Tonight, my bedroom is the back seat of a rented sedan.  Accustomed as I have become to more adequate accommodations, my partialities have long succumbed to fatigue, and the pain in my back demands compromise; if I cannot escape this car, at least I can sleep in it.  At any rate, the only choice I have in the matter is exactly where to park, as my attempts to locate an inn have yielded not so much as an indication that one exists.  At four in the morning, the barren, darkened streets of Deep River Falls suggest a nighttime moratorium on human activity, provoking within me a sense of intrusion while I was creeping along in my quest for a room.  Rather than continue to violate any potential mores in an endeavor most likely fruitless, I have chosen a tiny lot on a peninsula jutting into a particularly vociferous river.  As it happens, I am sharing this peninsula with this town’s lone church, which happens to be the first place I intend to visit tomorrow morning.   

    To say the least, the ride here was tedious.  After landing at the airport at ten, I endured four hours on the highway, took the appropriate exit onto a rural route, then spent an hour going up and down the same stretch of road like a pendulum, seeking the unmarked turnoff from either direction and overshooting it several times.  I had to pause repeatedly to try to make sense of the directions I had been given, which vaguely described specific landmarks –a magnificently bent tree, a defeated road sign peppered with buckshot, and finally a pasture bordered on its hilly western flank by an opaque forest –each one cloaked in darkness.  When, mercifully, I located my turn, I spent a final, perilous hour on a narrow dirt road that burrowed and corkscrewed its way into the depths of the forest.  As I had been told to expect, the radio broadcast immediately became a blare of static as I drove between the first two trees, and so I took each treacherous turn with only the chorus of insects and starlings to accompany me.  As I drove deeper into the woods, the voice of the river swelled until it was all, until it flooded my ears from every direction –until there were no thoughts, only its uncompromising insistence to carry on.  As odd as this may sound, I became less a driver and more a passenger.  Though my glazed eyes perceived only what the headlights illuminated immediately before them, I began to navigate the serpentine turns as if I had anticipated them, my hands barely exerting to steer.  The sensation lasted until the forest abruptly halted and I was on ancient pavement leading directly into the rustic hamlet of Deep River Falls. 

    My legs are now stretched out as far as the back seat allows, and I am grateful not to be any taller.  As I listen to the drone of the river, an alien notion enters my mind, and I have to laugh at the absurdity of it.  Sleep here, the river seems to whisper.  Come, sleep here by my side.  Illogical though it may be, I am somehow comforted that enough whimsy has survived the killing floor of academia for such a childlike thought.  I attribute it to exhaustion and invite it into my dreams, whence it likely came.  As my eyelids become theater curtains, I gaze above my feet at the cross at the top of the church’s steeple, framed in the back window, stained blue and black in the moonlight.

    In what seems like an instant, all is bright again and the peninsula is alive with voices.  My head throbs in time with the clanging of the church bell, a dull pain pulsating in my temples.  The inside of the car is muggy and my throat tight with thirst.  Dazedly, I sit up and open the car door to let the fresh air rush in.  In an effortful moment, I am balancing myself on legs as stiff as stilts, mopping sweat from my brow as I move achingly toward the church in the same clothes I slept in. 

    Good morning, professor, says the river.

    It is a rather unremarkable structure of white wood atop a brick foundation and topped by a steeple which, now that I can see it in the light, is rotting.  The rusty bell housed within moves the entire steeple with every swing, and I imagine only so many Sundays remain before the assemblage comes crashing down.  The sides of the church are punctuated by long-neglected stained glass windows, and the front doors shed flakes of red paint milled into the walkway by the feet of congregants filing inside.

    Within a certain radius of the church, all conversation ceases as absolute reverence becomes the rule; each head is bowed as they pass through the doors.  I take the cue and approach silently on uncertain legs, accepting a bulletin from a peculiar man inside the tiny lobby.  I am not positive about this, but there appear to be traces of makeup on his face –clown makeup.  Our eyes meet and I cannot discern whether distaste or disinterest renders the scowl with which he responds to my practiced half smile.  I nod and move past him into-

    This cannot be.

    By some architectural trickery, I have stepped into a cathedral too enormous to share a common locus with the country church house I have just seen from outside.  As mad as these words sound, the dimensions of the interior and exterior simply do not –cannot –correspond.  A suitable explanation eludes me.   The floor is too wide and too long, the ceiling too high.  Smoke and mirrors, I decide, not just because it is the most likely explanation for the surrealism of this place, but because it is the only answer with which I can cope.  Like any temple of manipulation, this church is designed to separate its occupants from reality such that anything seems possible.  Like a sweat lodge, a funhouse, or a casino.  This Church does not violate the laws of physics, the river did not call out to me last night, and I am not here on some wild goose chase because someone in my department had a goddamned dream.   

    Choosing a fairly innocuous seat in one of the less populated pews, I try to take in the rest of the room. Shadow blankets most of the church, obscuring the sparse ornamentation and what appears to be some perversion of the Twelve Stations of the Cross circumnavigating the stone walls.  On the apse is a massive, candlelit mural depicting Christ emerging from a river, arms extended.  In one hand, inexplicably, is a sword (machaira, if I remember correctly); the other hand is open, palm up. His hair is curiously fashioned –substantially longer in the front than in the back, and rippling muscles bulge wherever skin can be seen. 

    I study the bulletin and gather from it a couple crucial names before using it as a fan.  The pews fill rapidly as the rest of the congregation arrives.  The heat mounts accordingly.

* * * *

    Early morning sunlight struggles through the grimy stained glass and casts dull radiance upon a rapt congregation.  Beneath the impossibly high ceiling the floor of the nave is a dense mass of worshipful meat and moist breath crammed into ancient pews which, with a piercing squawk, betray the slightest fidget.  Frail and withered despite the resilient youth in her face, Helen McCorkle draws out low tones on an antiquated chord organ stationed at the far left end of the of the transept.  With timid and slight movements she matches the turbulent cadence of her husband’s voice.  The Reverend Earl McCorkle, meanwhile, paces the area between pulpit and lectern, a proud and fierce lion ruling from his chancel.  His voice, his condemnations and rebukes, resound explosively throughout his domain, warfare din bouncing off the planes of the arched ceiling.  Pacing against the backdrop of the Warrior Jesus mural, he browbeats his congregation.  Aside from his rounded body, his resemblance to Christ as depicted in the painting is somewhere between striking and suspicious.  His wavy black hair is fashioned the same: cut shorter in the front, long and cascading in the back.  A full beard blooms from his face and bounces about his chest. 

    The man is Vesuvius.  He spews molten charges of sin and woe upon the Pompeiians transfixed in the glowing spectacle of his eruptions.  My impulse is to run, to flee the hail of smoldering brimstone, but I, a stranger here, dare not arouse any additional suspicion.  A premature departure would generate entirely too much controversy.  I do not believe I could make an easy escape regardless, embedded as I am in the fleshy vice of the two townsfolk flanking me, stapling me in place with their elbows.  The hiss and wheeze of their breaths inflate the gaps between the Reverend’s barks.  I fanaticize about wasting away in this heat just enough to slip away, greased like a pig by the sweat now flowing freely from my pores.  There are no fans, no ventilation.  Fresh air moves only through the insufficient holes and gaps drilled by age into the walls of the church. Cooler air may hover in the expanse above our heads, but down here we stew in the wet heat of our own radiation. 

    Reverend McCorkle has himself produced a healthy sweat.  His mass, his figure, and the deadly intensity on his face as he moves about the chancel recall an engorged bear intent on savoring one more meal before hibernation.  He is only getting started –that is, the service has only just commenced, and it begins with the Reverend greeting his congregation the way a parent drunk with rage greets errant children.  He knows what they have done and are doing, to what extent, and why.  He is perturbed and disgusted by their very presence.  He has spent the last three minutes jabbing his finger and shouting words like sinner, liar, whore, and heathen at congregants as they squeezed into pews.  Now, finally, everyone is seated, and he stops moving for a dramatic moment, his beard bobbing on his heaving chest. Swiping the sweat from his brow, he begins to speak.

     “So nice of y’all t’ join us,” he says with a sneer, overemphasizing each word.  “So. Nice. A mighty big thank you for taking a break from your idolatry and whoredom t’ come and be redeemed.  I’m just so humbled.”

     My best translation of the Reverend’s speech does no justice to the experience of hearing him.  His accent rides on waves of wheat and fatback, with notes of cow shit and sweet tea in the peaks and troughs.  It is unsubtly southern American but lacking adherence to any particular region.  His syllables lean into each other as though his every utterance is a line of falling dominoes. Commas and periods are indicated by the addition of the “-ah” phoneme fastened to the last word of every clause, a standard enough mannerism among men of his ilk, but overemphasized here, as if in mockery.  Hard consonants leap to soft ones like stones in a creek, while soft consonants swoop beneath vowel sounds and burrow into them from beneath. Consecutive vowels compete with one another for dominance, adding syllables to many of his words. It is a unique dialect incubated in isolation like so many ingredients tossed in a pressure cooker and left to render over several generations. 

    Helen McCorkle is playing a creepy, atonal bassline beneath a single sustained note.  It is the song of someone suspended by a weakening rope over a nest of hungry alligators.  

    “Y’all’ve been invited into the Lord’s house, hallelujah, for He has prepared for y’all a supper, praise Him! He’s done set His tables with His best finery, and He’s laid before y’all a feast for t’ know comfort, hallelujah, and contentment for all time.  He sees y’all’s hunger and cures it with just a stroke of His mighty hand, hallelujah.  He knows what y’all like and He’s made a whole mess of it just for y’all!  But what is that smell?”

    Nostrils flaring, he sniffs at the air around him. 

    “What is that?” he repeats, the moment taffy in his hands.  “Why, I think that’s the smell of shit!  That’s what it is, ain’t it?  Y’all’ve been wading around in the nasty shit of your iniquity and have tracked your wickedness all over the Lord’s floor!  Y’all’ve befouled the Lord’s air with y’all’s filth, with the rancid stench of y’all’s sin! The Lord has prepared for y’all a meal t’ satisfy y’all’s hunger for all of eternity, and what’ve y’all brung Him ‘cept a hot dish of evil?”

    Chest heaving, he halts, and once he has caught his breath, he demands, “WHAT DO YOU HAVE T’ OFFER THE LORD?!” 

    A man not far from me is weeping as he whispers, “Nothing, Lord, I have nothing.”

    The Reverend probably cannot hear, but his tone changes nevertheless.  The rope has snapped, and he now wails in the terrified voice of a man plummeting headlong toward a grisly demise.  At the organ, Helen McCorkle adjusts accordingly; as soon as the Reverend speaks again, his accompaniment is a haunting mash of minor and diminished chords.

    “And what will the Lord say t’ me?!” he begs with a wide, sobbing vibrato.  “What will He say t’ the Shepard who was t’ lead you, my flock, t’ His Kingdom, when I done brung him a pack of unworthy wolves?!”

    Wolves.

    “Surely, He will say unto me, ‘I swanny, Earl, I asked of you sheep, and you done brung me wolves.’  That’s what He will say.  Know this, you hell beasts:  know that y’all will be licked by the flames, but the greatest portion of His wrath is reserved for me, cause I’m supposed t’ be saving y’all, but y’all only love y’all’s selves!  I’m gonna burn for my failure and y’all don’t even give a good Goddamn!”

    His words come out bulbous and watery, and he pauses now to weep.  Helen’s organ, so help me, weeps along.

    “Why?” he pleads.  “Why do y’all want to drag me down int’ Hell?  I only ever tried t’ save you.  But  y’all make my efforts an affront before the eyes of the Lord!”            

    Again, I hear the anguished murmur of a man near me: “I’m so sorry, Reverend.” 

    Reverend McCorkle squats to retrieve a large bottle from behind the pulpit.  Removing the cork, he lifts the green glass to his lips and takes a long sip while opening a massive bible with his free hand.  Whatever he is drinking, the sound of it bubbling down his throat can be heard over the organ and the short wheezing breaths of the people pinning me into the pew.  In seconds, the bottle is empty. 

    “Jo-Jo,” he says between gasps, “Bring out the pig.”

    From the shadows in the front of the church emerges a boy, hunchbacked and no older than ten or eleven, pushing before him a metal cage.  The sow within, disturbed suddenly from her slumber, squeals and stirs in her thick nest.  The boy pushes the cage into the center of the transept.  I alone react to the entrance of a caged animal and catch myself before anyone else notices the confusion and apprehension surely registering on my face as I perceive the composition of the sow’s nest.    

    Oh, God no.

    “Brothers and sisters,” the Reverend says, “stand now and confess.”

    The church is filled with a sound like the massacre of a flock of wooden birds as the congregants struggle out of the pews.  I allow the people on either side of me to rise first, then I stand, leaning behind them with the backs of my knees pressed into the bench.  Despite the strain in my thighs, I am relieved to breathe and move my arms a bit.  At my present angle, I can no longer see over the many heads between the Reverend and myself as he begins the Prayer of Confession.

 “Oh Lord, You have given unto us the gift of Life, hallelujah

 And You have blessed us, oh Lord, with eyes to behold the majesty of Your Creation,

And with ears, oh Lord, so that we may hear Your Word as it was given to the Prophets.

And yet, o Lord, we are drunkards, hallelujah, stumbling on the Path of Righteousness,

In the dark we grope for a way forward, oh Lord, until Your blessed light comes ‘round for to reveal how far we have strayed, hallelujah.

Gentle is Your hand, oh Lord, as you reach out to us.  You say ‘Come, for I shall set the path before you.’

But Lord, we cannot take Your hand, for we are foolish and stubborn in our wonderings, oh Lord, and our hands have been claimed by Satan, who leads us now to the water’s edge,

And who whispers softly of its coolness.

And we are only too happy to course down that River, oh Lord, and let it take us where it will,

Whores that we are, we let it have its wicked way with us.

O Lord, please forgive us our foolishness and pry our hands free from the Devil’s grasp,

So that we may return, o Lord, to the Path of Righteousness You have provided,

So that we may course down that River no more.

In Christ’s name,

Amen

The congregation echoes “Amen.”

    He reads from the Bible, but I know of no version of the Bible in which this “Prayer of Confession” can be found.

    “Now, I want t’ hear y’alls sins, all of ‘em.  Right now, in front of God, y’alls neighbors, and me, y’all better confess, and y’all best be loud and y’all better be thorough.  G’on, now, do it!”

    And they do.  With accents as distinct as that of the Reverend, the congregants, hitherto taciturn, are suddenly cacophonous with disclosure.  Shouting, howling, and sobbing, they are all urgent to be heard over each other until the air is crowded with sin.  A woman allowed her dog to lick dribbled condiments from between her legs.  A man confesses his arousal when inhaling the fumes of used adult diapers.  Siblings intentionally gave their ancient grandmother food poisoning.  I hear a young woman take on the blame for her husband’s bruised knuckles, and I hear her husband lament tolerating too much disobedience before laying down God’s holy domestic law.

    The stuff of gossip intermingles with acts of criminal depravity. 

    The man to my right says he cannot bring himself to fully forgive a friend for an old insult.  The woman to my left admits to allowing the neighbor boy to watch her change her feminine pads for the last year.  Someone confesses to compulsively overeating, and the woman next to him admits to making herself vomit after every meal.  Another woman helped to pass on a rumor that one of her neighbors once slept with her own father.  An older man says he allowed his wife to choke to death at the dinner table following a petty argument.         

    I still cannot see the Reverend, but through the forest of devout trees before me whipping in the wind of their shame I catch fleeting glimpses of Helen McCorkle.  She is standing, confessing in her husband’s direction, one hand wiping the tears from her face while the other stretches behind her and holds a plaintive chord.  With terror etched into her face she is screaming something I cannot hear, and I suddenly realize I am the only person in the church not participating in this ritual.  I open my mouth, then close it, jolted by the overwhelming impulse to betray myself, announce my skepticism –repulsion, actually –and reveal the academic purpose that brought me here.  I am alarmed at how close I just came to diving headlong into this chaotic fray, how easily I could have surrendered to the momentum, the sheer tidal wave of emotion.  For just a second, I am not a scientist or a researcher or even a grown man; for just a second, I am once again a child capable of being swept up in superstitious currents. 

    My mouth is open again, but I am back in control of it.  I am about to shout something innocuous, something that could fold easily into the ongoing frenzy of confession, like how I routinely circumvent my exercise routine against the advice of my doctor, when a newly familiar voice issues a sobbing confession. 

    “Reverend! I don’t know if I believe anymore, Reverend!”

    A round wave of silence ripples rapidly from an epicenter close behind me.  Helen McCorkle has lifted her hand from the keyboard, and every head turns to affix a grim stare at a man two rows to my rear.  He is crying uncontrollably now, his sobs echoing in the cavernous expanse of the church.  No one moves to comfort him, but the wide eyed people on either side of him, ostensibly his family, squirm for a precious few inches of distance, as if his crisis is contagious. 

    The pig grunts.  The man sobs.  Footsteps from the front of the church begin down the aisle.

    No organ.  The vacuum of its sudden absence introduces a profound gravity to this moment. 

    “Oh God, help me!” he mutters into his hands.  “God, please don’t let me course down that River!”

    He lifts his face to the ceiling.  No one offers him a handkerchief, so he is reduced to wiping his tears and snot on his sleeve.  He sniffs, sucks in his lower lip, and clenches shut his eyes.

    “Doug Graybeak,” Reverend McCorkle says in a graveyard tone.  His footsteps echo ominously as he approaches.  When finally he comes into view, he is standing at the end of my aisle, fresh droplets of drink or sweat glistening in his beard.  For a split second, infinite in its inexplicable horror, his eyes meet mine.  They are savage eyes, hyenas peering from the mouths of caverns beneath the rock face of his forehead.  The look, the fleeting, almost imperceptible glare he levels at me, I have seen it before, but never here among civilization, if indeed I am still among the civilized.  It is the penetrating glower of the human alpha probing all at once for intention, capability, and weakness.  My pulse, in this finite moment, quickens.  Adrenaline surges, and I am all at once ready for flight.  He is deciding which one of us can more easily eat the other.  I believe he favors himself.

    And the moment is over, McCorkle’s attention returning fluidly to Graybeak. 

    “Doug Graybeak, what you done said just now hurts me.  Doug, I don’t reckon you could hurt me any more if you was my own brother confessing your hatred for me from the loving arms of my wife.”

    Doug’s sobs assume a new timbre of anguish.

    “In fact, Doug,” McCorkle continues, “why don’t you just go ahead now and lay with my wife?”

    “No sir, Reverend McCorkle!” he moans.  “I don’t want to course down that River! I want to return to the righteous Path God set out for me.”

     Jo-Jo has brought the Reverend his bottle and now walks away proudly.  The Reverend takes another heroic draw from it, catches his breath, and says, “Doug, you say you want t’ walk the Path of Righteousness, but you also just said you don’t believe no more in where it’s taking you.  Do you think you can walk the Path with no faith in your heart and expect t’ stay on it?

     Doug opens his mouth and out of it tumble the words, “Well, no, Reverend, I-“

    “Cause that don’t make no kind of sense, t’ think you can take up a seat in my church and put a goddamned stake in my heart in front of my flock and then cry how you want t’ get back on the Path.  So since you want t’ hurt me so bad, I want you t’ come int’ my house and tell me how much you hate me while you fuck my wife!”

    Eyes dart accusingly at Helen McCorkle, then back at Doug.

     Stammering, Doug Graybeak cries something that sounds like, “No sir, Reverend, that ain’t what I want!” 

    After a thoughtful pause, during which he takes another pull from his bottle, Reverend McCorkle says, “So you don’t really want to hurt me, then?”

     “No! No sir.  I don’t want to hurt nobody.”

    “It was the devil, then, wasn’t it? The devil making you ask dangerous questions.  Leading you to the water’s edge.”

    Come, sleep by my side.

    Graybeak nods and sniffs.

     “Come here, Doug.”

    Doug Graybeak appears to hesitate before deciding the safest plan for him right now is to comply at once.  He encounters no resistance as he works toward the end of his pew.  McCorkle throws a meaty arm around his shoulder once he reaches the aisle. 

    “The Hall of Atonement!” McCorkle commands, and suddenly everyone at the end of a pew is standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisle, forming two opposing walls of stoic men, women, and children.  McCorkle moves his hand to Graybeak’s neck and with little effort directs him until he is on all fours.  McCorkle then raises that same hand high in the air and snaps his fingers.  Almost immediately, a woeful dirge fills the air as Helen McCorkle’s fingers lay into the organ keys to shatter the sweaty, tense silence.

    “Crawl forth in penitence,” mutters McCorkle.   

    Though I can no longer see Doug Graybeak, his movement along the floor is indicated by the grunts of his fellow parishioners, the grimaces on their faces, and the noise of their feet connecting to his body. 

    “Proverbs, Chapter 3, Verse 5:” says McCorkle, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.”

    Some of them lean forward to strike him with their bare hands or a Bible.  Children spit on him.  Poor Doug Graybeak is ushered all the way down the aisle by a slow wave of wordless violence as Reverend McCorkle lumbers behind him.  I see someone’s shoe raised high in the air, then watch it come down swiftly. 

    The heat now conspires with the sickening sounds of Doug Graybeak’s punishment, and a familiar queasiness begins to blossom in the pit of my stomach. My famously weak constitution is particularly sensitive to physical violence, and situations such as this –trapped in a sweltering church, surrounded by the potentially dangerous devotees of a lunatic zealot, and forced to listen as a man is beaten by his friends, neighbors, and coworkers –comprise the exact substance of my worst nightmares.  My insides churn and my mouth sweats.  I close my eyes and focus on my breath.  I press my teeth into my lower lip and massage the insides of my wrists.  I run through every available anti-nausea trick ever given to me by any doctor or well-intended associate until finally the nausea begins to subside and control is restored.  

    “Sit down!”  McCorkle’s cannonball voice fills the church.  “Doug! On your Goddamn feet!”

    The congregation follows his orders with a sound like a collapsing library.  I am pinned once again to the pew, but I feel increasingly confident in my stomach now that the violence is over.  The organ has halted and the waning reverberations give way to a silence undisturbed by the slightest murmur.  Doug Graybeak is upright, a shriveled, bloodied mess before us, wincing in pain and humiliation.    He stands dejectedly beside McCorkle; they are positioned behind the caged sow. 

    “Look at this embarrassment!” McCorkle commands.  “Look with your eyes upon this shitsack who once was a man!” 

    The pig grunts.

    “Douglas Graybeak, do you want t’ be a man again? A man before your family? Your neighbors?”

    Doug, with one eye swollen shut and the other in the path of a stream of blood, nods his head slightly, whispers what is presumably an affirmative.

    “Do you want t’ be a man before God?!”

    Doug answers with a more dramatic nod and manages to say “Yes, Reverend.”

    “You’re going t’ need faith, Doug, if you’re going t’ be a man.  Hallelujah!  A man without faith, Doug, ain’t a man at all, Doug.  A man without faith, Doug, ain’t nothing more than a sack of shit on its way t’ Hell’s cafeteria!”

    “Amen!” shout several congregants.

    “So where’s your faith, Doug?”  McCorkle demands, leaning into Graybeak’s face.  “Show me where you keep your faith.”

    Doug’s trembling hand creeps up to point at his heart.

    “Say it out loud, goddamn you!”

    “It’s here!” Doug cries.  “It’s right here!  My faith is in my heart, right where Jesus put it!”

    “Are you sure?!”

    “Yes, Reverend!  I’m positive!”

    McCorkle looks over his shoulder and says, “Jo-Jo, bring me the oil.”

    Jo-Jo emerges from the shadows and gives McCorkle an unadorned ceramic jug.  McCorkle dabs his fingers into it and smudges some on Graybeak’s forehead.   He then pours the rest into the cage, dousing the pig and her nest.  Jo-Jo hands the Reverend a book of matches, which he then squeezes into Graybeak’s hand. 

    My stomach heaves a bit at the sight of this.  The pig stirs anxioiusly in her nest of straw, kindling, and shredded paper.

    “Ray, Chapter 5, Verses 17-19:” McCorkle says.  “Foolish is the sheep who strays from the herd, and wicked is the herd who allows one of their own t’ stray. But damned is the Shepherd who fails t’ hold together his herd.  For though they all drown in flames kindled of their own iniquity, none need drown but for the failure of the Shepherd.”    

    Ray?

    “Douglas Graybeak, you have confessed t’ the greatest sin of all, and for your crime you have crawled through the Hall of Atonement.”

    “Praise Him,” Doug replies.

    “Are you ready, Doug, t’ accept the healing branch of Salvation, t’ pull yourself from the River, and t’ return t’ the flock on the Path of Righteousness?”

    “Amen, Reverend.  Amen.”

    “Doug, will you allow me t’ save you so that I may save myself?”

    “Yes, Reverend! Praise the Lord Jesus.”

    Helen McCorkle presses a minor chord into the organ, slowly adding harmonies in long steps.

    “O Lord, that this sinner may be redeemed in Your Holy Eyes, he offers ont’ You this humble sacrifice.”

    With trembling hands, Doug Graybeak strikes a match, lets it burn upside down for a moment, then drops it into the cage.  The flame immediately engulfs the sow and her nest. Her shrieks, set to organ music, fill the church.  She thrashes about the cage, adding arrhythmic percussion to this awful concerto.

    “Let us pray,” McCorkle says, and as the smell of burning pig reaches my nostrils, a torrent of vomit escapes my lips.