51 PERISH IN RURAL FIRE, CHILDREN ESCAPE BY WINDOW.

Survivors leapt to escape apocalyptic fire on third floor.

Harroway, Illinois - Tragedy struck the Blackleaf Tobacco Company on Monday night, as a fire broke out on the third floor of the factory, resulting in the deaths of 54 individuals, 46 of whom were innocent children. Blackleaf Tobacco Co. had been a respected company in our state for decades and had employed numerous enterprising children over the years. The cause of the fire has not been identified, and an investigation is currently underway.

The company's spokesman issued a statement that the third floor of the factory had been strictly regulated to safeguard the children working there. Furthermore, he conveyed the company's deepest sympathies to the affected families.

When the blaze began, a large number of children were trapped, and several lost their lives while trying to rescue the others. The fourth floor of the factory also collapsed, taking many more lives. The exact number of children killed in the tragedy is still being determined. In the midst of the chaos, Myles MacWard, a local boy who had been working at the factory for a year, emerged as a hero. MacWard, whose photograph graces the front page of this paper, quickly led the remaining children to a window where they could escape. Thanks to the storage crates located beneath the window, many children survived the fall, and we are told thirteen have been hospitalized.

Myles MacWard suffered a broken leg while aiding the children's escape, and we wish him a speedy recovery. This tragedy has affected the entire community, and we extend our deepest sympathies to the families who have lost their loved ones.

...

Long ago, it was said "for the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"—a phrase no boy can hope to understand. In childhood, the spirit is a free-flowing, gushing stream, nourishing the world and blindly running this way or that. The dirt, sediment, and soil gathers at its hinges and crossings every year, every change—every day in the world is a triumph of the flesh, until the dam has been built, and the stream of spirit becomes only a blocked-up trickle. What in the world can a defeated trickle nourish?

Life outside of seminary had all the dullness of a dried-up river. The rails underneath his boxcar thrummed with mechanical urgency, and it was not lost on Myles how little interest he took in the window next to him, only a pane parting him from the world he'd been born to. His stomping ground? No—a burial ground, a place where children like him were freely stomped into the dirt. What unripe fields of grain and pillaring warehouses spanned the scenes swiftly swept aside by his train were little more than the fruits of suffering, a sort he'd come to know intimately in these parts. It wasn't disinterest that clung his eyes to the cabin's oaken and plaster corners and seats, but a reflex ... the instinct of the gentle to turn away from the visceral. What were the odds that he would have the terrible fortune to gleam, in a passing instant, the shape of a child in one of those fields?

Of course, the comfort of the cabin had its own bitter irony. Who put the tables together? Upon whose broken, bruised hands was Myles now seated? When the cabin doors on either end of the passenger's mahogany tunnel creaked open, could there be the squealing of women, of children echoing in the creaky old oak? He knew how even the happy squeals of play were stolen, made into furnishings for the right purchase. Whose stories were bled into the wood?

If his window offered him the scope to look back—to face west, perhaps even to see what the clouds above Missouri looked like now ... then he would look, and he'd have something to sate his attention till Harroway other than his own poisoned thoughts. For the time being, he shut his eyes and listened drily to the monotonous tap-thrumming of the rails beneath him.

There'd be almost no risk of confrontation on the way, but, his Father cautioned, "you ought be ready for anything. Never turn down a stranger—curious or cursing." It had been "too long" since he had seen the world outside seminary. Myles felt that his learning was nowhere near complete; that he was unready to face the skeletons he'd left at Harroway. Yet Fr. Morgan had the right of it: if his vocation was an active ministry, then there's only so much activity to be had between isolated countryside walls. Sometimes, Myles wished the Father was as much a monk as the other Jesuits claimed. Being a student of the Society right about now felt far more than Myles had signed onto.

He caught his hand fidgeting with the trim of his robe and, when he'd looked up from it, saw in the corner of his eye the hateful, rising towers and bastions of an earlier time, the distant factorial shape like a black cloud blotting out the world around it. The symptoms of the sight were immediate: a shiver crept along his spine, prickling the hairs on his skin. He felt as though the seat bucked beneath him, and his fingers squeezed white with the rosary beads hidden in a pocket as if it would calm his balance, keep him tethered to one place, sitting upright and still. And then it passed. The fields returned to unready green and open, tilled dirt parted here or there by slim country road. There was nothing to fear, the novice told himself. They can't take him back—not while he's wearing a cross ... even without the cross, they couldn't take him back. Even still, Myles felt the sharp twist of recognition that, now, he could not even hope to look back for relief. Forward, to Harroway, was his only respite. It would not be long, now. He clutched the worn, old rosary in his pocket tighter still, trusting in its antiquity.

The years had a strange way of running together like water. Like ugly old copper, the weight of the past easily fell into place below, beneath it all and out of sight. And yet when one delves deep, they run the risk of scraping against the twisted, jagged past—a thing Myles very much wished not to do. He had been given a straightforward task. When completed, he would take once more to the monotonous, impersonal rails, next time headed west. When he returned to seminary, he would say a lot more than he had said ... no more unspoken words would be left to fester between him and his Father. It was foolish of him to leave without saying a thing. He couldn't waste time in Harroway, ruminating about a dead past, getting caught in the mire and muck of history. Even if his legs, when he stood up after the train came to a skidding, screeching halt, were shakily weak, his resolve was of stone. He would not dive deep in this bog, and he would not swim for long.

The cabin doors squealed open with the frightening demand to depart. Myles swallowed his discomfort, and all the senseless overthinking with it. He waited behind two strangers, faces he might, in a different life, have recognized and gotten to know. When the last man stepped across the gap between station and railcar, Myles mimed the move like an actor. The next steps brought him into the modest station, a stepping stone for journeys in and out of the big city. When this same train hummed again, it would carry on north to its real prize, perhaps forgetting it had even halted here. He realized as he walked head-down that the train would soon be abandoning him, would leave him stranded. His hand fidgeting in his robe pocket, he craned his posture upright and broadened his stride. He tried to look like a man who didn't need an escape, a back-up measure. Little good did the effort do him; halfway down the station platform's length came the collision. A curse and a swift succession of tiny taps parted the crash and his recognition.

"My apologies," Myles stammered, his gut twisting once more with onset shame. Not so much an actor after all. The man he'd shouldered into faced him with a changing face and a well-trimmed sandy beard. It began to twitch, wince—stifling a grin. The seminarian's hand twitched, and he realized that it had flung out of his robe pocket with the collision.

"Your beads, sir?"

"My ..." he asked, face flushing, before the man, wearing a curiously blue threadbare coat, shrunk from view—everything shrunk from view—and the young, foppish, little fool of a seminarian turned to see the rolling of exactly fifty nine sandalwood, palm wood, and olive wood beads, the tip-tapping as they scattered down the stairs one way, onto the rails the other way.

"... God!" he cried, hunching over at once in the stupid effort to collect them all, cupping his hands as if he were a walking dustpan—not far off the mark at any rate. 

He hunched all over the station, half-crawling from the open space to the dusty undercover of the benches, madly grasping at the little knobs for a whole minute before he saw a figure join in, picking them up one-by-one with a strange, almost inquisitive precision.

A few more minutes, and a dozen frantic searches, slipped past until the figure approached. Myles, hunched and cripplingly quiet, hands now coated in dust, dirt, and goodness knew what else—beads spilling every now and again whenever he'd make too quick a movement to capture a stray—looked up to the stranger. "Again, sir, my apologies ..."

"You're excused," she replied, "but how is your sight? Are you alright?"

He blinked, stood himself upright—not without sore strain—and carefully pocketed the scattered rosary beads he'd collected. "Oh, there's a good question," he muttered. Sure enough, the sand-bearded man was nowhere to be seen. "You've been such a help, lady. I don't know what happened, they just snapped free."

A short, modestly-dressed woman, maybe a worker, besides the out-of-place genteel boater hat she wore, probably not to shield her eyes from the sun—there was scarce any sun to go around in Harroway, usually. She raised a palm full of a dozen or so beads and proffered a polite smile. "Catholic?"

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Yes. "Priest?"

No—"just a student, as it is, passing through." Chicago?

"Here. I have some business in Harroway."

"How interesting," her smile beamed, and she lifted her hand above Myles's, gently pouring the beads into his cupped palms. "Is it to do with the sick priest over on Juniper?"

"Sick priest? I'm afraid I didn't know," he muttered. "No, it's about St. Antony's, the orphanage. Anyhow, thank you very much, ma'am. I am Myles MacWard," he added with an affected dip of his head, like a stage actor for a bow. He didn't realize how ridiculous it might look until afterward, when she mimicked an impractical curtsy, her smile turned grin.

"Missus Pease, if you please," she said. "It's nice meeting you, mister MacWard. I hope you found all your beads."

"I am sure I'm closer with your help," he said half-seriously. He knew that he'd lost too many to come anywhere near all. "Good day, Mrs. Pease," he said as she turned to hurry off somewhere with a distant good day in return. At once, he got to work scanning over the station another few times, though the effort produced no results. He put a dirt-stained hand to his silver crucifix, clutching it at the base of his collar, and whispered a prayer before rushing down the steps, a watchful eye now honed on any knickknack or article of trash he found in his way, leaping out at anything small and insignificant enough to seem from afar like his quarry. Nevertheless, there was not a single bead between the station and St. Antony's. With a glum, self-deprecating grin, he thought they, too, might have opted to roll on to Chicago.

Navigating the familiar streets was a more difficult task than he might've expected, and yet, strangely enough, a difficulty that gave him relief. So much time had parted now and his last visit to downtown Harroway that he'd hardly recognized it at all—whether it was the town or him that changed, he wouldn't dare say. The station, at the very least, had grown, and the streets aligning it to the market seemed thrice the size they looked in his very faint flashes of memory, though that meant the trees he remembered were gone, and, it seemed, the streets thinner, the stone townhouses and stores taller and fatter. The locals were out and about, forming a hubbub that Myles was very unused to, not that he'd have known what the town was like during daytime as a boy anyway. There was a smell to the air, however—one he couldn't describe well, only that it felt denser, perhaps even rancid. The sky felt compact also, like it was lower to the earth and overbearing. Missouri's sky was broad, open, and clear; one could take a breath and feel like it was a drop in an ocean of oxygen. There was little hope of that in Harroway, or in any town between Blackleaf and Chicago, where every breath of air was a scant, limited resource, riddled with the taste of smoke and soil.

The town demanded his full attention—that and his newfound caution against shouldering into strangers. It was five minutes walking before he'd realized he'd gone straight for too long. Yet, before he turned back, he saw a street-sign suspended just above a corner beside a grocer that read Juniper Ave. which he read twice, both readings bringing him a lump in the throat. Down that way was 'the sick priest' the lady at the station told him of—no doubt, courtesy demanded him to make a visit some time before he left. There were only so many Catholic parishes in rural Illinois; to not visit, especially when one was struggling, would be a certain snub. And yet the thought of visiting a parish independently, of being seen as ... well, as a Jesuit, an autonomous member of the Society ... this gave him an inexplicable thrill, but the sort of thrill that both lifts the imagination and weighs down the senses.

With such characteristic indecision did our seminarian make his first detour of many in Harroway: with a trepidatious gulp and a spinning mind, he strolled down Juniper Avenue practically blind, walking until he reached the modest, miniature-Gothic spire that marked the stout longhouse of a wooden chapel, the tower rising feebly toward a pallid gray sky, surrounded by the towering industry and residences that overshadowed it. This was not the pinnacle of the Church in Harroway, Myles knew—only an echo of Chicago, and the Archbishop there, his outreach generous enough to form parishes even in Harroway, his attention negligent enough to ignore their decline. There was no disgrace in it, Myles corrected as he stepped up the block stairs and tapped the uninvitingly tight-frame door, pushing it open warily. Chicago delineated the beating heart of the Catholic Midwest, and its arteries traveled east from there, not west. Not since Reverend de Smet had Catholic passions gushed freely west. Father Morgan used to speak much of it. No Christian could be blamed for concentrating his guidance on his spiritual constituency—there was little of that to be had in Harroway.

The white, wooden chapel opened into a less pallid color, at least: the longhouse splayed before the entry was improper in the corner frames, dusty at the ceiling, and there was a certain sense of oaken asymmetry to the whole interior, but paintings lined the walls, and right behind the altar was fitted an out-of-place altarpiece glass of ostentatious quality and color, vibrant shades of every hue illuminating the figure of the Resurrection, every jagged glass piece a different lens from which to look upon the Lord Risen. It was neither a large nor a unique piece, but the very fact that it was there, and looked to be handcrafted scrupulously—no cheap nor amateurish replica, in other words—said a great deal. Rare days of sunlight would make the piece illumine the Eucharist with an almost angelic beauty. Myles felt a raw and tender moment of envy for the sight, hoping against it that he would not stay long enough to see. Besides him and the glass, it seemed as if there were no other presences to make out.

With this solace in mind, Myles felt it too intoxicating a prospect to refuse; he neared the altar and sat in the rickety, protestant-seeming pews up front. How far had he come to step foot in this chapel—to find sanctuary in the church of his hometown? How different might things have been if he had not needed to take such a long roundabout way to reach this place ... if, as a child, it had been sufficient to be a boy, to sit upon pews, to listen to droning sermons ... he, of course, could never have been a Catholic, not without what happened. So it turned out that there was little use—so he thought—in imagining the ways things might have turned out differently. Underneath the quiet of the modest, wooden chapel, he felt with his body and soul that he had ended up in the right place, if even for the moment. His swimming thoughts stirred, the raging sea of his worries quieted, even if for only a moment. The trickling of his spirit had found a byway ... around the old, obstinate dam of maturity. There was in this chapel a little of that innocent light which could only be found where it was least expected. How long until that light would go out? And would he feel it again, if he left and returned on Sunday?

The door creaked open and shut behind him. His manners kept his head faced forward, as if his contemplation had not been cut—as if his contemplation was not dependent on the very fact of being alone. Heavy wooden steps preceded a slow seating just behind him. Myles's eyes lifted to the visage of the Lord, whose own eyes faced not his, and were not downcast nor set on the altar ... but faced up, skyward, toward the dark clouds lifted above and past them, He faced the Father. Myles pondered how great the connection was to the Holy Father when one looked up at an upward-facing Christ—he wondered how distantly God was observing him, just then. His right hand reflexively reached into a pocket full of parted, disconnected beads, and his heart sank at a possible answer.

"Myles MacWard."

It took him a moment to register. He'd begun to think that he was rather slow after all—everything that happened to him that day took him by surprise, and caught him stammering, stumbling into the next accident or misfortune. That moment of slow reaction, however he lamented it at the time, might actually have saved him. His sunken heart and his onset panic, holding his tongue hostage in his throat against him, had frozen him in place, almost as if he were praying, or, perhaps, asleep.

"Well," it hoarsely continued, "if it is Myles MacWard, here's the deal. You remember your friends, don't you?"

If—the word came like a scalpel. Such ifs were no flimsy phrases, no passing words. His heart skipped in his chest. If you are the man, then so-and-so ... if you aren't, nevermind—someone wanted Myles, he realized, stifling a reflexive swallow, they wanted something from Myles, or to do something to him ... his heart, though already sunken low, throbbed with new intensity, his spine would have turned like a worm in a dirt grave, his fingers, lacking a rosary while shoved in his robe pocket, instead shut hard against his palm, nails biting into skin. He wouldn't think their name—he'd try to stave the thought away. But it could be them. They could want him back—no, they could want to take the settlement back ... how could they not? Had he not always known that it was too good to be true, that no company so crass would do such a charity, that no child so unlucky as he could have his misfortune paid back in full and then some like that?

"Well, if you're sleeping, there's no good to it. But,"—the voice had shrunk lower, even conspiratorial ... or was he truly unsure if he was asleep?—"your friends, let's just say, want to catch up with you. You, after all, are our own little cash star, aren't you?"

The play came naturally, by this point. Myles was mistaken, prone to accidents—he'd snapped a rosary older than him just earlier that day. But he was not so foolish to speak up now, and, it occurred to him, it might not matter if he did. He wound his eyes shut as if doing so might also somehow shut out his hearing—it didn't.

"We'll catch up, old chap. Don't be stingy when we do," the grisly voice finished. A squeak released from the pew, and a series of slow, heavy steps followed the length of the longhouse back to the exit.

Myles, heart racing, released his nails from his palm. He pried, by force of will, his frightened eyes open. He had looked away in the train, he had shut his eyes on the ride. He had spent years in seminary, now cast out into the world—a world which he did not understand, like, or trust. And yet all the same, he had found his sole sanctuary and a moment of peace in this chapel, his spiritual inheritance ... and the world had walked right in, stole in on him still counting his broken beads, and made a threat. Was it the past, come to seize his future as he'd always privately feared? Or was this something of the world at present, something which his naive heart could not yet understand, something he could not contextualize? What was this, who was this? Was it the settlement money—yes, of course it was, it would always come down to that ... then was it them after all?

In that instant, he understood this much, and only this: he would not sleep a single night in Harroway if he did not find some semblance of an answer to this question. He flit his eyes sideways and craned quietly his head toward the door. He braced his vision for any number of revelations; it would not have shocked him in the least if it were Satan himself waiting for him to only look. Yet the man leaving the chapel, just now pulling open the door, had his back faced to him. His coat, clear against the white plaster interior, was threadbare blue.

The door shut quietly behind him, and Myles was once again left alone.