This Side of Brightness

chapter 2. 1916

They arrive at dawn in their geography of hats. A dark field of figures, stalks in motion, bending toward the docklands.

Scattered at first in the streets of Brooklyn — they have come by trolley and ferry and elevated train — they begin to gather together in a wave. Hard men, diligent in the smoking of cigarettes, they stamp yesterday’s mud from their boots as they walk. A trail of muck is left in the snow. Ice puddles are cracked by the weight of their feet. The cold inveigles itself into their bodies. Some of the men have big mustaches that move like prairie grasses above their lips. Others are young and raw from razors. All of them have faces hollowed by the gravity of their work; they smoke furiously, with the knowledge of those who might be dead in just a few hours. Hunching down into their overcoats, they can perhaps still smell last night on their bodies — they might have been drunk or they might have been making love or they might have been both at once. Later they will laugh at these stories of drink and love, but for now they are silent. It is far too cold to do anything but walk and smoke. They move toward the East River and cluster near the tunnel entrance, stamping their boots on the cobblestones for warmth.

The snow turns to slush at their feet.

When the whistle calls the sandhogs to work, they take a last pull on their cigarettes. The red tops of the butts flare and are dropped to the ground, one by one, as if swarms of fireflies are laying themselves down to rest.

In the middle of the line, Nathan Walker watches as men from the nighttime shift emerge from the tunnel, mucked head to toe, exhausted. Walker realizes that he is looking at his future, so he doesn’t stare too closely, but every now and then his hand stretches out and slaps a finished man’s shoulder. The weary man raises his head, nods, lurches on.

Walker resists the urge to sneeze. He knows that to have a cold means losing a day’s pay — his nose or his ears might leak blood in the compressed air beneath the river. If a cold is telegraphed, the foreman will pull him out from the crowd. So Walker sucks his coughing and his sneezing down into his stomach. He takes an amulet from his pocket, a piece of stone, and rolls it around in his fingers. The good-luck charm is icy to the touch.

Walker whispers to his partner, Con O’Leary. “What say, bud?”

“Sick as a small hospital. A hangover to beat the band.”

“Me too.”

“Sweet Jaysus, it’s cold though,” says O’Leary.

“Ain’t it just?”

“Heads up, son, here we go.”

The foreman nods at the two sandhogs, and they join the group at the mouth of the shaft. They stand close together and inch forward. Walker hears the whine of the compression machine from underground. It’s a long hard high sound that will soon become nothing in his ears; the river is a grabber of sound, taking it, swallowing it. Walker adjusts his hat and gives a last look out over the distance. Across the river the three-arch customs house is gray in the morning; longshoremen are busy at the docks; a couple of cargo ships are negotiating floes of ice; out on the water, a young woman in a bright red coat stands on the deck of a ferryboat, waving her arms back and forth. Walker recognizes her as Maura O’Leary; just before he disappears from view her husband, Con, touches his hat in a gesture that could be dismissal or boredom but is in fact love.

Walker grins at the sight, lowers his head, and begins his descent beneath the river toward another day’s digging on this, a morning so cold that even his heart feels frozen to the wall of his chest.

* * *

In the manlock, the door is closed tight and air hisses in around the sandhogs.

Walker opens the top button of his overcoat. He can feel his toes loosening now in the hot pressurized air. A bead of sweat forms on his brow, and he flicks it away with his thumb. Beside him, O’Leary stands slumped against the wall, breathing deeply. The two are soon joined by Sean Power and Rhubarb Vannucci. The air grows torrid as the pressure rises. It is as if a heat wave has decided to accompany them underground during winter. The four men hold their noses until their ears begin to pop.

After a few minutes, Power crouches down and takes a deck of cards from his dungarees. The men search in their pockets for coins and play hog poker while the air compresses their bodies to thirty-two pounds per square inch. Walker wins the first round, and Power slaps the young black man on the shoulder.

“Look at you, hey, the king of spades!”

But Walker takes no offense. He knows there is a democracy beneath the river. In the darkness every man’s blood runs the same color — a dago the same as a nigger the same as a Polack the same as a mick — so Walker just laughs, puts the winnings in his pocket, and deals the second hand.

* * *

Out of the manlock, still in their hats, the sandhogs enter the compressed air of the tunnel. More than one hundred of them, they slosh through the mud. Waterboys and welders, carpenters and grouters, hoist runners and electricians, they remove their caps and overcoats in the heat. Some have tattoos, others have potbellies, a few are emaciated, most are sinewy. Nearly all of them have worked as miners before — in Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Poland, Germany, England — with legacies of blackening lungs to prove it. If they could reach down into their throats they could chisel out diseases from their lungs. The tar and the filth would come away in their fingertips. They could hold a piece of flue-colored tissue and say, This is what the tunnels have done to me.

There have been many deaths in the tunnel, but there’s a law the sandhogs accept: you live as long as you do until you don’t.

Bare electric bulbs flicker, and the men move through a liquidy light, casting fiddleback shadows on the walls. The shadows melt and skirt and coalesce, growing longer and then shorter. In the middle of the tunnel runs a thin rail line, which will later be used for transporting equipment and mud. The men step along the tracks, and at various points they leave the convoy. Metal lunch boxes are thrown to the ground. Rosary beads are produced from pockets. The men remove their shirts in the temporary exuberance of beginning work. Here, the closure of a fist to show up an arm muscle. There, the pullback of shoulders to reveal a massive chest. Behind, the thumping sound of a fist into a palm.

But the four muckers — Walker, O’Leary, Vannucci, and Power — don’t stop to talk. They have to walk the full length of the tunnel, under the cast-iron rings, past machinery and vises and bolts and giant wrenches and stacked bags of Portland cement. Walker goes out in front, balancing on one of the metal rails, while the three others place their feet carefully on the wooden ties. Their shovels swing down by their legs. Walker’s has his name carved into the shaft, O’Leary’s has a bent metal lip, Power’s has toweling wrapped around the handle, and Vannucci’s, once minutely cracked, is held together with a metal sleeve. They continue along, right into the belly of blackness.

“Hotter than a whore’s kitchen today,” says Power.

“Ain’t that the truth?”

“Ever been in a whore’s kitchen?”

“Only for breakfast,” says Walker. “Grits and eggs over easy.”

“I swear! Listen to the youngster!”

“And a little sizzling bacon.”

“Whooeee, I like that.”

“Backside bacon. With a little on the rind.”

“Now we’re talking!”

At the head of the tunnel they reach the Greathead Shield, the last safety precaution, a giant piece of metal that is pushed through the river by hydraulic jacks. If there is an accident, the shield will hold the mud back like a lid on a cylinder. But the four men must go even further. They each take a deep breath and then stoop to enter the door in the shield. It is like entering a tiny room at the end of the world: seventy-five square feet, all darkness and damp and danger. Here, the riverbed is propped up with long breast boards and huge metal jacks. Above the men’s heads a steel ceiling juts out to protect them from falling rock and sliding mud. Right in front of their eyes hangs a wire-caged bulb, revealing mounds of dirt and puddles of filthy water. The bulb has a pulse to it, the electricity not constant. Sloshing through the water on the floor of the room, Nathan Walker and Con O’Leary reach out and touch the planks for good luck.

“Touch wood, buddyblue.”

“I’m touching,” says O’Leary.

“Goddamn, even the planks done got warm.”

By the end of the day the muck behind the planks will be gone, carted out on the narrow railway track, loaded on carriages, and pulled by wheezing draft horses to a dump site in Brooklyn. Then the Greathead Shield will be pushed forward once more. Silently, the men challenge themselves to penetrate the riverbed further than ever before, maybe even twelve feet if they’re lucky. They set up a platform to stand on. Walker unwinds a jack and Vannucci takes down two breast boards to create a window for their shoveling. Power and O’Leary step back and get ready to load the mud. The four will swap places throughout the day, shoveling and loading, loading and shoveling, slashing their shovels into the soil, burying the metal edges deep.

* * *

Nathan Walker will later sit shivering in the hospital lock and say to his friends, “If only them other guys knew how to talk American, nothing bad woulda happened, nothing at all, not a damn thing.”

* * *

He is the best of them, even though he’s only nineteen years old. The work is brutal, but Walker is always the first to begin digging and the last to finish.

Tall and muscular, he sends ripples along his arm with just one movement of the shovel. He drenches his skin in sweat. The other riverdiggers envy his fluidity, the way the shovel seems to meld with his whole torso, the quiet mastery of his burrowing, the blade making repeated ellipses in the air: one, two, three, strike, return. He stands wide-footed on the platform, wearing blue overalls ripped at the knees, his red hat sideways on his head, a string sewn into the brim so he can tie it under his chin. Every ten seconds the oozy muck comes out from between the breast boards at hip level. Walker turns up shells as he digs, and he rubs them clean with his fingers. He would like to find a slice of bone, an arrowhead, or a piece of petrified wood, but he never does. Sometimes he imagines plants growing down there, yellow jasmine and magnolias and huckleberry bushes. The edges of the Okefenokee swamp come back to him in waves, murky brown waters that pile into the Suwanee of his home.

Walker has been digging for two years. He arrived on a train from Georgia, the steam whistle ringing high and shrill in his ears.

The steel shield extends above his head, but much of the time he has to go beyond the shield where there’s no protection. None of the men wear helmets, and all that’s left is just them and river soil.

Walker takes off his shirt and digs bare-chested.

Only the river’s muck is cool against his skin, and at times he smears it on his body, over his dark chest and ribs. It feels good to the touch, and soon he is filthy from head to toe.

He knows that at any moment an avalanche of muck and water could sweep the men backward. They could drown with the East River going down their throats, strange fish and odd rocks in their bellies. The water could pin them against the Greathead Shield while the alarm sounds — a frantic rat tat tat tat of tools on steel — while the men further back in the tunnel scramble toward safety. Or escaping air could suck them against the wall, hurl them through space, shatter their spines against a breast board. Or a shovel might slip and slice a man’s forehead clean open. Or fire could lick through the tunnel. Or the bends — the dreaded bends — could send nitrogen bubbles racing to their knees or shoulders or brains. Walker has seen men collapse in the tunnel, grasping at their joints, their bodies ribboned in sudden agony; it’s a sandhog’s disease, there is nothing anyone can do about it, and the afflicted are taken back to the manlock, where their bodies are decompressed as slowly as possible.

But these things don’t scare Walker — he is alive, and in yellowy darkness he uses every ounce of his body to shove the river tunnel along.

The muckers have a special language — hydraulic jack, trench jack, excelsior, shimmy, taper rings, erector shield — but after a while their language is mostly silence. Words are precious in the compressed air. “Goddammit!” brings a bead of sweat to the men’s brows. An economy of hush and striking shovels, Walker breaking it very occasionally with his own gospel song.

“Lord, I ain’t seen a sunset

Since I come on down.

No, I ain’t seen nothing like a sunset

since I come on down.”

As he sings, Power and Vannucci time their digging to the rhythm.

A tube sucks out the water from around their feet. The men call it the toilet, and sometimes they piss right into it so the smell doesn’t hang around. Nothing worse than stale piss in the heat. They hold back their bowels so they don’t have to shit, and, besides, it’s difficult to shit in air that’s twice its normal pressure; it all stays in the gut until later, when they hit the water of the hog-house showers. Sometimes it comes out without warning, and they yell through the mist of hot air, “Who spiked them barbecue beans?”

Two hours of work and the tunnel is three feet deeper in length than before. The excavated muck has filled many small carriages, the containers shunted back and forth on the railway track with great regularity.

Vannucci watches Walker and learns from him. The Italian has a long stringy body, with blue veins striated on his arms. For this, the men call him Rhubarb. He first came down as a dynamiter, lighting and blasting and uncoiling his way through the tunnel’s opening, but the blasting was finished early and there was just pure muck left. A man can’t blast muck, much as he might want to, but Rhubarb still keeps a wrapped fuse in his pocket as a talisman. He has few English words with which to talk to the other men, so he speaks in his work and they respect him for it. Rhubarb hefts another shovelful of muck, while beside him Walker grunts.

One, two, three, strike, return.

Con O’Leary pants as he leans into the work. To his left, Sean Power sucks blood from his palm, having cut his hand on a sharp edge of the shield.

The men are beating the river and they are happy.

Soon the assembly gang will come along and put in a ring of steel — the pieces jammed into place by a small derrick, rotated by a powerful erector arm, then bolted on — and the tunnel will snake further toward Manhattan. The foremen will be delighted; they will rub their hands together and think of the day when trains run under the East River.

And then, at 8:17 A.M., when Nathan Walker has his back turned to the wall of mud, Rhubarb Vannucci lets out his very first attempt at a full English sentence. His shovel is in mid-swing, one shoulder high, the other low. Unseen by Walker, a tiny hole has appeared in the tunnel wall, a weak spot in the riverbed. The pressurized air hisses out. Vannucci grabs at a bag of hay to stuff the hole, but the dirt whirls from around it and the air escapes and the hole grows wider. At first the weak spot is the size of a fist, then a heart, then a head. The Italian can only watch as the young black man is whipped backward. Walker’s feet can’t grip the soil. He slides toward the widening hole and is sucked into it, shovel first, then his outstretched arms, followed by his head, right down to his shoulders, where his body stops, a cork in the tunnel. His upper torso belongs to the soil, his legs to the tunnel. Pebbles and river dirt greet him. The escaping air pushes at his feet. The soil sucks around his legs. Vannucci steps to the blowout and grabs Walker’s ankles to try and drag the riverdigger down. As he pulls, the other two muckers come forward, and both of them hear the echo of the Italian’s sentence around them.

“Shit! Air go out! Shit!”

* * *

On most afternoons before the blowout, the four men emerge from the hog-house showers, where the water jets out in irregular spurts from black hoses above their heads and the dirt makes puddles at their feet. Steam rises from beneath their overcoats when they hit the cold air outside. In the saloon off Montague Street they laugh at the sight of one another’s clean faces. For the first time all day they can see the cleft in Con O’Leary’s chin, the scars around Nathan Walker’s eyes, the rude bumps in Sean Power’s nose, and Rhubarb Vannucci’s sleek brown skin.

It is a dark bar, all wood, no mirrors.

The men pick sawdust from the floor and roll a few tiny pieces into their cigarettes. They sit in a corner snug, pass around a single match. Blue clouds of smoke rise above their heads. The barman, Brickbat Jones, carries a tray of eight beers toward them, his hands trembling with the weight. A garter swallows his tiny forearm.

“What’s up, boys?”

“Nothing much. You?”

“Same ol’ same ol’. You boys look thirsty.”

“I’ve a mouth as dry as a farmer’s sock!” shouts Power.

Brickbat is the only barman around who lets black men drink in his pub. Walker once saved a hammer from splitting open Brickbat’s head. He caught the weapon mid-swing and afterward never said a word about it, simply tossing the hammer in a garbage can on the way home. From then on, Walker’s beer cost a penny less for the week and free tobacco was dropped in his overcoat pocket.

“How’s the tunnel, boys?”

“Halfway along.”

“Takes a brave man,” says Brickbat.

“Takes a stupid man,” says O’Leary.

“Or a thirsty man!” roars Power, raising his glass.

The men drink in big noisy gulps, no method to it, as if they were a million miles from the rhythm of the tunnel. Their words come hard and gruff at first: a dime less in last week’s pay, the grouter in the manlock cheating at cards, the shredded remains of British soldiers that they hear about at home on their wirelesses, the possibility of American troops joining the fight in Europe. But their words and their throats are soon softened by drink. They relax and laugh. Stories are summoned up and melodeons are taken from pockets. Music coughs around the bar. Different languages blend. The men arm-wrestle. Sometimes a fight erupts. Or a man pisses at the bar counter and gets thrown out. Or a whore walks by the window, all red lips and drama, decoratively lifting the hem of her dress. Wolf whistles sound out and the men stare at the passing woman, their hearts growing huge and quiescent with lust. A clock lets out a gong on the quarter hour.

Rhubarb Vannucci is the first to leave, after two beers and four gongs, turning his overcoat collar up around his neck even before the last swallow.

“Ciao, amici.”

“See ya later, Ruby.”

“Hey, Rhubarb!”

“Sì?”

“A word of advice.”

“No understand.”

“Don’t forget the custard.”

It is Power’s joke — rhubarb with custard — but he has never explained it to the Sicilian.

The men chuckle and order another round. Empty glasses pile up around them. Smoke swivels in the air, and the seashell ashtrays become full.

Con O’Leary is next to leave, walking the cobbled streets toward the docks. He takes a ferry to Manhattan, stands in the cabin with the ferryman, then descends the gangplank and meanders through the darkening streets. His body is a father to his real age, rheumatism in it, feeling seventy although he’s only thirty-four. His belly jiggles as he walks. The studded heels of his boots raise sparks. Soon the tenement houses of the Lower East Side greet him. When he turns a corner he sees his wife, Maura, leaning out of a window, waving from under her umbrella of electric red hair. He waves back and she hurries to the kitchen, where she pours two mugs of tea.

Third to leave the bar is Walker, nodding to Brickbat Jones as he goes. He shoves some chewing tobacco in his mouth at the front door and spits as he strolls the streets. Back at the Colored hotel where he lives, he hangs his boots on the doorknob so they don’t stain the carpet. The room is tiny. It smells of old shirts and socks and sadness. Walker lies down on his orange bedspread with his arms folded behind his head and drifts off to sleep, dreaming of Georgia and days when he took a boat through the swamps.

Power is always last to go, reeling out to the wet streets at final call, lifting his cap to the moon. There are sunrises on Power’s fingers, big oval nicotine stains, and sometimes he staggers around in such a drunken stupor that there are the beginnings of sunrises in the sky too.

* * *

The shout rips along the tunnel, from mucker to assembly man to grouter to waterboy all the way back to the man who controls the compression machine: Blowout! Lower the pressure! Take it down! Abbassa la pressione! Obnizy cinienie! The pressure! Hey! La pressione! Lower it!

But the shouts get twisted and distorted in the languages they pass through, and, instead of being lowered, the dial on the compression machine rises.

With a million years of riverbed in his mouth and his shovel above his head in an attitude of ascension, Nathan Walker is trapped in blackness, his legs held down by Rhubarb Vannucci. Sand and muck and pebbles in Walker’s eyes ears mouth. Watery ooze fills up his throat. His face is ripped from thrashing around. A pebble has lacerated the base of his throat. Blood soaks into the mud. He is a stopper in the ceiling of the tunnel. The escaping air leaks in around him for an eternity of seconds until, with a slow, wormlike wiggle, Walker twists the shovel above his head to create an air pocket and the soil gives minutely.

Vannucci attempts to pull him down again.

Let go of my legs! thinks Walker, as he thrashes in the muck. Let go of my goddamn legs!

He wiggles the shovel some more, and air fills up around him. He inches his head sideways in the muck, and for a second there is the ghost of his dead mother at the train station in Waycross with a blue dress on and a yellow sunflower at her breast, waving goodbye as a steam whistle blows.

He twists the shovel more, and suddenly the air rushes and Walker is released like a spat cherry stone. Still conscious, he rises through the riverbed. Past what? Dutch ships sunken centuries before? Animal carcasses? Arrowheads? Scalps with hair still growing? Men with concrete blocks attached to their feet? The dead from slave ships, bleached down to bone? All the time the air cushions Walker against the tremendous weight of soil and sand and silt. He is an embryo in a sac, sheltered as he is slammed upward, five feet, ten feet, through the riverbed, the air pocket cutting a path through the dirt, keeping him safe.

The shovel is gone from his hands but it follows him like an acolyte, as does Vannucci, as does Power, with a bag of hay clutched to his chest as if in love, a roar coming from Vannucci, and all of them feeling as if their lungs are about to explode.

And then there is water — they are rising through the river — and perhaps astonished fish, staring. Walker will remember it only as pure blackness, water blackness, not even cold at first, then a ferocious whoosh in his ears, a pounding at his skull, his eyeballs bulging behind his lids, a sudden soaking, the shock of water, struggling for breath, chest heaving, the panic of being surrounded by dark river, convinced that they will drown, they will all drown, pike and trout and dirt and pebbles will make a home in their bloated bellies, barges will scour the water for their bodies, seashells will nestle in their eyeballs.

And then all three men erupt through the surface of the East River, their heads just missing the floes of ice, shooting out into the air with only their overalls and boots on, their chests contracting and expanding madly now; they are spewing water and muck from their mouths, gulping down oxygen, feeling their brains thump; some tools from the tunnel accompanying them, planks spinning, a hydraulic jack cartwheeling, a bag of hay, an overcoat, a hat, a shirt, the most unlikely of flying things: it is morning, it is light, and they are up on a huge brown geyser, themselves and their dirt and their tunnel equipment. There are ferryboats on the water. Curious seagulls in the air. Dockside workers pointing in amazement. The three sandhogs somersault in the air above the river. The water suspends them for a moment between Brooklyn and Manhattan, a moment that the men will never lose in their memories — they have been blown upward like gods.

* * *

Walker’s first thought when he is rescued and dragged onto a boat, half naked, blood streaming down his face: I’m so goddamn cold y’all could skate me.

* * *

Maura O’Leary combs a single strand of hair from her cheek. Her face is lean and spare.

Down its length the East River is quiet. She notices a few scows and barges and some bits of rafted rubbish on the water, the morning sun shining wheels of light in the flow. Some movement of workers on the piers. Mules and carts beyond the edges of the banks. And, in the river, nothing but a small gurgle, a few bubbles on the surface from the tiny, regular seepage of air from the tunnel below. Maura watches from the deck of the ferry in the freezing cold, a wool scarf around her head. Since dawn she has taken the ferry back and forth, back and forth, back and forth — it is her daily ritual. She has done it each morning since she found out she was pregnant. Her husband has allowed her the eccentricity. And, besides, the ferryman is Irish; he lets her ride for free. She is thinking of going ashore and taking a trolley home. Get the crib ready for the child, due in a month. Maybe make some potato soup for Con. Rest a little. Chat with the other women on the upstairs floor.

She moves to go belowdeck as the river howls and erupts. A massive funnel of water greets the city on one bank and Brooklyn on the other.

At first Maura sees only sandbags and planks of wood aloft on the geyser. She reels back, clutching at her stomach. Her feet slip on the wet deck, and she catches the railing and screams. The water keeps spurting, blowing the detritus of the tunnel twenty-five feet above the East River. Longshoremen look up from the piers, the ferryboat captain lets go of his wheel, workers on the docksides stand frozen to the vision. The sandbags crest the top of the geyser and hop around. A plank spins out from the brownburst and cartwheels down to the river. Maura watches as a bag seems to contort itself within the torrent and a curious, floppy limb emerges. She realizes that it is an arm and that a shovel is spinning away from it. A man has been blown from the tunnel! One, two, three of them! Raised from forty feet below! She sees Nathan Walker, his powerful body and the red hat that has stayed on his head like an autograph, tied under his chin with a string. But the other two bodies are hard to make out as they crest the water in their strange ascension.

Her husband’s name—“Con!”—stretches out from her mouth, as if on elastic.

The three men still bob on the upshoot, although the pressure begins to equalize and — almost gently — the geyser lowers them down to the river. As Walker crashes into the water, his head narrowly misses a chunk of ice. He submerges and then comes up and after a moment he begins swimming toward safety, his arms making great windmills in the river, churning a line of white.

Vannucci and Power hold on to floating breast planks. Blood spurts from one man’s head. The other lolls as if his neck is broken.

A scow is already heading toward them from the Brooklyn side. The ferryboat lets out short sharp emergency hornblasts. At the head of the tunnel shrill whistles are blowing, and a long rope of men uncoils to the light. The geyser dies down and becomes just a murmur.

“Con!” she screams. “Con!”

The next morning the newspapers report that Nathan Walker swam to the scow and was dragged aboard, blood all over his face. Vannucci and Power held on to the floating planks until rescued. The three men were brought to the manlock so their bodies could decompress. Walker sat silently. Rhubarb Vannucci tried to return straight to work, but he was bleeding and was sent home after an hour. Sean Power was brought to the lock with two broken arms, a mangled leg, and a deep gash in his forehead. Tubes were put in his ears to suck out the mud. The foreman gave him whiskey, and he vomited up what looked like a beach of sand and pebbles.

In the middle of the solid column of type — alongside an artist’s interpretation of the burst — it says that Con O’Leary, 34, from Roscommon, Ireland, is still missing, presumed dead.

Neighbors arrive at Maura’s fourth-floor tenement flat. They spread themselves out in a nimbus in her living room, silent in black dresses. Flowers sent by Walker, Vannucci, and Power stand on a small table.

A daguerreotype of O’Leary is being prepared for a mass card. Maura uses a kitchen knife to cut herself out of the old wedding photograph. When O’Leary is left alone, he stares up at her from the palm of her hand. She raises the image and touches it with her lips. In the photo her husband has a hard, taciturn face. The digger lived much of his life in a taciturn way, coming home, scraping mud from his boots with a knife, the slow silences at dinnertime when she would ask him to do a chore, the shrug of his shoulders, the lovely way he’d raise his chubby palms in the air and ask her, “But why?” An old white shirt of his is still hanging out the window to dry. Maura had been scrubbing the ring of dirt from around the collar. A catechism is open on the table, and Con’s baseball cards are scattered beside the book: to become an American, O’Leary had decided to fall in love with the game, following it meticulously. He knew every score, each stadium, all the managers, hitters, pitchers, catchers, and basemen.

The gutted piano he was fixing stands in front of the fireplace, the black and white keys spread out on the floor. He had rescued it from a rubbish dump and dragged it through Manhattan with a rope, destroying the carved legs as he pulled it over cobblestones. Four men were employed to help carry it up the stairs, only for O’Leary to discover it was an imitation Steinway, worth little more than the wood it was made with. He had been filing the keys down; they’d been sticking against each other, causing notes to distort. At night they would summon up songs that she could play.

Maura places the daguerreotype on top of the piano and turns her head as someone knocks on the door.

A heavy man, in a suit and tie and derby hat, brushes snow off his shoulders as he enters. He asks the neighbors if they will leave.

The women wait for Maura to nod and then file out, casting suspicious backward glances. They remain on the stairs, straining to hear. Wide-bottomed, the man sits in the only chair. He hitches up his trousers and Maura can see — as a puddle forms around his feet — his polished shoes.

“William Randall,” he says.

“I know who you are.”

“I’m deeply sorry.”

“Would you like a cup of tea?” She speaks as if there were marbles in her throat.

“No, ma’am.”

“The kettle’s on.”

“No, ma’am, thank you.”

And then a long silence as he remembers to take off his hat.

“After the blowout,” Randall says, “the tunnel was flooded. The other men were lucky to survive. We had to lay a canvas sheet on the river bottom. We dropped clay on top of it. From a barge. To seal the tunnel up again. We had to do it. We will, of course, give you compensation. Ma’am? Enough for you and the child.”

He points toward the bulge, and Maura folds her hands across it.

“There was no time to look for Con’s body,” he says. “We believe he got stuck in a second blowout. That’s all we can say. Will a hundred dollars suffice?”

Randall coughs and makes curlicues at the ends of his tawny mustache.

“The body might emerge; then we can pay for the funeral too. We’ll pay for the funeral anyway. Are you going to have a funeral? Ma’am? Mrs. O’Leary? I believe in looking after my workers.”

“You do?”

“Always looked after my workers.”

“You can leave now, please.”

“There’s always hope.”

“I appreciate your faith, but you can leave.”

His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. Randall mops his brow with a handkerchief. Beads of sweat reappear immediately.

“I said you can leave.”

“Ma’am?”

“Leave.”

“If that’s how you want it, ma’am.”

Maura O’Leary watches Con’s shirtsleeves flapping in the window, greeting the snow. She runs her finger around the rim of an empty teacup, curses herself for offering Randall some tea. She says nothing more, just goes to the front door and gently pulls it open for him. She stands behind the frame. The neighbors step back and let the man pass, watching him as he lumbers down the stairs, a roll of fat wobbling at the back of his neck. The women file back into Maura’s room, half a dozen accents merging into one. The sound of a car outside drowns out the muffled clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. Children are playing baseball with hurley sticks. At the window, Maura watches the children step out of the path of Randall’s motorcar, some of the boys reaching out to touch its waxed body. Maura pulls across the lace curtain and turns away.

The neighbors clasp their hands and hang their heads, too polite to ask what happened. Maura stands with them — nobody wants the chair — and combs a long strand of hair away from her eye. She tells her neighbors that her husband has already become a fossil and some of them wonder what the word means, but they nod their heads anyway and let it hang on the edge of their lips: fossil.

* * *

Nathan Walker repeats the word after making a brief visit to Maura’s apartment, having left an envelope full of money on the kitchen table after passing the hat among the sandhogs.

He walks the bright winter streets toward the ferry and wipes at his eyes with an overcoat sleeve, recalling one evening last winter after work. He was coming out early from the hog-house showers and was set upon by four drunken welders. They used the handles of pickaxes as weapons. The blows rained down on the top of his skull, and he fell. One of the welders leaned over and whispered the word “nigger” in his ear, as if he had just invented it. “Hey, nigger.” Walker looked up and smashed the man’s teeth with the heel of an open palm. The pickax handles hit him again, the wood slipping on his bloody face. And then came a shout—“Jaysus Christ!”—and he recognized the voice. Con O’Leary, out from the shower, stood only in his boots and trousers. The Irishman looked flabby and gigantic in the sunlight. He began swinging with his fists. Two of the welders fell, and then police whistles were heard in the distance. The welders stumbled off, scattering in the dark streets. O’Leary knelt down on the ground and held Walker’s head against his white chest. “You’ll be all right, son,” he said.

A patch of blood spread beneath the Irishman’s nipple. He picked up Walker’s hat from the ground. It was full of blood.

“Looks to me like a bowl of tomato soup,” said O’Leary.

The two men tried to laugh. O’Leary had said the word “tomato” as if there were a sigh in the middle of it. For weeks afterward Walker would see his friend and remember every syllable: to-mah-to.

Now, moving down the streets of the Lower East Side, Walker wipes the tears from his eyes and hefts the weight of another word upon his tongue: fossil.