Memorial Bridge

by James Carroll

  "He said human life is like a sparrow coming by accident into a great lighted hall in winter. It flies frantically in through a doorway from a world outside that is cold and dark, and it soars through the bright air of the illuminated hall which is so warm..."

  Dillon too, in the trance of the old man's description, began to see it.

  "...with its flickering candles, its tapestries, its stonework, its quiet fellowship, so beautiful. The sparrow flies quickly through, a perfect arc, and then, like that, goes out again through another opening into the merciless cold, the wind, the dark."

  What am I hearing? Dillon wondered. Who am I to have the sea within me, a feeling of the ocean inside my throat?

  "King Edwin's councilor said that human life is that interval of warmth and light and peace within the hall. Human life is the sparrow's flight. What comes after life and what goes before it is the winter darkness outside the hall. 'Therefore,' he said, 'if these new preachers have some certainty on these matters, it behooves us to receive it.'"

  The Jesuit leaned back, unfolding himself into his chair, moved.

  "Did they?" Dillon asked. When Father Ferrick failed to respond he said, "Did they have some certainty?"

  "Of course."

  "What was it?"

  "Why, our certainty."

  And Dillon sensed that this was the test, and if he was now required to take it, he would not pass.

  "Our certainty," the priest said, "is that outside the hall it is light, True Light of True Light. Here, inside, is where it is dark."

  "I'm not sure I believe that, Father."

  "I know. That's why you stopped short of the priesthood, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "What you believe in is the sparrow's flight."

  Dillon answered carefully, unsure now whether this man was a professor or a spiritual director. "Instead of a certainty of faith, what I have is eagerness, Father. I want a flight of my own. Is that wrong of me?"

  "No. But you don't get off the ground by hesitating, lad. You came so far in the Church and hesitated. Now you've come so far in the law, and I fear you're hesitating again."

  "Because I won't change my name?"

  "Because you won't act on your eagerness and get out. Why are you still in the stockyards? Why would you even think of working for Swift? Because it's so familiar to you, that's why. And 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 alone.

  Three

  Doran's was one of a dozen saloons on Exchange Avenue in the block across from the Stone Gate. It was like other back-of-the-yards taverns in its dinginess and in the thick, layered odors of cigar smoke, hoghouse and stale booze. The men who came to Doran's before and after work were not coming for decor.

  They weren't coming just for booze either. Like many pubs, Doran's had a back room the door to which was open during the day. The back room men, wearing headphones and punching tabulators, could be seen then from the tavern proper. The room was a betting parlor. Discarded gambling tickets covered the floor of the entire saloon.

  Now the back room was closed. Affixed to its door was a poster featuring a bespectacled orator in clerical collar whose twisted mouth and extended fist indicated the heat with which he was speaking. On the wall behind his pulpit was the carved legend "Christ Crucified," and text above and below the priest's image read, "I have taken my stand," and "Social Justice."

  It was Father Coughlin. The bread-box-sized Philco on which Doran's customers had listened to the radio priest every Sunday for most of the decade stood on the near end of the worn shiny bar that ran the length of one wall.

  Arranged along the bar at intervals were a complimentary jar of pickled pigs' feet, a salt shaker, a half-empty bowl of boiled eggs and the donation box from the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Tarnished spittoons stood at like intervals along the footrail. Against the opposite wall were benches and narrow tables, hardly more than hoisted planks.

  Most customers began their serious drinking standing up, but by now the benches were crowded with woozy, indifferent day-shift men who'd come in hours ago. More recently arrived drinkers at the bar, in contrast, tossed back ale and whiskey while talking energetically, or even arguing, pounding the smooth wood or each other's shoulders. These had mostly come in since supper.

  As in all tav
erns that had betting parlors in back, the windows were papered over to keep passersby outside from indulging their curiosity, although not patrolmen, since the bookies operated, in effect, in partnership with police. The blanked windows fixed the place in the constant artificial nighttime that daylight drinkers liked. But now, since it was nearly nine o'clock and finally dark outside, the tavern door was open to the authentic night. For once a balmy breeze wafted through the crowded room, swirling the smoke and carrying the noise out to the street.

  Cassie Ryan stood in the doorway. Most young women in such a threshold, and ordinarily Cassie herself, would have felt afraid. The roughness of the room and the crudeness of the men, with their brutal faces, loose jaws and bloodshot eyes, were not lost on her, but Cassie forced herself to recall that these same men with this same brainlessness crowded the vestibule of St. Gabriel's every Sunday. The wave of feeling that had carried her this far was not going to break now on girlish timidity. Cassie Ryan had come with a question and she was going to ask it, no matter of whom.

  She watched the yardmen in the tavern gesticulating at one another, indifferent to their filth; it was their liveliness that struck her. These men were so reserved in the presence of their women and children—she thought of them mutely hunched over one knee in the back of St. Gabe's—that it was a shock to come upon them in a moment of their vigorous camaraderie. How they prefer each other! How they sting each other's shoulders with their slaps, these fathers and sons who never so much as stroked a cheek at home. No wonder they love their whiskey and beer if this is what it does for them.

  A barrel-chested off-duty policeman pushed by her, turning his broad shoulders sideways to enter, touching his cap at her and letting his eyes hesitate on hers for a moment. She recognized his concern at once, his assumption that she was one form or another of the perennial waif sent by an irate mother for an oafish drunken father. She deflected the policeman's gaze, but not before it called up a choking sensation she hadn't felt in years, which was how long it had been since she or anyone had bothered to haul Mike Foley home from one of these dives. To her knowledge her uncle had never done his drinking at Doran's.

  The policeman went in. Cassie hesitated only a moment longer before following him. When she stepped into the tavern the thick air clogged her nostrils. To the warmth and joy of the room was added suddenly a fresh attentiveness as the men became aware of her. The tone of their banter shifted. Those nearest the door who had closed in behind the policeman made way again, opening her an avenue as the commuters on the North La Salle sidewalk had.

  Cassie nodded at them as she pressed on through to the bar.

  The bartender saw her coming. He held a finger up at the policeman, meaning Wait, and slid along his side of the rail to intercept her as close to the door as possible. He leaned toward her, quite obviously not to take an order but to hear whom she'd come looking for.

  "Jack Hanley," she said.

  In the din he hadn't heard. He cocked his ear at her. His face grew twisted and savage-looking.

  "Jack Hanley. I'm told he's here."

  The bartender drew back. Cassie saw the vein in his temple swelling and she sensed he was deciding whether to point him out. Cassie had no idea what Hanley looked like. She had gotten his name from the night supervisor at Swift's only by threatening to call the priest at St. Gabriel's. From Swift's she'd gone to Hanley's house. Hanley's wife had told her at once where she'd find him, but this bartender was like the supervisor in being a man. She was still at the point of taking this reticence as a simple part of how these men habitually dealt with women. Cassie felt she knew them. She felt a rush of resentment. She knew them all.

  The weight with which she'd packed her expression gave the bartender no choice. He turned and craned, looking across his room. His eyes stopped and Cassie followed them to the far corner where half a dozen overall-clad men were sprawled at one of the narrow tables.

  As she moved toward them the drinkers once more cleared the way for her, some unsteadily, some eyeing her with bleary shock. More than one man inhaled quickly at the sight of her. Now the shift in the room's tone was more pronounced as the others became aware of her. Even those young enough or sober enough to be struck by her rare green eyes and bright auburn hair, by her red lips even in that hard-set mouth and by the sure, certain way she carried herself, like a dame in the movies—even they reacted first to the intrusion she was. Gradually they stopped talking as she cut through the aisle they opened for her. In silence they watched as she approached the corner. When they saw that it was Hanley slumped there with his back to the room, they all guessed that she'd come because of the blood pipes.

  Those at the table with Hanley were the last to sense her presence. When finally they stopped talking—two froze with mugs nearly to their mouths—it was to peer upward quizzically. Jack Hanley was dead last to turn. His hat was cocked to one side, forgotten. When he looked up at Cassie the grief and fright she saw in his unfocused eyes seared themselves into her brain and she knew at once that this was him.

  "I'm Mike Foley's niece," she said.

  "Oh." Hanley started to get up, but he couldn't. He fell back into his chair. He reeked of alcohol. "Oh, darling," he said weakly.

  "I've come to find out what happened."

  Hanley looked quickly at his nearest companion, as if for guidance. The man was also drunk. He tossed his head toward Hanley's hat, which Hanley then took off. Now when he faced Cassie again a satisfied expression filled his face; by doffing his cap he had discharged what responsibility he had toward her.

  But Cassie repeated herself coldly, "What happened to my uncle?"

  Again Hanley cast his eyes about, but no one would meet them. He stared at the hat he clutched between his beefy hands. "He died."

  "I know he died. I've been to Riordan's. I've seen his body. But what happened to him? They told me he drowned in a vat at Swift's. But what was he doing at Swift's? What happened to make his head like that? Where did he—?" Cassie stopped abruptly as the rampant emotion began once more to overtake her. She had become hysterical at Riordan's. The undertaker had felt free to put his arms around her. Now she hugged herself hard, choking off the violent shudder she felt coming. If she held herself in the vise of her own arms she could do this. "You have to tell me," she said. Only she knew how close she was to weeping.

  Hanley's lips were set in a line. He thought if he didn't move she would go away. But she stood where she was above him, a grim statue. He said quietly, to soften her, "I knew him." He felt a fresh hit of the shock with which he'd heard who that pulpy mass had been.

  "Then tell me, please."

  Hanley brought his face up. "I mean years ago, I knew him years ago. I didn't know him now." Hanley clenched and unclenched his hands. "I don't know what happened."

  "But you found him."

  "I'm just a pipefitter, Miss. Your uncle was in the pipe. They made me go in for him."

  "Pipe?"

  Hanley realized he'd told her something she did not know. Stay out of this, he told himself. Stay out! Even drunk as he was, he knew enough to turn his back on the poor girl.

  "Pipe?" Cassie repeated. She took Hanley by the shoulder, to force him to look at her, but he wouldn't budge. She heard the screech of emotion in her own voice; she hated it. "They told me vat. He fell into a giant vat. He took a short cut across a slippery cutting table, lost his footing and slid into a giant pickle vat. That's what they told me at Swift's. They said it was his own fault."

  "Well then, what's your question, Miss?"

  Cassie was surprised by the sober, calm voice behind her. When she looked she saw the policeman she'd followed in. His tunic was open at the throat. His hat was off now. His head was shiny bald. He held a shot glass in one hand, a beer mug in the other. A black cigar poked out from the glass, between his fingers.

  "My question?" Cassie stared at him. She became aware of the press of stinking men. Why couldn't they give her room? They were all glaring at her as if it were a
n offense that she should want to know what happened to her uncle. The man at Swift's had concocted that story, she just knew it. When she'd challenged him, he'd as much as admitted it. He had told her he wasn't sure what had happened. My question, she repeated to herself. My only question.

  Her real question had little to do with the famous dangers of the slaughter pits. What had made her dear uncle's sweet, loving heart so weak? And, before him, why had her father disappeared? That was what she wanted to ask someone, but these stewed prunes were too much like her uncle and her father, as her stoical mother and aunt were too much unlike them.

  She looked at the policeman with a sudden incredulity, as if snapping out of a trance. "My uncle died at Swift's. But he didn't work for Swift's. He hasn't had a job in years."

  The policeman shrugged. "An odd-lot day laborer, Miss. Lots of fellows never tell them at home if they pick up a shift here or there." He lowered his voice to emphasize its Irish warmth. "Though usually they keep day workers away from the cutting tables. I'm sorry for your troubles, Miss."

  The policeman's sympathy took Cassie by surprise. She deflected her emotion by turning back to Hanley. "I asked to talk to someone who saw it happen. I told them I wouldn't leave until they said who I could talk to. Then they told me you."

  Hanley shot bolt upright. "I never saw it happen! I never saw anything happen!" He looked wildly about. "I just found him, is all. This has nothing to do with me. The blood was backing up into the slaughter rooms—"

  "Jack." One of the men next to Hanley tried to silence him by squeezing his forearm.

  But Hanley grabbed the man roughly in return. "You tell Buckley this has nothing to do with me! Moran sent me down there—"

  "Shut up, Jack!" The man pushed Hanley back into his chair.

  Cassie Ryan saw what a weary, frightened man he was. The onlookers were mainly expressionless, though at the mention of the name Buckley she'd seen the furtive rustle of their anxiety.