Stewart’s was a very large store. Will searched for a half hour, asking people if they had seen a pale boy in a pilot suit. No one had seen him, of course. In the end, it was Pickie Beecher who found Will. Will had paused under the little white rotunda, and was gazing up at it, imagining an apotheosis of A. T. Stewart for its blank white surface, when Pickie Beecher tugged at his sleeve and said, “I am ready to go now.”
“You mustn’t run off like that!” said Will. “Where did you go? Why did you run away? I have been looking for you all over this place.”
“It was necessary,” was the boy’s reply.
Outside, it was bitterly cold. Will put the boy in his new overcoat — another ready-made article — and held on to his hot little hand as they went down the sidewalk. Will thought he should be cold, this boy, like a corpse. But he was hot all over, and he got even hotter after a meal of red meat. Pickie Beecher paused to look at the pictures in Gronpil’s window.
“Would you like to have a painting? Something pretty to look at?” Will asked.
“No,” said Pickie Beecher. “A painting is not necessary.”
Back at the house on Fifth Avenue, Pickie Beecher hurried upstairs and pounded on the door to Gob’s room, demanding to be let in.
“I have them!” he said. “I have the jewels!” He had pulled a double handful of them from his pocket, rubies and diamonds and pearls in rings and on necklaces.
“Pickie Beecher!” said Will, coming up behind him. The boy looked up, no expression at all on his pale face, or in his dark eyes. He turned his attention to his booty, and his nimble little fingers tricked the jewels off their strings. “It’s wrong to steal things,” Will said.
“It’s not wrong. Not if it’s for my brother.”
Gob opened his door. “There you are!” he said, looking exhausted but rational. He was still wearing Lincoln’s hat, but now he removed it and put it on Pickie Beecher’s head. It rested on the boy’s ears, covering his eyes. “Here he is!” Gob said to Will. “Our little helper.”
Will came to divide his friendship with Gob into two portions — there was the time before the advent of Pickie Beecher, and there was the time after. Ante Pickie became as remote to him as the time before Christ, an era of antiquity, when people built ingeniously but never powerfully, when geniuses like the engineers of Alexandria made clever toys or cold, functionless monuments. The engine that had hatched Pickie Beecher was a thing of the most ancient past, and it came to seem as simple, in its way, as an aeolipile.
The advent of Pickie Beecher heralded a new age of building. He was their little helper, but he did work that was far out of proportion to his size. He fetched things, always saying they were for his brother, and Will came to understand what he meant by that. His brother was the engine, a perfect version of it that they had yet to build. In February of 1871, Will read in the Tribune an account of the disappearance of the gears that ran the pneumatic railway under Broadway. They had been stolen. The Tribune wondered if it was the work of the horsecart companies, but it was Pickie Beecher who had done it. Will did not know how. Will had no idea how Pickie Beecher executed his fantastic tasks.
Not the work, not the silent, electric motions of the machine, nor the glaring arc lamp that made Will’s bones feel warm when he stood beneath it, none of this had seemed unreal, before the boy. But Pickie Beecher made everything palpably strange, and the notion pressed on Will’s mind that he might be dreaming, or that he might be part of someone else’s dream — Gob’s, or Jolly’s bear’s, or even Pickie Beecher’s. He thought sometimes as he worked on the engine, or as he watched Pickie Beecher cut wires with his teeth, that the dreamer must wake under this burden of strangeness.
Pickie Beecher’s first work was disassembly. Gob was angry, at first, but then he joined in the careful destruction. “This form, too, has served its purpose,” Gob said to Will.
“You let the child rule you,” Will said, because he was so fond of his batteries, and Pickie Beecher had absolutely no respect for them.
“But I understand now,” Gob said. This was his refrain in the first weeks and months of the new age. “He’ll help us, don’t you see? He is a guide and a helper. He is a tool, a little engine in service to a bigger.”
Maybe, Will thought to himself, he is a clever urchin, fiendish but entirely of this world. Maybe he watched us through the skylight and thought, Now I will drop down and fool them, and then I will have hot food and a cool bed forever. But he could not look three minutes at the boy before this thought seemed ridiculous. This was the transformation their engine had effected, to make the ridiculous sensible and the sensible ridiculous.
The negative plates came out of their frames, the batteries came away from their cables, and the machine fell apart into its constituent copper and glass and iron and bone. Pickie Beecher arranged the pieces to his liking, and then he began to fetch heavier ones. Will would come to the house and find the giant gears leaned up against the walls in the workroom, their teeth almost scraping the ceiling. The workroom filled up with a haphazard array of stuff, all crammed together until there was no place left to store anything.
“My brother,” said Pickie Beecher, “he wants a bigger room.”
“Hello?” said Tennie. “Can you hear me?” Will took the tin can from his ear and spoke into it.
“Yes,” he said. They were talking over a lovers’ telegraph, two cans connected by a string. Tennie was in her Turkish corner, where she’d closed up her silk tent against him, insisting they play with her toy, something Gob had put together in the kitchen downstairs.
“Can you hear them?” she asked. “All those Irish innocents?”
“No,” he said. It was July, just after the great slaughter on Eighth Avenue. Angry Catholics had disturbed the gloating parade of the Orangemen and been punished with bullets by the police. Forty-five people had died. Will had seen a few of the wounded at Bellevue, which was also where all the bodies of the dead had been taken. He had stood that afternoon at a window on the second floor and looked down where twenty thousand mourners gathered outside the morgue.
“They are still angry,” she said. Then she stuck her head out of the tent and called out, “You may come in, if you bring me fruit.” He went in search of it. As he passed a window in the hall, he heard laughter coming down from the roof. Mrs. Woodhull was up there with her new friend, Mr. Tilton. He’d come to see her for the first time in May. Pickie Beecher seemed to hate him. Whenever they happened to be in the same room, Pickie Beecher would confront him, saying, “You are not my father.” Mr. Tilton always laughed at him and agreed that he was not.
Tilton was in love. He’d come to the house as Henry Beecher’s agent when Gob’s mother made a veiled threat to expose Beecher’s affair with Mrs. Tilton. He was supposed to soothe her, but she soothed him better. They were devoted companions.
Gob’s father was in the kitchen, sitting alone in the dark. “My boy,” he said to Will. “I am on the ceiling. Could you help me get down?” He had his pharmacopoeia, a dark wooden box, in front of him. Most doctors stocked theirs with a variety of medicines, but Canning Woodhull kept only morphine in his. “I find it cures everything but constipation,” he’d said of it. Will turned up the light to better examine the fruit and pick out the best pieces. Canning Woodhull’s eyes were eerie — wide, round, and almost all blue, with pupils closed down to the size of a dot of ink. He reached out to Will and said, “Give me your hand, my friend, before I float away.” Will put out his hand. Woodhull took it, shaking it as if in greeting, but also pulling on it, slow and steady. “There,” he said. “That’s better. How are you feeling this evening.”