Specimen Days

He was an immense gray-skinned man whose face, wide as a shovel, didn’t move when he talked. Only his mouth moved, as if by magic a man made of iron had been given the power of speech.

“Yes,” Lucas said.

The man looked at him skeptically. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. As he spoke, his mouth showed flashes of pink, livid in the gray face.

“I’m sound, sir. I can work as well as anybody.”

“And how old are you?”

“Thirteen, sir,” Lucas answered.

“You’re not thirteen.”

“I’m thirteen in another month.”

The man shook his iron head. “This isn’t work for a child.”

“Please, sir. I’m stronger than I seem.” Lucas settled his shoulders, striving to look sturdier.

“Well, they’ve given you the job. We’ll see how you do.”

Before he could stop himself, Lucas said, “Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you.”

“What?”

“Please, sir,” Lucas said. “I’ll work hard. I can do anything.”

“We’ll see. I’m Jack Walsh.”

Lucas held out his hand. Jack looked at it as if Lucas had offered him a lily. He took it in his own, pressed it hard enough to put the sting of tears in Lucas’s eyes. If Walt was the book, Jack was the works. He was made of iron, with a living mouth.

“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s get you started.”

Lucas followed him through the entranceway, into a hall where men behind wire cages scowled over papers. Beyond the hall, they came to an enormous room lined with furnaces. Where the light from the furnaces didn’t reach, it was twilight, a dull orange twilight that faded, in its remoter parts, to a bruised, furtive undark. The room reeked of heat and coal, of creosote. It rang and wheezed. Furies of sparks swirled up, skittish as flies. Among the sparks, men stood before the furnaces, stoking the fires with long black poles.

“This is coking,” Jack said, and said no more. Did he mean “cooking”? Lucas thought he would ask his questions later.

Jack escorted him past the row of furnaces, under a chaos of black hooks and leather pulleys that depended from the high ceiling, touched here and there by small incidences of orange firelight. A portal that opened from the room where the coking (the cooking?) was done led onto another room, equally large but dimmer, lined on either side by the gray-brown bulks of machines as preposterous and grand as elephants, machines made up of belts and beams and wheels turning with sharp squeals and groans. The room was like a stable or a dairy. It was full of steady, creaturely life.

“Cutting and stamping,” Jack said. “This is where you’ll be.”

The atmosphere of the cutting-and-stamping room was dust, but bright dust, drifting silvery particles that winked and glimmered in the sluggish light. Men stood at the machines engaged in mysterious efforts, bent over, straining with their shoulders and thighs. Lucas saw that the men, like Jack, had taken on the color of the room. Were they dying or just becoming more like the air?

Jack led him to a machine at the far end. Yet another room opened off this one, though Lucas could discern only a sepulchral stillness and what appeared to be stacks of vaults, like catacombs, filled with silver canisters. It seemed there must be another room after that and then another and another. The works might extend for miles, like a series of caverns. It seemed that it would be possible to walk through them for hours and finally reach—what? Lucas didn’t fully understand what it was that the works produced. Simon had never spoken of it. Lucas had imagined some treasure, a living jewel, a ball of green fire, infinitely precious, the making of which required unstinting effort. He wondered now why he had never thought to ask. His brother’s labors had always seemed a mystery, to be respected and revered.

“Here,” Jack said, stopping before a machine. “You work here.”

“This is where my brother worked.”

“It is.”

Lucas stood before the machine that had taken Simon. It was a toothed wheel, like a titanic piano roll, set over a broad belt bordered by clamps.

Jack said, “You must be more careful than your brother was.”

Lucas understood from Jack’s voice that the machine was not to blame. He stared at the machine as he’d stared once at the gorilla at Barnum’s. It was immense and stolid. It wore its wheel as a snail wears its shell, with a languid and inscrutable pride. Like a snail with its shell, the machine contained a quicker, more liquid life in its nether parts. Under the wheel, which snagged flecks of orange light on its square teeth, were the rows of clamps, the pale, naked-looking leather of the belt, the slender stalks of the levers. The wheel harbored a shifting shadow of brownish-black. The machine was at once formidable and tender-looking. It offered its belt like a tentative promise of kindness.

Jack said, “Tom Clare, over there” (he nodded at a young man laboring at the next machine), “stacks plates in the bin here. Tom, this is Lucas, the new man.”

Tom Clare, sharp-faced, whiskered, looked up. “Sorry about your loss,” he said. He would have seen Simon eaten by the machine. Was it his fault, then? Could he have acted more quickly, been more brave?

“Thank you,” Lucas answered.

Jack lifted from the bin a flat rectangle of iron, the size of an oven door, and laid it on the belt. “You fasten it tight,” he said. He screwed clamps down onto the iron plate, three on each side. “See the lines on the belt?”

The belt was marked with white lines, each drawn several inches above one of the clamps. “The top edge,” Jack said, “has to be lined up exactly. Do you understand? It has to be right up on this line.”

“I see,” Lucas said.

“When it’s even with the line and when the clamps are secure, you pull this lever first.”

He pulled a lever to the right of the belt. The wheel awakened and began, with a sigh, to turn. Its teeth came to within an inch of the belt.

“When the drum is turning, you pull the other lever.”

He pulled a second lever that stood beside the first. The belt slowly began to move. Lucas watched the belt bear the iron plate forward until it met with the teeth of the wheel. The teeth, impressing into the iron, sounded like hammers banging on glass that wouldn’t break.

“Now. Follow me.” Jack led Lucas to the back of the machine, where the plate was beginning to emerge, full of shallow, square impressions.

“When it’s come through,” he said, “you go back and pull the levers again. First the second one, then the first. Understand?”

“Yes,” Lucas said.

Jack pulled the levers and stopped the machine, first the belt and then the wheel. He released the clamps from the plate of iron.

“Then you inspect it,” he said. “You make sure it’s taken a complete impression. Four across, six down. They must all be perfect. Look into every square. This is important. If it isn’t perfect you take it over there” (he pointed across the room) “to Will O’Hara, for resmelting. If you have any doubts, show it to Will. If you’re satisfied that the impressions are perfect, if you’re sure, take it to Dan Heaney over there. Any questions?”

“No, sir,” Lucas said. “I don’t think so.”

“All right, then. You try it.”

Lucas took a new plate from the bin. It was heavier than he’d expected but not too heavy to manage. He hoisted it onto the belt, pushed it carefully up to the white line, and attached the clamps. “Is that right?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

He tested the clamps. “Should I pull the lever now?” he asked.

“Yes. Pull the lever.”

Lucas pulled the first lever, which started the wheel turning. He was briefly exultant. He pulled the second lever, and the belt moved forward. To his relief, the clamps held tight.

“That’s all right,” Jack said.

Lucas watched the teeth bite into the iron. Simon would have been pulled under the wheel, first his arm and then the rest. The machine would have ground him in its teeth with the same serenity it brought to the iron. It would have believed—if machines could believe—it had simply produced another iron plate. After it had crushed Simon it would have waited patiently for the next plate.

“Now,” Jack said, “let’s go and inspect the piece.”

Lucas went with him to the machine’s far end, and saw what he had made. A plate of iron with square impressions, four across and six down.

Jack said, “Does it look all right to you?”

Lucas looked closely. It was difficult to see in the dimness. He ran a finger into each impression. He said, “I think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“I think so.”

“All right, then. What do you do now?”

“I take it to Dan Heaney.”

“That’s right.”

Lucas lifted the stamped iron, carried it to Dan Heaney’s machine. Dan, bulbous and lion-headed, nodded. After a hesitation, Lucas placed the plate carefully in a bin that stood beside Dan’s machine.

“Fine, then,” Jack said.

He had pleased Jack.

Jack said, “Do another one.”

“Sir,” Lucas asked, “what are these things I’m making?”

“They’re housings,” Jack said. “Let me watch you do another one.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lucas did another one. Jack said it was all right and went off to attend to other things.

Time passed. Lucas couldn’t have said how much. There were no clocks. There was no daylight. He loaded a plate onto the belt, lined it up, sent it through, and inspected the impressions. Four across, six down. He began trying to drop each plate onto the belt so that its upper edge fell as close to the white line as possible and needed only the slightest nudge to put it in place. For a while he hoped the impressions made by the wheel would be perfect, and after what seemed hours of that he began hoping for minor imperfections, a blunted corner or a slight cant that would have been invisible to eyes less diligent than his. He found only one flawed impression, and that debatable. One of the squares seemed less deep than the others, though he could not be entirely sure. Still, he took the plate proudly over to Will for resmelting and felt strong and capable after.

When he had tired of trying to hit the line on his first try, and when he had grown indifferent to the question of whether he was searching for flaws or searching for perfection, he tried thinking of other things. He tried thinking of Catherine, of his mother and father. Had his mother awakened? Was she herself again, ready to cook and argue? He tried thinking of Simon. The work, however, didn’t permit such thoughts. The work demanded attention. He entered a state of waking sleep, an ongoing singularity of purpose, in which his mind was filled with that which must fill it, to the exclusion of all else. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.

It was after the lunch hour when his sleeve caught in a clamp. He’d allowed his mind to drift. The tug was gentle and insistent as an infant’s grip. He was already reaching for another clamp and saw that a corner of his shirtsleeve was in the serrated mouth of the first, pinched tight between clamp and plate. He pulled instinctively away, but the clamp held the fabric with steady assurance. It was singular and passionate as a rat with a scrap of gristle. Lucas thought for a moment how well the machine was made—the jaws of the clamps were so strong and sure. He tugged again. The clamp didn’t yield. Only when he turned the pin, awkwardly, with his left hand, did the clamp relax itself and give up the corner of his sleeve. The cloth still bore the imprint of the clamp’s tiny toothmarks.

Lucas looked with mute wonder at the end of his sleeve. This was how. You allowed your attention to wander, you thought of other things, and the clamp took whatever was offered it. That was the clamp’s nature. Lucas looked around guiltily, wondering if Tom or Will or Dan had noticed. They had not noticed. Dan tapped with a wrench on his machine. He struck it firmly but kindly on the flank of the box that held its workings. The wrench rang on the metal like a church bell.

Lucas rolled his sleeves to his elbows. He went on working.

It seemed, as he loaded the plates onto the belt, that the machines were not inanimate; not quite inanimate. They were part of a continuum: machines, then grass and trees, then horses and dogs, then human beings. He wondered if the machine had loved Simon, in its serene and unthinking way. He wondered if all the machines at the works, all the furnaces and hooks and belts, mutely admired their men, as horses admired their masters. He wondered if they waited with their immense patience for the moment their men would lose track of themselves, let their caution lapse so the machines could take their hands with loving firmness and pull them in.

He lifted another plate from the bin, lined it up, fastened the clamps, and sent it under the teeth of the wheel.

Where was Jack? Didn’t he want to know how well Lucas was doing his work? Lucas said, as the plate went under the wheel, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”

Jack didn’t come to him until the workday’s end. Jack looked at Lucas, looked at the machine, nodded, and looked at Lucas again.

“You’ve done all right,” he said.

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll be back tomorrow, then.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Lucas extended his hand to Jack and was surprised to see that it shook. He had known his fingers were bleeding; he hadn’t known about the shaking. Still, Jack took his hand. He didn’t appear to mind about the shaking or the blood.

“Prodigal,” Lucas said, “you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!”

Jack paused. His iron face took on three creases across the expanse of its forehead.

“What was that?”

“Good night,” Lucas said.

“Good night,” Jack replied doubtfully.

Lucas hurried away, passed with the others through the cooking room, where the men with the black poles were shutting down their furnaces. He found that he could not quite remember having been anywhere but the works. Or rather, he remembered his life before coming to the works as a dream, watery and insubstantial. It faded as dreams fade on waking. None of it was as actual as this. None of it was so true. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.

A woman in a light blue dress waited outside the entrance to the works. Lucas took a moment in recognizing her. He saw first that a woman stood at the entrance and thought that the works had summoned an angel to bid the men goodbye, to remind them that work would end someday and a longer dream begin. Then he understood. Catherine had come. She was waiting for him.

He recognized her a moment before she recognized him. He looked at her face and saw that she had forgotten him, too.

He called out, “Catherine.”

“Lucas?” she said.

He ran to her. She inhabited a sphere of scented and cleansed air. He was gladdened. He was furious. How could she come here? Why would she embarrass him so?

She said, “Look at you. You’re all grime. I didn’t know you at first.”

“It’s me,” he said.

“You’re shaking all over.”

“I’m all right. I’m well.”

“I thought you shouldn’t walk home alone. Not after your first day.”

He said, “This isn’t a fit place for a woman on her own.”

“Poor boy, just look at you.”

He bristled. He had set the wheel turning. He had inspected every plate.

“I’m fine,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant to.

“Well, let’s take you home. You must be starving.”

They walked up Rivington Street together. She did not put her hand on his elbow. He was too dirty for that. A fitful breeze blew in from the East River and along the street, stirring up miniature dust storms with scraps of paper caught in them. The dark facades of brick houses rose on either side, the lid of the sky clamped down tightly overhead. The sidewalk was crowded, all the more so because those who walked there shared the pavement with heaps of refuse that lay in drifts against the sides of the buildings, darkly massed, wet and shiny in their recesses.

Lucas and Catherine walked with difficulty on the narrow paved trail between the housefronts and the piles of trash. They fell in behind a woman and a child who moved with agonizing slowness. The woman—was she old or young? It was impossible to tell from behind—favored her left leg, and the child, a girl in a long, ragged skirt, seemed not to walk at all but to be conveyed along by her mother’s hand as if she were a piece of furniture that must be dragged home. Ahead of the woman and child walked a large bald man in what appeared to be a woman’s coat, worn shiny in spots, far too small for him, the sleeves ripped at the shoulders, showing gashes of pink satin lining. Lucas could not help imagining this procession of walkers, all of them poor and battered, wearing old coats too small or too large for them, dragging children who could not or would not walk, all marching along Rivington Street, impelled by someone or something that pushed them steadily forward, slowly but inexorably, so it only seemed as if they moved of their own will; all of them walking on, past the houses and stables, past the taverns, past the works and into the river, where they would fall, one after another after another, and continue to walk, drowned but animate, on the bottom, until the street was finally empty and the people were all in the river, trudging along its silty bed, through its drifts of brown and sulfur, into its deeper darks, until they reached the ocean, this multitude of walkers, until they were nudged into open water where silver fish swam silently past, where the ocher of the river gave over to inky blue, where clouds floated on the surface, far, far above, and they were free, all of them, to drift away, their coats billowing like wings, their children flying effortlessly, a whole nation of the dead, dispersing, buoyant, faintly illuminated, spreading out like constellations into the blue immensity.

He and Catherine reached the Bowery, where the rowdies strutted together, brightly clad, past the taverns and oyster houses. They swaggered and shouted, chewing cigars fat as sausages. One tipped his stovepipe to Catherine, began to speak, but was pulled onward by his laughing companions. The Bowery was Broadway’s lesser twin, a minor star in the constellation, though no less bright and loud. Still, there was more room to walk here. The truly poor were more numerous.

Catherine said, “Was it dreadful there?”

Lucas answered, “The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass.”

“Please, Lucas,” she said, “speak to me in plain English.”

“The foreman said I did well,” he told her.

“Will you promise me something?”

“Yes.”

“Promise that as long as you must work there you will be very, very careful.”

Lucas thought guiltily of the clamp. He had not been careful. He had allowed himself to dream and drift.

He said, “I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass.”

“And promise me that as soon as you can, you will leave that place and find other work.”

“I will.”

“You are …”

He waited. What would she tell him he was?

She said, “You are meant for other things.”

He was happy to hear it, happy enough. And yet he’d hoped for more. He’d wanted her to reveal something, though he couldn’t say what. He’d wanted a wonderful lie that would become true the moment she said it.

He said, “I promise.” What exactly was he meant for? He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

“It’s hard,” she said.

“And you? Were you all right at work today?”

“I was. I sewed and sewed. It was a relief, really, to work.”

“Were you …”

She waited. What did he mean to ask her?

He asked, “Were you careful?”

She laughed. His face burned. Had it been a ridiculous question? She seemed always so available to harm, as if someone as kind as she, as sweet-smelling, could only be hurt, either now or later.

“I was,” she said. “Do you worry about me?”

“Yes,” he said. He hoped it was not a foolish assertion. He waited nervously to see if she’d laugh again.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “You must think only of yourself. Promise me.”

He said, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“Thank you, my dear,” she answered, and she said no more.

He took her to her door, on Fifth Street. They stood together on the stoop that was specked with brightness.

“You will go home now,” she said, “and have your supper.”

“May I ask you something?” he said.

“Ask me anything.”

“I wonder what it is I’m making at the works.”

“Well, the works produces many things, I think.”

“What things?”

“Parts of larger things. Gears and bolts and … other parts.”

“They told me I make housings.”

“There you are, then. That’s what you make.”

“I see,” he said. He didn’t see, but it seemed better to let the subject pass. It seemed better to be someone who knew what a housing was.

Catherine looked at him tenderly. Would she kiss him again?

She said, “I want to give you something.”

He trembled. He kept his jaws clamped shut. He would not speak, not as the book or as himself.

She unfastened the collar of her dress and reached inside. She drew out the locket. She pulled its chain up over her head, held locket and chain in her palm.

She said, “I want you to wear this.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“It has a lock of your brother’s hair inside.”

“I know. I know that.”

“Do you know,” she said, “that Simon wore its twin, with my picture inside?”

“Yes.”

“I was not allowed to see him,” she said.

“None of us was.”

“But the undertaker told me the locket was with him still. He said Simon wore it in his casket.”

Simon had Catherine with him, then. He had something of Catherine in the box across the river. Did that make her an honorary member of the dead?

Catherine said, “I’ll feel better if you wear it when you go to the works.”

“It’s yours,” he said.

“Call it ours. Yours and mine. Will you do it, to please me?”

He couldn’t protest, then. How could he refuse to do anything that would please her?

He said, “If you like.”

She put the chain over his head. The locket hung on his chest, a little golden orb. She had worn it next to her skin.

“Good night,” she said. “Have your supper and go straight to bed.”

“Good night.”

She kissed him then, not on his lips but on his cheek. She turned away, put her key in the lock. He felt the kiss still on his skin after she’d withdrawn.

“Good night,” he said. “Good night, good night.”

“Go,” she commanded him. “Do what you must for your mother and father, and rest.”

He said, “I ascend from the moon … I ascend from the night.”

She glanced at him from her doorway. She had been someone who laughed easily, who was always the first to dance. She looked at him now with such sorrow. Had he disappointed her? Had he deepened her sadness? He stood helplessly, pinned by her gaze. She turned and went inside.

At home, he fixed what supper he could for himself and his father. There were bits, still, from what had been brought for after the burial. A scrap of fatty ham, a jelly, the last of the bread. He laid it before his father, who blinked, said, “Thank you,” and ate. Between mouthfuls, he breathed from the machine.

Lucas’s mother was still in bed. How would they manage about food if she didn’t rise soon?

As his father ate and breathed, Lucas went to his parents’ bedroom. Softly, uncertainly, he pushed open the door. The bedroom was dark, full of its varnish and wool. Over the bed the crucifix hung, black in the sable air.

He said, “Mother?”

He heard the bedclothes stirring. He heard the whisper of her breath.

She said, “Who’s there?”