C HAPTER N INETEEN

My mother first read about it in the Tablet, the weekly newspaper for the Archdiocese of New York. It seems that a janitor in a small church in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was mopping up one morning when he happened to notice red stains on the floor beneath the life-sized crucifix at the altar. Looking up, he saw that the wooden Christ figure was bleeding from the nail holes in his feet.

A miracle. And just like that, Scranton turned into Jerusalem as Catholics from all over the country flocked to view this miracle.

Of course my mother wanted to go and see it. My father thought she was out of her mind. We took a two-week vacation to a Pocono Mountains resort each summer during the last week of July and the first week of August, and that was the extent of the Sullivan family travels. An old navy buddy of my father’s owned the place, so we got a discount on our cabin. My father fished, my mother struggled to cook our meals on a bottle-gas stove, and I formed fleeting friendships with the children of other vacationers around a large swimming pool with a cracked cement floor. Then we returned home to Flushing for the remaining fifty weeks of the year, and no other family trips were ever even discussed until the Bleeding Jesus hit the headlines.

Our church was organizing an overnight trip to Scranton—a chartered bus there and back, plus one evening at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, buffet dinner and buffet breakfast included. My mother would leave on Friday morning and be back late Saturday afternoon. The cost was fifty dollars. She had the money, her own money.

Now it was Thursday night. We were at the kitchen table, eating macaroni and cheese, and my mother wanted my father’s approval. He was dead set against it.

“Mary. This is ridiculous.”

“Not to me it isn’t, Danny.”

“Why do you want to see this thing?”

“It’s a miracle in our lifetime.”

“It’s a scam that’s going to be found out, sooner or later.”

“Oh, Danny. You have no faith at all, do you?”

“Not in things that don’t deserve it. Somebody’s workin’ an angle here, I can just feel it.”

My mother shook her head. “It’s so sad. If you can’t explain it, it has to be a fake.”

“And if you believe it, it has to be real.”

“You would have laughed at Lourdes, Danny.”

“I’m laughing at Lourdes right now, Mary. Everybody who goes there in a wheelchair comes home in the wheelchair. Who gets healed?”

“There’s such a thing as spiritual healing, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s where the priest says, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ just as the collection plate comes around.”

By this time my mother had her hands over her ears. When he was through talking she lowered her hands and said, “I’m going to Scranton and I’m taking Samuel.”

“You’re what?!”

“You heard me.”

I was shocked. This was the first time I’d heard that I was going to Scranton.

“Your supper for tomorrow night is in the freezer,” my mother continued. “Preheat the oven—”

“Whoa, whoa! Why are you dragging the kid along?”

“I think he should see this.”

“Mary. Don’t turn your obsessions into his obsessions.”

“Danny—”

“Sammy,” my father said, leaning into my face, “do you want to go on this trip?”

I was twelve years old, and I was in a terrible jam. The truth of it was that I wanted to attend a school dance that was being held on Friday night. I’d never been to a dance before, and all the kids in my class were going to be there, including Margaret Thompson, and I’d been lying awake nights thinking of ways to ask her to dance.

She was the prettiest girl in my class, maybe the prettiest girl in the world. She had green-blue eyes and perky ears and blond hair that she wore in pigtails, and a giggly laugh that just about made me swoon. All the guys liked her, and I knew they’d all be asking her to dance.

She barely knew I was alive. Once she asked if she could borrow my eraser, and when she returned it to me her fingers brushed the palm of my hand, and I damn near fainted.

Would I pass out if I tried to dance with her? I didn’t know, but I was willing to try. At least I thought I was.

Then came the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton, and suddenly my mother wanted me to go with her. The only good thing about that was that I’d miss school on Friday. The bad thing was that I’d miss the dance. The worst thing was that no matter what I wanted to do, I didn’t want to disappoint either of my parents, and that was an impossibility.

My father had me locked in his gaze. “Don’t look at your mother. Look at me and tell me—do you want to go on this trip?”

I swallowed, put my fork down. “Well, there’s this dance at the school tomorrow night.”

“There you go!” my father said. “He wants to go to the dance, like any normal kid!”

My mother looked at me. “Samuel. There’ll be plenty of dances.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” my father roared.

“And I really don’t want to travel alone, Samuel.”

“Alone!” My father snorted. “You’ll be with your own kind! A bus full of Holy Rollers, going to see a phony miracle!”

She ignored the insult, didn’t even look at him. She was smiling at me in a way that was both motherly and seductive. “It’s up to you, Samuel,” she said softly. “You choose.”

My head was pounding. I wanted to break a window, run outside, scream at the sky. My father was glowering at me. My mother looked at me as if she’d known what my answer would be all along.

And she did, of course. I couldn’t let her go alone. I couldn’t disappoint my mother. I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do, any more than I could flap my arms and fly to the moon. “I’ll go with you, Mom.”

My father threw down his fork and got up from the table. “A hundred bucks shot, instead of fifty,” he all but snarled on his way out the door.

“It’s not your money, Danny!” my mother called after him, but I doubt he heard her. She was stroking my cheek the way she did whenever I was a very good boy.

I was the only child on the whole damn bus. The passengers were mostly women and almost entirely elderly. Canes and crutches filled the overhead racks, and the reek of Ben-Gay arthritis cream was enough to make my eyes tear. Every seat on the bus was full, with the exception of two in the back, which were being used to transport folded-up wheelchairs.

One old man named Harry Campbell wore jet-black sunglasses. He was stone blind. Why was he making the trip if he couldn’t even see the bleeding crucifix?

“He has faith,” my mother explained. “He has the faith to believe in a miracle, even if he can’t see it.”

He has fifty bucks, my father would have said. He has fifty bucks for the bus and the motel.

I had to hide a smile, thinking of what my father would have had to say if he were along for the trip. It would have been a lot less spiritual but a lot more amusing.

Maybe that’s why my mother wanted me to come with her so badly. I would be a teenager in less than a year—the sap was rising, the hormones were brewing. Maybe she sensed that her grip on my soul was loosening, and that a trip like this would strengthen it. Maybe, maybe, maybe….

Our motel room had two narrow beds, a bureau, a window overlooking the highway we’d just come off, and a bathroom with a shower, but no tub. There were two glasses on the bathroom sink, wrapped in plastic pouches. There was a paper band around the toilet seat that was supposed to assure us that the thing was clean, that our asses would be the first to make contact with it since the gray-haired Irish maid we’d passed in the hallway had given it a swipe with a disinfectant-soaked cloth.

My mother put our small overnight bag on the bureau, and then we stretched out on the beds for a little rest. Everybody from the bus would be gathering downstairs in about half an hour, and then we would all walk to the church to bear witness to the miracle.

We lay there staring at the ceiling, a checkerboard of perforated white tiles. I wondered what we’d be having for dinner. I was thinking ahead, past the miracle. I had never been to a buffet. The thought of it was a lot more exciting to me than a bleeding Jesus.

“Samuel?”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“I’m glad you’re here with me. Are you glad you’re here?”

“I guess.”

“We’re very lucky to be seeing what we’re about to see. People all over the world wish they could be here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Samuel?”

“What?”

“I want to apologize for your father.”

I didn’t like what she’d just said, or the way she said it. “Apologize for what?”

“What I mean is…I’m sorry he’s not a better man.”

I sat up on the bed, staring straight into her shining eyes. This was the sort of thing she never could have said in our house, or in that rickety cabin in the Poconos. She was telling me she was sorry she’d allowed Danny Sullivan to be the father of her child, instead of someone worthier of the role than the wisecracking, beer-swilling lout she’d permitted to impregnate her.

It was a hell of a thing to hear, especially in a boxy little room like the one we were in, so close to the Pennsylvania Turnpike that the whine of traffic was as constant as a heartbeat.

What could I say? I felt sorry for her and furious at her in equal measures. If she had that kind of scorn for my father, how could she feel about me, the fruit of his loins?

No—no, I was wrong about that. She was looking at me with what appeared to be unqualified love. She obviously didn’t think of me as a part of him—and after this special road trip together, I’d be hers more than ever.

“Samuel. Have I upset you?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’m not criticizing your father. He’s a certain type of person, that’s all. He’s not much like me…or you.”

I wasn’t going to respond to that. I was starting to think about the dance I’d be missing, and the way my father wanted me to go to the dance. It was enough that my mother had gotten her way and hauled me along on this crazy trip. It wasn’t necessary for her to tear him down. So I remained silent, staring at the perforated ceiling, wondering why there were holes in those tiles and why my parents couldn’t get along.

My mother rose from her bed. “We should go downstairs and join the others. Do you have to go to the bathroom first?”

I did have to go. I snapped the paper band off the toilet seat, took a piss, washed my hands and face with a tiny bar of motel soap, and then I was as ready as I’d ever be to see the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

It was a three-block walk to the church, but it took us the better part of an hour, at a crutches and wheelchair pace. Inevitably my mother wound up leading the blind man with the jet-black glasses, his bony hand clutching the crook of her elbow, and though a local church guide had been sent to lead us it was obvious to all that my mother was the one in charge.

She appointed (or should I say anointed?) me to push one of the wheelchairs, containing what was left of a once-vigorous woman named Helen Paulsen, who claimed to have been a member of the U.S. Olympic swim team during the 1920s. She blamed her decrepit hips on all those years of kicking her way up and down swimming pools, but she had no regrets—God was good, she said, God will look out for me.

God, and the pension left to her by her late husband, who’d been a member of the Steamfitters Union before lung cancer claimed him.

“Oh, Samuel,” she said, looking straight ahead as I pushed her along the sidewalks of Scranton, “it is so awfully good of you to push me this way.”

For some reason Mrs. Paulsen, a lifelong resident of Flushing, had acquired a half-assed British accent.

“I don’t mind, Mrs. Paulsen.”

“And aren’t you a lucky lad to be taking part in this thrilling expedition?”

You’d have thought we were hacking our way through a jungle on our way to find Dr. Livingstone. She turned her head to look at me. “I said, aren’t we lucky—”

“Yes, ma’am, we sure are lucky to be here.”

“Why, you’re the only child on the trip! Are you aware of that?”

I was aware of it.

The church was a small gray building with a plain metal cross out in front, over the front doors. Buses with logos from all over the Northeast were parked along the curb, and a steady stream of people was flowing in.

They were prepared for it, too—a makeshift ramp had been built to cover half the stone stairway leading into the church. I joined a line of wheelchairs at the ramp and slowly pushed Mrs. Paulsen into the cool, incense-smelling church. To my right, my mother was leading the blind man up the steps. We inched along at an identical pace, side by side. My mother winked at me, her partner in this mission of mercy.

It was now five o’clock in the afternoon. All the kids from my class were at home, getting ready for the dance. I was pushing a cripple, on my way to watch a statue bleed.

We shuffled toward the altar, where flashbulbs popped. Mrs. Paulsen rocked from side to side, unable to contain her excitement. A pale priest with a butterfat face but a slim body stood in front of the altar, smiling benignly at the approaching hordes. He wore rimless glasses that seemed to be buried in the flesh around his eyes. I could smell the Vitalis that held his thinning, slicked-back hair in place.

“Keep moving, please,” he said softly, to nobody in particular. At last we were in front of the altar, where our shuffling steps came to a halt before the strangest sight I had ever seen.

A huge cross stood behind the altar, bearing a life-sized wooden Christ figure that was held to the cross at the hands and feet by nails that seemed to be the size of railroad spikes. The figure must have been made from some kind of fruit wood, a dark brown color that had never tasted paint or varnish. The only real color was the bright red liquid that dripped from the holes in Christ’s feet into a golden bowl that had been placed on the floor below.

I didn’t know what to feel. I suppose I should have felt afraid—I mean, how creepy was this?—but before I could feel anything, here came the voice of my mother, all but choked with joy, describing the sight to the blind man who clutched her elbow:

“He’s bleeding from his feet…there, a drop just fell…Oh, Mr. Campbell, it’s an amazing sight…the blood falls into a little golden bowl on the—there! Another drop just fell from his feet! It’s very bright red…absolutely beautiful…”

Mrs. Paulsen turned around to look at me, her eyes brimming with tears. For a moment I thought she might spring from her wheelchair and run up to embrace the dripping Christ figure, but instead she just smiled and said, “Thank you, thank you, Samuel, for bringing me.”

“You’re welcome,” I replied automatically, and a moment later we were moving to make way for the crowds behind us. There was no time to get a really good look at the crucifix, so it all seemed like a dream. We moved past the altar and hooked around toward the back of the church—wheelchairs to the left, ambulatory people to the right. Silent nuns stood at the corners of the church with collection baskets, into which everybody dropped paper money and coins. My mother had given me a dollar to contribute, which I dutifully donated.

We would all meet out front to begin the walk back to the motel, and our already-paid-for buffet dinner. My mother had the dreamiest look I’d ever seen on her face. She was literally happier than I’d ever seen her—or had I ever seen her happy at all before?

I was troubled, though. I had questions I wanted to ask, questions I didn’t want Mrs. Paulsen or the blind man to hear. I would have to wait until later.

Dusk was coming, and with it a chill in the air. I helped Mrs. Paulsen put a shawl across her shoulders before beginning the push back to the motel. My mother was a big woman, but suddenly she seemed as light and graceful as a ballet dancer. Her feet seemed to barely touch the ground, and I half expected her to take wing and fly back to the motel, with Mr. Campbell hanging on like a pilot fish.

“Oh, Samuel,” she said, bending to kiss my cheek, “wasn’t that just amazing? Aren’t you just…”

She paused, struggled to find the right word, found it at last “…tingling?”

“Yes, Mom,” I lied. “It was amazing.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.” At least I was telling the truth about that.

“So am I,” she said. “Hungrier than I’ve ever been!”

She looked wide-open, innocent, joyous—all the ways she could never be in my father’s presence.

I thought that maybe I shouldn’t ask her the things I wanted to ask her. I didn’t want to wreck this perfect experience for her. But I was a kid, and I was curious, and in the end I went ahead and did it.

At least I waited until after we’d eaten.

The motel buffet was a lot more dazzling to me than the Bleeding Jesus, a long row of metal pans heated from below by flaming cans of Sterno. There was lasagna (overcooked, not nearly as good as my mother’s), southern fried chicken (tasty but a bit greasy), creamed corn, french fries, breaded flounder fillets (for Catholics who still adhered to the no-meat-on-Friday ban, even though the pope had lifted it), and string beans (straight from the can, and limp as a priest’s handshake).

There were also bowls of cold stuff on offer—potato salad, sliced beets, coleslaw, and sliced dill pickles. Everything had a large metal spoon in it, and you just helped yourself.

I stuffed myself with chicken and creamed corn, while my mother must have fired down half a dozen fish fillets drenched in tartar sauce. It was hard to tell exactly how much she’d eaten because the fillets were boneless, while I had a mountain of chicken bones on my plate that testified to my greediness.

Everybody stuffed themselves. Apparently nothing stokes an appetite better than a good old-fashioned miracle. The conversations were loud, almost raucous, as if we’d all just been to an exciting ball game. The motel staffers cheerfully refilled the food pans as they emptied. The Bleeding Jesus was bringing in the kind of business this small town had never known before. For a little while I was glad to be here, and then I was jabbed by thoughts of the dance. Would I ever have worked up the courage to ask Margaret Thompson to dance? This was a question I’d never be able to answer. Who would be holding her in his arms, instead of me? That was a question that would torment me all night.

When we’d laid waste to the main meal, out came the desserts—chocolate cakes and cherry pies, gallon containers of chocolate and vanilla ice cream, plus chocolate and butterscotch sauce in squeeze containers, whipped cream in cans, rainbow sprinkles, and a huge jar of maraschino cherries.

My mother built us the biggest ice cream sundaes I’d ever seen—three scoops apiece, topped by whipped cream, sprinkles, butterscotch sauce, and maraschino cherries. We were certainly getting our money’s worth from the Bleeding Jesus package deal. The crowd got even louder during dessert, probably from the sudden sugar rush. It was almost like being at a pep rally. In the midst of the noise and halfway through my sundae, I chose my moment.

“Hey, Mom, can I ask you something?”

“Of course you can, sweetheart.”

“How come Jesus wasn’t bleeding from his hands?”

The smile fell from her face. A bit of whipped cream on her upper lip was giving her a white mustache, but I didn’t think this was the time to mention it. Instead, I plunged ahead with more questions.

“I mean, shouldn’t he be bleeding from his hands, too? There are holes in his hands, aren’t there?”

“Of course there are.”

“But the hands weren’t bleeding. And what about the crown of thorns on his head? The thorns made Jesus Christ’s head bleed, didn’t they?” I swallowed. “Well, the head of the wooden Jesus wasn’t bleeding,” I said in a voice that had suddenly become a whisper. “I just don’t understand…why it wasn’t bleeding in those other places.”

My mother detected the whipped cream mustache on her lip, wiped it off with a napkin, rolled the napkin into a ball, and tossed it on the table.

“Samuel. Why must you ask these questions?”

My scalp tingled, as it always did when I feared I was letting her down.

“Mom. You said I could ask.”

“These are the sort of questions your father would ask.”

Oh boy. Now I’d done it.

“Mom. I’m sorry I said anything.”

“No, no, sweetheart, that’s all right. I’m glad you’re so…observant.”

She didn’t mean that. She reached across the table, patted the back of my hand. A smile returned to her face, but it was like the smile of a clergyman, bland and vague.

“I can’t answer your questions, Samuel. I can’t say why the head and the hands aren’t bleeding, because I don’t know why. I also don’t know why his feet are bleeding. You see? That’s the way it is with a miracle. We can’t understand it. We can only appreciate it.”

“Okay, Mom.”

“Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“I’m very glad you’re here with me.”

“Me, too, Mom,” I lied again.

“Now, this is a night to celebrate, so let’s finish our sundaes and go back for more. How does that sound to you?”

Later, up in our beds, we lay on our backs, bloated with food. The waistband of my pajamas bit into my belly and I wondered if the hum of highway traffic would lull me to sleep or keep me awake.

I’d never slept in a room with my mother before and it felt strange. She was groggy from the feast and lay staring at the ceiling, a dreamy look on her face.

“Samuel.”

“Yeah, Mom?”

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

She’d never asked me anything like this before. The question frightened me a little. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

“Uhhh…”

“It’s all right if you don’t know. It’s perfectly all right if you don’t know.”

“Well…”

“I just want you to know that I think you’re a very special boy. Can you think of any other boy in your class who could have appreciated this experience the way you do?”

“No, Mom.”

That was the truth. Most of the boys in my class were baseball players, roughnecks, troublemakers, and some of them were just plain crazy. Marvin Kelly’s specialty was turning his eyelids inside out so that the red showed above his bugged-out eyeballs. He’d do that to himself and then hide in the girls’ cloak closet, waiting for someone to open the door and shriek with terror. Craig Jancovic was an albino with white hair and pink eyes who once caught a big beetle in the schoolyard, rubber-banded it to a firecracker, and blew the creature to smithereens.

And the wildest kid of all was a dark-eyed terror named Alonzo Fishetti, who came to school each day as if he were doing the nuns a favor. At twelve he was already shaving and flirting relentlessly with the girls. He didn’t seem to mind getting hit with the yardstick, or any other punishment they could dream up for him. Fishetti became a legend one afternoon when he climbed out of our second-story classroom window and began walking on the ledge, intending to go around the corner to the other side of the building. That’s where the girls’ bathroom was, and that’s where they were changing their clothes for a basketball game. Fishetti figured he could get a good look at half-naked girls through the window, but halfway there he lost his balance and fell to the ground, breaking his ankle. He didn’t even cry. He just lay there on the macadam, lit up a Camel cigarette, and waited for help to arrive.

I never did things like that. I never even dreamed of doing things like that. I was a good boy. That’s what the nuns always wrote in the “comments” section of my report card—a good boy, polite, well behaved.

But I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and before I could say anything more, my mother spoke.

“I wanted to become a nun.”

Her words jolted me. She didn’t even sound like herself, maybe because she was crying. She rolled on her side to face me, blinked back tears.

“You did, Mom?”

“I certainly did.”

“What happened?”

“Your father happened.”

I swallowed, tasting something disagreeable from the buffet feast brewing deep in my guts. “You mean you fell in love with Dad, and decided to get married?”

She didn’t answer me right away. “Well,” she finally said, “something like that.”

“But if you’d become a nun—”

“I never would have had you. That’s true, Samuel. Obviously things worked out for the best.”

She didn’t mean it. My own mother was telling me that if she had her way, a second chance to do it all again, she’d want to spend it as the Bride of Christ. I was the only person in the world she could share this with, and the only person who shouldn’t have been hearing it.

I stared up at that unbelievably ugly perforated ceiling. It was like the night sky in reverse—black dots instead of white for stars, a white background instead of a dark one.

“Samuel.”

“Yeah, Mom?” I figured she wanted to apologize for what she’d just said, but I was wrong. She cleared her throat, hesitated.

“If you should decide to become a priest…well, that would be all right with me.”

I sat up and looked at her, my blood tingling. She was beaming at me, her eyes bright and hopeful, and through my shock and confusion it did dimly occur to me that maybe, just maybe, this was the real purpose behind our trip to see the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton.

“You want me to be a priest, Mom?”

“I didn’t say that. I want you to be whatever you want to be. If you wanted to be a priest, I would be…”

She couldn’t find the right word. “Happy?” I guessed.

“Pleased,” she decided. “Pleased for you, and the life you would lead.”

I lay down again, stared at the ceiling. For the first time ever I began thinking about the life of a priest—saying Masses, distributing communion wafers, going to people’s houses for Sunday dinners…hearing confessions! What would that be like, sitting in a dark box to hear people tell me their sins!

And what about those white collars that always seemed to be choking the men who wore them? Every priest I’d ever seen seemed to have the edge of that collar biting into his neck fat, like the collar of a dog being restrained by his master. That particular detail of the priestly life seemed to be the worst of all—I’d be forever digging my forefinger into my collar, pulling it away from my Adam’s apple to get a few unblocked breaths of air. Could I live with that? Could anybody? Apparently, they could.

“I don’t know if I could do it, Mom,” I blurted.

“Oh, sweetheart, you don’t have to know! You have years and years to think about it.”

I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to think about anything. I guess I just wanted to be a kid.

It was getting late, but I wasn’t sleepy. I realized that by this time the school dance was over, and I couldn’t help thinking about which of my classmates had gotten to dance with Margaret Thompson. By missing the dance I feared that I’d be completely out of the running for the winning of Margaret’s heart. That thought saddened me beyond words. All I could do was sigh.

My mother heard me. She sensed my anguish but completely misunderstood it.

“Samuel, please stop worrying. Forget I said anything. Don’t even think about being a priest.”

“Mom. If I became a priest, I couldn’t get married, could I?”

“That’s right, Samuel.”

“So I couldn’t have children, could I?”

“No, you couldn’t.”

“I might want to do those things, Mom.” Even though you didn’t want to!

“Of course you might, Samuel. You’ll make all those decisions when the time comes.”

She wasn’t being sincere. Her words were like the warning on a cigarette package, something she was forced to say by law. She’d planted the seed she’d wished to plant, far from the wrath and mockery my father would certainly have rained down upon the life path she was suggesting for me with all her considerable will and might.

“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?”