“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!”