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 b.u.t.terfat 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 n.o.body 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 revealing the truth was an entirely different thing. 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 b.u.t.terfat-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 sh.e.l.l 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. n.o.body n.o.body would look at me. I had f.u.c.ked 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. would look at me. I had f.u.c.ked 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. 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 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. 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 good pants. To get that... pants. To get that...redness out of them." 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 G.o.d, what a mess!"
"It"ll wash out."
She turned to me at last, her eyes twin b.a.l.l.s 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 we 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 Much worse." 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!" 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.
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. He looked at the stranger beside him, then at the child behind him. This time, he did not wink at me. He shook his head from side to side, as if in mourning for the loss of something precious, a loss he should have seen coming, a loss he should have done something to prevent. But what? What could he have done?
"You talk to him, Danny," my mother said. "Explain to him that people can"t just go around touching things that aren"t theirs."
"Mary. Calm down."
"I"m tired, Danny. I"m very tired."
"I know you are. Let"s just get home."
"Yes, home. I want to go home."
"Shhhh, shhhh...we"re almost there."
My mother went straight to bed without even saying good night to us. My father and I were rarely the only two people awake in the house, and neither of us was comfortable with it. He went to the refrigerator and came to the kitchen table with a bottle of Rheingold beer and a gla.s.s. This puzzled me. My father never drank from a gla.s.s. He sat down, and told me to sit with him.
"How old are you now, Sammy?"
He was serious. He didn"t know. Every year or so he asked me how old I was, like a census taker.
"Twelve."
"Well, h.e.l.l, I"d say the time has come for your first cold frosty one."
He poured beer into the gla.s.s and pushed it to my side of the table. I couldn"t believe it. Every time he popped open a beer for himself, my mother sighed and her nostrils went wide. And he wasn"t breaking the law, the way I was about to! What would she say if she saw me with a beer in my hand?
I kept my hands on my lap. The room reeked of hops, corn, and barley. It was so quiet I could hear the bubbles popping in the head of foam.
"Dad. I"d better not."
"Come on. I was ten when I had my first taste."
"Mom wouldn"t like it."
"Sammy, your mother is already as upset as she can be. Nothing you or I do can make it worse. Now lift that gla.s.s."
I obeyed him. He clinked his bottle against my gla.s.s.
"Drink."
I filled my mouth with beer. I didn"t like the taste. It seemed grimy and bitter, but I swallowed it, then gulped down the rest and slammed the gla.s.s down as I thought a hardened drinker would. My father chuckled, took a swallow from his bottle.
"What do you think, kid?"
"Not very good."
"You have to get used to it."
"If you have to get used to it, what"s the point?"
He laughed out loud. "Good question." He leaned back in his chair, took another swallow of beer. "You didn"t do anything wrong, kid."
"Mom thinks I did."