C HAPTER T WENTY-ONE

The next night Father Bielinski was dropped off in front of our house by someone driving a black car, a car that barely came to a stop to let him out before rolling off into the night.

The butterfat look had drained from his face, as if he’d been fasting since the scandal broke. He had the ageless look of a priest—he could have been thirty, he could have been fifty. He didn’t have the conventional dock poles to mark the normal passages of life—wives, children, grandchildren. His only dock pole had been the priesthood, and now that was gone. He was a man totally unmoored and adrift in the world.

Father Bielinski carried a small brown suitcase that may very well have contained all his worldly possessions. He wore his black priest clothes, save for the white collar—I imagined it being ripped from his throat by an angry bishop in a defrocking ceremony.

He stood out there like a lost child until my mother took him by the hand, led him inside, and sat him down at the kitchen table. There was no need for us to introduce ourselves—everybody knew who everybody was. My father was way up in the woods with Charlie McMahon, so we could all relax.

Relax? Maybe that’s not quite the word for it. A tremor seemed to be coming from the priest’s body, radiating from his core, as if there was a motorized apparatus where his heart had been. He didn’t want anything to eat. All he wanted was a cup of black coffee. When he lifted the cup, it chattered against the saucer. He seemed exhausted.

“Thank you for having me,” he said.

“Thank you for being here,” my mother replied.

“Everybody else has been so…harsh,” he finally decided.

“They certainly have.” My mother patted the back of his hand. “Everything is going to be all right.”

The priest forced a smile. He probably didn’t believe her but he appreciated the gesture. “Thank you, Mary.”

“You just relax and forget about everything for the next few days.”

“I’ll try.”

He was tired. He wanted to go to bed. We took him out to the garage, where my mother and I had set up the cot. My mother showed him where the bathroom was and gave him a towel for his morning shower.

“Do you like bacon and eggs, Father?”

He grinned. “Love ’em.”

“That’s what we’re having for breakfast.”

“Great.”

“Do you need a toothbrush, soap…?”

“I’m all set. Thank you.” He took my mother’s hands in both of his and held them as if he needed the warmth. “I’ll never forget this, Mary.”

He let go of her hand, shook mine with surprising strength. “Go to bed now, you two, it’s late.”

“Yes, Father,” we said together.

We left him in the garage. I was in my bed reading ten minutes later when my mother appeared in my doorway.

“You know, Samuel, this would be a good time for you to apologize to Father Bielinski, before he falls asleep.”

I sat up in bed. “Apologize?”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“Mom, I—”

“Just do it for me, Samuel, please.”

I crept downstairs in my pajamas. The house was dark but there was a stripe of yellow light at the bottom of the door connecting the laundry room to the garage. For the first time in my life, I knocked on a garage door.

“Come in.”

Father Bielinski was stretched out on the cot, still in his day clothes. He was barefooted. He’d set his shoes on the floor, neatly, each with a rolled-up sock inside it. He was a precise man, as I’d known from his work on the crucifix. The bare bulb in the garage ceiling burned brightly. Moths bumped into it, bounced off, came back for more. Moths would make great Catholics.

He’d been reading a Bible with what looked to be a leather cover. He marked his place with the book’s built-in red ribbon, set the book on the floor, adjusted his glasses, and seemed startled to see me.

“Samuel! Hello.”

“Hi, Father.” I swallowed. “I want to apologize to you.”

“Apologize?” He seemed surprised.

“Yeah,” I continued. “I’m sorry for what I did to the crucifix.”

He chuckled, sat up on the cot. “Samuel. Let’s get something straight. I’m the one who did the wrong thing. All you did was reveal my sin.”

This was the first time I’d ever heard the word “sin” spoken in regard to any of this business. It chilled me to think of a priest capable of sin. If this was so, what hope could there be for the rest of us?

I fought off a shiver and said, “Mom says you didn’t do anything wrong.”

He nodded. “Your mother is a very nice person. But she’s wrong about that, Samuel. I should not have done what I did. My intentions were good, but the deed itself was wrong.”

I felt my eyes well up with tears. “I shouldn’t have done what I did, either.”

“Well, you couldn’t have done what you did if I hadn’t done what I did, could you?”

I was tired, dizzy, confused. “I guess not, Father.”

He sighed, stroked my hair. “Samuel, I would gladly accept your apology if you had done anything wrong. But you didn’t. I did. All right? Are we clear on that?”

“Yes, Father.”

“I cut open the leg and planted the blood sack to create a false miracle. I acted alone. Nobody encouraged me to do it. Do you understand?”

It was like confession in reverse, the priest spilling his guts to a child. It was a little creepy. He could tell that I wanted to be out of there, but he wanted an answer.

“Do you understand?” he asked again.

“Yes, Father…. Are they going to let you be a priest anymore?”

He forced another smile. “I can’t answer that. I’ve been suspended from my duties, for the time being. Please don’t worry about that. Let’s just look forward to a fine breakfast in the morning. Are your mother’s bacon and eggs as good as they sound?”

“Yes, Father.”

He stretched out on the cot. “Well, then, I’m going to dream about them all night, and then in the morning the bacon and eggs will be like a dream come true.”

He winked at me. We shook hands, and I turned to go. By the time I reached the door, he called my name. I turned and saw that he was crying, but his voice was steady.

“Your mother is right about one thing,” Father Bielinski said. “I did mean well. Do you believe that?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Well, that means the world to me, Samuel, the world.” He wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Life gets very complicated sometimes, young man. I was trying to make it…simpler. Does that make sense?”

“I guess so.”

“Thank you, Samuel. Thank you for listening, and God bless you.”

I was dismissed at last. I went back upstairs, where my mother stood at the doorway to her bedroom.

“Did he accept your apology?”

“He said I didn’t do anything wrong. He said he was the one who did the wrong thing.”

Her face broke into a blissful smile. “What a wonderful man,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Good night, Samuel.”

We both went to bed. The house was absolutely silent, and would remain so through the night, without my father stumbling home in the wee hours. He was far, far away in the woods, trying to kill deer with Charlie McMahon.

I awoke to smells of frying bacon. It was Saturday morning, and we always had great breakfasts on Saturday mornings. I came downstairs to find the table had been set for three, with our best dishes and silverware. We’d never had a houseguest before and I could see how these special touches might make it a fun thing, despite all the turmoil.

Crisp strips of bacon were laid to drain on paper towels. It was a beautiful, sunny day. My mother was scrambling a big pan of eggs, fluffy and yellow as only she could make them. The kitchen clock said it was ten minutes past eight.

The torment in my mother’s eyes was obvious: do you let a priest sleep, or do you wake him up to eat as you’d awaken a civilian? She wrestled with it, made a decision.

“Samuel, go and wake Father Bielinski. Tell him breakfast is ready.”

I was glad to do it, pausing to knock on the garage door. He didn’t answer. I knocked again, harder, hard enough to push the door open, a door that had always had a weak latch. The last thing I wanted to do was barge in on a priest’s privacy, but I couldn’t catch the door in time, and it swung open, and then the whole world turned upside down and inside out, right there in our tiny garage in Flushing, Queens.

Father Joseph Bielinski was hanging from the highest beam in our garage, but this was no ordinary suicide. This had to have been the sequence of events, some time in the wee hours of the morning:

He’d gotten up and made the bed, the blanket taut and tucked in all around. He’d taken off all his clothes, folded them neatly, and stacked them at the foot of the cot. He’d brought a loincloth with him, really just a wide cream-colored scarf, which he wrapped and tied around his narrow waist, and then he pressed a crown of thorns onto his head (Had he woven it himself? And where had he carried it? In his little brown suitcase? How do you pack a crown of thorns?).

Bleeding from the thorns, he found an old soda crate in the garage and stood it on its tall side, right beneath the beam. He also found a broomstick, and unscrewed the broom head from it. With the broomstick in one hand and a length of three-strand rope in the other, Father Bielinski climbed up on the soda crate.

Ours was a low-ceilinged garage—his head was probably nudging the beam as he tied the rope around his neck, and then around the beam. Then he put the broomstick across his bare shoulders and dangled his hands over each end of it, locking his widespread arms in place no matter what happened next.

What happened next (and last) was that Father Bielinski kicked the soda crate out from under his own feet. He dangled, he strangled, and there he hung on that bright, bright morning when I showed up to call him for breakfast.

It’s funny how you notice things. Through the shock and horror of it, I couldn’t help registering that the garage light was still on, that it had burned through the night. This was one of the things that drove my father crazy—leaving a light on unnecessarily. It’s a good thing he wasn’t around to see this….

I heard myself giggling, or making a giggling sound that had nothing at all to do with humor. Maybe it was the first step toward madness. The second step arrived in the form of my mother, bustling into the garage with a cheerful morning greeting that died in her throat at the sight of the dangling priest.

“Sweet Jesus,” she breathed. “Sweet Jesus…”

We stood beside each other, staring at Father Bielinski. A horrible, horrible odor filled my nostrils, and then I saw that the priest had shit himself in the final moments of his life. It ran down his leg and onto the floor in a steady drip, much like the drip of fake blood that had gotten him into so much trouble.

But the blood that flowed from his thorn wounds was real. He had done it. This time, Father Joseph Bielinski had actually done it.

He had created a Bleeding Jesus that shed genuine blood. And my mother and I were the only people in the world who knew about it.

I don’t know how long the two of us stood there staring at the dangling priest. I had stopped making that giggling sound, and could hear my mother’s heavy breathing. She stepped right up to the corpse, and saw something jutting from the waist of the loincloth. It was a note.

She read it, crossed herself, and handed it to me. The handwriting was small and neat.

“Mary, Sammy, thank you for caring. Yours in Christ, Father Joseph Bielinski.”

She took back the letter and stuck it in the pocket of her apron. Then she looked up at Father Bielinski again, shook her head, and looked at me. She didn’t have to say it. Her eyes were more accusing than words ever could have been. Forget the fact that the man himself had absolved me of responsibility for all that had happened—my mother’s eyes said otherwise. This was all my fault. I was a bad boy.

“Mommy. I’m sorry.”

She nodded, looked back at the priest, and put her hands on her beefy hips, the way she always did when facing a challenge.

“You’re going to have to help me take care of this, Samuel.”

Take care of it? Take care of what? The man was dead, wasn’t he?

“What are we going to do?”

“He can’t be found like this.”

“He can’t?”

“Absolutely not.”

My mother went to my father’s tool cabinet and found a pair of gardening shears. She set the soda crate up on its edge, stepped up on it with startling agility, and cut the rope. Father Bielinski fell like a puppet whose strings have been cut, but his arms were still spread wide, held in place by the broomstick as he landed in a puddle of his own shit. My mother remained perched on the soda crate for a moment like a giant dove before stepping nimbly to the floor.

“All right, Samuel. We’ve got to work fast now.”

She gently removed the crown of thorns from Father Bielinski’s head and set it aside. She pulled the broomstick out from across his shoulders, allowing his bony arms to fall to his sides. Then she stretched him out on the cement floor, very gently, as if he were still alive.

The rope was still around his neck. I couldn’t stand the sight of it.

“Aren’t you going to take the rope off, Mom?”

“No, that stays.”

Her instructions to me were clear and precise, as if she’d had weeks to prepare them. I was to fill the bucket under the laundry room sink with warm soapy water and bring it to her, along with the “rag bag” where we kept tattered old clothes and torn towels. I did as I was told, and then she gave me a five-dollar bill and sent me to the Grand Union supermarket to buy a box of plastic trash bags.

“Make sure they’re the heavy-duty kind, Samuel.”

“Okay.”

“And don’t tell anybody what’s happened here.”

It all became horribly real to me on the walk to the supermarket, out there in the normal world. It was a dazzling day, a beach day, a picnic day, and we had a dead priest in our garage.

Luckily I didn’t see anybody we knew at Grand Union. I found a box of ten heavy-duty plastic bags and took them to the ten items-or-less lane, where a gum-chewing checkout girl smiled at me.

“Second box for half price,” she said.

“Huh?”

“These are on special. If you buy another box it’s only half price.”

How good it was, how sweet it was to hear the voice of somebody outside the lunatic world I inhabited! I wanted to stay there at the cash register and listen to this girl talk to the customers all day long, but I couldn’t. I was in the middle of a mission from hell.

“I think these’ll be enough,” I managed to say.

She shrugged, rang it up, handed me the receipt and my change. “Okay, sweetie, have a nice day.”

A nice day.

When I got back to the garage the first thing that hit me was the reek of Pine-Sol cleanser. My mother was mopping the floor. She turned to look at me.

“It took you long enough,” she said.

The dead priest was now fully clothed, shoes and all. He was lying on the cot. Except for the rope around his neck, he could have resembled a man who’d fallen asleep while reading a book.

My mother had stripped him, washed him, and dressed him. I’m sure she’d worked without worry that someone might come along, because my father was far, far away and we never had visitors. My mother did a lot for needy people, but she did it on their turf. Charity may begin in the home, but as far as my mother was concerned, it was always an away game.

The dead priest seemed to be smiling. She’d washed away the bloodstains from his thorn wounds. She was washing the last of the shit from the floor when I walked in. She leaned the mop against the garage wall. “Give me the bags.”

I handed them over. She took one and filled it with the rags she’d used to clean up, as well as the soiled loincloth and the crown of thorns. The last thing to go in was the disposable mop head. She sealed the bag, then dropped it inside another bag, which she sealed even tighter.

“Now listen, Samuel. Go back to Grand Union and drop this in one of their big garbage Dumpsters. They’re behind the store.”

I took the bag from her and stared at her, slack-jawed.

“We can’t have it near the house,” she said impatiently. “It’s evidence. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Go. Don’t take so long this time. And don’t let anybody see you.”

How was I supposed to keep anybody from seeing me? Was I expected to turn into the Holy Ghost?

I should have been scared, but I was too stunned to be anything but numb. I hurried to the supermarket. The plastic bag seemed to be gaining weight with every step I took. I went around back, where there was a row of giant Dumpsters. How the hell did my mother know about these Dumpsters?

They reeked of rotted vegetables and rancid animal fats. I stood on tiptoe to lift a Dumpster lid and tossed the bag in. It made a hollow kettledrum sound as it hit bottom. The Dumpster must have been empty. More garbage would cover up the bag in the course of the day.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. A young Puerto Rican in dirty workman’s overalls was scowling at me.

“Hey. Whatchoo doin’, man? This ain’t no dump!”

I was petrified. “I just…”

“Come on, man, say it!”

“Our garbage cans are full. My mother told me to bring it here.”

He let go of my shoulder, shook a finger in my face. “I’ll let it go this time, but don’tchoo dump here no more.”

“Oh, I won’t. I promise.”

“And tell your mother what I said.”

“I will….”

I walked away fast. Once I reached the sidewalk I broke into a run, which carried me all the way home. When I got to the garage the windows had been opened and a breeze blew through the place, weakening the Pine-Sol stench.

My mother was fussing around with the dead priest on the cot. She’d placed his hands over his lap and was now stepping back to view her scenario, cocking her head to assess it, like a woman arranging pillows on a couch.

Pleased with it, she turned and looked at me. “Did you do it?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Good boy. There’s just one more thing.”

She took the bare wooden broomstick the priest had used to crucify himself and began screwing the broom head bristles back onto it.

“Your father would notice if this was missing,” she said. “You know your father.”

She finished the task, stood the broom in its usual corner. “Okay, Samuel. Now we’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I’ll tell you all about it while we eat.”

That’s right. With the dead priest in the garage, we sat and had our bacon and eggs. Grease had congealed on the bacon and the scrambled eggs were crusty, but we ate them anyway, because it was a sin to waste food.

I was so stunned by all my mother had done while I was out disposing of evidence that I’d forgotten to tell her about the Puerto Rican who caught me using the supermarket Dumpster. Now it felt as if it were too late to tell her. Besides, what could we do about it? Go back and retrieve the bag? No way.

While we ate, my mother revealed her plan.

It was really quite simple.

“You didn’t see anything, Samuel.”

“I didn’t?”

“I’m the one who found Father Bielinski hanging from the ceiling. I cut him down and tried to revive him, but it was too late. I put his body on the cot. It’s as simple as that.”

“What about all that other stuff?”

“There isn’t any other stuff. By the time you showed up, I’d already cut him down.”

My mother was many things, but until this moment she had never been a liar. This was terrifying to me, in a way more terrifying than the crucifix suicide itself.

What could I say? My mouth had gone dry. I had to swallow to speak. “Mom…that’s not how it happened.”

“As far as we’re concerned, that’s exactly how it happened.”

“But the crown of thorns, and the other stuff—”

“Samuel! There isn’t any other stuff.” She lifted the phone. “Remember what I said. It’s important that we tell the same story, in case anyone asks you anything, including your father. Especially your father.”

She waited for me to nod, then dialed 911.

The police showed up, a uniformed cop and a detective, and so did an ambulance. My mother stuck to the story she’d forged, and the cops had no reason to doubt her. They never asked me a single question.

The ambulance guys took the noose off Father Bielinski’s neck. Then they put him in a body bag, zipped it shut, put it on a rolling stretcher, and took it away.

I was glad when he was out of our garage, but upset that his brown suitcase was still there. I wanted every trace of him to be gone.

The cops were wrapping things up. Almost casually, the detective asked my mother, “You cut him down, but why didn’t you take the noose off his neck?”

“I didn’t want to tamper with any evidence,” my mother replied.

The detective seemed surprised. “Didn’t you try to revive him?”

“Oh yes, but I knew he was dead.”

“How’d you know that, ma’am?”

“He was ice-cold.”

The detective stared at her for a long moment. “Did he leave a note?”

“No, sir,” my mother lied.

The detective’s eyebrows went up. I prayed that he wouldn’t look at me, or my trembling knees.

“No note? That’s kinda odd. You sure? You looked all around?”

“There is no note, Detective.”

He looked at the uniformed officer, who shrugged.

“All right, then,” the detective sighed. “Be forewarned, the press will be all over you. Lucky for you it’s Saturday morning. Most of the reporters in this city got hangovers right about now.”

My mother forced a sly chuckle. “Lucky isn’t exactly the word I’d choose for a day like today, Detective.”

Within hours the phone was ringing off the hook and reporters were knocking on our door. My mother and I holed up in the house, ignoring everybody. They didn’t leave until dark. The phone rang until midnight.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Samuel?”

“Why did you lie to the detective about the note?”

“Because it’s precious to me. The police have no business reading Father Bielinski’s final words.”

We went to the eleven o’clock Mass as always on Sunday morning, and this time a dozen newsmen were outside St. Aloysius, shouting questions at my mother as we arrived and left. They got pictures, but no words. My mother wouldn’t even look at them.

The story had hit the Sunday papers with a splash, but the only one to worry about was George O’Malley’s in the New York Star. He had a friend in the coroner’s office who told him about some “mysterious puncture wounds” on the dead priest’s head.

What could have caused them? The coroner did not know, and would not speculate. I started to worry about the garbage bag I’d dumped at Grand Union. If anyone poked through it they’d find the crown of thorns, and put the puzzle together.

I don’t remember much about the Mass that day, except that Father Bielinski was never mentioned during the sermon. His name only came up in the list of the dearly departed we were told to pray for. Everybody stared at us but they left us alone.

As we were leaving church I saw George O’Malley among the newsmen standing in front of the church. He waved to me, and I waved back. My mother smacked my hand. It was the first and only time she’d ever hit me.

When we got home I couldn’t hold it any longer. I told my mother about the Puerto Rican workman who’d caught me dumping the garbage bag at Grand Union. I expected to be yelled at, but she didn’t do that. Instead, we both got on our knees and prayed.

“What are we praying for, Mom?”

“That nobody finds that bag.”

Together we said ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys so that the plastic bag containing the dead priest’s shit-stained loincloth and crown of thorns would make it all the way to the city dump in Staten Island, undisturbed, to eventually be buried under untold tons of garbage.

Amen.

Late that night we heard Charlie McMahon’s car pull up in front of the house. I looked out my bedroom window and saw my father laughing with Charlie as he struggled to get his duffel bag out of the car. A dead deer was strapped to the hood of Charlie’s car. I wondered who’d shot it, Charlie or my father. I’d seen enough death for one weekend. I prayed that when Charlie drove away, he’d take the deer with him. Sure enough, he did.

“Thank you, God.”

I heard my father slam his way into the house. My mother was downstairs, waiting for him. She was going to tell him the same story the rest of the world believed about Father Joseph Bielinski. There was no reason for him not to believe it. I was beginning to believe it myself.

The kids at school didn’t ask me about the suicide. Maybe the nuns had instructed them not to. Only Alonzo Fishetti had the guts to come up to me in the schoolyard.

“Guy musta been fuckin’ crazy, huh, Sullivan?”

Alonzo, you have no idea.

My mother turned the proceeds of the Father Bielinski fund over to his church in Scranton, with instructions for them to do as they wished with the money. I graduated from St. Aloysius school that year and the following year went on to Holy Cross High School, an all-boys’ school.

I never danced with Margaret Thompson, never asked her out.

When my mother died George O’Malley wrote an obituary about the staunch defender of the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton, and the way she stuck up for that suicidal priest, and the way she died in church, in line to receive Holy Communion. He sent me a letter saying if there was anything he could do for me, please let him know.

I let him know the day after I quit my pizza delivery job at Napoli’s. I phoned George and told him I needed a job. He invited me to visit him at the New York Star office, where he offered me a job as a copyboy.

I quit school and took the job. Within six months I had my first bylined story. I was a promoted to reporter by the time I was twenty. I was George O’Malley’s big find, something he could crow about. They said I was a natural newsman.

Of course I was. After all, I was the kid who’d exposed the hoax of the Bleeding Jesus of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

My mother wanted me to become a priest. Instead, I became a tabloid newspaperman. I guess there’s really not all that much difference. It’s all about getting people to believe in stories that demand an enormous leap of faith.

Funny thing was, I couldn’t tell anyone my biggest story of all, until this crazy night with my son and my father at our old kitchen table.