of the complainants who'd made their way to our office in search of hope—Autherine Devine and her husband, Matt, sporting lopsided brogans, both diagnosed with lung cancer; Lynette Williams, and her gangly adopted son, Lance, battling leukemia, and beyond them, Raymond Murdock, survivor of multiple strokes.

     "God bless you," the minister began in a booming, plummy voice. "For coming out

this evening. For sitting down, to stand up. And fight for what's right. God don't like ugly. And we got too much ugly going on around here."

     "Yes, Lord," Autherine said.

     "Like many of you," Reverend Veal continued. "My roots in this land go back

generations, over two hundred years, far back as the slave revolt. This place is home.

Before the chemical plants came in, you could grow beans and okra, melons and fruit trees. You could breathe without your lungs burning. Now the high school is a methanol plant and the post office, an oil testing lab. Sugarcane fields, a plastic plant. There's benzene and oil in the water and ammonia in the air."

     "Yes, yes," a voice called.

     "And cancer everywhere you look," he said.

     Lynette Williams moaned.

     "In your neck, throat, breast, lung, kidney," he raised an arm, thick as an oak limb, and pointed at Lance. "Even in your blood."

     Lynette sniffled.

     "I know this grief," he said. "Lord, I have heard from too many suffering this pain, how much harm is being done to your saints at Jerusalem."

     I leveled my shoulders. Forget Jerusalem; let's chronicle the harm here at home. A

reckoning that would take us deep into the new year: greed, paranoia, selfishness,

manipulation, sloth, pathological lying, short-fused brutish violence, family treachery, community betrayal, theft of clean water, theft of fertile soil, theft of the very air we breathe.

     Reverend Veal smiled beatifically in my direction.

     "The Bible teaches endurance, hanging on until the bitter end, being an overcomer, that's what I'm talking about. We gotta hang on till we overcome this pollution madness."

     I stared at the minister's wingtips. Watched Autherine hug herself. Begin to rock.

     "We have to throw off everything that hinders us, all the sin that so easily entangles, we have to cast off and do what we all have to do, like the bible teaches us—let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. And will you run that race?"

     "Yes," Christopher Patterson shouted.

     I half-turned to stare.

     "We must run with the hounds of this cancerish hell nipping our heels, trying to drag us down."

     "Yes," Raymond Murdock said.

     "But the bible says, 'Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me. And are we sitting in

darkness?"

     "My my my—"

     "Now, we may have fallen, once or twice—"

     Or ten thousand times, I wanted to shout.

     "And you CRIED and you PRAYED. And you CRIED and PRAYED. And CRIED

and you PRAYED and CRIED..."

     Autherine spasmed into a soft guttural keening.

     Someone near the back said, "Amen."

     "But we got up."

     A woman with auburn ringlets; stood and fluttered her fingers.

     Reverend Veal paused, wiped the sweat from his neck and face, then began to pace.

     "The BIBLE reminds us that trials serve to strengthen our faith and bring us to

maturity."

     "Well," a gravelly-voiced, clean-shaven man said.

     I squirmed, smoothed the cotton dress over my thighs. Crossed my bare legs and

closed my eyes.

     "I have had trials," Reverend Veal's boom pulled me back inside the church.

     "Yes, sir," an elderly man exclaimed.

     "Have you had trials?"

     There was a chorus of concurring murmurs.

     "We all have trials," Reverend Veal said. He froze, then gazed at the star-shaped glass in the roof.

     "But we carry everything to God in prayer."

     "Amen," several voices uttered.

    "Let us now hear from Sharon Moore, the scientist connecting the dots between the chemical plants and our sickness."

     The speaker strode to the podium gripping a manila folder. Vincent glanced at me and nodded.

     "Thank you, Reverend," she said. "And thank you all for coming out tonight to learn the truth."

     An electrical current snaked through the room. Christopher Patterson scooted to the edge of his pew.

     "I am a chemist," she said. "I take samples from the air, land and water to see what's in them. I have done scientific analysis of the land here. And I came to tell you, you have been exposed to concentrations of chemicals like chloroprene at 700-800 times the rate of other people in the nation. Chloroprene causes cancer. There is no safe limit for it. And if you grew up here, you have been exposed for a very long time, over fifty years, since the plant first started making it. Now the powers-that-be will say, 'There they go, trying to shut the plants down again. You can't prove cancer is because of us.' And they'll call you fearmongers. And ask, 'what about the jobs? There are tax dollars at stake.' But I ask, is any job worth the silent slaughter of the people who live next door to the plants?"

     I heard angry buzzing in the pews. Vincent nodded at the speaker.

     Reverend Veal rose and patted Sharon Moore on the back.

     "And they told us, so many of us were dying 'cause we had bad luck. Told us, we didn't understand the science of what was going on in our natural world. Told us not to believe what our eyes could see. That we weren't feeling what we felt, which was sick as dogs."

     "'Cept they wouldn'ta let this happen to dogs," Christopher Patterson shouted.

    "I live between a chemical plant and a refinery," Autherine said. "Sometimes the fumes so strong, I can't even breathe."

    "And there's always explosions," Lynette said. "Especially on the weekend when the EPA is closed. Boom! And then the house is shaking. I go outside and smoke so thick it's like fog. I have to put towels around the door. And nobody can tell us nothing about it. Not the EPA. Not DEP. Not the oil company. Even folk that work there don't know what's going on and can't find out. But I got spots all over my body and breathing problems."  

     "My boy go outside and say, 'What that smell, daddy?' It hurt to breathe."

    "I live next to the fertilizer plant," another man said. "We get skin rash so bad only bleach can kill it."

    "At least before the plants moved in we had pecans and wallflowers, hummingbirds and fireflies. Now they gone and we got awful smells. And cancer. Skin peel off my face when it rain."

    "A lot of us don't have health insurance."  

    "The Fifth Ward school—" Sharon Moore began to weep.

    Reverend Veal swabbed his face and neck one last time, then stepped away from the podium, grasped Sharon Moore's hands.

    "With God's grace, we will fight this," he said. "And we will win."

    "Well, well," Autherine sing-says.

    His fierce glare rested on me.  

    A heavy-bosomed woman in a tight black sheath and white kitten heels, wearing a plumed hat, stood beside the piano. A waif-like young man pumped the pedals and raised his slender fingers over the black and white keys. Mrs. Amsterdam, according to the program I fanned myself with, began to hum.

    The grief-stricken began to warble, then drone the words, but Mrs. Amsterdam's chest-voice soon silenced the crowd.

"We fall down but we get up

For a saint is just a sinner who fell down

but we couldn't stay there and got up—"

     The heaped losses of my life, began to rise inside me now, stuffing my throat with dust. We will help them prove it. And we will win.

    The church bell sounded a solitary echoing knell.

    I stared at Vincent's watering eyes. There is nothing like the intimacy of tears, and I, still did not know how to handle another's grief. Autherine pressed a tissue into my hand.

     "I'm glad you came," Vincent said, eyes shining, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He patted my hand. Words rushed and tumbled inside my brain, but sat still as mothers of the church on my tongue. I dipped my head, suddenly much more shy. Sometimes there is comfort in silence. Sometimes there is consolation in pain. I sat with my lover as grief’s precise ache filled our hearts.