All day long Maura imagines this as she stuffs bristles into paintbrushes. Her fingers develop calluses from the work. At the end of her shift she takes the baby carriage and lifts it down the stairs, developing muscles in her arms from the weight. The mass card sits in her pocket, Con’s face permanently at her hip. When she arrives home she props the card up on the piano and strikes a few notes. She looks around the room and waits for his hands to touch her shoulders.
Nathan Walker visits on Sunday afternoons, aware that his skin color would provoke too many whispers if he came late at night. He takes off his shoes at the bottom steps so his feet don’t sound out on the wooden stairs, climbs the four flights noiselessly, leaves his chewing tobacco in a flowerpot, and knocks on the door.
Maura looks along the length of the corridor to make sure nobody has seen him. She guides him inside by the elbow. He keeps his eyes to the floor.
“You eating all right, Nathan?”
“Yes, yes.”
“You sure now? I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife.”
“I’m eating just fine, ma’am.”
“Well, you look a mite skinny to me.”
“Believe me, I ain’t lacking.”
“I have some potatoes.”
“No thank you, ma’am, I just ate.”
“Really, I insist.”
“Well,” he says, “if they’re gonna go to waste, ma’am.”
Embarrassed at the feast she has prepared, Maura too lowers her eyes. After potatoes and meat and tea and biscuits, she lets Walker take Eleanor into his huge arms. It is strange for Maura to watch the young man with her child, his bigness making the baby seem minuscule. Such a clash of skin. It worries her, and she keeps an eye on Walker. She has heard stories of his kind, yet she sees the gentleness in him. Sometimes Walker rocks Eleanor back and forth to sleep on his knees and when he feeds her he pretends the metal spoon is a zeppelin negotiating the sky between them. Walker always places a one-dollar coin on the mantelpiece when he leaves, and Maura O’Leary puts the money away in a biscuit tin marked ELEANOR.
Walker leaves the tenement house quickly, furtively.
Later, he must sit at the back of a movie house, and during Tillie’s Punctured Romance the heads of men obscure the swing of Charlie Chaplin’s cane. It strikes Walker that it’s only in the tunnels that he feels an equality of darkness. The sandhogs were the first integrated union in the country; he knows it is only underground that color is negated, that men become men.
Not even in the gloom of the cinema can he slip like a snake through his own skin.
When he was a ten-year-old boy in the swamps of Georgia, Walker forced a water snake to stay on a rickety wooden pier for five hours. He had heard it would dehydrate in the sun. The snake fought ferociously at first, wiggling from the pier toward the water, but he kept pulling it back by its head and tail. Remembering an old saying, he knew the snake wasn’t poisonous: Red and yellow kill a fellow, red and black be nice to Jack. He didn’t want to kill it himself, he just wanted the snake to die in the heat, but it kept on thrashing. The sun began to sink low in the Okefenokee sky. In frustration, the young boy put his foot on the snake’s neck and slipped his knife in. Its innards were warm and he knocked them into the water. He brought the skin home to hang on his wall. Most of the house was made with logs, but his own room was composed of cinder block. He made a lot of noise hammering the nails. When the snake was stretched above his bed, his mother came in and asked him where he had gotten it. He told her the story, and she whipped him for his lack of respect.
She told him that all creatures deserved the very same treatment, that none were mightier than others, that all were made the same. They all came into the world with nothing and left the world with even less. Only belief in God and the goodness of man would bring them any happiness.
“Do it again,” she said, “and I’ll whip the fire out of you.”
After church that Sunday the preacher told him to make amends. He kept a different snake in a box after that, treated it carefully, fed it with mice, and was amazed to watch it molt out of itself during summers, leaving sheets of clear skin in the box — much like the men he sees nowadays, a decade later, in the streets of New York, molted out of their civilian clothes into military uniforms, on their way to Europe to fight in the Great War, some of them even colleagues from the tunnels, uniforms crisp and ironed, military hats uncomfortably tilted on their heads. He has heard that, at the front, under bloody French sunsets, the sandhogs do well in their foxholes; they can dig quicker and faster and harder and deeper and further than anyone else.
* * *
One Sunday afternoon, at the end of his visit, Walker says to Maura, “There was a trick y’alls husband used to do, times, ma’am. He’d be there digging away in the tunnel with the rest of us. And see, he had this bullet that he found somewhere, on the street or something, I don’t know. Anyways, we were at the front of the tunnel, and Con wasn’t wearing no shirt or nothing. Most of the time we don’t wear no shirts, see. And he’d up and shout, ‘Look at this, lads!’ He had that funny way of talking, just like y’all. Tomahto. Potayto. That sort of thing. Anyways, he bent on over, ol’ Con, and put the bullet into his stomach. Right on in. It went disappeared in there! He held that bullet in his belly all day long without dropping it, not a once! Working and digging away! And the rest of us were just laughing like there was no tomorrow.
“So I know what y’all’re saying, ma’am, ’cause we miss him too, he broke the darkness for us too; that’s what he did, ol’ Con, he broke the darkness real good.”
* * *
On the morning of the inaugural run in 1917, Walker, in his red hat, makes his way along the cobblestones of Montague Street in Brooklyn. He smiles when he sees that most of the other sandhogs have come back in their working clothes too: tattered shirts, dungarees, and their favorite caps.
Many of the men have never met before, having worked different shifts. Their wives and children are with them, carrying unlit candles. The families descend the steps of the subway station and move quietly toward the platform. They walk to the front of a train where the boss, William Randall, is standing. Randall is waiting for the photographers’ flashbulbs to catch him smiling. It is his first time below, and he is telling the reporters and dignitaries how proud he is of his underwater tunnel. More than anything he cannot wait to chop the red ribbon and send the first train through. As he talks, Randall preens himself for the cameras. He smells of shaving soap and hair oil, an arrogance to the smell, something the tunnel has never known before.
But instead of ducking under the black hoods of their cameras to catch Randall’s smile, the photographers turn to watch the men, women, and children filtering down the platform.
As the families move alongside the train, the tunnel is plunged into darkness, the power sabotaged by the sandhogs for an hour. Matches flare and candlelight illuminates the faces of the workers as they file past. Randall lets out an indignant yell and shouts at a group of men in suits. They hold their hands up in supplication, saying, “Nothing we can do, Mr. Randall, sir.”
At the rear of the group of workers, Walker grins.