F Wilson - Midnight Mass

Then he was out the door and gone. Joe turned to Zev and saw the old man rolling up his sleeves.

"Nu?" Zev said. "The bodies. Before we do anything else, I think maybe we should move the bodies."

ZEV . . .

By early afternoon, Zev was exhausted. The heat and the heavy work had taken their toll. He had to stop and rest. He sat on the chancel rail and looked around. Nearly eight hours work and they'd barely scratched the surface. But the place did look and smell better.

Removing the flyblown corpses and scattered body parts had been the worst of it. A foul, gut-roiling task that had taken most of the morning. They'd carried the corpses out to the small graveyard behind the church and left them there. Those people deserved a decent burial but there was no time for it today.

Once the corpses were gone, Father Joe had torn the defilements from the statue of Mary and then they'd turned their attention to the huge crucifix. It took a while but they finally found Christ's plaster arms in the pile of ruined pews. Both still were nailed to the sawed-off crosspieces of the crucifix. While Zev and Joe worked at jury-rigging a series of braces to reattach the arms,

Carl found a mop and bucket and began the long, slow process of washing the fouled floor of the nave.

Now the crucifix was intact again—the life-size plaster Jesus had his arms reattached and was once again nailed to his refurbished cross. Joe and Carl had restored him to his former position of dominance. The poor Nazarene was upright again, hanging over the center of the sanctuary in all his tortured splendor.

A grisly sight. Zev never could understand the Catholic attachment to these gruesome statues. But if the undead loathed them, then Zev was for them all the way.

His stomach rumbled with hunger. At least they'd had a good breakfast. Carl had returned from his food run this morning with fresh-baked bread, peanut butter, and two thermoses of hot coffee. He wished now they'd saved some. Maybe there was a crust of bread left in the sack.

He headed back to the vestibule to check and found an aluminum pot and a paper bag sitting by the door. The pot was hot and full of beef stew, the sack contained three cans of Pepsi.

He poked his head out the doors but saw no one on the street outside. It had been that way all day—he'd spy a figure or two peeking in the front doors; they'd hover there for a moment as if to confirm that what they had heard was true, then they'd scurry away.

He looked down at the meal that had been left. A group of the locals must have donated from their hoard of canned stew and precious soft drinks to fix this. Zev was touched.

He was about to call out to Joe and Carl when a shadow fell across the floor. He looked up and saw a young woman in a leather jacket standing in the doorway. The first thing he did was check for her right ear for one of those cursed crescents. Easy enough to see with her close-cropped, almost boyish brown hair. She didn't. Such a relief.

"Yes?" He straightened and faced her. "Can I help you?"

"Isn't this St. Anthony's church?" she said, making a face as she looked around at the destruction.

"It was. We're trying to make it so again."

Her gaze had come to rest on his yarmulke. "But you're a—"

"A rabbi, yes. Rabbi Zev Wolpin, at your service." He gestured around him at the church. "Such a long story, you wouldn't believe."

She smiled. A pretty smile. "I'll bet. I'm looking for my uncle. He was a priest here but he left. I need to find him."

Zev felt a lightness in his chest. "His name wouldn't happen to be Cahill, would it?"

Her smile broadened. "Yeah. Father Joe Cahill. You know where he might be?"

"I believe I do." He turned and called into the nave. "Father Joe! You have company!"

LACEY . . .

Lacey totally lost it when she recognized the tall, broad-shouldered man striding toward her through the rubble of the church. He needed a shave, he needed a haircut, and his faded jeans and flannel shirt were anything but priestly, but she knew those blue eyes and the smile that lit his face when he saw her.

"Uncle Joe!"

She found herself running forward and flinging herself at him, sobbing unashamedly and uncontrollably as she clung to him like a drowning sailor to a rock.

"Lacey, Lacey," he cooed, holding her tight against him. "It's all right. It's all right."

Finally she got hold of herself and eased her deathgrip on him. She wiped her eyes.

"Sorry about that. It's just..."

"I know," he said, taking her hands in his.

Lacey looked up at her uncle. Did he? Did he realize what she'd been through to get here? She'd thought she was tough, but the trip from Manhattan had taken her longer than she could have imagined, and put to shame every nightmare she'd ever had.

"How are your mom and dad?" he asked.

She saw the forlorn hope in his eyes—her mother was his older sister—but had to shake her head.

"I don't know. I tried to contact them when the shit hit the—I mean, when everything went to hell, but the lines were down and everything was chaos. I got to wondering if they'd even bothered trying to get in touch with me."

"I'm sure they did," Uncle Joe said. "Of course they did."

"How can you be so sure? They've refused to speak to me for years."

"But they love you."

"Funny way of showing it."

"They're not rejecting you, Lacey, just your lifestyle."

"One's pretty much wrapped up in the other, don't you think. At least you kept talking to me."

She'd been moved as a kid from Brooklyn to New Jersey when her father landed a job with a big pharmaceutical company in Florham Park, but New York had remained in her blood. When it came time for college her first and last choice had been NYU, for reasons beyond what it offered academically. Its location in Greenwich Village had been equally important.

Because somewhere along her years in high school Lacey Flannery had realized she wasn't like the other girls. She needed an accepting atmosphere, a place where anything goes, to stretch her boundaries and find out about herself, learn who she really was.

In her second year at NYU she moved into an off-campus apartment with a senior named Janey Birnbaum. At the time her folks thought they were just roommates. Three years ago, right after her graduation with a BA in English, she came out.

And that was when her folks stopped speaking to her. She'd tried to visit them, tried to explain, but they hadn't wanted to see or speak to her.

The one person in the family she'd found she could talk to was, of all people, her uncle the Catholic priest. Uncle Joe hadn't approved but he didn't turn her away. He'd tried to act as go-between but her folks stood firm: either get counseling and get cured—like she was mentally ill or something!—or stay away.

She had a feeling her father was behind the hard line, but she couldn't be sure. Now she might never know.

The rabbi said, "So may I ask, what is it, this lifestyle, that your parents reject but a priest doesn't?"

"I'm a dyke."

The rabbi blinked. Probably the first time anyone had ever put it to him that bluntly. She also noticed her uncle's grimace. Obviously he didn't like the word. Lacey hadn't liked it either at first, but Janey and her more radical friends encouraged her to use to it because they were taking it back.

That was all fine back then, but now . . . take it back from whom?

"Doesn't that mean a lesbian?" the rabbi said.

"Through and through."

"Oh. I see."

"Not just a garden-variety lesbian," Uncle Joe said. His wry smile looked forced. "A radical lesbian feminist, and an outspoken one at that."

"You forgot to mention atheist."

His smile faded a little. "I try to forget that part."

It had taken Lacey awhile to come out, but when she did she decided not to be out partway. She wasn't ashamed of who she was or how she felt and was ready to get in the face of anyone who tried to give her grief about it.