Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
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Lucas put his small hand on his father’s brown one. He loved himself for loving his father. It was the best he could do.
“I’m off to the works,” he said.
“Aye,” his father answered, and took another breath from the tube. The machine was a gift from the tannery. They had given him the machine, and some money. There had been no money for Simon, because dying was his own fault.
Lucas kissed his father’s forehead. His father’s mind was leather now, too, but his goodness remained. All he had lost were his complications. He could still do what he needed to do. He could still love Lucas’s mother and tend to her. Lucas hoped he could still do that.
He said, “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
“Aye,” his father answered.
On his way to the works, Lucas stopped at the school. He didn’t enter. He went around to the side and looked through the window. He could see Mr. Mulchady frowning at his desk, the little flames from the lamps dancing on his spectacles. He could see the others hunched over their lessons. School would go on without him. Here as always were the desks and slates. Here were the two maps on the wall, the world and the stars. Lucas had only lately understood (he could be slow in some things) that the two were different. He’d believed, and had not thought to ask otherwise, that the stars were a version of the world, that they mirrored its countries and oceans. Why else would they be mounted side by side? When he was younger he had found New York on the map of the world and found its counterpart on the map of the stars, the Pleiades.
It was Mr. Mulchady who’d given Walt’s book to Lucas, on loan. Mr. Mulchady said Lucas had the soul of a poet, which was kind of him but wrong. Lucas had no soul at all. He was a stranger, a citizen of no place, come from County Kerry but planted in New York, where he grew like a blighted potato; where he didn’t sing or shout as the other Irish did; where he harbored not soul but an emptiness sparked here and there with painful shocks of love, for the map of the stars and the answering flames on Mr. Mulchady’s spectacles; for Catherine and his mother and a horse on wheels. He did not mourn Simon; he had no convictions about heaven, no thirst for Christ’s revivifying blood. What he wanted was the raucousness of the city where people hauled their loads of corn or coal, where they danced to fiddles, wept or laughed, sold and begged and bartered, not always happily but always with a vigor that was what he meant, privately, by soul. It was a defiant, uncrushable aliveness. He hoped the book could instill that in him.
Now, abruptly, he was finished with school. He would have liked to say goodbye to Mr. Mulchady, but if he did Mr. Mulchady would ask him to return the book, and Lucas couldn’t do that, not yet. He was still an empty suit of clothes. He hoped Mr. Mulchady wouldn’t mind waiting.
He said goodbye, silently, to the classroom, to the maps and Mr. Mulchady.
The works was like a city unto itself. It was red brick walls and red brick towers, a gate big enough for six horses walking abreast. Lucas entered through the gate, among a crowd of boys and men. Some went quietly. Some spoke to one another, laughed. One said, “Fat, you never seen one as fat as her,” and another said, “I like ’em fat.” The boys and the younger men were pale. The older men had darkened.
Lucas, uncertain, walked with the others into a cobbled courtyard where stacks of brown-black iron, dusky as great bars of chocolate, stood against the red brick walls. He went with the others to a doorway at the courtyard’s opposite end, an arched entrance with flickering dark inside.
He stopped there. The others moved around him. A man in a blue cap jostled him, cursed, walked on. The man would be eaten as Simon had been. What the machine did not care for would be put in a box and taken across the river.
Lucas couldn’t tell whether he was meant to go in or to wait here. He thought it might be foolish to wait. The others were so certain, so loud but steady, like unruly soldiers on parade. He hated drawing attention to himself. But he thought, too, that if he went on he might be drawn forward into some error, obscure but irredeemable. He stood in an agony of doubt with the others flowing around him.
Soon Lucas was alone save for a few stragglers who hurried by him without seeming to see him at all. Finally—it seemed an unspeakable mercy—a man came from the building into the courtyard and said, “Are you Lucas?”
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