This Side of Brightness
He rubs the water over his upper torso, though it’s cold cold cold cold. His skin tingles and tightens and his nipples stand hard. He brings the snow to his veined forearms and underarms, thinks for a moment about venturing down to his crotch, decides against it.
Grabbing his clothes, he crosses the tracks. The tunnel, in width and height, is the size of an airplane hangar.
Treefrog jumps up a pillar and grabs a handhold that he has fashioned with a chisel, puts his foot between the pillar and the wall, heaves himself up with both hands, and he is on the first catwalk. With a lithe movement he is on the second, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, flicking one of his lighters as he goes, first with the right hand and then with the left, a huge cheap flame around him. His hair falls across his eyes so he can hardly see.
He reaches the edge of his nest—twelve steps and always twelve—and swings himself in.
At the entrance there is the carcass of a smashed traffic light, rescued once by Faraday. Treefrog has secured the light to a hook in the wall with barbed wire, but there’s no red yellow green since he doesn’t want electricity, no way; it’s better to keep the nest dark; he likes it that way.
He nods to the light and moves toward his bed.
The mattress dips in the middle from the imprint of his body and he sits, listening to the sounds of the world above him: the traffic on the West Side Highway, the high-pitched yelps of the kids tobogganing in the park, the low growls of Manhattan. Treefrog pulls some extra clothes from the sleeping bag where he has kept them warm during the night—three pairs of socks, a second coat, another pair of gloves, and an extra T-shirt, which he puts in his pocket to use as a scarf. He climbs down once more from his damp nest to the frozen mud of the tunnel floor. He likes to balance on the metal rails as he walks. Five minutes along, he passes the concrete cubicles of Dean, Elijah, Papa Love, and Faraday, but all is quiet. He moves through the shafts of light, comes to the stairwell, climbs, and then squeezes himself through the hole in the ironwork gate.
Outside, in the world, the snow is so white that it hurts his eyes. Treefrog searches through his pockets for his sunglasses.
* * *
The crane is not around when he gets to the river. The ice has insinuated itself further into the Hudson, and the place where he threw the bricks has resealed itself like a wound, just a few pieces of timber and a plastic oil container frozen at the edge now. Barges are out in the channel, where the water still flows amid occasional chunks of ice. Further south, houseboats are tethered to the docks, icicles hanging in shards off the ropes.
The snow blows along the waterfront in vicious snarls.
Treefrog wraps the extra T-shirt around his face to protect himself from the blizzard. He moves through the park, along the bend of the highway where the cars are few and slow, and up the tunnel embankment. He dodges a few snowballs from teenagers, counting his steps as he trudges through the six-inch snow. In the playground near 97th Street he spreads a blue plastic bag over a picnic table that is chained to the chicken-wire fence and sits down, far away from the swings.
A few children move delightedly through the snow. He doesn’t go nearer for fear of frightening them. Or their mothers. If they looked at him closely they might recognize him, although his hair used to be short, cropped tight to his head, and he didn’t have the beard.
From the table he can look down onto the playground: two fiberglass dinosaurs for the children to sit on, a curved silver slide, two smaller slides, some monkey bars, a swinging bridge, a suspended tire, and six swings in a perfect row, three for small kids, three for older ones.
The bitter cold chews at his body, and the wind freezes mucus to his beard.
But when he takes off his sunglasses and puts them on his head, he sees his daughter. It is summer, years ago, and she is eleven years old, wearing an orange dress, beads in her hair, and the trees are green, the light is yellow, the playground is humming, and the earth is alive—those were the good times—and she is swinging her way merrily through the air, arms outstretched, feet tucked under the swing, white sneakers, blue socks, her hem to her knees. He stands behind her and catches the swing, pushes her higher, and then his hands move slightly and he feels the familiar huge hollowness in his body and he pulls away, wincing at the vision.
A pang of hunger whistles through his stomach and rests in his liver. He needs to find some cans or bottles to redeem. Treefrog stands and billows air into the empty blue plastic bag; the cans will be heavy today with all the melted snow inside them. He should eat a sandwich, maybe. Or buy some chicken in the Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Perhaps another bottle of gin if he can afford it. He has heard that up north, in Maine, the places where you cash cans are called Redemption Centers.
At the edge of the playground, Treefrog waves through the sheets of snow to his daughter, puts his glasses back down to his nose, wipes a frosting of ice from his beard, and moves on, shivering, up 97th Street toward Broadway, where he becomes a solitary man dipping into the garbage cans of Manhattan.
chapter 4
1916–32
Each weekday morning, when Nathan Walker descends the tunnel under the East River to continue the job of digging, he spends a moment alone and says a few words to the man coffined in the soil above him. The other sandhogs leave him be. Walker slaps his shovel against the steel ceiling, and it rings out loud and metallic.
“Hey, Con,” he says. “Hey, bud.”
He moves on to the end of the tunnel, mud splashing up to the back of his torn overalls. At the Greathead Shield the digging has just begun. Vannucci is already hard at work with two new sandhogs. Sean Power can no longer dig, his body mangled by the accident. Walker steps through the door in the shield and tips his hat to the new men. They nod back. In just two weeks they have already formed the necessary bonds of muckers. Silently, Walker begins his day’s digging, but after a while he begins to feel the rhythm seep into him and he lets his tunnel song escape his lips: 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.
* * *
Eleanor O’Leary is born at home nineteen days after the blowout, on Maura’s thirty-fourth birthday. Carmela Vannucci is the midwife. She brings the baby out with gentle ease and whispers prayers in Italian. There is an uproar of red hair on the baby’s head.
Maura lies back in her bed—the sheets, rough to the touch, are made from bleached flour bags, still faintly fragrant of something like wheat—and she thinks of her husband and his pocket watch, wonders if it is still running in the river soil. At night Maura remembers herself to sleep and wakes to find the smell of wheat even stronger. Sometimes, in her drowsiness, she thinks she has returned to the ocher fields of Roscommon with a confetti of swans beating across the sky, but when she rises to look out the window it is the gas lamplights of Manhattan that stare back at her.
When she’s well enough to take visitors, she puts a dark dress over her nightgown, props herself up in bed, and says nothing about the dreams that she has of her husband’s watch—it is there, ticking away in his ribs, his bones are knotted together with suspenders, and the second hand is counting the drip-away of his flesh.
After a month Maura finds work in a paintbrush factory not too far from the East River. The foreman allows her to take the baby with her. She wipes a clean circle in the dusty factory window so she can look outside and imagine Con resurrecting himself upward through the water. He will fly out with his shovel in his hands and roar at the sun. The light will glint off the studs on the heels of his shoes. He will somersault through the air and then descend with the geyser, into the river, hanging on for a moment to a floating plank. He will swim to shore with a grin on his face, and she will meet him on the dockside and hug him and kiss him. He will stroke the cheek of his unseen child and say, “Jaysus, Maura, what a beauty.”
All day long Maura imagines this as she stuffs bristles into paintbrushes. Her fingers develop calluses from the wo
rk. At the end of her shift she takes the baby carriage and lifts it down the stairs, developing muscles in her arms from the weight. The mass card sits in her pocket, Con’s face permanently at her hip. When she arrives home she props the card up on the piano and strikes a few notes. She looks around the room and waits for his hands to touch her shoulders.
Nathan Walker visits on Sunday afternoons, aware that his skin color would provoke too many whispers if he came late at night. He takes off his shoes at the bottom steps so his feet don’t sound out on the wooden stairs, climbs the four flights noiselessly, leaves his chewing tobacco in a flowerpot, and knocks on the door.
Maura looks along the length of the corridor to make sure nobody has seen him. She guides him inside by the elbow. He keeps his eyes to the floor.
“You eating all right, Nathan?”
“Yes, yes.”
“You sure now? I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife.”
“I’m eating just fine, ma’am.”
“Well, you look a mite skinny to me.”
“Believe me, I ain’t lacking.”
“I have some potatoes.”
“No thank you, ma’am, I just ate.”
“Really, I insist.”
“Well,” he says, “if they’re gonna go to waste, ma’am.”
Embarrassed at the feast she has prepared, Maura too lowers her eyes. After potatoes and meat and tea and biscuits, she lets Walker take Eleanor into his huge arms. It is strange for Maura to watch the young man with her child, his bigness making the baby seem minuscule. Such a clash of skin. It worries her, and she keeps an eye on Walker. She has heard stories of his kind, yet she sees the gentleness in him. Sometimes Walker rocks Eleanor back and forth to sleep on his knees and when he feeds her he pretends the metal spoon is a zeppelin negotiating the sky between them. Walker always places a one-dollar coin on the mantelpiece when he leaves, and Maura O’Leary puts the money away in a biscuit tin marked ELEANOR.
Walker leaves the tenement house quickly, furtively.
Later, he must sit at the back of a movie house, and during Tillie’s Punctured Romance the heads of men obscure the swing of Charlie Chaplin’s cane. It strikes Walker that it’s only in the tunnels that he feels an equality of darkness. The sandhogs were the first integrated union in the country; he knows it is only underground that color is negated, that men become men.
Not even in the gloom of the cinema can he slip like a snake through his own skin.
When he was a ten-year-old boy in the swamps of Georgia, Walker forced a water snake to stay on a rickety wooden pier for five hours. He had heard it would dehydrate in the sun. The snake fought ferociously at first, wiggling from the pier toward the water, but he kept pulling it back by its head and tail. Remembering an old saying, he knew the snake wasn’t poisonous: Red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black be nice to Jack. He didn’t want to kill it himself, he just wanted the snake to die in the heat, but it kept on thrashing. The sun began to sink low in the Okefenokee sky. In frustration, the young boy put his foot on the snake’s neck and slipped his knife in. Its innards were warm and he knocked them into the water. He brought the skin home to hang on his wall. Most of the house was made with logs, but his own room was composed of cinder block. He made a lot of noise hammering the nails. When the snake was stretched above his bed, his mother came in and asked him where he had gotten it. He told her the story, and she whipped him for his lack of respect.
She told him that all creatures deserved the very same treatment, that none were mightier than others, that all were made the same. They all came into the world with nothing and left the world with even less. Only belief in God and the goodness of man would bring them any happiness.
“Do it again,” she said, “and I’ll whip the fire out of you.”
After church that Sunday the preacher told him to make amends. He kept a different snake in a box after that, treated it carefully, fed it with mice, and was amazed to watch it molt out of itself during summers, leaving sheets of clear skin in the box—much like the men he sees nowadays, a decade later, in the streets of New York, molted out of their civilian clothes into military uniforms, on their way to Europe to fight in the Great War, some of them even colleagues from the tunnels, uniforms crisp and ironed, military hats uncomfortably tilted on their heads. He has heard that, at the front, under bloody French sunsets, the sandhogs do well in their foxholes; they can dig quicker and faster and harder and deeper and further than anyone else.
* * *
One Sunday afternoon, at the end of his visit, Walker says to Maura, “There was a trick y’alls husband used to do, times, ma’am. He’d be there digging away in the tunnel with the rest of us. And see, he had this bullet that he found somewhere, on the street or something, I don’t know. Anyways, we were at the front of the tunnel, and Con wasn’t wearing no shirt or nothing. Most of the time we don’t wear no shirts, see. And he’d up and shout, ‘Look at this, lads!’ He had that funny way of talking, just like y’all. Tomahto. Potayto. That sort of thing. Anyways, he bent on over, ol’ Con, and put the bullet into his stomach. Right on in. It went disappeared in there! He held that bullet in his belly all day long without dropping it, not a once! Working and digging away! And the rest of us were just laughing like there was no tomorrow.
“So I know what y’all’re saying, ma’am, ’cause we miss him too, he broke the darkness for us too; that’s what he did, ol’ Con, he broke the darkness real good.”
* * *
On the morning of the inaugural run in 1917, Walker, in his red hat, makes his way along the cobblestones of Montague Street in Brooklyn. He smiles when he sees that most of the other sandhogs have come back in their working clothes too: tattered shirts, dungarees, and their favorite caps.
Many of the men have never met before, having worked different shifts. Their wives and children are with them, carrying unlit candles. The families descend the steps of the subway station and move quietly toward the platform. They walk to the front of a train where the boss, William Randall, is standing. Randall is waiting for the photographers’ flashbulbs to catch him smiling. It is his first time below, and he is telling the reporters and dignitaries how proud he is of his underwater tunnel. More than anything he cannot wait to chop the red ribbon and send the first train through. As he talks, Randall preens himself for the cameras. He smells of shaving soap and hair oil, an arrogance to the smell, something the tunnel has never known before.
But instead of ducking under the black hoods of their cameras to catch Randall’s smile, the photographers turn to watch the men, women, and children filtering down the platform.
As the families move alongside the train, the tunnel is plunged into darkness, the power sabotaged by the sandhogs for an hour. Matches flare and candlelight illuminates the faces of the workers as they file past. Randall lets out an indignant yell and shouts at a group of men in suits. They hold their hands up in supplication, saying, “Nothing we can do, Mr. Randall, sir.”
At the rear of the group of workers, Walker grins.
One by one, the sandhogs and their families duck under the red tape at the front of the train. The men don’t even look at their boss as they file past. Randall tries to stop them, but they move like water around him.
The workers tug at the brims of their hats, telling the photographers not to accompany them, just to let them be for a while; this is their moment, and they would rather be left alone.
Someone lets out a low whistle, and the sandhogs enter the tunnel carrying the candles.
“You built all this, Pa?”
“Well, bits of it.”
“Wow. How long is it?”
“Couple thousand feet or so.”
“Exactly, Pa?”
“Give or take an inch or two.”
“It’s dark.”
“Of course it’s dark, it’s a goddamned tunnel.”
Walker watches as two boys throw a baseball back and forth. The ball thumps in their catching mitts. Wa
lker smiles to himself, thinking this is probably the first sub-aqua pitch in the history of the world. He steps between the boys and ducks the flying ball. The boys cheer.
“Spitball!” says Walker, and he goes further into the tunnel.
A few of the women, including Carmela Vannucci—heavily built with a pile-up of hair at her neck—carry rosary beads that leak through their fingers. They whisper to Saint Barbara, the patron of miners. There is melancholy in the movement of the women—they are praying for the tunnel dead—and yet a relief that it wasn’t their own men who were spirited away. Long dresses swishing, hair in bonnets, the wives slip their arms through their husbands’ elbows as they walk down the side of the track.
In the candlelight, Walker finds Sean Power limping along, holding his nephew’s hand. Power turns and puts his hand on the boy’s head.
“Meet Mister Walker.”
The boy stretches out a grimy hand. “Hello.”
“Mister Walker was around that day God farted,” says Power.
“Huh?” says the boy.
“The day we got blown from the tunnel.”
The boy chuckles but still holds tight to his uncle’s hand. Walker follows behind them. He listens as his fellow mucker points out parts of the tunnel to the boy.
“That’s where the foreman with the glass eye sat,” says Power. “His hair went on fire one day.”
“Did his eye melt?”
“’Course not,” says Power. “And the welder went on fire here. Tomocweski. Up in a ball of flames. Smelt like roast beef.”