The air in Terrebonne Parish had weight. It pressed against your skin like a damp cloth and tasted of sulfur, brine, and the faint chemical sweetness of something that had once been organic but was no longer. Mercy LeJeune noticed it on the first day, standing at the window of the rental house on Highway 90, and she did not think about it again until the fortieth day, when she could not remember what air without weight felt like.

The chemical plant sat three miles east, a constellation of storage tanks and pipes and smokestacks that extended into the sky like the ribs of some enormous creature that had died and been left to bleach in the sun. On certain days, when the wind came from the east, the plant's smell filled the house, and Mercy would stand at the window with her mouth open, breathing it in the way a person breathes poison when they cannot stop.

She had come to cover the plant's environmental violations. Her editor at the Terrebonne Gazette had sent her with a file: three incidents of contaminated groundwater, two respiratory illness clusters, one fish kill in the bayou that had killed approximately four thousand pounds of catfish and bass and whatever else lived in water that should not have lived. The plant's official response, quoted in the file, was We are committed to environmental stewardship and regulatory compliance.

She did not believe the plant. She was not sure she believed the file either. In her experience, truth was rarely in the file or in the press release. It was in the space between them, in the places where no one had set up a camera or opened a notebook.

Ember was the first person who spoke to her in the space between.

She found him at a community meeting in the basement of the St. Jude Catholic Church. The room was full of people who had lived in Terrebonne Parish their entire lives and who had learned, over years or decades or generations, to tolerate the smell because the alternative was to leave and there was nothing else to leave to.

He was standing at the front, next to a folding table with a pitcher of water on it. The water was cloudy. Everyone in the room had seen cloudy water. This pitcher was cloudier than usual, which meant someone had tested it, which meant someone cared, which in this parish was almost more disturbing than not caring.

"This is from Mrs. Delarousse's well," he said. His voice was calm, the way a man's voice is calm when he has learned that calm is the thing that keeps other people from panicking. "It contains benzene at levels that exceed state standards by a factor of four hundred and twelve."

He poured a glass. He drank it.

The room was quiet in the way that rooms are quiet when people are trying to decide whether to be impressed or to be frightened. Mercy decided for both.

After the meeting, she followed him out into the parking lot. The humidity was so thick her shirt was already stuck to her back. Spanish moss hung from the live oaks like laundry on a line, gray and ancient and dripping with something that might have been water or might have been the slow condensation of decades of breath.

"You drank it," she said.

"It was boiled," he said. "I am not stupid."

"Your name is on the sign-in sheet. Isaiah Baptist."

He turned. He was taller than she expected, maybe six one, lean in the way that people are lean when they move through the world with the specific purpose of not getting in anyone's way. His hands were scarred—burn marks on the knuckles, pale lines across the palms that looked like someone had tried to write on them with a hot pen and given up.

"You can call me Ember," he said. "Baptiste is my grandmother's name. I earned the other one."

"How?"

He held up his hands. The burn marks caught the orange light of the parking lot. "I used to disarm bombs. Now I disarm things that are almost bombs. The difference is mostly semantic."

She looked at his wrists. On his left wrist, a red string. Simple. Worn. The kind of thing a grandmother gives a grandson and the grandson wears because the grandmother gives it to him and he does not know how to say no to a grandmother.

"What is that?" she asked.

He looked down at it, surprised, as if he had forgotten it was there. "My grandmother gave it to me. She says it keeps the fire seeds out."

"What are fire seeds?"

He smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that does not reach the eyes but gets there anyway. "Anything that starts a fire. A cigarette dropped in dry grass. A spark from a grinder. A bomb. A device left at a gate. The word fire seed is what my grandmother uses for all of them. Everything is a fire seed if you are old enough."

---

The romance was feverish. It happened in the heat and the humidity, in the spaces between the plant's smokestacks and the cypress trees and the houses where the water ran brown from the tap and the people pretended they did not notice.

They smoked on her porch at midnight. The cicadas were loud enough that speaking required effort, so they did not speak much. The air was thick enough to taste. Spanish moss hung from the oak branches like shrouds. The chemical plant's smokestacks glowed red at the top, a constellation of warning lights that Mercy had learned to look at without looking at.

"My grandmother says the white sandalwood tree grows wild along the waterways," Mercy said, on the third night of knowing him. "She said my great-great-grandmother planted one in eighteen ninety. It is probably dead by now. The water is not right for it."

Isaiah was quiet for a long time. The cicadas filled the silence.

"I drew one once," he said. "In a notebook. A white sandalwood tree. I do not know why. I was in Afghanistan, in a place where nothing grew, and I drew a tree that grows in water."

"Where is the notebook?"

"Here." He tapped his chest. "And in a drawer in this house, under a stack of paper that I have not sorted in two years."

She looked at him. The porch light cast his face in yellow, and the shadows under his eyes were deep and dark, and his hands—his scarred, burned hands—were resting on his knees, palms up, the way hands rest when they are remembering what they have held and what they have let go.

"Why do you do this?" she asked. "Disarming the devices. Risking your life for a parish that tolerates the plant but does not thank you."

He did not answer immediately. The cicadas were loud. The plant glowed red. A frog jumped into the canal behind the house and made a sound like a stone being dropped in water.

"Because someone has to," he said finally. "Because the devices are there, and if I do not remove them, someone else dies, and I know how to remove them, and so I remove them. It is not a philosophy. It is a geometry. There is a bomb. I am a person. I am between the bomb and the person who will die. I remove the bomb."

She reached out and touched his hand. His skin was hot. The scar tissue was rough. The red string was warm from being on his wrist.

"I am the person who will die," she said.

He turned his hand over and took her fingers. "No," he said. "You are the person who writes it down. That is different."

---

The explosion happened on a Tuesday in August. The plant's storage facility—Tank Farm C, according to the later reports—ruptured at approximately 2:47 p.m. The initial blast killed four workers. The secondary fires killed six more. The toxic cloud that rolled into the bayou, visible from the highway as a brown wall moving south at the speed of a fast car, killed fourteen people who were not working at the plant but were living in the parish that the plant had turned into a slow poison.

Dozens died. The number changed as the days passed. Forty-one. Forty-three. Forty-seven. The plant issued a statement. The state investigation was announced. The governor sent condolences.

Ember was at the scene within twenty minutes. He had been two miles away, disarming a device left at the plant's north gate—a homemade incendiary, crude but functional, the kind of thing that corporate saboteurs and radical environmentalists leave when they have decided that writing letters is not enough. He had cut the wire. He had laid it on the ground. He had called it in. He had turned toward the explosion.

He walked toward it. Not ran. Walked. The way he walked toward everything.

The site was unstable. There were reports of secondary devices—saboteurs had planted multiple incendiaries at the facility, knowing that first responders would arrive and knowing that the chaos of the initial blast would make detection difficult. Ember went in anyway.

Mercy was at the community meeting hall when she heard. She ran. She arrived at the perimeter at approximately 4:30 p.m. Police tape. State troopers. The air still smelled of sulfur and burning plastic and something else, something that had once been human and was no longer.

She saw him at the edge of the tape. Or she thought she saw him. He was inside the perimeter, moving between the wreckage, his face covered with a cloth, his hands moving with the calm precision that had disarmed devices and held her hand on a porch at midnight and told her about trees that grow in water and do not grow in poison.

She did not reach him. She never reaches anyone in time. This was the second time, and the first time had been in Port Harcourt, in a different story, with a different name, and she had learned nothing from it except that reaching in time is not a skill she possesses.

He went in. He did not come out.

---

Mercy searched his house three days after the explosion, when the parish had moved on to grief and the grief had moved on to anger and the anger had moved on to the slow, grinding machinery of a regulatory investigation that would take six months and produce a fine that the plant would pay from its advertising budget.

She found the notebook under a stack of paper in the drawer of his kitchen table. It was a small black notebook, the kind you buy at a hardware store for six dollars, filled with handwriting and sketches and the kind of marginalia that appears when a person is thinking and drawing at the same time.

The sketches were of white sandalwood trees.

Hundreds of them. Different angles. Different sizes. Some detailed, with roots and branches and leaves rendered in careful pencil. Some barely sketches—three lines that suggested a trunk and a canopy and the word TREE written beside them in capitals, as if the word itself was a form of prayer.

On the last page, a single sentence, written in a hand that was slightly different from the rest, as if the person who had written it had been moving faster or feeling something heavier:

The tree remembers everything. It does not move, so it has to remember everything. She planted one in the front yard anyway. The soil was bad. The water was poisoned. The air was thick with sulfur and chemical sweetness and the slow death of a parish that had tolerated the plant because the alternative was to leave and there was nothing else to leave to.

She planted the seed in spring. The tree grew slowly. White flowers bloomed in April, small and white and fragrant, the kind of fragrance that cuts through the plant's smoke and reaches you for exactly three seconds before the sulfur comes back.

The plant continued to pollute. The smokestacks glowed red at night. The fish did not return. The tree grew.

=== OTMES v2 Objective Code === OTMES/WS-T0-03 M: [10.0,1.0,5.5,9.5,2.0,3.0,7.0,0.0,5.0,5.0] N: [0.30,0.70] K: [0.85,0.15] θ: 225° V: 1.0 I: 1.0 C: 0.9 S: 0.5 R: 0.0 TI: 96.8

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: