Flesh and Blood (29 page)

“I’m impressed,” I said. “Was that all off the top of your head?”

“I give over a hundred presentations on the shroud a year,” he said. “My wife says I say this stuff in my sleep.”

“How exciting for her,” I said. “Now, can I have a straight answer? Is there paint present or not?”

“There is an incidental amount of artists’ pigments on the surface.”

“And?”

“And, this led some, including Dr. William McDaniel to conclude that the Shroud was a forgery made with paint,” he said.

“But you don’t think so?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I agree with McDaniel’s fellow members of the STURP, Holt and Allen, who said that it had nothing to do with the body image.”

“Then how’d it get there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“But you have a theory,” I said.

“We’re talkin’ about the most holy icon in history,” he said. “Think about it. There’s only one. It can only be in one place at a time—until, presto-copyo, they traced and copied it.”

“So the paint came from attempts to reproduce it.”

“That or some senile old monk used it for a drop cloth when he was re-doing his abbey.”

“What?”

“I’m saying it’s the most widely recognized and reasonable theory. The truth is we’re talking about somethin’ that could potentially be several centuries to thousands of years old. It’s come in contact with everything imaginable during that time, so a little paint shouldn’t surprise anyone. The bottom line is the image is not paint.”

“But is it blood?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It’s scorch or burn marks of the body and
some
blood stains.”

“I’m amazed you’re not a literalist,” I said.

“Just tryin’ to be precise.”

“Tell me about the scorch marks,” I said. “What made them?”

“We don’t know,” he said. “There’s nothing else like it in the world. No other body has ever left such a mark on anything. And if it were a painting, then it’s the first outline-less painting in existence. Every artist uses an outline—especially when working on something fourteen feet long, but there’s not one on the shroud. And another thing, the color of the image is nearly indistinguishable. I mean it’s one color, yet the image is almost three dimensional, and the closer you get to it, the more the image disappears into the cloth. You really have to be a least six feet away from it to see it, so if an artist did it, he’d have to have used a six-foot brush.”

“What about—”

“I’m not finished,” he said. “The image seems
not
to be the result of something being added to the linen, but something being taken away. It’s a chemical change. The marks seem to be the result of those areas aging faster. Like a newspaper yellowing in the sunlight. The STURP concluded that they were created by a phenomenon, as yet unknown, or a momentous event that caused a rapid cellulose degradation oxidation of the very top linen fibrils of the cellulose fibers of the Shroud, thereby creating a straw-colored image similar to that of a scorch. And one last thing, when STURP flooded the Shroud with transmitted light from behind, the blood stains showed up very well—presumably because they’re substantial and solid, but the body image barely showed up at all.”

“So there
is
blood on the shroud?” I asked. “Not paint or pigment or dye?”

“Yes,” he said. “The late Dr. Joseph Hellen identified the blood on the Shroud as being mammalian, primate, and probably human. Dr. Peter Lowenstein, professor of forensic medicine at the Turin University, has stated that the blood on the Shroud is human with characteristics appearing to belong to type AB.”

“So, there’s scientific evidence that there’s actual blood on it,” I said, excitement filling my voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the blood of Jesus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s true.”

“But it is a shroud that wrapped a real human body that had undergone a real-life crucifixion. There are blood stains and postmortem blood spillage to indicate injuries caused by severe whipping, various incidental abuse, such as a crown of thorns and beatings, piercings of the feet and wrists, and a bladed weapon being driven through the side of the chest. Ring any bells?”

“Just one.”

“Have you seen pictures of the Shroud?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you notice the two blood flows near the visible wrist?”

“Yeah.”

“Those trickles could only have been made by the arms being stretched out sideways at a sixty-five degree angle.”

“In other words,” I said. “A crucifixion position.”

“Exactly,” he said. “And, it depicts the nails having been driven through the wrists, not the hands, which is the way most artists have erroneously painted them for thousands of years. And did you notice you can’t see his thumbs on the Shroud?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because the nails were driven through the wrists, which means they severed the median nerve, which triggered a motor reaction—the thumbs snapped into the palms. That’s just one way the Shroud’s images and injuries are anatomically and forensically correct.”

I thought about what he was saying. There was far more to this mystery than I realized.

“And get this,” he said. “Whatever made the image, what ever precipitated this rapid aging, affected only the very top fibrils— the images are a surface phenomenon, but the blood stains seeped down into the fabric. And, the blood stains were on the shroud before the image was formed, and there is no image in the area of bloodstains. The blood somehow impeded the image from forming.”

“Which means?”

“That if a forger had painted or created the image and then added human blood to make it realistic, wouldn’t he have had to make the image first and then added the blood afterward?”

The sun seemed to be trying to make up for what it had missed during the rainy, overcast morning, steam rising from the sizzling wet asphalt, the remaining raindrops on the hood of my S-10 baking off. Inside, in the absence of air conditioning, Mom and I cooked.

“I’m about ready to be flipped,” she said. “And in another few minutes, I’ll be ready to serve.”

“Sorry,” I said.

A drive to the coast to get her out of her death room had sounded like a good idea when it was still cloudy and overcast.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m just happy to be here with you. The sun will be down soon.”

The descending sun set the tops of the slash pines to the west ablaze in front of an artist’s bold splash of pink and orange that cast elongated shadows across the road like backlit window blinds.

“Why don’t you buy a new car?” she asked. “You can afford it, can’t you?”

“I had a lot of debt after the divorce,” I said. “I’m still chipping away at it.”

We rode for a while in silence, the monotonous uniformity of the seemingly endless rows of pines on either side of us only occasionally giving way to an open field or pasture where cattle nuzzled their way through the damp grass. The sound of running water from the flowing ditches mixed with the wind whispering through the pines created a lonely, empty sound in the absence of our conversation.

“I’m sorry, John,” Mom said, turning away from her window to look at me. “For the kind of mother I was. For what I put you through, for what you inherited from me.”

No matter how many times she apologized, it never sounded real. Not that I doubted her sincerity. I didn’t. Maybe it was the way her confession lent credibility to everything I felt—the verbalization of my nightmares in the waking world. Hearing her speak aloud our secrets prevented me from maintaining my normal distance and defense when I could almost imagine I was thinking of someone else—my doppelgänger, perhaps, and his mom. Her words confirmed my fears, her acts of contrition confronted my denial, and I never knew quite what to say.

I glanced over at her.

Mom’s dark brown hair was quickly becoming gray, her deep brown eyes, though finally clear, were sad and longing. Her face held no visible sign of emotion, just the too-early deep lines of a life lived hard. She was still pretty, and occasionally when she smiled, you could see just how beautiful she had once been.

When I was a child, we were very close. Far more alike than anyone else in the family, we shared an understanding nearly conspiratorial in its intimacy. I never doubted her love or adoration— until it was withdrawn from me to be lavished on her existential melancholy and the elixirs she used to mute it all too briefly.

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “I’m not ready.”

My eyes began to sting as I nodded my understanding, glancing over at her, realizing just how unprepared for her departure I, too, was.

“Too much left to do,” she continued. “I’ve just started living again.”

“But some people never do,” I said. “You’ve used the gift of death to—”

“No,” she said, shaking her head violently. “It’s not a gift. It’s an enemy. It’s not right. It’s not supposed to be this way. This isn’t natural. This isn’t what God planned.”

I didn’t say anything. Her opinions on this subject were far more relevant than mine.      “Am I a fool?” she asked.

“What?”

“To believe I could actually be healed,” she continued. “To believe that the Shroud might be a conduit of God’s special grace for me? Is it just desperation? Just a last foolish act?”

I slowed down as the road ended at the Gulf of Mexico. When we came to a stop, I checked my rearview mirror and discovering that there was no one behind us, sat for a moment, and stared at the calm, key lime-colored waters as they gently caressed the brilliant white sands of the shore. The setting sun shimmered across the surface, its soft glow refracting off it like a rain of fireworks sparks.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I
do
know that all acts of faith involve a certain degree of foolishness. They’re illogical, unreasonable, so of course they seem foolish.”

She nodded, seeming to think about it, to attempt to knead some reassurance out of it.

We took a left on Highway 98 and drove slowly through the growing town of Mexico Beach. The beaches were empty, the tourists conspicuously missing from the hotels and shops with CLOSED signs hanging in their windows.

“Do you believe in divine healing?” she asked.

I nodded.

“What do you believe?”

I shrugged. “I don’t have beliefs as much as openness to possibilities,” I said.

“What about the Shroud?” she asked. “Can God use it to heal me? Is it real?”

I shrugged. “She can use anything,” I said. “Her grace is in all things and all things can be conduits of that grace. I think it comes down to where or in what or whom we can most readily find that grace. If that’s the Shroud for you—”

“It could be,” she said, “but only if it’s real. Is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just started looking into it. It’s going to take a while. I’m trying to be thorough.”

“Just don’t take
too
long,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“What have you found out so far?”

I told her.

“So you think there really is blood on it?”

“It appears to be,” I said. “An ancient DNA specialist confirmed the presence of male DNA on the Shroud. And every one of the wounds is consistent with a victim of crucifixion. And many forensic pathologists have confirmed that the wounds and blood flows are anatomically correct.”

I could see hope beginning to expand inside her, and though I feared it was premature, it improved her countenance so much I continued.

“There’s no explanation for how the image got there either,” I said. “It’s like a faint burn mark, almost like a picture. In fact, it shows up better as a photo negative than it does as a positive. And there doesn’t seem to be any way an ancient forger could’ve done it. So far, no one has been able to duplicate it—even using modern technology.”

“So it could be … ,” she asked, unable to keep the excitement out of her voice.

I shrugged. “I’m still skeptical,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t get your hopes up just yet.”

“But how can I not?” she asked. “It seems that all the evidence is pointing to it being authentic.”

“Not all of it,” I said. “I’ve just glanced over it. I’m going to try to study it some more soon, but it looks as if the presence of blood on the Shroud contradicts Jewish burial customs.”

“How?”

“From what I’ve found, the Jewish custom was and still is to wash all the blood off a body before it’s buried. And I haven’t even gotten to the carbon-dating tests yet.”

“I just feel like I’m giving her false hope,” I said.

“Are you?” he asked.