because for the likes of us it's so safe and comfortable."
"I pulled the rotting corpse of a man out of a blood pit at Swift's this afternoon, Father. From the mark on his hand I know he was a Hibernian. That's how safe the stockyards are for the likes of us. You assumed before it was an accident, but he'd been flogged. That corpse was a little warning against thinking too much of yourself. If so, it's a warning I reject. I don't know who the fellow was, but maybe his offense was a Canaryville version of refusing to change your name simply because your betters don't like the ring of it, if you receive my meaning, Father. Besides, it took a hell of a lot—" Dillon's anger surprised him. Was there something true in what the priest was saying? Hesitating? Again? Dillon shook the question off. "I'm not talking about narrow loyalty, Father. I broke more rules of the tribe in leaving the seminary than I would in changing my name."
The priest nodded, accepting Dillon's point. After a pause he said softly, "The sparrow's flight through the hall, whatever else one believes or doesn't believe, is all too quick, gone in a flash. I'm sorry about the man you found. I'll pray for him. I'll pray for you too, if you don't mind.
Don't waste another moment of your time, that's all I'm telling you. Be what you can be, Dillon."
"It's not advice I'm used to getting, Father. Didn't Jesus say His Heavenly Father watches over the sparrows—not the ones that find it possible to fly, but the ones that fall? Isn't that what I'm supposed to do now? Get off the ground so that I can fall?
Then
God will love me? Then the Church will take me back?"
The priest shook his white head slowly. "I had the impulse to send you over to Lambert, Rowe because I didn't think you would fall. I see now..." He hesitated. "...that I was more right than I knew." He slapped his desk and stood abruptly. "Now go home and study your notes. Start from scratch with them. I don't want you embarrassing me in that exam tomorrow after I stick my neck out for you."
A few minutes later, after leaving Loyola, Dillon was riding the El, rattling south away from the Loop, looking out across the western stretches of the hard-ass, indifferent city. The last glow of twilight faded above the silhouettes of the roundhouses and smokestacks and grain elevators and mills. This had been a day on which the slow coming of summer darkness seemed for once completely wrong. The darkness should have come hours ago.
He'd left Father Ferrick feeling the way, as a boy, he'd felt leaving the confessional. He'd wanted to savor that sweet catharsis, but the feeling didn't last. The image of what had sullied him intruded, and with it a wholly different, and unwelcome, set of feelings.
The dead man.
The murdered man.
The darkness.
Against the darkness outside the window, against the shocking image he saw reflected in the darkness of his own pupils, Dillon closed his eyes. He had left the dean's office resolved to go directly to his workman's bare room in a boardinghouse on Halsted Street and study through the night—a perfect exam!—as he had so many times before.
But what were the requirements of school now if not a mockery of what Dillon knew to be the truth about himself? Something irresistible was drawing him back toward that foul abyss into which, for a moment, naked as the day he was born, he had plunged. No mere idea or hope or feeling or metaphor—the darkness outside King Edwin's castle—that blood pit was a fact, a fact about the world, like it or not,
to which he—"Sean"—belonged. It wasn't over yet.
The train accelerated as it hit the downward slope at Archer that marked the end of the elevated section of the line. Now the train rumbled into his home neighborhood, and Dillon felt a rare dose of longing for it. This
was
his place. These
were
his people: the canaries, the yarders, the Irish, the Catholics, the human beings. He was involved with them. He was not
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