by Paula Guran
“So Colonel Roebling, the boss, the chief engineer,” Mischke continued, “he comes down. He has carpenters drill holes to see how far the fire has gone into the wood. They drill here, there, there … and they find live, burning coals two feet deep in the wood, three feet deep, four feet … ”
Mischke had finished his first sandwich, and he took the second out of his lunch pail and made a swooping gesture with it. He was eating a huge amount, even for a man of his size, and he’d emptied two of the four bottles of beer that were in his pail. “Finally Colonel Roebling decides to flood the caisson. He gets all of us out, and then he lets all the air out so that the river floods in, and the whole caisson is full of water. He didn’t want to do this, because he was afraid the water crashing in might wreck the caisson. But there was no choice; the fire would not die any other way. You understand? The fire would not die. Not down here. Not with this air.” Mischke waved his hand through the thick, heavy air between us.
“And it worked?” I asked. “Flooding the caisson put out the fire?”
“Of course! The colonel, he’s a smart man; he knows what he’s doing. They flooded it, and left it full of water for two days. That finally put the fire out. And the caisson wasn’t damaged by the water at all. Once they pumped the water out again, we went back in and had the Brooklyn caisson down to bedrock in two weeks.” He looked at me with a crooked grin of pride. “Forty-five feet below the bottom of the river we dug that thing.” The gong ending our allotted time for lunch sounded, and we stood up to go back to our shoveling. Mischke caught my arm. “You have to understand,” he said, putting his face close to mine again. “It’s different down here.” He stabbed a finger in the direction of his lunch pail. “You see how much I eat? We are all like that down here—you will be too in a day or so. The air does something to you, to your insides, so you burn through food like that fire burned through wood. Everything is different down here. Life is different, fire is different. Even the stones are different!”
I looked at him, not sure what he meant. “The stones?” I asked, but too late; he had turned to pick up his shovel and was walking away to his assigned digging station.
We shoveled. Our shift ended, and we went home and came back the next day and the next and the next. As Mischke predicted, my appetite while in the caisson became as outsized as his. And at the end of each day, as we “locked out” and climbed the spiral stairs to the outside world of afternoon sun and cold November air, a crushing weight of exhaustion descended on me, out of any proportion to the work I had done. I would have been ashamed at my feebleness as I staggered up those steps, but I saw that all the men around me were in the same condition. There was something about leaving the air of the caisson that made the energy drain out of you like water being poured from a jug.
Then one afternoon as we were waiting for the boat that would ferry us to shore, one of the men near me suddenly made a strange yelping sound, crouching in on himself and grabbing at his stomach. A moment later he dropped to his knees, his face screwed up in agony.
“Agh,” Mischke grunted beside me. “It’s caisson disease—the Grecian Bends.”
His words confirmed my guess. I’d heard of this disease that struck caisson workers, though this was the first time I’d seen it. Like any disease, this one seemed to be random and inexplicable. There was no guessing who would fall sick from it, or when. They said that sometimes a big, muscular man would become ill after his first day in the caisson, while a puny man would work day after day for months. Even the form the disease took was random. It might be a pain in the knee or elbow, or agonizing stomach cramps, or a temporary paralysis of the legs, or sudden fainting and unconsciousness. They also said that at another place in America, where a bridge was being built across the Mississippi river, caisson workers had died of the disease.
Soon two men came along and helped the sick worker to his feet. They seemed to be friends of his, and they got him onto the ferry and sat on either side of him for the ride back to shore. Perhaps he would be back at work the next day, or perhaps not.
A few days after we saw the man get sick, Mischke came to me at lunch, drawing me over to his favorite bench in a corner of one of the interior partitions. “Look at this,” he said when we were sitting down. He pulled a stone a little smaller than a fist out of his pocket and handed it to me. At first I saw nothing but a rock, but at Mischke’s “Look, look!” I peered closer. Embedded into the stone and only partially revealed was the skull of a small animal, showing a pointed jaw with many teeth. Except for the teeth it looked like the skull of a bird, but I guessed it to be some kind of lizard.
“Colonel Roebling,” Mischke said, “he calls these stone bones ‘fossils,’ and says they have been here for a long, long time, since before there was even a river here. He also tells me that in some parts of the world they find bones like these that are huge, bones from giant monsters that died out long ago. Around here there are only these smaller ones, but still, it’s strange to think about, eh?” He took the stone back from me and stared down at it himself. “I find a lot of these. I keep my eyes open while I dig, and I find them. Sometimes when the colonel comes down here he asks me if I have any good ones, and he buys them from me.” He hesitated for a time, and then looked up at me. “You want to see something else, young Dudek? Look here.” He moved toward me so that we were huddling together over the stone in his hand. “Up there, in the regular air of the world, these things, these fossils, they are like stone. Stone in the shape of bones, but just stone. But down here … as long as they stay down here, in this air …” Cupping the stone in one hand, he slowly drew the thumbnail of his other hand across the edge of the jaw. Bits of stone flaked away under the pressure of his nail, revealing a line of white.
“You see?” He lifted the thing closer to my face. “It is still bone, as if this little animal died a year ago, even less! Down here, in this air…” He paused, squinting at me so that the narrower of his mismatched eyes closed down to nothing. “Things don’t die so easy, so completely. Like the fire in the Brooklyn caisson that wouldn’t die. And now, here, we are deeper than the Brooklyn caisson ever went.”
“Mischke,” I said slowly. “What are you saying? Do you think these bones aren’t dead?” I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed for my friend or if he was making a joke. I’d found that Americans often like to tease us “fresh off the boat” immigrants, telling us wild, silly stories just to see what we’ll believe. Perhaps Mischke was playing this sort of game with me.
“No, I’m not saying that,” he answered. “This thing is dead. It was dead before it even got covered up in the ground. I know when something is dead, Dudek, have no doubts about that.” With that he turned away from me, putting the stone back in his pocket.
Mischke didn’t speak to me much over the next few weeks. In the vast, six-chambered space of the caisson, it’s easy enough for a man to keep to himself, even with over a hundred men down there with you. I worked. I shoveled dirt, I cracked boulders with a pickaxe, I learned how to drill holes for gunpowder in the larger boulders. And at the end of each day I drank, I ate, I slept, I missed my home.
Then Mischke came to me one afternoon as we were lining up at the airlock at the end of our shift. “Dudek, I need to ask for something from you. A favor. I need to ask for a favor.” He said the word as if it was something shameful.
“Of course, Mischke,” I said. “What can I do?”
“I want you to ask them to put you on second shift. You see …” His eyes shifted around uncertainly, which was something I’d never seen in him before. “I watch out for it on first shift,” he said. “You can keep your eye on it in second shift, and third shift, at night … well, there’s not so many men down here then, and they don’t work so hard. That foreman is drunk most of the time, so we just have to hope …”
I waited, not wanting to annoy Mischke with a flurry of confused questions. Finally he seemed to notice my silence and uncomprehending expression. “I … I f
ound something,” he said. “Maybe it’s nothing. Probably it’s nothing. But I have to see, I have to try, to find out …”
“What did you find, Mischke?”
He regarded me silently for a time, and then brought one of his big hands up to the level of his chest, his fingers curled as if holding an imaginary object the size of an apple. “An egg!” he said after another pause. “I was digging, and there were fossil bones first, and then three eggs. One smashed in, one cracked … and one … perfect. No cracks … just smooth, clean, perfect. I think … I think maybe it is not dead, Dudek. I think … if I take care of it, keep it warm … I think maybe it will hatch!”
Where I come from, people believe many things that I’m told the educated people of America do not believe. The evil eye that can spoil a baby’s heart and make it die, the bit of red string to protect the baby, the danger of black cats, of spilled salt, and a hundred other things our grandmothers tell us of the hidden ways the world works. But this was not like one of those things that might be or might not. This was something that made me feel bad for Mischke. Once I started looking, I had seen many of these fossil bones that Mischke had shown me, and they were all nothing but stone; rocks in the shape of bones. Even if one of them was in the shape of an egg, it could no more hatch than any other stone. I avoided Mischke’s eyes, not knowing what to say.
“I keep it hidden,” he went on, “in a tin box I keep on the shelf where I put my lunch pail, covered up with a rag. It has to be up out of the ground so the air can get at it. And it’s up high, so it stays warm. That’s important. You understand? But the air … that’s what’s most important. It has to stay down here in this air until it’s ready. If someone finds it and takes it up, takes it outside, that will kill it for sure!”
“So what do you want me to do, Mischke?”
“Just watch! Make sure nobody goes poking around in my stuff! That nobody moves the tin or tries to look inside! Put your lunch pail up on the shelf next to where I leave the tin, so it will look like it belongs to you.”
It seemed vastly unlikely to me that anyone among the caisson laborers would touch, much less steal, anything that belonged to another worker, but I didn’t argue the point. The more Mischke talked about this thing, the wilder his eyes got and the sadder I felt.
So I asked to be put on second shift, and the bosses agreed. They had a hard time finding men to work in the caissons; once men got a taste of how hard the work was, how strange the environment was, how terrifying it was if you let your imagination go, many of them left after their first day. Every week there were new faces in the crew, and after only a couple of months I was considered one of the “old hands” among the men.
As Mischke had said, on his corner of a shelf there was a bunched-up rag, and under the rag was a tobacco tin with a few holes punched into it. I didn’t look into the tin, or even touch it. I just did my work and left at the end of my shift.
Again I barely saw Mischke for a few weeks. When I did encounter him, it was in the caisson, during the second shift. “Hullo, Mischke!” I called out. “You’ve switched to the afternoon shift?”
“Yes,” he grumbled, and then took me by the arm and led me to an empty corner. “Listen, Dudek. I need some food. I haven’t had anything since … Can I have some of yours? I’ll pay you back.”
Puzzled almost beyond speaking, I said “Of course!” then fetched my lunch pail and handed it to him. “Take whatever you like.”
He fished around, took out one of my two thick sandwiches, unwrapped the paper to look at it, and apparently satisfied, tore off half of it and put the rest back in the pail. “Thanks, Dudek,” he said, already turning his back to me. He walked away, holding the piece of sandwich as if it was precious to him in some way that had nothing to do with hunger.
I saw him again as the shift was close to ending. “Can you bring more food tomorrow?” he asked. He stood crookedly, as if he was too exhausted to straighten his back.
“Mischke, what’s wrong? Why can’t you get your own food?”
“I’m not coming out. I have to stay down here for … I don’t know, a little longer. Maybe a few days. It’s not ready … I mean, I don’t think it should come out yet. It might not be strong enough yet. And I have to feed it!”
I felt certain I knew what “it” was, or what Mischke thought it was, and that certainty made me feel sick. I couldn’t bring myself to try to confirm my guess, and in any case I doubted that Mischke would answer me if I did. “You can’t just stay down here around the clock, Mischke,” I said. “The foremen will notice—”
He put his hand on my arm. “Please! I just need food for a few days! Do this for me, Dudek!” It was strange, beyond strange, to see this big man, whose strength and toughness had once seemed limitless to me, reduced to pleading; and pleading not even for himself, but for …
“Of course, Mischke,” I said. “I’ll bring extra food tomorrow.”
Things stayed like that for three days. During that time I saw that Mischke had taken one of the empty gunpowder boxes for his own. These were sturdy little wooden crates that the men often used as stools to sit on while eating. Mischke had whittled a few holes in the box, and had tied the lid on with a crisscross of rope. Watching him from a shadowy distance, I saw him dropping bits of food in through the holes. When I left the caisson at the end of the shift each day Mischke would stay behind, hiding in one of the far partitions so the foreman wouldn’t notice.
On the morning of the fourth day, a man approached me as I was eating breakfast. It was an Irishman named Quinn, who worked the evening shift and who I’d shared a few drinks with recently. “They caught your crazy friend Mickey,” he began. From the story that followed I gathered that Mischke had been noticed as he tried yet again to stay behind in the caisson as the work shifts changed. The foreman had called him a dozen foul names and ordered him into the airlock and off of the jobsite. “So he came up with the rest of us,” Quinn said, “but as soon as he was out in the air you could see he was sick—sick with caisson disease. He walked a few steps, and then he was on the ground, like a dead man. They took him to the company hospital on the dock.”
Asking after Mischke at the hospital, I was led to a room where there were six men, all lying in narrow beds that were lined up along one wall. More and more men had been getting the disease as the caisson went deeper under the bottom of the river, and there was space in the room for many additional beds.
“Young Dudek,” Mischke said to me as I approached, making a weak smile. His head was propped up with pillows, but his body was so limp it looked as if he had been crushed into the mattress by a great weight. “Who would think that I would get the Grecian Bends, eh? I’ve been down there as long as anyone, and never had even a twinge before.” He attempted another smile, and then just lay breathing for a time. “Not a good disease, Dudek. I can barely move. My legs are like dead sticks of wood. They say I will get better, but they don’t know. … Some get better, some don’t.” I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t have been an insult to Mischke. We both knew that two men had died from the bends in the past few weeks.
Then Mischke’s eyes sharpened, fixing on me. “Listen Dudek. I need your help. My box—what I have in the box—I need you to …” He stopped, perhaps because of something I allowed to show on my face. Another span of time passed in silence, and I had the feeling that Mischke was gathering himself for some effort. But when he finally spoke again, it seemed that he was changing the subject.
“They have some nurses here,” he said, shifting his eyes to the doors of the big room. “Nice women, very good and kind. But they keep talking to me about prayer; they will pray for me, they want me to pray for myself. Do you pray, Dudek?”
“Not often.”
“I used to. I used to feel close to God, sometimes, like he was … ” with painful effort, he lifted one arm, vaguely indicating a space somewhere beside him. “Like he was right there, with me. I thought about becoming a priest w
hen I was a boy. Then I grew up, I got a wife, and we … we had …”
Mischke’s face was stony, showing no emotion, but he couldn’t seem to finish the sentence. Finally he lifted both arms from the bed, bringing his hands near each other, as if cradling something. “When you see death, Dudek, when you see it and hold it, hold it as a thing in your hands, and you know it for what it is, something as solid and real as a stone, something that is black and terrible and is always there, always with us, eating out the insides of life …” He sighed and slowly lowered his trembling arms. “When a man sees that, Dudek, he does not pray any more.”