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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.”
