Read Online Sunday Billy Sunday by Mark Wheaton - Free Book Online Page A

hypovolemic shock due to dehydration. This kind of death took days and during that time, that those crucified, a word that came from the same Latin root that brought “excruciating” to the language, also endured the public humiliation of not only being nude while on the cross, but also having to urinate and defecate in front of others as they slowly died.
    It seemed like an utterly humiliating way to go.
    Father Billy thought about this when he’d gone to the church council to explain why he felt the giant wooden crucifix he’d only bought a couple of years before now had to be lowered, checked and later re-hung, he ran into some resistance as most believed there was nothing wrong with it. Only after he explained that he was afraid that he’d pulled it loose from its moorings when he’d grabbed for it during his fall and that it might one day collapse down on a parishioner did they decide to go along with his plan.
    After professional movers had lowered it from the wall and loaded it into the truck of a parishioner named Jay Berger, Father Billy had it driven to his house where he had offered to clean it thoroughly before replacing it on the wall behind the altar. With the help of a couple of neighbors, Father Billy set it up on a pair of saw horses in his garage, thanked everyone profusely, then closed the garage door and covered the windows.
    That first night, he prayed to it, lying on the cold concrete floor underneath the saw horses, thinking it might make all the difference as in the presence of the crucifix was where it had all begun. But after there was, again, no answer, he merely meditated with it for hours, laying his hands on different points on the sculpture in hopes of once again feeling the pulse that he reluctantly had to admit he didn’t believe he’d feel again. At this point, however, already into the second week of June, Father Billy’s plan for the summer camp was well under way.
    He hadn’t known exactly what he was doing when he started taking the sculpture apart, but once he decided that he didn’t care if the wood ended up fractured beyond repair, it was a lot easier. After awhile, he had but one goal anyway: extract the three, foot-long iron spikes that represented the nails used by the Romans to affix Christ to the cross.
    It had taken all night, but he finally managed to tear them out of the wooden limbs they’d been ‘driven’ into and weighed each in his hand. One of them had been bent at the tip when the sculptor had pounded it into the hole he’d chiseled out, but Father Billy figured he could straighten it out if it proved an impediment.
    But staring at the three nails now three weeks later in camp, now removed from the heavy black leather satchel he had brought them and a handful of other, equally sinister items to Camp Easley in, he suddenly realized that he knew where the sculptor had gotten them from. Though prefabricated railroad spikes had become fairly standard in the twentieth century, he had seen photographs of the crude, poorly-patterned spikes that were used prior to this. Each one would have to be smithed individually, meaning tiny differences and imperfections in the iron would reveal that no two were identical. That was definitely the case here.
    Each one was about thirteen inches long, weighed seven or eight pounds and could be easily hefted in one hand. Unlike, say, a kitchen knife that had a handle or a dagger that had a hilt, these nails required the holder to grip them just under the nail head, which could be awkward once the tip struck anything more solid than sour cream. Father Billy had experimented with downward thrusting movements involving the nails for days, repeatedly sliding his hand down the four-sided spike, which led to more than a few cuts and even splinters from residual pieces of wood still embedded on the nail’s flaws.
    “It’ll take more than that to stop me,” Father Billy reflexively joked skyward as he applied band-aids to his