Father Bielinski phoned our house every night for a week after the story broke, a soft-spoken man we technically had never even met. The strength with which he had grabbed me to try and pull me away from the Bleeding Jesus didn’t match the soft, defeated voice I heard over the phone.
“Is Mary Sullivan there, please?”
He didn’t have to identify himself. I knew who was calling. Before I could even say anything my mother was there, taking the phone from my hand and gesturing for me to go up to my room, out of earshot.
At supper a few nights later she dropped the bombshell while my father was cutting into his steak. “He’s going to stay with us for a few days.”
My father looked at her, poked a slab of meat into his mouth. “Who?”
“Father Bielinski.”
My father set his knife and fork down. “Mary. Have you lost your mind?”
“He has nowhere else to go. It’s the least we can do for him.”
There was no fight left in my father. My mother was no longer a worthy opponent for him—she was a mental patient to be handled with the weary patience of the men in the white coats. He rubbed his hand through the bristles of his crew-cut hair and looked at me with tired eyes before turning his defeated gaze toward his wife. “When’s he getting here?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Where’s he gonna sleep?”
It was a good question. My father slept in the spare bedroom so often now that he didn’t intend to lose it, especially to a disgraced priest.
“In the garage,” my mother said. “We can fix up that old cot of yours. We’ll keep the car in the driveway while he’s here.”
“How long did you say he’s staying?”
“As long as he likes.”
“I thought you said it would only be for a few days.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Oh boy, Mary. Oh boy. I’m not hangin’ around for this.”
He wiped his mouth on his napkin, rose from the table, and left the room. My guts were in free fall. My father was leaving us! How could my mother just sit there, spooning mashed potatoes into her face?
“Mom!”
“It’s all right, Samuel. Your father’s just a little upset.”
“He’s leaving us!”
“He’d never leave us. Finish your meal.”
I couldn’t choke down another bite. Minutes later my father reappeared in the kitchen, carrying his old duffel bag from his navy days. He wore a black-and-red-checkered woodsman’s jacket, far too warm for a night light this.
“Where are you going?” my mother calmly asked.
“Deer hunting with Charlie McMahon.”
Charlie had a cabin far up in the woods in upstate New York. Once a year or so my father joined him on a hunting expedition, but never for an overnight trip, and never this abruptly.
My mother forced a laugh. “Really? When were these plans made?”
“About eleven seconds after you announced that the priest was coming here.” He turned to me. “I’ll be back on Sunday night, Sammy.” He turned back to my mother. “By that time, he’d better be gone.”
Without another word he left the house, slamming the door. My mother finished her mashed potatoes, set her fork down.
“This could actually work out quite nicely,” she said, more to herself than to me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-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.”
<
br /> 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 sh
ears. 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.
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