“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.
Matt had to hide his smile again, and Earl kicked him under the table to get him to pay attention as the captain droned on, his back to them as he went over a diagram on the wall. Earl gave him a quizzical frown as Matt chuckled at his shitty memory.
Maybe this was a sign, he remembered thinking. Maybe God was punishing him. The captain could talk all he wanted about God's will, but maybe the captain didn't know God's will from a stump. Maybe this indignity meant that the stain on his soul could never be wiped away. Maybe he had sold his soul to the devil himself and that devil was the captain. He imagined himself in hell, and it didn't seem much different from that pitch-black caisson, twenty-five feet below the bottom of the East River. But then a copy of
Harper's
sailed out of the inky blackness, landing at his feet. His eyes couldn't pierce the dark. He was about to call out when a voice spoke from the dark.
“First day?” The voice startled him with its closeness. “You'll get used to it.” The barest glimpse of a shadow flitted across the doorway to the chamber beyond. Matt couldn't be sure he had even seen it. He called out his thanks, but there had been no answer. Matt was pretty sure that it wasn't God that tossed him a copy of
Harper's
, but he couldn't shake the possibility.
He and Earl had survived their first day in purgatory, and a few months later, they lit a fire that nearly brought the bridge down and came close to killing Washington Roebling in the process. McDonald was the man they framed for it. His body still lay where they'd buried him, somewhere in the lonely marshlands of Brooklyn.
Matt was lost in his memories when he heard the captain say in a low voice, “Emmons! We're not keeping you from anything important, are we?”
“Duh ⦠I mean, no, sir,” Matt stumbled.
“Good. Now that we have everyone's attention, I was saying that we have nearly all the information we need, thanks to Corporal Jacobs, who has been
good enough to liberate plans, specifications, order forms, letterhead stationery, et cetera, et cetera.”
Jacobs smiled thinly and gave a small nod, gazing over the tops of glasses that clung to the bridge of his nose. They seemed about to fall in his lap, but that was nothing new. They gave the little man a schoolmarmish look. Behind his glasses, his bow tie, and clerk's demeanor was a most vicious little man. Jacob's slight build and medium height belied his real gifts. His eyes, small, black, and unblinking, were the only window to the real man. Usually they were taken to be the eyes of a bureaucrat. In reality, they more closely resembled the eyes of the razorback pigs he hunted as a boy in east Texas.
Throughout the war he never took a prisoner. Earl had asked him about it once, at the end of a day when he saw Jacobs run his bayonet through the throat of a wounded Union sergeant.
“Waste of time,” Jacobs had said. “Takes men to guard 'em, wagons and trains to haul them to camps, and food to keep them alive, things the Confederacy has precious little of. It's just economics.”
Bart had been a bank clerk before the war. Despite that, most men he had served with knew him to be bloodthirsty beyond all logic and reason. “Cold as the grave,” someone had once said, out of Jacobs's earshot, of course. Earl was the closest thing to him in their little group, but where Earl was callous, he wasn't inhuman, and that was a word that fit Bart Jacobs like a coffin. The rest of the men called him Weasel, part because of his size and his pinched, tight-lipped expression, part because he had the unsettling habit of going for the throat. Of course, nobody called him Weasel to his face, leastways not if they didn't want a second windpipe.
Being an unremarkable little man, Weasel blended into a crowd better than anyone. He was a good clerk too and was much valued by the bosses in the bridge offices. He worked hard, stayed late, and over the years he had slowly stolen or made precise copies of most of the plans he thought they'd need and a bunch more that they'd never use. Weasel was very thorough.
“As you know,” the captain said, looking at Weasel, “we have been ordering copies of various components from the very manufacturers that are contracted to make them for the bridge. Some steel, for example, has come from Roebling's own mills in Trenton. I take particular satisfaction from that. The idea that Roebling's own company would contribute to our plans is sweet irony indeed.” There were chuckles around the table.
“Our brothers in Richmond have been very supportive over the years. They have been busy testing the components we send them.” Glances were exchanged around the table. They all knew that the captain had shadowy backers in the South, but who they were was known only to him. Most figured
it was the Klan. Nathan Bedford Forrest had testified in '71, before a congressional committee, that he had disbanded the Klan, which nobody really believed. Forrest, the original Grand Wizard, was a legend by any standards. During the war he had thirty horses shot from under him and killed thirty-one men in hand-to-hand combat. His battles were becoming required study in military colleges around the world. When he died, a few years before, 20,000 mourners attended his funeral.