“Samuel. Let’s try and get some sleep. We’ve got another big day tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She rolled over and within minutes, she was asleep. She’d said what she wanted to say, so she could conk out with a clear mind.
But I was wide-awake and anxious, lonelier than I’d ever been—lonely in advance over the life my mother had mapped out for me. A priest? Who in his right mind could possibly want to be a priest? Beyond that, something else was troubling me—the fact that my own mother didn’t seem bothered by the idea that she would never have grandchildren. Wasn’t the desire for grandchildren a normal thing? Weren’t old people always taking photographs of their grandchildren out of their wallets and boring anyone who’d listen with tales of these wondrous youngsters?
Well, that was fine for the rest of the world, but as far as my mother was concerned the Sullivan line would end with me, and that was all right.
I looked over at the stranger in the next bed, her shoulders heaving with each breath she took. I was sad. I was lost. A weird feeling was gnawing at me, and it took a minute to figure out what it was. At last, it came to me. It was a brand-new feeling, one I’d never experienced before.
I missed my dad.
It felt as if I’d been asleep for five minutes when my mother shook me awake. She was showered and dressed, and cheerfully announced that the buffet breakfast was being served in fifteen minutes—just enough time for me to shower and dress.
We stuffed ourselves again, and this time there were pans of scrambled eggs, pancakes, link sausages and bacon, as well as tubs of oatmeal and Cream of Wheat and small boxes of every cereal they made at Kellogg’s. My mother must have eaten a dozen pancakes, drowned in butter and maple syrup, while I couldn’t stop myself from gorging on the link sausages. If we’d stayed at the motor lodge for another night or two I’m sure that somebody from our group would have suffered a gluttony-induced coronary.
We were all packed up and ready to leave, our stuff stowed safely in the bus. The plan was to make one more visit to the Bleeding Jesus, return to the bus, and head home. We paired up as we had the day before, my mother leading the blind man while I pushed Mrs. Paulsen.
I was woozy from the food, from a lack of sleep, and from the almost indescribable weirdness of it all. I needed the wheelchair almost as much as Mrs. Paulsen did that morning. I actually clutched its handles to maintain my balance.
My mother, on the other hand, looked as if she’d just swum the length and breadth of Lourdes, and emerged from the waters brimming with hope and happiness for the sweet, blue-skied future. She probably could have given Mr. Campbell a piggyback ride to the church, stoked as she was by her faith and the miracle we were about to witness yet again.
The line leading inside was longer and slower this time. The cool weather had turned—the sun was hot, making me feel even dizzier. I didn’t realize I was leaning my full weight on the wheelchair handles until Mrs. Paulsen suddenly tipped back and did a “wheelie,” her dangling legs kicking the ass of the wheelchair pusher ahead of us. She shrieked, and I quickly set her down on all four wheels and apologized to the tall, skinny guy we’d bumped. He was cool about it, and then I apologized to Mrs. Paulsen.
“Oh, don’t worry, Samuel, I’m fine.”
A tight claw on my elbow—my mother had me in her grip from the adjacent line for the ambulatory, her total mortification burning like hell’s fire in her eyes.
“Was that supposed to be funny, young man?” she hissed.
“Mom! It was an accident!”
“Kindly be careful, and remember where we are.”
“I’m sorry….”
But I wasn’t sorry. I was sick of this whole thing, and dying to be out of there. The last thing I needed was another look at the Bleeding Jesus. I also knew that everybody back at school on Monday would be telling me about what a great dance I’d missed, and how I should have been there, and that was going to kill me.
I was tempted to turn the wheelchair around, push Mrs. Paulsen back down the ramp, and then let her go rolling down the long, steep sidewalk. Talk about a Holy Roller! And how many of those waiting out there would have rushed to save her, at the price of their precious places in line?
We inched our way into the church. The heat was worse indoors, as the place was not air-conditioned. Rotating fans pushed the steaming air around without cooling anyone. I was sweating right through my shirt, but my mother seemed remarkably cool. Mr. Campbell took off his glasses to wipe sweat from his face, and I saw with horror that he was not only blind—he had no eyes at all. His eyelids covered the sockets like sunken drumskins, and I wondered how such a thing could have happened to him. Had he been born that way, or had some disaster robbed him of his eyes? Thankfully, he put his glasses back on to hide the horrible sight….
A sudden bumping sensation—while staring at the blind man’s empty eyes, I’d once again rammed Mrs. Paulsen into the wheelchair pusher in front of us. This time, he was not quite so understanding. He turned to me with his hands on his hips, rolled his eyes, and sighed in exasperation.
“Do you mind?” he said, clearly a queen. “I mean, it’s getting a bit boring.”
I apologized all over again, to the man and to Mrs. Paulsen. I dared to look at my mother, who was shaking her head.
“I suppose that was another accident, Samuel?”
My cheeks burned with shame, and suddenly, in the midst of all this, we were upon the Bleeding Jesus and the smiling priest with the butterfat face. It was the same scenario as the day before, but something was different. Everything seemed to have slowed down. It was as if the line had stopped moving, and we had all the time in the world to drink in this miracle, unlike the fleeting passage of the day before. So much had happened to me since we were here last—two buffet meals, and two remarkable revelations. My mother wished she’d become a nun and not a wife or a mother, and she wanted me to be a priest, just like the man in black who stood there with his hands behind his back, guarding the Bleeding Jesus.
I was more interested in that man than I was in the miracle. He seemed peaceful and smug, and for no good reason I wanted to do something to jolt him, snap him out of his superior state of calmness.
A red velvet rope hung in a protective loop before the crucifix, and it might as well have been a barbed-wire fence. Nobody went near it. It was strictly a symbolic thing to keep the believers at a respectable distance.
It made sense. It was only natural that everybody would want to touch the Bleeding Jesus, to see if its flesh was warm, to let it heal the maladies within their bodies, known or unknown. But if you let one person touch it, you’d have to let everybody touch it, and then what would happen? The red velvet rope was there for our own good.
And the hell with that.
I released the handles of Mrs. Paulsen’s wheelchair, walked around it, and stepped right over the lowest part of the rope’s loop. A collective gasp rose from the masses, as if I’d just stepped onto the surface of the moon.
“Son,” the priest said, calmly but firmly, “get back in line.”
My mother wasn’t nearly so calm. “Samuel!” she hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I igorned the both of them, took a step toward the Bleeding Jesus. My mother called my name again, and it sounded as if she was a mile away. Again, I ignored her.
I was staring at something that seemed kind of odd. Up close like this, I could see that there was a horizontal line in the wood above the Christ figure’s bleeding foot, right across the shin, maybe six inches above the nail. Then I saw vertical cuts running down from the edges of the horizontal cut, which met at another horizontal cut just above the ankle. Together the lines formed a rectangle in the wood, a rectangle that could not be seen from the other side of the velvet rope. It was as if somebody had made cuts with a thin-bladed saw, then sanded them smooth to hide them. Why?
A hand gripped my shoulder—the priest with the butterfat face had a grip like iron. �
�Son, please, get back in line.”
It wasn’t really in me to disobey a priest, but I had to. I shrugged my way out of his grip, knelt before the Bleeding Jesus, grabbed at his shinbone, and pulled.
A chunk of wood came off in my hand, clean-cut on four sides. My mother screamed. I still had the chunk of wood in my hand as the priest grabbed me from behind and pulled me away, but of course it was too late.
Within moments, the entire church was aware of what had happened, the news traveling like a lightning bolt from the crucifix all the way back to the last person in line. They rushed the altar like a human tidal wave.
“Fake!” somebody screamed. “It’s a fake!”
People were pushing each other, punching each other. I wrestled my way out of the priest’s grasp, still holding the block of wood. Suddenly it was knocked from my hand by my mother, who then grabbed my wrist and pulled me away from the mob, past the altar, and toward a red-glowing exit sign beyond it. Her other hand gripped the elbow of the blind man, who kept asking as he stumbled along: “What happened? What happened?”
We dragged behind her as she found the exit door, and the three of us plunged outside. It was an emergency exit door, so when it slammed behind us there was no handle on the other side, no way to get back inside. We stood there in an alley full of crates and garbage cans.
“What happened?” the blind man asked again, his breathing jagged with terror. My mother wouldn’t answer him. She stroked his back, the way you’d calm a dog frightened by thunder. I was jolted by a sudden concern—Mrs. Paulsen! What was going to happen to her inside the church, with nobody to guide her?
“Mom,” I said, “I’d better go get Mrs. Paulsen!”
It was as if she hadn’t heard me. She continued stroking Mr. Campbell’s back, staring accusingly at me all the while.
“Mom?”
“Ohhh, Samuel.” She shook her head, sighed, rolled her eyes to the heavens. “Samuel, what have you done?”
I couldn’t answer her. I’d exposed a fraud, but I’d let her down. She’d always told me to tell the truth, but apparently revealing the truth was an entirely different thing.
I couldn’t believe it. She was angry with me, disappointed in me! We stood staring at each other in that alley, her hand still mindlessly stroking the blind man’s back. “What happened?” he continued asking, his patience as limitless as the heavens above. “Please tell me, Mary, what happened?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The perpetrator of the Great Hoax of the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton turned out to be the butterfat-faced priest himself, Father Joseph Bielinski. Like Jesus Christ himself, the priest had been a carpenter’s apprentice when he was a boy. And like countless Catholics, he was dismayed by the loss of faith and the drop in attendance at church.
So he’d taken it upon himself to create a miracle in his own sleepy parish. Late one night, he carefully cut that chunk of wood from the Christ figure’s shin. He hollowed out the area and installed a rubber pouch filled with a red fluid that turned out to be Karo sugar syrup mixed with a red dye. He drilled a tunnel through the wood from the base of the shin cut to the nail holes, and through this tunnel he snaked the narrowest of plastic tubes, which was connected to the blood pouch like an intravenous drip. The tube slowly fed the fake blood through the nail holes, a tiny drop every ten seconds or so. Father Bielinski glued the shell of the shin back in place to hide the whole apparatus, sandpapered the edges, and that was that—until I ripped the thing off and exposed the fraud to the world.
Now I knew why the Christ figure couldn’t bleed from the holes in his hands. The crucifix was in a Y shape, with the hands higher than the forearms. Father Bielinski may have been in the miracle business, but he needed the force of gravity to make it happen. Even a miracle worker can’t make fake blood flow upstream.
Our bus left for New York three hours late. Somebody else had wheeled Mrs. Paulsen to the bus—I was glad to see she wasn’t hurt.
But she wouldn’t look at me. Nobody would look at me. I had fucked up the whole trip. I had single-handedly shot down a miracle, dashed their hopes for a richer, more meaningful life. We drove away from that church like people fleeing from a burning city, the bus driver threading his way among police cars and ambulances.
People were being bandaged by Red Cross workers, right out there on the sidewalk. I saw head injuries, and white bandages stained with blood—real blood. I saw an old lady being carried on a stretcher, an oxygen mask clamped to her whiskery face.
It was my fault she’d gotten hurt. It was my fault that everybody was hurt, or unhappy. If I’d left the Bleeding Jesus alone, none of this would have happened. It was my first real sip from the bottomless cup of guilt I would continue to drink from for the rest of my life.
“I’ll have to soak those overnight.”
The voice of my mother, speaking to me as she stared out the bus window—last row, last seat. The blind man was asleep beside her, his head on her shoulder. I sat across the aisle from them.
“Soak what, Mom?”
“Your pants. Your good pants. To get that…redness out of them.”
I looked at my pants. There was a slash of fake blood on my thigh. I dared to touch it, and it felt crusty from the dried sugar syrup.
“Samuel. Don’t touch it.”
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“What a mess,” she said, shaking her head. “Oh God, what a mess!”
“It’ll wash out.”
She turned to me at last, her eyes twin balls of brown fire. “I don’t mean that. I mean the terrible thing you’ve done.”
I tried to swallow. It felt as if a tennis ball was lodged in my throat.
“Me!”
“Why did you step over that rope? Who said you could touch the crucifix? Didn’t you hear the priest tell you to stay away from it?”
All I could do was breathe. People on the bus were looking at my mother, admiring her as they loathed me. She closed her eyes, sighed as deeply as any human being has ever sighed.
“Your father,” she moaned. “Your father is going to have such a field day with this.”
And then she remained as silent as a stone for the remainder of the longest bus ride of my life.
But she was dead wrong about my father.
He was there to pick us up at the church parking lot. Of course by the time we got there the whole neighborhood knew what had happened, via word of mouth—no CNN in those days. We’d gotten out of Scranton fast enough to keep me from being identified as the boy who’d revealed the disgrace of the Bleeding Jesus, but everybody in Flushing knew I was the one, and that included my father.
He stood outside the bus with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, looking as if he’d been waiting there since we’d departed. We were the last ones to get off the bus.
“You guys okay?” he asked.
He was being really decent, this guy my mother was sorry had been the one to sire me. He should only know how she felt about him! It was tempting to shout this terrible truth to him, but I didn’t. I just stood there while he rubbed my hair with one hand and took his wife in a gentle embrace with his other arm.
My mother wept. I’d never seen her cry before, never even imagined she could do such a thing in his presence. He tucked her face against his chest to deprive the rubbernecking crowd of their pleasures.
“Get the bag, kid.”
Our bag was the last one in the luggage compartment, all the way in the back. The driver was waiting for me to get it, a dirty look on his face. He knew I was the reason he was three hours behind schedule. I had to climb inside the compartment to get our bag, and was gripped by a fleeting but terrifying thought—the bus driver was going to slam down the luggage lid with me still inside, and drive off to some remote area to kill me! And what’s more, he’d be doing it with my mother’s permission, as well as her blessing!
But no. I scurried in and out with the bag. The bus took off with a great wheeze of diesel fumes, and then w
e Sulllivans got into our car and went home.
My father drove slowly. He kept checking on my mother, as if she were made of porcelain and might shatter if he hit the brake too hard. “Mary.”
“Not now, Danny.”
He looked at me on the backseat and winked, a wink that promised everything would be all right. But he was promising something he couldn’t deliver. “Look, Mary, I just want to say—”
“I have never, ever felt so terrible in all my life.”
“Come on.”
“I mean it.”
“What about when your parents died?”
“This is worse. Much worse.”
“Oh, come on, Mary!”
My father didn’t know what else to say, and I didn’t know what to feel. I tried to imagine my parents dying, and couldn’t think of anything worse than that. Yet here was my mother, pretty much saying that she’d rather have a false Bleeding Jesus dripping away in Scranton, Pennsylvania, than the two people who gave her the gift of life.
My dad tried to hold his tongue, but he just couldn’t. “I tried to warn you,” he said gently. “This whole thing had a bad stink, right from the start.”
“Danny. You’ve got to talk to him.”
“Who?”
She jerked her thumb over her shoulder without looking at me.
“Oh, you mean our son! Talk to him about what?”
“The terrible thing he did.”
My father laugh-snorted. He could be very dangerous when he made that sound. He was like a ram backing up and lowering his horns for battle when he made that sound. “Hang on now, woman. You’re upset with Sammy for revealing a fraud!”
“Don’t call it a fraud! If Samuel hadn’t done what he’d done, everything would have been all right!”
She was practically screaming, and when she stopped we just sat there in the jarring silence. My father was breathing hard. He was not bracing himself for battle. For the first time ever, he seemed to be afraid of his wife. Until now, she’d been an amusing religious eccentric. Now, suddenly, she’d pole-vaulted over the line, into the sand pit of total insanity.
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