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“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 He felt the kiss still on his skin after she’d withdrawn.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?”
“It’s only me,” he answered. “Only Lucas.”
“Lucas. M’love.”
His heart shivered. It seemed for a moment that he could abide with his mother in the sweet, warm darkness. He could stay here with her and tell her the book.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“I’m ever awake. Come.”
He sat on the edge of the mattress. He could see the sprawl of her hair on the pillow. He could see her nose and chin, the dark places where her eyes were. He touched her face. It was hot and powdery, dry as chalk.
“Are you thirsty, are you hungry?” he asked. “Can I bring you something?”
She said, “What’s happened to ye? How have they darkened ye so?”
“I’ve been to work, Mother. It’s only dust.”
“Where’s Lucas, then?”
“I’m here, Mother.”
“Of course you are. I’m not quite right, am I?”
“Let me bring you some water.”
“The hens need looking after. Have ye seen to the hens?”
“The hens, Mother?”
“Yes, child. It’s gone late, hasn’t it? I think it’s very late indeed.”
“We haven’t any hens.”
“We haven’t?”
“No.”
“Forgive me. We did have hens.”
“Don’t worry, Mother.”
“Oh, it’s fine to say don’t worry, with the hens gone and the potatoes, too.”
Lucas stroked her hair. He said, “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
“That’s right, m’dear.”
Lucas sat quietly with her, stroking her hair. She had been nervous and quick, prone to argument, easily angered and slow to laugh. (Only Simon could make her laugh.) She’d been vanishing gradually for a year or longer, always more eager to be done with her work and off to bed, but still herself, still dutiful and fitfully affectionate, still alert to slights and hidden insults. Now that Simon was dead she’d turned into this, a face on a pillow, asking after hens.
He said, “Should I bring you the music box?”
“That’d be nice.”
He went to the parlor and returned with the box. He held it up for her to see.
“Ah, yes,” she said. Did she know that the box had ruined them? She never spoke of it. She seemed to love the music box as dearly as she would have if it had caused no damage at all.
Lucas turned the crank. Within the confines of the box, the brass spool revolved under the tiny hammers. It played “Forget Not the Field” in its little way, bright metallic notes that spangled in the close air of the bedroom. Lucas sang along with the tune.
Forget not the field where they perish’d,
The truest, the last of the brave,
All gone—and the bright hope we cherish’d
Gone with them, and quench’d in their grave.
His mother put a hand over his. “That’s enough,” she said.
“It’s only the first verse.”
“It’s enough, Lucas. Take it away.”
He did as she asked. He returned the music box to its place on the parlor table, where it continued playing “Forget Not the Field.” Once wound, it would not stop except by its own accord.
His father had moved from his place at the table to his chair by the window. He nodded gravely, as if agreeing with something the music said.
“Do you like the music?” Lucas asked him.
“Can’t be stopped,” his father said in his new voice, which was all but indistinguishable from his breathing, as if his machine’s bellows were whispering language as they blew.
“It’ll stop soon.”
“That’s good.”
Lucas said, “Good night, Father,” because he could not think of anything else to say.
His father nodded. Could he get himself to bed? Lucas thought he could. He hoped so.
He went to his own room, his and Simon’s. Emily’s window was lit. She was faithfully eating her candy, just as Lucas faithfully read his book.
He undressed. He did not remove the locket. If he removed the locket, if he ever removed the locket, it would no longer be something Catherine had put on him. It would become something he put upon himself.
Carefully, he found the locket’s catch and opened it. Here was the black curl of Simon’s hair, tied with a piece of purple thread. Here, under the curl, was Simon’s face, obscured by the hair. Lucas knew the picture: Simon two years ago, frowning for the photographer, his eyes narrow and his jaw set. Simon’s face in the locket was pale brown, like turned cream. His eyes (one was partially visible through the strands of hair) were black. It was like seeing Simon in his casket, which no one had been allowed to do. What the machine had done had rendered him too extraordinary. Now, in the quiet of the room, the Simon who was with them still met the Simon who was in the locket, and here he was, doubled; here was the smell and heft of him; here his habit, on the drinking nights, of slapping Lucas playfully. Lucas closed the locket. It made a small metallic snap.
He got into bed, on his own side. He read the evening’s passage.
I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
When he had finished it he put out the lamp. He could feel Simon in the locket and Simon in the box in the earth, so changed that the lid had been nailed shut. Lucas determined never to open the locket again. He would wear it always but keep it forever sealed.
He slept, and woke again. He rose to dress for work and get breakfast for his father, feeling the locket’s unfamiliar weight on his neck, the circle of it bouncing gently on his breastbone. Here was the memento of Simon’s ongoing death for him to wear close to his heart, because Catherine had put it on him.
He gave his father the last of the jelly for breakfast. There was no food after that.
As his father ate, Lucas paused beside the door to his parents’ bedroom. He heard no sound from within. What would happen if his mother never came out again? He got the music box from the table and crept into the room with it, as quietly as he could. His mother was a shape, snoring softly. He set the music box on the table at her bedside. She might want to listen to it when she awoke. If she didn’t want to listen to it, she’d still know Lucas had thought of her by putting it there.
Jack wasn’t there to greet him when he arrived at the works. Lucas paused at the entrance, among the others, but didn’t linger. Jack would most likely be waiting for him at the machine, to tell him he had done well yesterday, to encourage him about today. He passed through the vestibule, with its caged men scowling at their papers. He passed through the cooking room and went to his machine. Tom and Will and Dan all said good-morning to him, as if he had been there a long time, which pleased him. But there was no Jack Walsh.
Lucas got to work. Jack would be glad of that when he came by. Lucas steadied himself before the machine. He took the first of the plates from Tom’s bin. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.
He inspected every plate. An hour passed, or what seemed like an hour. Another hour passed. His fingers started bleeding again. Smears of his blood were on the plates as they went under the wheel. He wiped the plates clean with his sleeve before conveying them to Dan.
He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.
It was only at day’s end, when the whistle blew, that Jack appeared. Lucas expected—what? A reunion. An explanation. He thought Jack would tell him apologetically of a sick child or a lame horse. Jack would squeeze his bleeding hand (which Lucas feared and longed for). Jack would tell Lucas he had done well. Lucas had aligned each plate perfectly. He’d inspected every one.
Instead, Jack stood beside him and said, “All right, then.”
There was no tone of congratulation in his voice. Lucas thought for a moment that Jack had confused him with someone else. (Catherine hadn’t known him at first, his mother hadn’t known him.) He almost said but did not say, It’s me. It’s Lucas.
Jack departed. He went to Dan, spoke to him briefly, and went into the next chamber, the room of the vaults.
Lucas remained at his machine, though it was time to go. The machine stood as it always did, belt and levers, row upon row of teeth.
He said, “Who need be afraid of the merge?”
He was afraid, though. He feared the machine’s endurance, its capacity to be here, always here, and his own obligation to return to it after a short interlude of feeding and sleep. He worried that one day he would forget himself again. One day he would forget himself and be drawn through the machine as Simon had. He would be stamped (four across, six down) and expelled; he would be put in a box and carried across the river. He would be so changed that no one would know him, not the living or the dead.
Where would he go after that? He didn’t think he had soul enough for heaven. He’d be in a box across the river. He wondered if his face would be hung on the parlor wall, though there were no pictures of him, and even if there had been, he couldn’t think of who might be taken away to make room.
Catherine wasn’t waiting for him tonight. Lucas stood briefly outside the gate, searching for her, though of course she would not have come again. It had been only the once, when he was new, that she was worried for him. What he had to do was go home and see about getting supper for his parents.
He left among the others and made his way up Rivington and then the Bowery. He passed by Second Street and went to Catherine’s building on Fifth.
He knocked on the street door, tentatively at first, then harder. He stood waiting on the glittering stoop. Finally, the door was opened by an ancient woman. She was white-haired, small as a dwarf, as wide as she was tall. She might have been the spirit of the building itself, pocked and stolid, peevish about being roused.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Please, missus. I’m here to see Catherine Fitzhugh. May I come in?”
