Body and Blood - Hardcover

Schiefelbein, Michael

3.51

96 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312330197 ISBN 13: 9780312330194

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2007

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As a sixteen-year-old Catholic seminarian, Chris Sieb had a deep crush on fellow student Jack Canston. Now, twenty-five years after parting ways, Jack has transfered to the Kansas City diocese where he once again encounters Chris - now Father Sieb - a devoted priest and closeted gay man. After seeing each other for the first time, the two rekindle their boyhood yearnings, beginning a secret relationship.Their reverie is brief, however, abruptly shaken when another closeted priest in the diocese, a former classmate of the two, dies suddenly, an apparent suicide. Shortly thereafter a letter arrives at the archbishop's office claiming that more was going on than anyone ever expected. As his secret affair continues, Chris begins to realize there is something horribly wrong with Jack, some dark secret he's withholding, one somehow connected to their deceased classmate - and that the threat it represents is closer than he could ever guess. Now his one chance to survive lies in finally uncovering the truth.

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About the Author:

MICHAEL SCHIEFELBEIN is the author of the Lambda Literary Award nominated Vampire Vow and Vampire Thrall. After spending ten years studying for the priesthood, he graduated from the University of Maryland with a doctorate in English. He resides in Memphis, Tennessee, where he is a professor of writing and literature.

Chapter 1
The scene in my head was vivid. I saw Jack Canston in a red tank top and black running shorts, kneeling with his sinewy arms outstretched, as if he were on the cross—not Jesus. He kept his eyes on the real crucifix, spotlighted above the holy tabernacle. I knelt next to him in the dark chapel, trying to keep my focus on the crucifix. Trying not to glance at Jack’s shoulder muscles, like armor pauldrons on a medieval knight, trying not to watch Jack’s Adam’s apple move on his strong neck when he swallowed. When my outstretched arm brushed Jack’s, my groin tingled.
“He’s the crucified Lord,” Jack whispered, “begging us to die with him.” He squeezed his eyes shut in adoration, and tears trickled from his thick lashes, down his smooth cheeks. He was only sixteen and hadn’t begun to shave. But hair grew thick in his armpits. I inhaled their sweaty odor. Before we had entered the dark chapel, I’d noticed that
the back of Jack’s red tank top was drenched with sweat. We had
just finished a secret run on the country road winding around the seminary—while the other seminarians played pool or watched television in the recreation hall in the west building.
“The crucified Lord,” Jack repeated. “Do you feel his love, Chris?”
“Yes.” I glanced at the cross and then back at Jack. I wanted to kiss him and sink to the slate floor in his arms.
“He dies for us again,” Jack continued. “Every day in mass. Every time the priest lifts the bread and says, ‘This is my body, given up for you.’ ”
My body, given up for you. Given up for you. Given up for you. That scene with Jack, a scene of long ago, faded, morphing into the scene before me now. The real Jack, an older Jack, stood before me. It had been twenty-five years since the scene in the dark sanctuary. Now the light of a waning winter afternoon settled in the airy chapel. And Jack, now forty-one years old, stood behind the altar, beautiful in a white chasuble. Thirty of us priests, also in white, crowded around him in the large, open space—like the heavenly host gathered around the Lamb in the Book of Revelation. All of us extended a hand toward the wafer as he lifted it and pronounced the words of consecration, his dark eyes raised to the soaring ceiling, “This is my body, given up for you.” Jack’s tone was softer now, all these years later, more reflective—marked by experience.
The years had left him even more handsome. His thin face had filled out, and his angular nose, jaw, and chin now made him look rugged rather than austere. Heavy stubble covered his cheeks, and his hair was thick and long and shabby—no longer combed back from his forehead and parted. His wiry body had thickened into a powerful mass of chest, shoulders, and arms. He exuded a rugged, faintly sleazy, sensuality.
Why had he returned, almost twenty-five years after breaking off contact with me and disappearing in the vastness of Montana? Why had he left his own diocese and his own family to return to the Archdiocese of Kansas City?
I couldn’t stop staring at Jack through the rest of mass, with all of the old feelings rushing through me—feelings I thought had died long ago. Their intensity scared me. Jack scared me. When mass ended, I avoided him, removing my alb in the chapel and draping it over a pew rather than removing it in the sacristy where Jack and other priests went to disrobe.
Then I headed for cocktails in the library of what was now St. John’s Diocesan Center. In the late eighties, after years of dwindling enrollment, the old high school seminary had been converted to administrative offices and a retreat center. I, now sixteen years a priest, was in charge of managing it, and I lived on the premises. The archbishop, who lived there as well, held a monthly gathering for his clergy—mass was followed by cocktails and dinner. Tonight, three days after Christmas, we celebrated the holiday.
I stood in line at the drink table, watching nervously for Jack’s appearance. A crowd of priests mingled around a glowing Christmas tree in the center of the dimly lit room. The earnest faces of a few young guys stood out—boys still in love with the church they’d surrendered their lives to. But most of the priests were over fifty, paunchy, and dressed in nappy, stretched-out sweaters or faded clerical shirts with Roman collars.
As I poured myself a drink, Corey Mulhane fumbled toward the table. Corey’s brown eyes were bloodshot. His full lips and pale, freckled cheeks hung loosely, as though his face was slipping off his skull. The boyish cuteness that lingered as he approached fifty seemed strangely grotesque whenever he drank.
“Nice little party, huh?” Corey said. “The archbishop loves his priests.” He filled a glass with Scotch and raised it in a toast. “Here’s to the church and its lovely twelve days of Christmas cheer.”
I nodded doubtfully. Corey must have started drinking that afternoon before mass. He’d been off the wagon since his parents’ death the year before—his mother’s stroke coming just two months after his father’s heart attack. But his parishioners at St. Michael’s indulged their dimpled Irish darling, and the archbishop felt sorry for him, only gently nagging him to reenter the archdiocese’s treatment program for parish priests.
We stepped over to a sitting area and settled on a leather sofa.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Never better. Nice to be with the gang.”
“How did Christmas masses go at St. Michael’s?”
Corey smiled and snorted. “Fat Mary Conley belted out ‘O Holy Night’ again. The stroke didn’t stop her, goddamnit. Year number fifteen.”
I glanced at the door when someone entered. But it was only the archbishop, a bony man with a fringe of white hair. He wore a black jacket over his clerical shirt, and the pectoral cross he’d received on becoming a bishop was visible inside the lapels. We all applauded him.
“Thank you,” the archbishop said, raising his hand as though offering an appreciative blessing. “You are good and faithful servants. After a busy Christmas in our parishes, I know you’d prefer to stay home on a cold night like this. Your sacrifice shows how fortunate I am as your shepherd. You truly inspire me!”
Corey was right. Archbishop Alfred Koch did love the priests of the three counties that made up the Archdiocese of Kansas City. And he bent over backward to keep them happy. He knew how overworked everybody was, a number of priests serving two or three parishes in rural areas. Little by little, lots of priests had abandoned their posts after the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s awakened them to the beauty of the secular world. Most left to get married. More than a few found a place in the growing gay community—not that this was ever officially acknowledged. I’d learned more and more about the gay life in Kansas City through the Web site of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. One of our ex-priests, a student I had admired back in high school, recently had become the center’s president.
The church’s return to staunch conservatism ushered in by John Paul II did attract some devout young candidates to the priestly ranks. Maybe their number would grow until the archdiocese returned to its smug days of glory, but if it did, the archbishop could say good-bye to some of the last liberal holdouts.
The archbishop’s little speech triggered Corey’s disgust with Roman hierarchy. He turned to me with a cynical expression and said, “Did you read what good old Cardinal Ramirez said in the Vatican rag?” He raised his chin and affected a snotty attitude as he quoted the cardinal: “Homosexuals are intrinsically disordered, incapable of spiritual leadership. Allowing homosexuals in the priesthood is ‘absolutely inadvisable, imprudent, and risky.’”
“Jesus,” I moaned. “Let the witch hunt begin.”
Corey nodded. “Oh, it will. Of course, you have nothing to worry about. Father Seib is pure as the driven snow.” Corey spoke with mock reverence. “Father Seib would give his chaste body over to be burned for the sake of Holy Mother Church.”
“I don’t think Ramirez is making any fine distinction between repressed homosexuals and active ones. He’d happily toss out anybody he suspected of ever having a wet dream about another man. Which would mean tossing out fifty percent of the clergy in every diocese—bishops included. Men who’ve given their lives to Holy Mother. Talk about ingratitude. And hypocrisy!”
Corey snorted. “You’ll all just get more damned scared—and closeted.”
“Whatever you say.” I resisted getting drawn into the familiar argument. According to Corey, I’d sold out to the increasingly uptight church and turned into a pathetic, asexual zombie. Corey himself proudly joined gay organizations and went to an annual retreat for gay priests.
Corey looked ready to argue, but his attention suddenly shifted to the door. “Well, don’t forget your virtue now that lover boy is finally here,” he said. “I know you’ve been counting the minutes since his transfer was announced last month.”
I turned, and there he was, accompanied by a pudgy old classmate, Reggie Lutz, jabbering...

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