The Brooklyn Bridge was dubbed “The Eighth Wonder of the World” when it opened in 1883. It is made of more than granite, steel, and concrete. The men who built it sacrificed sweat, blood, health, and even lives to build it. But perhaps one builder gained something very special indeed.

CAISSON

KKARL BUNKER

The first time I saw Mischke was in the winter of 1871, and he was on his knees making cooing noises at a baby. The baby was on the lap of its mother, a plump young woman whose expression made it clear she didn’t know quite what to make of the oversized bear of a man who was tickling her infant’s cheek with a calloused finger. The woman had entered the noisy tavern a few moments prior, and had sat at one of the tables after speaking a few sharp words to the barkeep. Her presence had attracted some attention, as it was a rare thing to see a woman in one of these New York taverns. But the man on his knees hardly seemed to notice her; he was only interested in the baby. For its part, the infant seemed quite happy with his new friend, laughing and flailing a fat little arm as he tried to catch the finger tickling his face. After a few attempts he succeeded, his hand clamping down on a great log of a forefinger it could only half encircle. At this the man’s enthusiasm redoubled, and he launched into an excited monologue that included a few phrases of Polish along with the clucking nonsense syllables. I recognized the eastern drawl of Kresy dialect, close enough to the Mazovian Polish I grew up with to give me a sudden ache of homesickness. Then another man approached. He looked down at the Pole with disapproval, but immediately the woman launched into a tirade at him, snapping out a string of angry words in Irish-accented English that was too fast for me to follow. The couple left, and the big Pole got to his feet.

I was new to this country, and I felt always on the edge of being overwhelmed by the strangeness of everything. I slept in one of the many small rooms above the Nassau Avenue tavern I was in, and five other men shared the room with me. We were all strangers to one another, and it was clearly the tradition that we continue to treat each other as strangers, even as we unrolled our sleeping pallets side-by-side, so close they almost touched. Indeed, it sometimes seemed that being strangers to each other was the rule for all people of America. The Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn where I lived was largely a mix of German and Irish immigrants, with a few Poles like myself, and a dozen or so other nationalities beginning to sprinkle in. So everywhere I turned there were people not like myself, and I felt like a small fish tossed into an alien sea.

And this new man, in spite of the familiarity of his language, was a strange-looking figure even in a country of strangers. Like the crude wooden tables and chairs around us, he looked like something banged together by a peasant carpenter. He was coarsely chopped and chiseled and sawn, the various mismatched pieces of him held together with pegs and nails. His nose was crooked, and one eye was always open wider than the other. He hadn’t shaved recently, and his hair looked like it was hacked off with a pocketknife. His face was craggy and lined in a way that made it impossible to guess his age.

I was sitting at a long table a few feet from where the Irish girl had sat to wait for her husband. As the man I’d been watching stood, I called out to him in Polish, shouting over the background noise. “I think you must have a well-loved little baby of your own at home.”

I knew before the words were fully out of my mouth that I’d made a terrible mistake. The man looked down at me, and while his face was as immobile as stone, he seemed to turn gray and crumple in on himself as I watched. He pulled out the empty chair across the table from me and sat down slowly. For a long time he stared at me with an expression I found frightening, until I realized he wasn’t truly looking at me at all, or at anything else in this world. Finally he made a hunching, rolling gesture with his huge shoulders, as if throwing off some great weight. Then he turned and bellowed out to the bartender, calling him by name and asking for vodka and a bowl of cabbage soup. When the bottle and a glass were delivered to the table Mischke poured the little glass full and then emptied it in two swallows. Only then did he look at me— really looking at me now—his eyes scanning my face. “Mazowsze,” he said, guessing the general region of my origin from my accent as I’d done with him. “Warsaw?”

“Kutno,” I corrected, and then I stuck out my hand in the American fashion. “Stephan Dudek.”

He took my hand. “Mischke,” he said. In all the time I knew him, I never learned his first name.

A bowl of soup and a slab of bread were brought to the table, and Mischke began to eat. A few minutes passed without him speaking or looking at me, and I began to wonder if he’d forgotten about my existence—if the few words he’d shared with me were all I would ever get from him.

But then he looked up, his eyes meeting mine. He jabbed a finger in the direction of his soup bowl. “I showed the cook here how to make kapusniak,” he said. “It’s not bad.” He twisted around in his chair and yelled the bartender’s name again, demanding another bowl of soup “for my countryman.” Then he looked me over, examining what he could see of my body as well as my face. “You work in the docks?”

I nodded.

“You look like a strong man, and healthy.” He’d switched to English, and I got the feeling he was repeating something he’d heard in that language. He refilled his vodka glass and took a sip from it—an oddly delicate gesture on a man of his size. “You want to make two dollars and twenty-five cents a day?” he asked. “Come with me tomorrow, I’ll get you a job working on the bridge.”

My face must have taken on a silly expression, because Mischke broke into a ragged grin. Two dollars and twenty-five cents was far more than I earned on the docks, but … “You mean on the towers?” I asked. I was thinking of the dizzying height of the Brooklyn tower, only half-finished, I’d heard, and already it was taller than any other man-made thing I’d ever seen.

“Nah!” Mischke growled. His voice was full of disdain, as if he considered wrestling huge blocks of granite into place hundreds of feet in the air to be work for boys. “Not the towers. The caissons! The Brooklyn side is all done, but on the New York side there’s still months of work.”

“The caissons!” I echoed.

“You’ve heard about them?”

“I’ve heard a little,” I said, not adding that what I’d heard sounded both terrifying and incomprehensible. “But I don’t understand it too well. Something about working under the water?”

“Yes!” Mischke said with a kind of wild delight in his eyes. “Under the water, but not in the water! I’ll explain.” He took hold of his soup bowl with both hands and slid it toward me a few inches. “It’s like this: Here is Brooklyn.” He stabbed his thick forefinger down on the table between himself and his soup bowl. “And here is New York.” His finger thumped down on the opposite side of the bowl. Then he pointed into the bowl. “The soup here is the East River; a big, wide river, you know. So. To build a bridge this big, first you need two towers, one on each side, but both of them in the river, not back here on the shore. The towers will hold up the bridge, okay? Aha! But how to build a stone tower that has its foundation deep down in the water of the river?” He held two fingers together and poked them into his soup, down to the flat bottom of the bowl. “That’s the problem!”

When you order vodka from a bar in America, they give you a little doll-sized glass to drink it out of. Mischke picked up his glass and emptied it into his mouth. Then he held it upside down over his soup, lowering it slowly toward the surface. “Imagine this is made of wood,” he said, tapping the glass with a finger of his left hand. “Imagine it is big. Very, very big. But it floats, see?” He held the glass so it was just skimming the surface of his soup. “Now. You float this out to the right place in the river, and then you start laying blocks of stone on top of it. More and more stone. You start building your tower. You know what happens? This thing”—he pointed at the glass—“it sinks. The more stone you add to the top, the lower it sinks in the river. Enough stone, it goes down to the bottom of the river.” He pushed the glass down to the bottom of his soup bowl.

“Clever,” I said.

He leaned closer to me suddenly, glaring with his mismatched eyes. “Wrong!” he said. “Not clever, because that’s not the end of it.” The wider of his eyes relaxed, while the narrower one kept up a skeptical squint. “What’s at the bottom of a river, Dudek? Mud, that’s what! These towers that will hold up the bridge, they’re going to be tall, huge! Taller than the Trinity Church when they’re done! You want to build something like that on mud?”

I was new to New York, and hadn’t seen Trinity Church yet.

Mischke’s voice changed to a gravelly whisper and he smiled like someone making a sly joke. “This is where it gets interesting, young Dudek. This is where you come in. You and me, and the job we do.” Again he pointed down at the glass he was holding up-ended in his soup. “This thing, that’s the caisson. That’s French for box, because that’s what it is, a big wooden box, open at the bottom. It has air in it, right? I push it down into the river, the soup, but the air is still in it, right? Hah?”

“Right,” I said. “Air.”

“So what they do, what Colonel Roebling does—he’s the boss, the big boss, the chief engineer, they call him—what Colonel Roebling does, he makes it so men can go down inside here.” He tapped the little glass. “Men go down in there, and they dig. They breathe the air that’s pumped down and they dig and dig, and all the dirt they dig is hauled up and out from inside the caisson, and it—the caisson—it goes down into the mud at the bottom of the river. The men dig out the mud and dirt and rocks from all around the floor of the caisson, and down and down it goes, into the earth, while up top they keep laying on more and more stone blocks. The caisson goes down more, and more, and more … until it is on bedrock.” He thumped his fist on the table. “Solid.” I peered down at Mischke’s upside-down vodka glass, sitting in the bowl of murky soup. “Inside … that box … under the water … under the bottom of the river … That’s where you go? To dig?”

He was grinning at me, his big yellow teeth showing. “Inside, Dudek! That is the job I got for you. Me, I already worked on the Brooklyn caisson. Now you and me, we go work on the New York side. We go in there and we dig, dig, dig.” He put his free hand near the glass, extended the first two fingers and made waggling motions with them, like the scratching, digging legs of a rodent. “There is more,” he said, his grin becoming uncertain. “Much more for you to know, to learn, to find out. But that is enough for now. You know more now than I did when I started.”

I had a dozen questions, and probably there were a hundred more that I didn’t know enough to ask, but I said nothing. It was a job, and a job that paid well. Two dollars and twenty-five cents a day was more than any other job I’d ever heard of.

The next morning I was standing on a sea of stone, half a city block in size. Scattered here and there were huge boom derricks, steam engines spewing out black coal smoke and white steam, and everywhere men busy at a myriad of different tasks. Mischke and I worked the first shift, so the start of our day came at six in the morning. We were in a cluster of about a hundred men grouped around a small opening in the center of the stone plateau. Most of these men had an easy slouch that showed they were familiar with the setting, but a few of us were what the foreman called new guys. “You new guys come with me,” he said. “I’ll lock in with you.”

“Lock in?” I asked Mischke, not sure I liked the sound of it.

“It means go in through the air lock. You’ll see.” The foreman led us through the crowd of workers and then down a long spiral staircase. When the steps ended, the outside world had been reduced to a small disk of light above us, and we were standing on an iron deck the size of a big room, surrounded by walls of stone. There was a square hatch built into the floor, and the foreman went over to this, opened it and climbed down through it, calling up to us to follow. One by one we went through the door and down a ladder and found ourselves in a smaller room, this one cylindrical and walled with more iron. There were about ten of us in our group, but there was space enough in the room for at least twice that many. The foreman climbed back up the ladder and closed the door we’d come through, and then called out to Mischke, “Open the valve, Mickey!”

Mischke turned a thing like an oversized faucet handle, and the room was filled with a howling roar. Air was rushing through the valve, bringing with it a stifling flood of heat and humidity. After a short time I felt a piercing pain in my ears, and it was obvious that others of us “new guys” were feeling it too. The foreman was yelling an English word at us over and over, but I was distracted by the pain and I couldn’t think of the word’s meaning. “Swallow!” Mischke translated, shouting at me. “Swallow, swallow!” Some minutes later the roaring stopped, and the foreman opened another hatch at our feet. Again there was a ladder leading down, and again the foreman went first, then Mischke, then the rest of us.

It could have been another world, a world out of a fever dream.

It had been explained to us that the caisson was divided by timber walls into six lengthwise sections, and we were in one of these sections. So the width of the chamber was not so great, but the length seemed interminable, the far wall invisible in the misty gloom. The roof was three or four feet above our heads, and the ground we stood on was hard-packed dirt and gravel. At intervals along the walls there were blazing white lights, so bright that it hurt to look at them. But as bright as the individual lamps were, the steamy air seemed to swallow up the light before it had gone any distance. I could see that the walls had been whitewashed at one time, but months of spattering mud had blackened all but the uppermost few feet.

One of the men standing near me swore in English, and his voice was so strangely thin and weak that we all turned to look at him. He repeated the word, listening to himself, and then laughed, saying that he sounded like his own mother. The foreman spoke to us then, and his voice too was transformed into a thin, wheezing treble.

We new guys were directed to a shelf where we could stow our lunch pails, and to pegs where we could hang our jackets and shirts. I saw then that the men who had “locked in” before us were all stripped to the waist. Outside it was a chilly November morning, but in this place it was miserably hot and humid.

And the air … I’d been distracted by my surroundings, but now I realized that I was panting as if I’d been running for miles. The air was thick and sluggish; it took effort to pull it into my lungs and then force it out again, like breathing water. I felt a flicker of panic nudging at the back of my mind: the panic of drowning. Mischke thumped his hand on my back. “It’s best not to think about the air,” he said. “Just breathe the stuff, and you’ll be okay.” Even Mischke’s voice, as big as he was, became weak and feminine in this place. I was about to make a joke to him about this, but the foreman was yelling at us—as well as he could in his enfeebled voice. It was time for us to work, he said.

The work was digging. Just as Mischke had described it with his soup bowl and vodka glass, we were to dig out the dirt from under our feet, and from underneath the walls of the massive structure we were inside. Shovelful by shovelful, we dug. We filled wheelbarrows with dirt and emptied them into a water-filled depression at the center of the caisson. A huge pipe ran from this pool up through the ceiling and on to the surface above, and inside this pipe was a clamshell device that lifted the dirt up to the outside world. Rocks too big to be lifted out in this way were broken up by men with picks. Boulders too big for men with picks were blasted apart with gunpowder. But for me and most of the men in the caisson, all we did was dig. Plunge your shovel into the sandy soil, lift it, dump out the soil. Then do it again, and again, and a thousand more times. It seemed absurd, what we were being asked to do—a few dozen men using the strength of their arms to create an inverse mountain, to lower this monster structure of wood and stone into the earth, like a farmer pounding a fence-post into the ground. But Mischke told me that the caisson was measured to sink a few inches every day, perhaps a foot in a week, a few feet in a month, and by these degrees the job would be done. The tower would have its foundation, the bridge would have its tower, and in time, the river would have its bridge.

So we shoveled.

At our lunch break Mischke went and sat on a bench that was against one of the outside walls of the caisson. Holding a gigantic slab of a sandwich in one hand, he banged on the wall behind us with the beer bottle in his other fist. It clanged metallically. “The inside is covered with sheet iron,” he said. “They didn’t know to do that with the Brooklyn caisson, so it was just wood. One day—it was when the digging in the caisson was almost done—a worker held a candle too close to the calking fiber between the timbers, up near the roof, and it started to burn. Nobody noticed the fire for a while, and by the time they did, it had eaten out a void inside the wood.” He leaned closer to me, looking into my eyes. “Things do not behave down here like they do up in the world. And fire … fire is one thing that behaves very differently.” He pointed up at the ceiling over our heads. “You know the walls and the roof of this caisson are thick, right? Layer on layer of the heaviest timbers, so the roof is fifteen feet thick. Well, that was a good thing, because the fire was burning through all of that. The place where the fire started was a small hole, no bigger than my hand. But inside the timbers of the ceiling, it was like a living thing, eating away more and more of the wood, hollowing out a big chamber. But that wasn’t the strangest thing, or the worst. Once that fire got started, it seemed that nothing would put it out. We used buckets of water at first, then they brought in a big hose and a pump, blasting water into the hole the fire had made. But always as soon as the water stopped, the fire would begin again. It seemed like it would soon eat away the whole top of the caisson, and all the stone of the tower above us and all the water of the East River would come down on our heads.” Mischke paused to chuckle, and I knew it was the sickly expression on my face that was making him laugh.

“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 found 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 when 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.”

He lay very still then, so quiet and still that I found myself checking whether he was still breathing. His voice was soft when he spoke again. “But now I have seen something else, Dudek. Something alive, something alive that shouldn’t be alive. Something beautiful, and like nothing else in the world. It stands on two legs like a bird, but it’s not a bird. And always it looks at me, following me with its eyes. When I take the lid off the box it looks up at me with those eyes and … it sees me. It sees me as a fellow living being, and its eyes say to me, ‘I am alive, Mischke. I am alive like you, and you are alive like me.’ Do you understand, Dudek?” Again he raised one arm, reaching toward me, but he was too weak and his arm dropped, hanging off the side of the bed until I moved it back onto the mattress for him. A tear was making a slow trek down the left side of his face, following a deep crease that ran from the corner of his eye almost to his ear.

“What do you want me to do, Mischke?” I asked.

“Just feed it. Put some food through the holes in the box. Some bread, soft meat, maybe boiled egg. Just keep it fed! When I get down there again, I’ll take it out. Out of the caisson. I don’t know if it’s strong enough yet for the outside, but we have to take our chances, eh? It and me both, we’ll just have to see.”

On my next shift in the caisson I found Mischke’s box, pushed into a corner and apparently undisturbed. Mischke had written his name on the side of it with charcoal, the letters rough and almost illegible. The lid was still tied on with rope. I stood looking at it for a long time. In the dim light there was little hope of peering through the holes to see if anything was inside it, and I didn’t try. I could have untied the rope and taken the lid off, but I didn’t do that either. I just stood looking into the shadowy corner until the foreman yelled at me to get to work. At my lunch break I got down in a squat in front of the box with my back to the nearest group of men. Quickly and furtively I tore up half a sandwich and stuffed the pieces through the holes in the lid of the box. No sound came from inside, but I kept jamming in pieces of bread and meat as fast as I could and then walked away.

I repeated this ritual for three days, and on the fourth day the box was gone. I went to the man nearest me, and then another and another, asking each one if he knew anything about the box. Finally one answered with something other than a blank stare: “Sure, the big guy, Mickey, he had it under his arm when he locked out this morning. He was right there at the shift change—didn’t you see him?”

When my shift ended I went to the boarding house where Mischke lived. He wasn’t there, and the men he shared a room with said he had packed all his belongings and left that morning. I didn’t see him again until four years later.

It was one of the first warm days in the summer of 1876. Though the great bridge itself was still years from completion, the New York caisson was long finished. The vast space that Mischke and I and hundreds of others had toiled inside of was now filled up solid with concrete, and the huge tower of countless tons of stone had been built on top of it. But all of that was behind me. I worked at a bookbinder’s now, and I was walking in Central Park, on my way to a concert at the Naumburg bandstand. I had just passed a couple without really looking at them, only vaguely noticing that the woman was carrying a young child on her hip. But after I’d gone a few steps further I heard a gruff voice calling my name. I realized who it was before I’d even turned around.

“Mischke!”

“Young Dudek,” he answered, grinning at me.

For a moment, I could only stare dumbly at him. I knew it was Mischke I was looking at, but he was a man transformed. The rough, irregular features were still there, but his face was softer, cleanly shaven and pink. His hair was neatly trimmed and oiled, his clothes clean. Even his eyes seemed less mismatched, and far less imposing. I real-ized I was seeing Mischke as a happy man, and even as that thought occurred to me he was introducing me to the woman at his side as “My wife Rosalie.” The tenderness in his voice left no doubt about the source of his happiness. “And my little one, Anna!” he added, touching his hand to the cheek of the toddler in her mother’s arms. “Who could believe I would have such a beautiful family? Eh? Who could believe?” The pride glowed from him like heat from a fire.

For a few minutes we stood there among the trees and grass of the park, talking of our time in the caisson, the progress of the bridge, and about our lives now. Mischke told me he’d used his savings from his caisson wages to purchase half-ownership in a grocer’s shop, and had met Rosalie as one of his customers. “She kept telling me how to run the business,” he said, “so I told her she better marry me so she can run things herself!” He laughed, and his wife rolled her eyes with an expression that told me this was an old joke between them. Neither of us made any mention of Mischke’s last days in the caisson or of the box he took away from it.

As we talked, Mischke’s daughter began to squirm in her mother’s arms. She pointed down the path to one of the sausage-vendor carts that had recently begun appearing in Central Park. “Ma, Pa,” she said excitedly, “get sau’ge for J’zurkie? Get sau’ge for J’zurkie?”

Mischke smiled over at his daughter. “Jaszczurkie has plenty of other food, Anna,” he said. You can feed him when we get home, okay?”

“But sau’ges are his favorite!” Anna protested, but then her mother set her down on the gravel path, and after a few soft words took her hand and strolled out onto the grass with her.

I realized then that the word that was puzzling me was a diminutive of jaszczurka, the Polish for lizard. But already Mischke was continuing our conversation, asking me where I was living now and whether I’d met “a nice girl” yet. Distracted, I stammered out an answer. Mischke’s only acknowledgement of my befuddled, questioning expression was to give me the briefest of winks before turning to look at his wife and daughter walking hand in hand on the grass. Somehow I knew that was all the answer I would ever get.

We parted a short time later, and I walked on alone. The sun was warm on my face, and the breeze was sweet with the smell of life.