That was the first time I'd been back in the church since high school, and it still gave me the willies. The saccharine-sweet paintings of biblical scenes -- particularly those where blood and suffering were involved; the designer crosses and crucifixes, which stood around as helpless as ever without Reverend Bail to attend them....

During the night, however, some fundamentally disenchanted person (whether a young person or not, I do not know; God knows) broke into the church, and according to police had themselves quite a party. After which they set fire to the building, and fled on foot into the darkness.

As the flames rose higher and higher into the star-bespeckled sky, and the faint popping and snapping quickly escalated into full-scale, bed-rattling explosions, people began to wander out onto their lawns rubbing their eyes, blinking like newborns at their neighborhood, lit up all around them as it were like the Second Coming.

Many of them ran back into their houses and got dressed, and packed their car trunks with coolers of snacks, thermoses of coffee, warm blankets and lawn chairs, and headed up onto the surrounding hillsides for a better view. From the darkened window of my tiny cabin I could see them up there after a while, walking around in their own headlights, eagerly sharing with those who in their haste had made no provision.

What surprised me most, however, was how calm everyone was: I had expected wholesale panic to ensue. People running to and fro with pathetic garden hoses, peeing at the fire like Liliputians; perhaps even an old-fashioned bucket brigade! But everyone just stood there with their children around their knees, pointing upwards and shouting "Look!" as the steeple toppled over and crashed through the roof, and the children clapped their hands and squealed at the fusillade of bright sparks that chimneyed straight up into the dark stars like the smoke from a giant kiln.

Even the tombstones in the graveyard seemed to be getting into the act, leaning back and rejoicing, shouting "Hallelujah!" as a thin mist curled up from their warm, moist bellies, like steam from fresh-baked bread.