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Professional fighters, even scrappy teenagers, are well acquainted with stiff blows. Jud understood that in a previous life. These days he doesn’t go looking for a fight, but it comes to him occasionally: more often than he’d like and not frequently enough to expect it. The first time Wicks details his lurid escapades in the shower, Jud doesn’t see the ring, or the counting of the rounds. By the third time he realizes he’s losing on points, and if he doesn’t make a change, it’ll turn into a knockout.
In the midst of the fourth confession, Monsignor Wicks makes a sudden movement, miming ejaculation in a way Jud doesn’t want to think about. Jud is also bad with sudden movements, and he feels himself flinch as he whispers, “Jesus,” under his breath. In flinching he has taken another hit to the head, on which Wicks can immediately capitalize.
“Does my confession make you uncomfortable?” asks Wicks, leering forward. “Hm, Father?”
Jud bites his tongue to stop himself from asking if it’s over. He doesn’t have to know Wicks well to understand that the pattern of his cruelty necessitates not wincing twice. In seminary school, Jud’s first good mentor told him to forgive his reflexes, who didn’t know he was no longer a boxer; that it was better to startle than to strike. In a moment of weakness, Jud longs for the days when he was the striking type. Instead of giving in, he says, “I’m here to listen. Not to cast judgement or opinion. Those are God’s jurisdictions.” He can feel his hand tighten on his thigh. The curve of Monsignor Wicks’ smile grows slowly.
The points go to Wicks again. Jud leaves, his ears ringing, as he dreads the next week.
Fear makes people dangerous. To one another, to themselves. Fear of the unknown turns to poison in an instant when left unchecked. For Jud, the adage is slightly more literal. He knows the shape of his worst impulses when backed into a corner: how fear turns to rage turns to fists, how fists turn to injury, how injury turns to death. Jud is no longer afraid of himself the way he was when he was seventeen and so furious it spilled out of him, but he knows what he’s capable of. He knows that children do not seek the violence he craved unless something is wrong. Perhaps they are very, very afraid. Monsignor Wicks does not know that Jud is dangerous in terror. Monsignor Wicks is taking pains to make Jud flinch.
The rectory is so cold that Jud can see his breath as he wakes in a flurry of movement. Shortly after becoming a killer, this would happen often. Jud, overcome with emotion, would hit something until he was exhausted enough to sleep. Tonight he’s shivering. He slips out of bed to find a thicker blanket.
Shortly after Christmas but before the New Year is one of Jud’s favorite seasons. It’s restful, contemplative, quiet. He can lose himself to uninterrupted prayer and study. The deep winter chill reminds Jud of the peace he finds in this week every year. He finds Monsignor Wicks instead as he rounds the corner, with a magazine.
“Shit,” says Jud, embarrassed. “Shit, sorry.” Wicks is sitting by the fireplace in only his underwear. Jud stumbles over his words. “I didn’t mean— I was— I can go.” Tired and disoriented on account of his midnight excursion, Jud had turned the wrong corner. This is nothing untoward. It is perfectly reasonable for the Monsignor to disrobe in his own home. Jud can feel his heartbeat in his throat.
Wicks fixes Jud with a long, appraising look. Then he puts his free hand down his pants. Jud’s mouth goes dry. “Take my confession?”
“I—” Jud clears his throat. “I don’t know if I— it’s late, and—” He can’t say no. He knows he can’t say no. Not as a priest, and not as a subordinate, entirely reliant on Monsignor Wicks’ mercy. “Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
Jud sits down. He itches at the side of his neck. That tattoo took so long to heal it’s still a nervous habit.
“Forgive me, father,” says the Monsignor, and Jud steadies his resolve.
Twice in the next week Martha asks if Jud is feeling okay. He’s not so naive to take it as a kindness, even if he wishes it was. Martha is pious and devoted, hardworking and steadfast. In another life, Jud likes to think, her loyalty is not so firmly pointed towards Monsignor Wicks, and in that life they might be friends. Martha’s inquiries about his health are suspicious pinpricks she will deliver back to the Monsignor and the flock to undermine his credibility. Jud really hopes he’s wrong. After all, they do spend a lot of time filing stuff together. But that Sunday after mass, Vera beams her waxen smile in Jud’s direction and says, “Are you sure you should be here? Martha said she thought you were ill,” and Jud is sure he made the right choice by keeping his mouth shut.
“Fine,” he says, with a forced levity. “Just the changing of the seasons.”
From behind, Monsignor Wicks claps a hard hand onto Jud’s shoulder. He jumps, despite himself, his fists balling up involuntarily. “Always so humble, our Jud,” says the Monsignor with a viper’s smile. “You really weren’t feeling yourself this week, were you?”
“No,” Jud insists, his voice thin, “I’m fine.”
A surreptitious rustle of vestments makes Wicks’ movements invisible as he lowers his hand: first to Jud’s mid-back, then further still, coming to rest at the threshold of his waistband. On a technicality, he is not touching Jud anywhere inappropriate. “No?” repeats Monsignor Wicks, leaning towards Vera to cover the way he presses into Jud, maintaining the unsullied appearance of a righteous priest. “You still look a bit peaky. You might want to lie down, if the services took so much out of you.”
The stench of alcohol leaks from the Monsignor’s mouth and hits hot against Jud’s ear. He must have overindulged in the store room. Or, Jud realizes as he thinks back to today’s homily on greed and selfishness, Wicks woke up with a vendetta, and is having his fun. Jud pushes himself away from Wicks’ grasp, triangulating himself between the Monsignor and Vera. “I don’t think so,” says Jud, his fear crystallizing into something worse. “I’ve already told you. I feel fine.”
Jud spends the next hour speaking at length to every parishioner. He tries to interact with everyone briefly every week, with respect to Wicks’ authority. Today he is methodical, attentive, and slow; two newcomers walk away smiling, excited to see him next Sunday. Jud knows he’s acting out of anger, that this is the closest he will come to revenge in Wicks’ church. If Wicks wants to make their conflict public, Jud can too. At least Jud channels his anger into kindness. At least no one else will take the brunt of it.
Once they are alone, Wicks calls out to him. “You really want my church, don’t you, Father?”
Jud turns around and forces himself to breathe. “I’m here to assist you, Monsignor. That’s all.”
“Assisting me? By peddling woke bullshit to my flock?” Wicks begins to raise his voice, so Jud crosses the grass to slash any reason to shout.
“One man’s vengeful God does not necessitate the erasure of a loving one,” Jud says, calm. He has been grounded by his hour of service, rejuvenated by lively conversation and solemn prayer. “We don’t have to see eye to eye to prioritize spreading the word of Christ. Bringing people to Him in our own ways.” With a glimmer of his most naive hope, Jud wonders if they could leave each other be, respect each other’s separate ministries, and pass like ships in the night.
Wicks shatters it. “You greedy whore,” he says, his consonants grinding into a growl. Jud stands unblinking. “You overstep your place. You disrespect this church. You disrespect me!” His voice booms against the stone walls. The desire to hit him rises like bile in Jud’s throat.
“I’ve told you,” says Jud, swallowing it down, “I want to serve.”
Tension thickens the air as Wicks looks up at him. Though lanky and thin, Jud is taller than the Monsignor, and with his confidence comes a weighty presence. His youth and his posture combine to tip the scales in his favor, and he looms over Wicks without trying. Jud looks like an authority. He looks like a threat.
Wicks sweeps Jud’s legs out from under him with three words. “Take my confession,” he says.
In the shower, Jud rubs his skin red and raw like he used to wash off blood. Wicks is taking advantage of his dedication to his position, pinning him inside the booth like a butterfly to a cork board. He wants Jud decorative, vulnerable, and immobile, unable to work or disagree. And Jud isn’t stupid. He knows that this confession was both a punishment for his boldness and a test of his composure: another push past the last stretched boundary of Jud’s halfhearted attempts to cut off the graphic details of how Wicks touches himself. In the slash of his crooked smile, Jud could parse the Monsignor’s vindictive glee. The punishment fit the crime— Jud spent too much time listening to the wrong voices. Now he would only be allowed to hear one.
As he runs the hot water tank to its limit, though, Jud realizes that Wicks lied to him. After about ten minutes of par-for-the-course monologue on masturbation, Wicks turned the subject to— “You,” he’d said, smiling, shaking his head. Jud, who had been doing so well, felt the fear start to trickle like postnasal drip into the back of his throat.
“Me?”
Wicks had pointed at him, shaken his finger. “When I came to check on you, even after all you had done, when you were trying to corrupt Vera to your liberal modernity, you raised sin in me. Your presence brought me closer to sin.” Jud stayed quiet. The Monsignor laughed at the look on his face and leaned closer. “Do you not understand? You made me hard in front of all those people, Jud. I’ll probably have to take care of myself when we’re done. I almost did it in the bathroom, the little one by the entrance, just so I could tell you. And, well, because it was uncomfortable. Tell you the truth, I could do it now, right now, and I don’t think it would take me very long.”
Jud tried to breathe evenly as the Monsignor, evoking that late night in the rectory, reached into his trousers again, giving himself a lazy stroke, and then another. Jud watched his eyes flutter back in his head, and there was a grunt in his voice as he said, “This is probably a sin, too, isn’t it, Father?”
The shower goes cold all at once and Jud hops around in surprise as he is thrust back into the present, shutting off the water as quickly as he can manage. “Shit,” he whispers, fumbling for a towel. “Shit, fuck, shit.” He’s shaking in a way that he can attribute to the sudden cold, but knows is from the memory and the lie that sustains it: Jud had felt the Monsignor pressing into his back, every inch of him, and the erection he feared never came. Jud would have known. Wicks was crafting a story to keep Jud ashamed and frightened, reveling in details that were at least partially false, and forcing Jud to listen week after week. How much was a lie? Had it been from the start? Did Wicks hate him so badly from the moment they met that he wanted to neuter Jud’s confidence and kill his ministry? Or is he being paranoid now? Or—
Jud hears himself sob before he can process his own building tears, sitting heavily on the toilet seat and pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. He is cold and wet and his shoulders are heaving as he tries to cry silently, fearing Martha, fearing Wicks, furious with them both. His skin is still blotchy and red from the hot water and his vigorous scrubbing, a physical sting to match his reaction to having been finally mentally overwhelmed. Jud hasn’t felt so off-kilter since his life was in danger. Since he was a danger to others.
“Lord,” he whispers through a ragged breath, “Lord, please. I need Your strength.” Jud is not ashamed to cry; he understands that he needs an outlet for the roiling tide of his emotions. He trusts Christ to catch him, but Jud knows he’s falling because he’s been pushed. The rectory, infected by Wicks’ presence, cannot comfort him. Jud, sitting on the closed toilet with his towel around his waist, crying into his hands, is exactly what Wicks wants.
Jud spends the night in the church. His back hurts in the morning, and his blanket is too thin, but he wakes renewed. He keeps his faith close enough to warm him.
The priest is a liar. Blanc can tell within minutes. Innocent, yes, but a liar. He’s able to glean one truth from Jud’s writing — the more important truth, if he’s prioritizing the case — but Jud’s reaction to the body belied a different struggle. Jud doesn’t bring it up. Jud won’t bring it up, Blanc realizes, not even when he is given pen, paper, and privacy, and Blanc’s promise to help. Jud won’t even admit that he hated Wicks in so many words.
But Blanc can see how Jud bleeds in the aftermath of the Monsignor’s death, how he does only the barest to staunch the flow, how numbly he has accepted that the fight is lost. Blanc is careful to distinguish the case from the intangible war between Jud and Wicks, one that he does not fully understand but abhors by its shape. Jud will not speak about it, but Blanc tries: he mentions the homophobia, the sins of the church, the abuses of man. Each critique is delivered with the dispassion of a nonbeliever, so Blanc can’t permeate the membrane between them. Jud sees Blanc’s pointed insights as a theological debate, or, equally likely, refuses to engage the personal side he knows is there.
After Samson, but before Martha, in a moment of relative reprieve, Blanc makes headway on accident. He pats an unsuspecting Jud on the shoulder, who jumps, whirls, and says, “Jesus fucking Christ,” his eyes wide.
“Are you alright?” asks Blanc, who knows he is not. Sometimes, as Jud is taking great pains to prove, he must let others catch up to his observations. “You look rather pale.”
Jud catches his breath and flexes his hands. New bruises stain his knuckles, a hangover from his altercation with Samson’s punching bag. For a moment, Blanc thinks he might cry again. Slowly, Jud processes Blanc’s face before him, and his expression softens before it could crystallize into anger. “I’m just jumpy,” he says, and shrugs, rolling the vulnerability off his shoulders.
A rush of disappointment floods Blanc. Jud is better than this fucking place. “So you’ll keep protecting him?” he demands. “After this?”
Jud shrugs again, clasping his hands around his elbows and hunching his shoulders inwards. His dark eyes gleam as he looks towards Blanc — his fear morphing into anger; his anger to violence; his violence to salvation, forgiveness, love. Blanc knew that Jud did not kill Wicks from the moment they met, because Jud would have done it the way he does everything else: honestly, in plain sight, edited only slightly for the people he hopes to serve. In this understanding Blanc knows why Jud won’t talk about it, even if he can never agree.
“Wicks is God’s problem now,” says Jud, serene. “My concerns are with this church.”
“You can’t mean that.”
Looking back at Jud, though, Blanc realizes that not only can he mean it, but he does. He is an untouchable man of the cloth, charged now with leading the flock that turned on him and clawing back their shattered respect. It is not just Wicks’ targeted cruelty that must fade, but all the messy parts of the man Blanc met on his knees. As soon as Blanc entered the church, Jud moved to serve him, even with tears still drying on his face. It isn’t fair: Jud’s suffering has become a moral from which others can benefit. In effect, he can never be hurt again.
Jud smiles, and Blanc hears the unsaid parts a moment too late: I never said I forgave him. “Maybe,” he says instead. “Sometimes we need the storytelling.”