LAGRANGE, Ky. - On the way from Cincinnati to Louisville, a train rumbles past Earl Bierman's hell.
Its wail fills the prison where the old man makes his bed. Lost souls sound this lonely.
On a television screen in a room near the front of Kentucky State Reformatory, the faces of parole board members flicker into view.
''They're ready,'' a guard says to someone out in the hall.
And an old man with thick glasses and narrow shoulders appears in the doorway.
Inmate number 114523
That's Earl Bierman. That's him there at the threshold.
He will enter the room and sit at a long table. He will turn to face the TV screen, propping his left elbow on the shiny tabletop. Then he will lean forward, narrow shoulders hunched.
''Good afternoon, Mr. Bierman,'' the chairwoman of the parole board will say - and, in so doing, will begin one final confession for a fallen man of the cloth.
Earl Bierman used to be a teacher at Covington Latin School. But in 1993 he pleaded guilty to 29 counts of sodomy and other charges involving six boys. Now he is inmate number 114523.
Father Bierman has spent the last 42 months at Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange on a 20-year sentence. He ate scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning, the morning of his parole hearing. He ate fruit and biscuits.
Now he must swallow his considerable pride.
Up the road in downtown LaGrange, diners are raising their napkins, another lunch hour done. In a moment, a train will run through, northbound. The tracks run right through the heart of town.
LaGrange's motto is ''On Track.'' But who has a clue where the big trains are going? Who can imagine where they've been or what kind of burden they carry? The trains are so close and so dangerous. And yet so unknowable.
Like the prisoners on the edge of town.
Slicing the air
Who has Earl Bierman become, and is he any different from the man who came to LaGrange in July 1993? In moments, the parole board will begin the search for answers.
Desperately, Father Bierman will plead his case, seeking absolution from two men and a woman miles away in Frankfort.
And the cry of that northbound train, hauling steel for cars from Birmingham to Detroit, will fill the hearing room as Earl Bierman's voice rises.
''I'm dying here in prison,'' he will say. ''It's killing me, literally.
''Do you think after this hell on earth I would ever reoffend again?''
His hands will slice the air. They move, they wave, they gesture.
Saving one soul
Father Bierman's hands are small and delicate like the claws of a bird, with fingers so smooth they shine. This is a man who hasn't done much manual labor. These hands have offered the blessed sacrament and they have torn asunder.
They have blessed and they have cursed.
They have touched souls and teen-age boys.
And now, after destroying so many lives, they will work hard in the end to save only one:
That of Earl Bierman.
In a moment, Board chairwoman Helen Howard-Hughes will put her hand to her throat and squint.
Board member Theodore Kuster will look at Father Bierman, saying: ''I don't see as much remorse as I would expect from a man of the cloth.''
And the board will vote to deny parole.
All of it will happen just this way. But for the purposes of our story, it hasn't yet. In our story, it's still 1 p.m. on a Thursday, and when we leave Father Bierman is filling the doorway, standing at the threshold, full of hope, full of the future, dreaming of the fresh start his victims never can, dangerous and unknowable, a train bearing down on the town.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.