Crucified

by Michael Slade

  Clang!

  The sound of the hammer striking the head of the first nail sent a jolt of electricity up the boy's nerves. It felt as if the spike had pierced his hand.

  Clang . . . clang . . .

  The executioner gave the nail a double tap to sink it into the wood, then positioned another nail over the soft part of the Kristo'' s other palm.

  Clang!

  Clang . . . clang . . .

  Jesus stifled a cry and bit his lip. A pack of photojournalists called out for the Romans to clear the way so they could capture the grimace on his face for readers back home. With a heave and a haul, three attendants erected the cross, then the executioner pounded nails through the soft tissue between his toes. His feet were nailed individually, instead of overlapped, so the Kristo could support his body weight on the shelf of the cross.

  Jesus seemed sublime as he whispered to himself.

  Was he dreaming?

  Was he praying to God?

  The boy felt the hands of the priest on his shoulders, giving him a massage.

  In less than fifteen minutes, they took Jesus down.

  Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  The executioner nailed another Kristo to that cross.

  Thirteen men were crucified before the Passion was done, and that burst of faith would stay with the boy for the rest of his life. Was being crucified not the ultimate affirmation of the sacred narrative at the heart of the Church?

  And as he was to learn, Father felt just like he did.

  The heat soared to a scorch the following day, and the blazing sun beat down like a hammer on a nail. To cool off, the priest took the boy to a swimming hole at a lonely mission outpost.

  "Well?" said the priest. "Who are you? Tom Sawyer?

  Huckleberry Finn?"

  The boy grinned. "My mom read me those books."

  "Of course she did. All American boys read about Tom and Huck. Shall we swim?"

  "I don't have trunks."

  "No need for swimsuits. Tom and Huck skinny-dip. Is this not the Garden of Eden? No fig leaves here."

  And so the boy shucked off his clothes and dashed for the inviting water, expecting the priest to follow. Instead, he found himself alone in the pool, and when he looked back to see why, there was the priest, on the edge of the pit, with tears stream-ing down his cheeks.

  "What's wrong, Father?"

  "Come here," summoned the priest.

  From the look on his face as he gazed at his reflection in the pool, you'd think he was staring at himself burning in the depths of hell. As the boy emerged from the water, the priest averted his eyes.

  "Get dressed," he said. "I have sinned. We do need fig leaves. The snake is loose in Eden. Satan is trying to possess me. He's after my soul, son. I need help to exorcise the demon."

  "What can I do?"

  "The cross," sobbed the priest.

  It took the rest of the day to gather what they required. On the way to Cutud to purchase one of the whips sold to tourists as souvenirs, the missionary told the boy about the Jesuit priest who was martyred by Iroquois Indians in the 1600s. "What faith!" he said. "They stripped his flesh to the bones on his arms and legs.

  They blistered him with boiling water to mock our baptism. They roasted him in a belt of blazing bark soaked in pitch. They hung red-hot hatchets from a ring around his neck. They scalped him and pressed burning coals into his eyes, but still Father de Brebeuf kept praying to God. So they cut off his lips and tore out his heart. That, my son, is how a Catholic suffers for his faith."

  Next, they drove to a hardware store for tools and beams of wood. On returning to the mission, the priest told the boy about mortification of the flesh—modern monks who whip themselves raw in monasteries; Opus Dei faithful who wear the cilice, a metal chain with spikes, locked around the thigh; and believers who bear stigmata, bleeding wounds that correspond to Christ's.

  '"And they that are Christ's have crucified their flesh,'" quoted the priest. "That's St. Paul's letter to the Galatians. After Pope John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square, he wrote on our need to suffer. 'As the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the Cross of Christ,' he explained, 'the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him.'

  "Are you strong?" he asked the boy.

  "Yes," the boy replied.

  Early Easter morning, the priest set things up. The boy helped him build a whipping post in the yard and watched him join the beams as a cross. The top of the crucifix angled up to rest on a stone wall.

  "Here," he said, handing the boy the bamboo-tipped scourge. "Hit my back as hard as you can until it bleeds like the backs of the men you saw in Cutud."

  Stripping off his shirt, the priest hugged the pole. "Do it!" he said.

  So the boy skinned him alive.

  "Take that, Satan!" the priest wailed again and again, his voice so raspy that it frightened birds out of the trees. The ground around him was red with blood when he finally groaned for the boy to stop.

  Soaked with sweat, the boy panted from exertion.

  Too weak to walk, the priest crawled to the cross on his hands and knees. The boy trailed him with the hammer and several nails. The flayed priest slowly climbed the slanted beam, then struggled to reverse himself. He gasped when his shredded back made contact with the wood.

  "Ready?" asked the boy.

  "Do it," said the priest, with less conviction than the first time.

  The boy poked the tip of the nail into his quivering palm, just as the executioner had done on Friday, then he raised the hammer over his head, and—

  "Save me!" cried the priest.

  —brought it down.

  Clang!

  + + +

  The boy had bounced from one boarding school to another as his father, the ambassador, took postings at various embassies around the world. In the end, his father's lust for women embroiled him in scandal, making him a pariah in Washington.

  Finished with school, the son announced that his life's work would be for the Church, and that caused his irate father to summon him home. There were money troubles that required new hands on the oars, a front man to puppet for the sinner.

  The would-be priest got out of a cab and followed the path down through colorful autumn trees to the summer cottage above the ocean. It was no longer legal to build this close to the sea, but his father's hideaway had been grandfathered in as an exception to the law. The sinner didn't want a railing through his panoramic view, so there was nothing between the deck and the thirty-foot drop to the sea except a narrow strip of grass along the lip.

  His father was sweeping leaves off the deck when he rounded one side of the cottage. His arrival made the sinner turn, and he slipped on a wet leaf, flying off the deck in a flail of arms and legs. With nothing to keep him from plummeting over the edge, he tumbled down the cliff face and struck the rocks in the foamy surf below.

  The son approached the edge and looked down at his father.

  The sinner was floating face down in the brine.

  He was still alive.

  The son felt nothing from all the neglect his father had heaped on him.

  God would decide if the sinner should live or die.

  The son waited . ..

  And waited . . .

  Until his father ceased moving.

  Then he went into the cottage to call for help.

  + + +

  "Hello, Father."

  "Hello, my son."

  It was more than a decade since they'd last seen each other in the Philippines.

  "You recognize me?"

  "The eyes are the window to the soul. And you have such striking eyes. What brings you to the Vatican?"

  "I wish to become a priest."

  "So you said when you were a boy. Remember?"

  "Yes."

  "You kept my secret. About my crucifixion."

  "I said I would."

  "That means so little these days."

  "Not to me, Father. W
ill you hear my confession?"

  "In the confessional?"

  "Here will do."

  The would-be priest spread his arms to take in the vast expanse of St. Peter's Square. A rare snowfall had whitened the cobblestones around the larger-than-life figures in the Nativity scene next to the well-lit Christmas tree by the obelisk. Bundled up, nuns slipped by with umbrellas to protect their cowls. Except for the striking of clocks, sounds were few in Bernini's colonnade.

  The penitent told the priest about his father's death.

  "There's a difference between misfeasance and nonfeasance," said his confessor. "You didn't push your father off the cliff. Your sin is that you weren't the Good Samaritan."

  "Father?"

  "Yes?"

  "I wish to join the Legion of Christ."

  "Ah," said the priest. "The shock troops of the Church."

  "To feel worthy, I must test my faith."

  "Test it how?"

  "As you did. Will you crucify me?"

  + + +

  Clang!

  Never had he felt such agony! So excruciating was the pain from his skewered palm that his mind had to scrunch like his eyes to hold back the scream.

  Clang . . . clang . . .

  In slipped the nail like a razor.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,

  He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,

  His truth is marching on.

  The shadow of the hammer-wielding priest circled around the rock walls to the young man's other hand.

  Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel

  Since God is marching on.

  Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

  Glory! Glory—

  Clang!

  As the nail impaled his other palm, the penitent's eyes flew wide. He was suffering amid the foundations of Christianity, in the vault beneath the ruined church. Back then, believers had cowered in this catacomb, while martyrs were fed to the lions above. Now, through tears, he took in the flames of countless votive candles flickering around the altar that was him. And as he concentrated on the Christian marching hymn that his iPod earphones fed to his soul, the pain in his temples pounded the lights into the same fiery cross that had once converted Constantine.

  In procession, that Christian battle hymn bled into another.

  Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before—

  Clang!

  One foot was nailed to the cross.

  At the sign of triumph Satan's host doth flee;

  On then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!

  Hell's foundations quiver at—

  Clang!

  His other foot was nailed to the cross.

  Like a mighty army moves the church of God;

  Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod ...

  Suddenly, the pain was gone and all he felt was bliss. The cross blazed before him like a beacon in the darkness. The road behind him was the Way of the Cross, and he was now the vanguard of a long, long line of popes, and saints, and inquisitors, and crusaders, and martyrs, and apostles. Henceforth, the Legionary of Christ would march against all those who threatened his Church.

  The crucifying priest signed him with the cross.

  "Put you on the armor of God," he said, "that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the Devil."

  Ephesians 6:11.

  "Endure hardship, as a good soldier of Christ."

  2 Timothy 2:3.

  "It is written," he said.

  + + +

  Founded by Marcial Maciel in 1941, the Legion of Christ took its inspiration from the Cristero War of the 1920s. Waged by men known as Cristeros—soldiers of Christ-—this was an uprising against anti-Catholic laws in the Mexican Constitution of 1917. "I envied the ones who went out to fight for Christ,"

  Maciel once said. "I, too, wanted to give my life for him."

  As the youngest founder of a religious congregation in the history of the Catholic Church, Nuestro Padre—Our Father—

  as Maciel came to be called, modeled his militant order on the Roman legions that spread Christianity throughout the empire after Constantine. There was no room for nonsense in the Legion of Christ. A legionary's crusade was to extend the Kingdom of Christ, and his life focused on the gospel, the Eucharist, and the cross.

  That's what the Legionary wanted.

  But Satan had other plans.

  Who else could have perverted the devotion to Christ of the Kristos in the Philippines? In 1996, a Japanese non-Christian was crucified in Cutud so he could petition God to cure his sick brother.

  He turned out to be an actor in sadomasochistic pom. His crucifixion was filmed for video release in the sex shops of Japan.

  Who else was polluting sinless souls with pop culture, with a false madonna mocking the Virgin Mary and Christ's crucifixion onstage, and with peddlers of heresy suggesting that Mary Magdalene had mothered Christ's child and begotten a line of royalty in Europe?

  Who else was to blame for Nuestro Padre's fall from grace under allegations of sexual abuse?

  And now, with darkness closing in on the Kingdom of Christ—and with infidels, heretics, atheists, pagans, skeptics, perverts, and heathens gathering for the Apocalypse—who was trying to unleash the satanic threat of the Judas relics on the foundations of the Roman Catholic Church?

  Only the Legionary stood between the darkness and the light. But how could he hope to defend his Church in this all-or-nothing crusade when—having verbalized the blasphemies in those accursed Inquisition records—he had conjured the Devil and let Satan take possession of his mind?

  Good Lord!

  Was that, too, not written in the Bible?

  Jesus asked him, saying: What is thy name? But he said: Legion. Because many devils were entered into him.

  —Luke 8:30.

  For he said unto him: Go out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

  And he asked him: What is thy name? And he saith to him: My name is Legion, for we are many.

  —Mark 5:8-9.

  With that in mind, the Legionary of Christ slipped away, and Satan once again took the wheel of the car. The Fiat abandoned the road for a bumpy path that ended in a dark pocket on the riverbank. Here, the possessed priest parked, got out, looked around, and walked to the back of the car.

  The corpse of Lenny Jones lay hog-tied in the trunk.

  The killer hauled the remains out and lugged them down to the water. Then he went back to the trunk for a hammer. Swinging it repeatedly, he pulverized Lenny's face beyond recognition.

  After dumping the mangled mess into the stream and watching it float away, he cleaned himself up in the water and churned the bloody ground into mud.

  As he embarked on the journey to his next kill, the clouds broke to reveal the hunter's moon.

  HARD LANDING

  THE NEXT DAY

  "That looks tasty," Wyatt said. "What is it?"

  "Hopple popple," Liz replied, isolating the casserole's ingredients with her fork. "Diced potato, bacon, onion, and scrambled eggs. You're late, and we couldn't wait."

  "Sorry, but a colleague phoned with a promising lead.

  Speaking of which, where's Lenny?"

  Yesterday, in the beer hall, they had agreed to meet for brunch in the hotel's restaurant so Lenny could show them the war archive kept by his grandfather, Trent Jones. In an email sent shortly after the bomber was found, Lenny had told Balsdon and Swetman that he'd bring the file to Germany.

  "Missing in action," Sweaty said. "I rang his room, but he wasn't there."

  "So what are you eating?"

  "Apfelpfannkuchen."

  "Gesundheit," Wyatt blessed him.

  "Apple pancakes to you."

  "But not to you?"

  "I did spend a year i
n a Stalag Luft camp."

  Wyatt caught the eye of the waitress across the restaurant and used sign language to place his order. He pointed to Liz's hopple popple, then to himself. The blonde with two braids smiled, nodded, scribbled on her notepad, and went to the kitchen.

  Rook sat down.

  Unlike the beer hall, this restaurant irked him. Those around him wore suits, ties, jeans, and designer labels. There wasn't a dirndl or any lederhosen in sight. Years ago, Wyatt had cleaned out a stash of his dad's youthful relics, including a grade three social studies text. Published in the mid-1950s, the book was a trip around the world, with Dutch kids in wooden shoes and Chinese kids in triangular hats. Wyatt wished it was still like that—not a global village of homogenized beings produced by jet planes, franchises, and TV.

  But then, of course, he'd be wearing a coonskin cap.

  "Strange, Lenny being late," said Liz. "Can't imagine what would be more pressing than us."

  "Maybe that barmaid who was . . ."

  "Who was what?"

  "Zaftig," Swetman suggested.

  "Right," Wyatt agreed.

  "You think Lenny's in bed with that buxom beer-hall babe?"

  "She would be more pressing," the historian punned.

  Liz rolled her eyes.

  "While we're waiting," Wyatt said, turning to the radioman of the shot-down Halifax, "tell us what happened the night you bailed out over Nazi Germany."

  + + +

  '"Pilot to crew. Bail out.' That's what Wrath said to the six of us through the plane's intercom," Swetman told his two brunch companions all these years later.

  Listening to him, Wyatt and Liz could picture the frantic scramble in the Ace of Clubs. The guns of the Junkers 88 had obviously done real damage to the tail section. That was evident from the erratic way the crippled plane was flying. Swetman and Balsdon were in the compartment under the cockpit and behind the nose cone. Above them, Wrath struggled to keep the Ace as level as possible while the crew prepared to abandon the aircraft.