Creed came down from the tower

"Right, right, right. Now go out there and execute. Move that ball. Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody." Garland Hobbs handed off to me on a quick trap and two people hit me. There was a big pileup and I felt a fair number of knees and elbows and then somebody's hand was inside my facemask trying to come away with flesh. I realized Mr. Kimbrough had issued directives. On the next play I was passblocking for Hobbs and they sent everybody including the free safety. I went after the middle linebacker, Dennis Smee, helmet to groin, and then fell on top of him with a forearm leading the way. Whistles were blowing and the coaches edged in a bit closer. Vern Feck took off his baseball cap and put his pink face right into the pileup, little sparks of saliva jumping out of his whistle as he blew it right under my nose. Creed came down from the tower. Chapter 7 of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least. Other tilings were not so displeasing. Exile compensates the banished by offering certain opportunities. Each day, for example, I spent some time in meditation. This never failed to be a lovely interlude, for there was nothing to meditate on. Each day I added a new word to my vocabulary, wrote a letter to someone I loved, and memorized the name of one more president of the United States and the years of his term in office. Simplicity, repetition, solitude, starkness, discipline upon discipline. There were profits here, things that could be used to make me stronger; the small fanatical monk who clung to my liver would thrive on such ascetic scraps. And then there was geography. We were in the middle of the middle of nowhere, that terrain so flat and bare, suggestive of the end of recorded time, a splendid sense of remoteness firing my soul. It was easy to feel that back up there, where men spoke the name civilization in wistful tones, I was wanted for some terrible crime. Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history. I found comfort in west Texas. There was even pleasure in the daily punishment on the field. I felt that I was better for it, reduced in complexity, a warrior.