The Engineer's Wife

by Tracey Enerson Wood

  PT didn’t play by the rules, so I had to be the one to set limits, and we were already flouting them. I was torn by opposing forces: my pleasure in his company and also needing his financial backing for the bridge, and society’s rules—I shouldn’t be visiting him without escort. Although I was fairly sure I could resist temptation to go any further, it seemed wrong to put myself in a delicate situation.

  I had only my instincts to guide me, and it seemed my instincts were clouded by emotion. It seemed the answer then was to separate those emotions from any action. I could feel what I must feel; there was no controlling the yearnings of the body. The sin was only to act upon them, at least with someone other than one’s husband. I was suddenly eager to get home to Wash.

  “Where has the day gone? I must be getting home.” I swooped up Johnny and hustled through the curtain, dropping one of my gloves in my haste.

  Fourteen

  Brooklyn, New York

  1870

  At dusk, our bedroom window offered a spectacular view of the riverfront, the play of the light and lengthening shadows changing throughout the day. The scene had vastly altered over the last days and weeks. A row of ramshackle houses on the ridge above the river had been demolished, affording a direct view when the caisson was floated into place in early spring.

  Peering through the spotting scope Wash had set up to monitor the bridge construction from home, the number of workers I could see dwindled as the caisson sunk below the river surface, taking the workers with it. I panned past barges, heavy with stacks of stone, cranes, and generators, and focused on children playing king of the hill on the mountainous debris of their former homes. I would ask Wash how the families were being relocated. Perhaps I could be of some assistance to them.

  Closer to home, workers filed up the street, empty dinner pails in hand. Some walked with a normal gait, others stiff and bent. I tried to spot Wash among them. A worker I recognized, O’Brien, was having a particularly difficult time. He had been a frequent messenger to our home, usually accompanied by several of his children. A muscular Irish laborer, it appeared he could carry twice his own weight. Tonight, he stumbled, dropping his dinner bucket and tools. He stooped, hands on his thighs, his breath coming in shuddering heaves.

  His adolescent son, Patrick, and another man came running. They stretched O’Brien out on the ground, lifting and bending his legs for him. After a few more moments, he stood up on his own.

  “Mama.” Johnny, now two, tugged at my skirt, a picture book clasped to his chest. I scooped him up, and we nestled in a chair for story time.

  I had just tucked Johnny in bed when Wash returned, his clothes filthy and smelling like a swamp. I asked him what had happened to O’Brien.

  “Caisson disease. From working in high air pressure.”

  “Will he be all right?”

  “He should be with some rest.” He unbuttoned his shirt as I ran the bath.

  I gaped at his holster and pistol. “Is that loaded?”

  “Not anymore.” He smirked.

  I was still getting used to seeing his facial expressions, since he had shaved his mustache and beard because he was “tired of picking out grit.”

  His casual smirk and the sight of the weapon made my palms sweat. “Why are you carrying your gun, Wash?”

  “I’d hoped we’d hit bedrock by now. But we’re meeting more boulders than anticipated.”

  “You’re shooting boulders?” I gathered soap and a washrag. An odor, reminding me of a river rat, permeated the air when he dropped his trousers. I tucked the soap bar under my nose for relief, wondering if working in those awful conditions could affect his judgment.

  “Something like that.” He patted the holster on his hip. “Going through the hatch today, I noticed how long the ladder was getting. Must be forty feet by now. So we have twenty or thirty feet to go.” He removed his holster belt and set it on the pile of clothes.

  My dirty, stinky husband relaxed into the tub, making silt soup of the water. “Workers are getting irritable down there. Fights break out, and I spend half my time settling them.”

  I widened my eyes and glanced at the gun.

  “Ha. Don’t worry. It’s not for that. I hid it under my shirt, out of sight. The caisson is a strange place, and some people don’t adapt well. It has a good high ceiling, but the shadows and dank smell give a feeling of being in a cave. The limelights cast an unworldly glow.”

  I tried to imagine working in the strange space. It was far from anywhere I wanted to be, but I was curious all the same. “How do you feel in there?”

  “Well enough. One tries not to think about the weight of the water and ground pressing in on all sides, but a body senses it anyway.” He scrubbed his face and arms with a rag. The soap slipped from his hands and leapt into the water over his lap. “Fetch that for me, will you?” he said with a playful grin.

  I peered into the murky water. “Not on your life.”

  He splashed me, and I shrieked in protest, dabbing my face with a dry towel. “Tell me more about what it’s like down there.”

  “Well, at the moment…” He looked down at his lap.

  I threw the rag at his head, and it fell to his shoulder. “In the caisson. What’s it sound like?”

  “Ohhh.” He recovered the errant soap and scrubbed the back of his neck. “Sounds are strange in compressed air—eerie, jumbled. Like this. Put a finger in your ear.”

  I did.

  “Now jiggle it around a bit. That’s what it sounds like. Imagine the clang of iron as men break down stones with pickaxes. Air compressors hiss, gears and pulleys squeal and grind, metal scraping metal.” He cupped water in his hands and flung it onto his head.

  “Here.” I poured clean water from the French pitcher over his head.

  He wrapped his finger with the chain to the drain plug and pulled. “I’m always listening for the hum of the generators and air pumps on the roof. Any change, and I’m topside immediately. Oxygen has to be pumped in at an ever-rising pressure to counteract the increasing pressure of water and earth on the outside walls…and to keep us alive.”

  I wrapped my arms around myself, imagining being trapped inside this open-bottomed box, far below the river. For the first time, my head buzzed not only with worry for his health and comfort but for his very life. “What happens if those compressors fail?”

  He must have detected the tremor in my voice. “Don’t worry. Four are on all the time. Two more available for backup. If something happened to all four, the walls would hold up long enough to get ’em started up again.”

  Deciding not to explore walls caving in to spare myself more nightmares, I took a different tack. “What do you walk upon?”

  Wash stood up, his body dripping, his scent decidedly more pleasant. I started to rub him dry with a towel. He was so pleased about the events of the day, I grew excited for him, just like our early days together. His eagerness and bodily warmth comforted me. I felt I could melt into his very being, somehow making us both safe.

  He grabbed the towel and wrapped it at his waist. “You’re distracting me from my story.”

  “Clearly.” I was ready to move on to the bedroom, but he was enjoying telling his story.

  “There are walkways of wooden planks over the ground. Piles of rock and silt—like stalagmites. A shiny bit of metal might turn out to be a tea kettle, a pitchfork, or even a piece of jewelry buried in the riverbed. But we don’t take too much time to hunt treasure. Mostly, we’re clearing a path for the shoe.”

  “The shoe?”

  “That’s the layer of metal wrapped around the bottom of the outside walls and three feet up the inside walls.” He made a V with his hands. “The walls come to a point—like a row of sharp teeth—to cut into the ground.”

  I dabbed at little puddles from his splashing. “How do they clear the path?”

 
“By digging ditches around the inner walls. Just like prison or the army.” He chuckled. “They pry out the boulders with picks and shovel the rubble into the chute. The digger on the roof brings it up, and workers on top cart it away.”

  “And if the boulders are too large to fit in the chute?”

  “That’s where the gun comes in.”

  “You have yet to explain that.”

  “Yesterday, O’Brien and Dunn were taking turns, one holding an iron bar wedge, the other whacking a three-foot boulder with a sledgehammer. But the wedge kept slipping. So Dunn sat on the boulder with the bar between his legs, and O’Brien hammered away—until Dunn shrieked in pain.” Wash laughed.

  “Oh my, that’s not funny.”

  “No, he was putting him on. Later, my foreman, Young, tells me O’Brien got sick the night before. And numb from the Grecian bends. He was worried about him smashing his foot or something.

  “The air pressure was well above normal and rising. I went topside with O’Brien for a rest. I get a little shaky too when I first come out.” Wash held up his hand.

  I curled my fingers around his. They were warm and strong, as always, but I could feel a strange vibration within them. My eyes met his in concern.

  “Don’t worry about this tough old bear.” He shook my hand off. “I decided we have to find a better way to evacuate the boulders—we’re running out of time. In normal atmosphere, we could use powder to blow it up, but there’s more oxygen down there and nowhere for the blast to go. It could cost us our eardrums…or worse.

  “So I did an experiment.” He picked up the holster, took out the revolver, clicked out the chamber, and gave it a spin. “The air could explode. And shooting a hole in the walls or ceiling would cause the air to whistle out. Nevertheless, a test—one careful shot—was in order.”

  “Young said it was too dangerous. He lit a match, and whoosh.” He threw his arms into the air.

  “Wash, the oxygen!” Why had my extraordinarily careful husband suddenly begun taking risks?

  “I told him to evacuate the men. After the other men were out of the caisson, I loaded my revolver, aimed at the ground, and fired. I expected a huge bang and blowback, but the report was strangely muted, echoing like a shout down a well. We waited a bit, but nothing happened. I put a finger in my ear to check for blood, but no.”

  I gingerly picked up his soiled clothes. “Wash, do you think you need to take some time away from the site? You’ve been working without a break for so long. I’d hate for you to make unwise decisions…”

  He threw his head back with laughter, and not in a way I was accustomed to. His recklessness, his strange, almost giddy reaction to my concern gnawed a pit in my stomach.

  He looked at me, eyes dancing in amusement. “There needed to be one more test. I aimed for the boulder at an angle so the ricocheted bullet would land harmlessly. I fired, a rock fragment blew off, and the bullet zinged into a support beam. No explosion, no pressure wave, no problems.” He grabbed both of my arms, blue eyes full of excitement. “I told Young to get me some dynamite.”

  The strength in his grip, the surety of his decision, eased some of my concern for his well-being. But my head reeled at the thought of explosives in that treacherous box. Even though Wash slyly dropped his wrapped towel and now smelled delicious, I could no longer be enticed into the bedroom.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Millie brought her son, a bit older than Johnny, for a visit. She agreed to watch the boys so I could bring Wash the biscuits she had made.

  Wash was thrilled with the rapid pace of caisson descent, now that he was blowing up all obstacles. I was less thrilled with this new danger to add to my worries. Wash said they had only about ten feet to go, less than a month at the new pace. The progress wasn’t evident from the outside. As the foundation sank from the weight of each new layer of stone, the top of the tower remained just above the waterline.

  I carried a dinner pail across the makeshift walkway from the shoreline and navigated around huge wooden boom derricks as they lifted stone blocks from a barge and placed them on the tower. The work site was bristling with activity, even as the sky grew purple with dusk. The huge metal jaws of a clamshell digger descended through an air lock into the caisson, coming back up dripping with rocks and sludge, causing me to dodge quickly past.

  I headed toward the caisson entrance, a sealed hatch the size of a manhole cover inside a small shack. A sign read DANGER. CONCENTRATED OXYGEN. No smoking.

  I greeted the burly guard with EINAR written across the front of his shirt. He crossed his considerable forearms over the letters. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I can’t let you go down there.” With his singsong accent and straight blond hair, I guessed him to be of Scandinavian descent. “I’ll have that supper sent down next shift change. Probably minus a few things,” he added with a chuckle.

  Standing ramrod straight and clutching the warm pail to me, I fixed my face in a serious scowl. “I won’t stay long. Visitors spending only a few minutes have shown no ill effects.”

  Einar tilted his head toward the edge of the tower, where men guided carts filled with boulders, muck, and unconscious workers down tracks to the shore. A few pale and sweaty men lay on stretchers, holding their heads. One struggled to a standing position, then collapsed in pain. Other workers retched.

  “It’s no place for a woman, even if you are the boss’s wife.” He appraised me head to toe. “Maybe especially.”

  “Is there a law against it?” I tried to maintain my stern look, but my scowl began to falter upon witnessing the sickened men.

  “Probably.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “Is it your place to argue with the boss’s wife?”

  Einar shrugged. “Your funeral.” He turned a wheel on the hatch, and we waited as air hissed out. Then he checked a gauge and left me to open the hatch myself. “Good practice. You’ll have to open the one at the bottom of the chamber too.”

  Clenching my jaw, I struggled with the lock until the hatch flew open with a blast of warm air. What would I see down there, and how could I maintain my composure? I hadn’t thought past this point. My eyes measured the small opening, comparing it to my full and stiff dress. It would be a tight fit. Setting down the pail, I attempted to squeeze through the portal, but the volume and stiffness of my skirts trapped me with one leg in and the other out. I was a poor bridge, spanning two worlds but going nowhere myself. How could I understand my husband if I could never take a step into his world? I yanked at the dress, so humiliated I didn’t care if it tore to pieces. Seeing no way to go through, I held out a hand to Einar.

  Chewing his lips and feigning a cough, Einar took my hand and pulled me free. “As I said, ma’am. You can’t go down there. Now let me take that supper off your hands.”

  * * *

  Later that night, I sat at my vanity, attacking my unruly curls with a hairbrush.

  Wash lifted the French pitcher and poured water into the bowl. “I’m sorry, dear, but it’s not a good idea for you to go into the caisson.”

  “I wanted to see you and bring Millie’s biscuits,” I told Wash’s reflection. I wouldn’t have mentioned my ordeal, but Einar had snitched.

  He combed his hair, still wet from the tub, dried the new stubble of his beard, then walked slowly and stiffly to the bed.

  “You’re getting worse.” I felt the familiar knot develop in my stomach. “Have you consulted the doctor?”

  “Interestingly enough, Dr. Smith offered several treatments.”

  I had to help him into bed. He groaned as I tried to straighten his legs.

  Wash glanced toward his whiskey and medicine bottle on the nightstand. “No one knows the cause exactly, but he is eager to prescribe the treatment, which amounts to little more than a dulling of the senses. A little backward, don’t you think?”

  “Dr. Smith is a bridge comp
any physician, not specially trained for this.” My mouth twisted. “Perhaps no one is.” I poured whiskey in a glass, counted out the prescribed three white pills. “Even so, if no one knows the cause, he can observe which treatments work and which don’t.” I tucked a pillow under his bent knees.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “The good old trial-and-error method used by the so-called science of medicine. What happened when engineers employed that method? ‘Let’s see if this bridge will hold the weight of a person.’” He popped a pill and shrugged.

  “A carriage.” He popped a second pill. Shrugged.

  “A train.” He popped the third pill and gagged dramatically.

  “Oops, not a train.” He drained the whiskey.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Forgive my lack of respect for doctors. They can chop off toes to save a man’s foot but can’t keep the tetanus from killing him anyway.”

  I climbed into bed, kicking the warming brick out of the way, then looped my arm around him. “Your father wouldn’t want you to—”

  “I feel fine when I’m down in the caisson, and I can handle the pain of being above ground.”

  “The pain of being alive without your father, being out of the caisson, or both?” I curled up next to him, soothed by his warm, soapy scent.

  “Oh, my love, let’s just enjoy each other.” He kissed me, gathered my nightgown, and slipped his hand under it. “See? I’m starting to feel better already.”

  We made love, allowing me to forget all about caissons and their hazards. But after, while he drifted into sleep, knees tenting the bedcovers, images of men on stretchers floated in my mind, keeping me awake through many hourly chimes of the clock.

  * * *

  I hated being foiled by a stupid dress. By the next morning, I had devised a new plan. I rose before Wash and searched his armoire, scavenging for work clothes. Finding nothing remotely my size, I donned a shirt and trousers, a simple task compared with the complex assembly of my usual undergarments and dress. How lovely it would be to be dressed in a minute, ready to greet the day.