St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) by Terence M. Green

an altar boy, serving Sunday Mass at St. Paul's Church, across from the school. The image of my father as a kid in grade school is hard enough for me to conjure up. The thought of him as an altar boy is almost incomprehensible.
    The whole area was called Cabbagetown. Irish Cabbagetown. Up until the 1950s it was pretty much a slum. Today, it's quite gentrified, diverse, interesting, downtown, central—trendiness mingled with vestigial traces of the old, the seedy. Corktown was a part of it—the part south of Queen, where St. Paul's was. Quite appropriate, since Dad's paternal grandfather, a shoemaker by trade, one of my great-grandfathers—who had the same name as Dad's father, Matthew Nolan—was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1842.
    It was in the newspaper just recently: six coffins discovered during playground construction at St. Paul's School, which was built upon a nineteenth-century cemetery. Burial records show that nearly three thousand Catholics were interred there between 1847 and 1857. No one knows how many bodies were buried between 1822, when it opened, and 1847, when records began. Thousands more, presumably. Also in the area is a mass trench, containing more than eight hundred Catholics who died of typhus in 1847—emigrants who had escaped the Irish famine only to perish thousands of miles away, be buried in that strange, hard soil. The cemetery was closed in 1857 because it was full; grave markers—not the bodies—were removed in 1870.
    As a child, my father played atop their bodies. Brother Jerome wielded his eraser there. They are still there, an entire community, founders, shoring us up, unsung.
    My father and Brother Jerome are still there too.
     
    Jeanne: He told her he was working in a factory in Dayton. That's how I know what I know.
    Delco. It fit. Owned by General Motors. Jesus. I even had a Delco battery keeping the electrics in my '93 Honda Civic humming. I saw the irony: maybe Bobby Swiss had made the unit that helped power me here, to Dayton, across Mad River, to this low floodplain of the Great Miami, seat of Montgomery County.
    Down a funnel. Inevitable.
     
    My map told me I was actually in Kettering. From what I could determine, Dayton was a metropolitan area that included the cities of Kettering, Miamisburg, Xenia, Fairborn, Oakwood, and Vandalia. Population of Dayton was around two hundred thousand. If you included the greater metropolitan area, it went up around a million.
    I stopped at a 7-Eleven, looked up Delco in the phone book, and called. I told the woman who answered that I was a journalist doing an article on factory shift work, and asked them how long a typical shift would be at their plant. The one that starts at 7 a.m., for instance.
    "It finishes at five. Shifts are eight hours, with an hour for lunch or dinner, and two half-hour breaks."
    I hung up. I had a whole day ahead of me. I bought a pocket guide to Dayton.
     
    I'd seen Wright State University from my window at the Hampton Inn. Like Bowling Green, I wanted to see more of it.
     
    It was enormous, a huge campus. And beautiful: trees, ravines. I parked the car, got out, walked for a bit.
    My guide told me that its charter was less than thirty years old, that there were sixteen thousand students here, more than ninety percent of them Ohioans, that there were seven hundred thousand volumes in the libraries. As a state university, its tuition was around four thousand dollars—double that if you were from out of state—staggering sums to me, especially when you factored in living expenses as well.
    In the bookstore, Dayton's aviation pioneers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, were represented by a silhouetted logo of their famous biplane. A metaphor for discovery, change, literally throwing off earthly shackles, defying gravity, they had taken flight, freed themselves.
    As at Bowling Green, and as I had the previous evening from the window of my room at the Hampton Inn, I pictured Adam sitting in libraries here, surrounded