Suspension

by Richard E. Crabbe

“Bucklin should have just been made to disappear, like McDonald before him, not cornered in an alley within a block of my office!”

  “’Suppose, Cap’n” was all Earl said, his head slumped a bit.

  “Do you really?” the captain Sangree asked skeptically, raising an eyebrow. “I wonder, Earl. Pointing a finger at him, he said again for emphasis,”We’ve worked too long and hard to let any one of us ruin things, including me, I might add. Everything hinges on what we do over the next months. You do understand me, don’t you, all of you?” he asked, scanning the eyes around the table. Nods and”yes, sirs” went around the room.”Good. I don’t want to belabor the point, so let’s move on. Earl, I want your full report on what happened with Bucklin. Everything, mind you, down to the last detail.”

  Earl Lebeau was not a big talker, as he would readily admit. Like most things about him, his speech was stripped down for the long march. He hadn’t had much in the way of schooling past the fourth grade, and he could read and write and cipher just enough to get by. He was no fool, though, and had a natural, backwoods sort of cunning that had served him and “the cause” very well over the years. Thin as a pick handle and just as tough, his real skills ran in other directions.

  “Well, sir, I’ve been keepin’ an eye on Bucklin, jus’ like you said. Followed him home ’out lettin’ him see a bunch o’ times. Looked for an opper … ah, you know, a chance to git him alone, on the sneak. Figured I’d cut his throat if the chance come,” Earl said as if he was talking about planting vegetables. He went on to describe how he had followed Bucklin, hunted him actually. He’d tracked him home after each day’s work, watched his tenement from a safe distance, even gone up to his door and lingered in the hallways in hopes of surprising Terrence in the one place he felt relatively safe. But Bucklin was either being very careful or he was very lucky. Earl wasn’t a big believer in luck.

  “Truth to tell, Cap’n, he was scared. Seemed he was bein’ mighty careful.” A fact Earl Lebeau had a grudging admiration for. “I got to thinkin’ he was usin’ the boy for cover when he had to go out for food an’ such. He was keepin’ to the crowds when he was out the last week, with the boy, or without.” Lebeau had worked hard, even using disguises when he slipped into the tenement. “Camped in them shitty hallways, disguised like a beggar. Place is a rabbit hole. Folks in an’ out o’ there all hours, an’ every kind o’ goddamned foreigner ye can think of. Thought o’ doin’ him in the crapper once, but damned if even that didn’t have a crowd.” Grim laughter followed that observation.

  The captain shook his head slowly, the disdain and disgust for the capital city of Yankee greed visibly sickening him. “People live like animals in this godforsaken city. Half of these pigsties don’t have toilets. Streets full of beggars and orphans. Horse shit and garbage ankle deep.” He shuddered visibly as he said this, disgusted by the filth of the center of the Yankee universe.

  “God, how I miss the South. The smell of hay in the mornings, the red-buds, the cotton blowing like snow, a church choir on Sunday. That’s the way God meant for man to live, not like this,” he said, waving a dismissive hand toward the window. “Wallowing in filth, grubbing for the almighty dollar.” The captain’s eyes didn’t see the little room anymore. They looked away to a land he remembered as in a dream. The years had colored the South of his dreams in increasingly rosy hues.

  “The Almighty may not have seen fit to bless our armies with victory on the field of battle, but we have been called to do His bidding,” the captain said, his voice ringing off the walls. “Just as Booth was called to bring down the serpent Lincoln, we too have been called.” Like a good preacher, he swept the room with his eyes, driving them to his will and purpose. “We’ll turn the dreams of that bastard Roebling to dust.” He held up an open hand and closed it slowly as if crushing stone in his bare hand. “We owe him a debt of pain, boys. We were that close at Little Round Top.” The captain held his fingers up, less than an inch apart. “And he snatched it away. He dares to dream of bridges.” The captain sneered and shook his head as if this were the height of insult. “Oh, it’s easy to dream and build when you’ve everything to build upon.” Thaddeus took a deep breath, a slow grim smile creasing his features and a light growing in his eyes. “We’re going to show Colonel Roebling what it means to lose everything.” The men watched the captain’s arms and hands as they seemed to show Roebling’s downfall. “This bridge is his life. What else does he have left except a crippled body? Destroy the dream and we destroy the man.” A bony fist smacked into his palm with a sound like a minié ball striking bone. “He will know then what it is to lose everything.” He raised his hands up, his fingers spread wide, and said in a solemn tone, “So help me God!”

  The captain’s eyes were black holes, his mouth a thin line of barbed wire. Nobody spoke. When the captain was like this, it was best to keep still. They had all seen him this way before, and there wasn’t one of them who’d ever gone against him at such a time. Others had in years past but it had proven to be a particularly risky undertaking.

  Despite his zeal and lust for vengeance, there was still a man of the South inside, or at least the remains of one. “My one regret is that Mrs. Roebling will be hurt in this. She seems a decent woman.” He gazed out the window into the deepening night and with a small shake of the head whispered, “Sometimes the decent reap what the wicked have sown.” Like flipping a switch, he focused on Lebeau, his eyes bright in the dim light of the room.

  “Uh … yes sir, amen to that, Cap’n.” Earl went on to describe how he finally saw his chance, figuring to keep going before the captain went off on another one of his speeches. Earl tried to emphasize how careful Bucklin had been and how very few opportunities he’d had.

  “He did seem to be a careful man, unlike our Private Watkins here.” Too many beers, not enough brains. You should be more careful. The captain’s words dripped sarcasm. Simon Watkins’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his skinny neck as all eyes turned to him. It was a cool night, but he looked like it was hot in his corner of the room. He was lucky to be alive, he knew. His loose tongue in front of Bucklin had nearly wrecked everything. The captain had a way of dealing with men who failed him. He’d seen it done—had done it himself on the captain’s orders. Back in ’76 when Jack Cummins managed to put another of their missions in jeopardy, the captain had dealt with him viciously. When it was over, he and Earl had been ordered to dump the body in the Ohio. It had been cold. Watkins could still recall how Cummins crashed through the ice when they’d thrown him off the train trestle. He was cold inside but his forehead beaded with sweat. Watkins started to think that if he managed to leave this room alive, maybe there was something he could do, maybe some way he could get out of the mess he was in. The possibilities swirled in his sweating head.

  “Right,” Earl said, trying to keep the heat off his friend. “So when Bucklin went off to Brooklyn to visit the cemetery, I figured I had a chance. Caught him on the way home. Had a gun to his back. Figured to take ‘im up on the bridge where nobody could see, give ’im a little shove … look like suicide. He was quick, though, I’ll give ‘im that. Knocked my gun away. Threw a goddamn pipe at me—near took my head off. Then he took off runnin’ like a scalded cat. Bastard could run too. Chased ‘im across an’ down the stairs. Didn’t catch up with ‘im till he tried to jump the gate of the alley. Missed his footin’. That’s when I got ‘im. Nobody saw. Hell, it was maybe three in the mornin’. He fell over the gate after I swatted ’im, so I went over too to finish up. That’s about it, I guess.”

  “I would have liked the suicide. That was good thinking,” the captain said dryly. There were chuckles around the table, even from Watkins, who was wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  Earl glanced around with a question on his face. “You wouldn’ be makin’ sport of me, Cap’n? Ah don’ take to bein’ made sport of.” There was the hint of trouble in Earl’s tone. The others tensed.

  “No, Earl, I wasn’t making sport of you,” the c
aptain said evenly, looking him in the eye. “Please continue.”

  Earl seemed to take that at face value and went on. “Heard his head go pop, like I says. After, I threw a couple of crates over ‘im, checked over the gate to make sure nobody was on the street, then I jumped it and walked away. Simple as that. Nothin’ more to tell.”

  The captain probed for more details, digging for anything that might be of use or anyone who might possibly have seen or even suspected what Earl had done.

  “Nothing else?” the captain asked one final time.

  “No, sir.”

  The captain nodded thoughtfully, pacing the room for a minute. He stopped suddenly and said, “Earl, I want you to do a little follow-up work on the Bucklins. We’ll talk after the meeting. There’s something I have in mind.” Earl nodded. “I suppose you did as well as could be hoped for under the circumstances,” Thaddeus conceded. “Still, I can’t help but wish that you were able to get rid of him like you did with that fool McDonald. Now, that was a thing as neatly done as ever there was.”

  Matt Emmons sat at the table with Earl, the captain, and the others, but he wasn’t listening. The captain’s mention of McDonald reminded him of the day he first started work on the bridge. They had all had plenty of experience with bridges during the war. They’d blown dozens. They’d even blown three after the war. The train trestle at Ashtabula in ’76 had been a simple job by comparison. They got eighty Yankees when the trestle buckled under a passenger train. They had watched as eleven cars tumbled into the icy river over seventy feet below. Matt could still hear the screams sometimes.

  When they first came to New York, after reading in the Richmond papers that the bridge would be built, the captain argued that working on the thing was the only way to fully understand it. It was like nothing they’d ever attempted before, and it made sense to know it inside and out.

  “We’ll have unlimited access. Nobody will question our comings and goings. It’s perfect,” he’d said. One by one they had all applied for jobs. Some were hired on the spot, some had to keep at it till a job on a particular work crew opened up, but after a while they all were in. Matt and Earl had started in the Brooklyn caisson in September of ’70. That first day was one of the worst days of his life, maybe the worst. Nothing could have prepared him for the caisson.

  “It’s like being a miner,” the captain had told them with some impatience. A wry grin crept across Matt’s face at the thought. He caught himself when he noticed the captain looking. He made a show of paying attention but when the captain went on, Matt drifted back into his daydream. Although it had been years ago, the caisson was still fresh in his mind. After the first few days, he had sort of gotten used to the conditions. As for Earl, he didn’t say much one way or the other, and hardly ever complained, except on the first day.

  Caissons were essentially diving bells, they were huge inverted boxes designed so that gangs of men could work within in relative safety below the level of the river. Sunk on the river bottom at first, the caissons would partially fill with water, like a glass inverted in water, until the water pressure equaled the air pressure within. In order to force the water out, the air pressure had to rise. The deeper a caisson sank into the river bottom, the higher the air pressure had to be. Compressed air was the answer, pumped in constantly to maintain proper pressure and keep the river out.

  The caissons were essential to the bridge, for upon them the stone towers would rise. They needed to go deep enough to rest on a completely solid footing, preferably rock. To do that, the workers slowly excavated the dirt and stone within each caisson, effectively undermining it and lowering it as they went. All the while, stone was piled on top. Caissons may have been big diving bells but they felt like tombs.

  Matt recalled climbing down into the air lock the first day, through a hatch in the top. Once inside, he and Earl had looked up through the thick glass ports in the ceiling, the ghostly light their last connection with the outside world. The other men shifted on their feet nervously. The clang of the hatch reverberated through the walls of their cast-iron tomb.

  “New fellas, ain’t ye?” the air lock operator had said with a gap-toothed grin while turning a large valve. Compressed air shrieked, driving white-hot nails into their ears, which popped painfully as the pressure increased. Matt’s breath came fast and labored. He and the others drowned in the crushing air as the pressure built to equal that of the caisson below. One of the others, a man named Mike Lynch, was the first to go down into the Brooklyn caisson. When the foundation was completed in March of ’71, and the caisson filled with concrete, he had been the last man up. As quick as it started, the air pressure leveled off, and the hatch in the floor dropped open. A gaping black hole awaited them. As Matt looked down into the caisson, an unnatural light danced and flickered. He could still feel his guts twist as he looked down that hole at the bottom of the river.

  Captain Sangree was droning on about some small details, which didn’t interest Matt or even concern him that much. They’d gone over the damned plans so many times he could recite them in his sleep. He drifted off again, while trying to appear to pay attention.

  One in three didn’t come back after the first day in the caisson. He began to know why as they started down the ladder. The humidity rose to meet them, lapping in waves until it engulfed them completely. The heat was intense. Men took off their shirts immediately. Their voices had changed in the unnatural air pressure, becoming high-pitched and tinny. Matt grinned at the memory, hiding his smile from the captain behind a concealing hand.

  “Matt, I say we get the hell outa here,” Earl had said abruptly. He had a hand on the ladder leading up to the air lock, when a muffled clang from up above made them both crane their necks. The heavy, cast-iron hatch shut over their heads.

  “Where do you two choir boys think you’re going?” Matt could remember those words like they were spoken yesterday. It was their introduction to Charles Young. They turned to look at a big man. His wide shoulders and thick neck gave him an impressive presence that didn’t match his reedy voice.

  “We’re new,” Earl had said, shifting his feet like an errant schoolboy.

  “Well, shit, I can see that,” Young said, laughing. “You two look like a couple o’ canaries in a cellar full o’ cats. Thinkin’ of going up the ladder? Can’t say I blame you. By the way, your voice will be just as manly as ever once you get topside. It’s the air, does strange things. Can’t even blow out a candle down here. I’ve seen dozens try, but none as done it. Once a flame gets goin’ there’s no stoppin’ it, so be damned careful with fire. That’s rule one. You’ll have a big appetite too and not just from the work, so pack a big lunch or you’ll regret it.”

  Captain Sangree said something to bring Matt out of his daydream again and he nodded with the rest of them, as if he knew what was being said, then slipped back into his own thoughts. Working in the caissons had been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for him and Earl. He found himself thinking about it more often now that the end was in sight.

  Oddly, the thing Matt recalled most was his growling stomach. It gurgled like a clogged drainpipe, twisting and cramping from nervousness or the air pressure or both. As Young showed them what to do, his gut growled and tumbled. They started by hauling dirt to the dredge pool. Two dredges were contained in large square shafts. These shafts, which were filled with water, extended down through the caisson roof into a pool of standing water in the caisson floor. The weight of the water in the shafts was counterbalanced by the air pressure in the caisson.

  “Inside these shafts are clamshell dredges,” Young said. “You boys dump the dirt and rocks into the pool and the dredge scoops it out and drops it topside. Fuckin’ things get stuck all the time. We spend half our time fixing ’em.”

  There were gangs of men in the chamber, working at excavating under the edges of the caisson wall. The wall was only eight inches thick at the bottom edge, shod with cast iron that was called the “shoe.” Matt remembered watching
the men working at a boulder wedged under the shoe, going at it with steel bars and sledgehammers. It was still clear in Matt’s mind, the pounding, ringing hammers, sweat glistening and running on shining backs, mud smeared on haggard faces, the heavy smell of creosote and tar that sealed the wood of the caisson walls, the cursing in high-pitched voices, the ghastly light and oppressive heat. Sometimes boulders broke quickly, sometimes they didn’t. There were plenty of boulders. One hundred twelve men to a shift, in two daily shifts, managed to sink the caisson about two inches. Matt recalled how the heavy timbers groaned, creaked, and squealed around them as the 3,000-ton caisson was lowered, its load of granite above growing with every passing day. The Brooklyn caisson hit bedrock at forty-four feet six inches below the high-water mark. The New York caisson had gone much deeper.

  Thinking back on it now, Matt could hardly believe he had gone through with it.

  “Dear God, what have I got myself into?” he had mumbled as he picked up his shovel. So, they dug and sweated and wondered if any small part of their labor was worth the price. After about twenty minutes of hauling rocks and dirt, the cramps in his gut had gotten harder to ignore. Matt had searched desperately for an outhouse, going from chamber to chamber, until he ran into the foreman.

  “You gotta go, you go in one of the chambers we’re not working in. No shitters down here. I hear the engineers are working on one, though,” he said with a laugh. Matt had found a chamber that was empty of any activity. It was without light and about as black as an executioner’s heart.

  He had felt his way down the wall, running his hands over the rough tarred timbers. He didn’t go far till he stopped and dropped his trousers. Feeling like he was going to die, he started to pray. He prayed long and hard. It seemed an eternity at the time, alternately praying and shitting. But after a bit it began to pass, and he got to thinking that his prayers were answered. Then the horrible truth struck him. He had no paper.