Specimen Days. Michael Cunningham
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 of the cutting-and-stamping room was dust, but bright dust, drifting silvery particles that winked and glimmered in the sluggish light. Men stood at the machines engaged in mysterious efforts, bent over, straining with their shoulders and thighs. Lucas saw that the men, like Jack, had taken on the color of the room. Were they dying or just becoming more like the air?
Jack led him to a machine at the far end. Yet another room opened off this one, though Lucas could discern only a sepulchral stillness and what appeared to be stacks of vaults, like catacombs, filled with silver canisters. It seemed there must be another room after that and then another and another. The works might extend for miles, like a series of caverns. It seemed that it would be possible to walk through them for hours and finally reach—what? Lucas didn’t fully understand what it was that the works produced. Simon had never spoken of it. Lucas had imagined some treasure, a living jewel, a ball of green fire, infinitely precious, the making of which required unstinting effort. He wondered now why he had never thought to ask. His brother’s labors had always seemed a mystery, to be respected and revered.
“Here,” Jack said, stopping before a machine. “You work here.”
“This is where my brother worked.”
“It is.”
Lucas stood before the machine that had taken Simon. It was a toothed wheel, like a titanic piano roll, set over a broad belt bordered by clamps.
Jack said, “You must be more careful than your brother was.”
Lucas understood from Jack’s voice that the machine was not to blame. He stared at the machine as he’d stared once at the gorilla at Barnum’s. It was immense and stolid. It wore its wheel as a snail wears its shell, with a languid and inscrutable pride. Like a snail with its shell, the machine contained a quicker, more liquid life in its nether parts. Under the wheel, which snagged flecks of orange light on its square teeth, were the rows of clamps, the pale, naked-looking leather of the belt, the slender stalks of the levers. The wheel harbored a shifting shadow of brownish-black. The machine was at once formidable and tender-looking. It offered its belt like a tentative promise of kindness.
Jack said, “Tom Clare, over there” (he nodded at a young man laboring at the next machine), “stacks plates in the bin here. Tom, this is Lucas, the new man.”
Tom Clare, sharp-faced, whiskered, looked up. “Sorry about your loss,” he said. He would have seen Simon eaten by the machine. Was it his fault, then? Could he have acted more quickly, been more brave?
“Thank you,” Lucas answered.
Jack lifted from the bin a flat rectangle of iron, the size of an oven door, and laid it on the belt. “You fasten it tight,” he said. He screwed clamps down onto the iron plate, three on each side. “See the lines on the belt?”
The belt was marked with white lines, each drawn several inches above one of the clamps. “The top edge,” Jack said, “has to be lined up exactly. Do you understand? It has to be right up on this line.”
“I see,” Lucas said.
“When it’s even with the line and when the