Memorial Bridge by James Carroll Read Free Book Online Page B

exacting something too. After a moment Dillon said with bemused casualness, "You know about the sparrows?"
    The Jesuit laughed. "I know that the birds around the yards aren't canaries, and never were."
    The two men smiled at each other, thinking of the same story. In the last century the population of English sparrows feeding on bits of grain in the ubiquitous piles of dried dung had become so large that the area had become known as Canaryville.
    Father Ferrick said, "But when I think of sparrows I think of St. Bede's sparrow."
    What was this? Dillon raised his eyebrows.
    The priest leaned toward him, his large hands entwined. "The story is
in Bede's
Ecclesiastical History,
the story of the conversion to Christianity of what we now know as England."
    Father Ferrick's intensity pulled Dillon in.
    "The Druid king, Edwin, called a meeting of his councilors to hear what they had made of the preaching of the monks who had come over from the Continent. The king and his barons gathered in a great stone hall illuminated by the flames of torches and candles, warmed by a massive fire at one end. They sat around a table, each man giving his impressions while the king listened.
    "St. Bede says that the king and his advisors achieved no understanding of what they were groping toward until one councilor—we don't know his name—stood up when it was his turn to speak. Instead of talking about what he'd heard of the Christian preaching, he said something about human life."
    Father Ferrick paused here, as if to plunge into his story. But surfaces to him were a sea to move across. Dillon saw the sea shimmering in his eyes. His story was a ship in which to cross it. Dillon waited, listening.
    "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