Page 271 - What They Did to the Kid

What They Did to the Kid 259

unnumbing, beginning to believe,
I taste the coming bleak
of the world’s most lonely winter.

My heart broke that day the earth stood still. The world quaked,
fell to its knees, stopped, not knowing what to do, where to go, feel-
ing time itself divide into before that day and after that day. Oh Jack!

December 5, 1963

Days of mourning later, after the Widow, after the tiny daughter,
after the young son saluting, after the saddled black stallion, rider-
less, with the boots turned backwards in the stirrups, after the days
of drums, Lock kind of slapped me around. He said my sentiments
were hopeless, God rest ye, so hopeless they weren’t even Christian.
It was again the Eve of the Feast of Saint Nicholas, merry gentle-
men, and while Ruprecht ran wild through the study halls exciting
all the boys, let nothing you dismay, with thoughts of Christmas vaca-
tion, I told Lock, my best friend, nothing of my decision to abandon
my vocation. He would have judged cause and effect in what was
only sad coincidence.
John Kennedy was dead and I was done a-grailing.
I had saved enough money in my shoe box for a one-way train
trip home to Peoria.
Later, in the dead of the night, at 4:30, before dawn, fourteen
days after the martyrdom of Jack Kennedy, the martyrdom of my
vocation, I left Misericordia Seminary.
I walked quietly down four flights of marble stairs, alone, and
with one suitcase, into which I packed eleven years of my life, I
pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out into the snow
still lit by moonlight. Misericordia stood dark and separate behind
me.
I was a twenty-four-year-old boy, and I had never ever in eleven
years of keeping the Grand Silence from dusk till dawn been outside
the seminary buildings after night prayer.
All the other boys and all the priests lay asleep. Only the sacristy
light, high in a chapel window, showed out in the cold air. The

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