“So what do you want me to do, Mischke?”
“Just watch! Make sure nobody goes poking around in my stuff! That nobody moves the tin or tries to look inside! Put your lunch pail up on the shelf next to where I leave the tin, so it will look like it belongs to you.”
It seemed vastly unlikely to me that anyone among the caisson laborers would touch, much less steal, anything that belonged to another worker, but I didn’t argue the point. The more Mischke talked about this thing, the wilder his eyes got and the sadder I felt.
So I asked to be put on second shift, and the bosses agreed. They had a hard time finding men to work in the caissons; once men got a taste of how hard the work was, how strange the environment was, how terrifying it was if you let your imagination go, many of them left after their first day. Every week there were new faces in the crew, and after only a couple of months I was considered one of the “old hands” among the men.
As Mischke had said, on his corner of a shelf there was a bunched-up rag, and under the rag was a tobacco tin with a few holes punched into it. I didn’t look into the tin, or even touch it. I just did my work and left at the end of my shift.
Again I barely saw Mischke for a few weeks. When I did encounter him, it was in the caisson, during the second shift. “Hullo, Mischke!” I called out. “You’ve switched to the afternoon shift?”
“Yes,” he grumbled, and then took me by the arm and led me to an empty corner. “Listen, Dudek. I need some food. I haven’t had anything since … Can I have some of yours? I’ll pay you back.”
Puzzled almost beyond speaking, I said “Of course!” then fetched my lunch pail and handed it to him. “Take whatever you like.”
He fished around, took out one of my two thick sandwiches, unwrapped the paper to look at it, and apparently satisfied, tore off half of it and put the rest back in the pail. “Thanks, Dudek,” he said, already turning his back to me. He walked away, holding the piece of sandwich as if it was precious to him in some way that had nothing to do with hunger.
I saw him again as the shift was close to ending. “Can you bring more food tomorrow?” he asked. He stood crookedly, as if he was too exhausted to straighten his back.
“Mischke, what’s wrong? Why can’t you get your own food?”
“I’m not coming out. I have to stay down here for … I don’t know, a little longer. Maybe a few days. It’s not ready … I mean, I don’t think it should come out yet. It might not be strong enough yet. And I have to feed it!”
I felt certain I knew what “it” was, or what Mischke thought it was, and that certainty made me feel sick. I couldn’t bring myself to try to confirm my guess, and in any case I doubted that Mischke would answer me if I did. “You can’t just stay down here around the clock, Mischke,” I said. “The foremen will notice—”
He put his hand on my arm. “Please! I just need food for a few days! Do this for me, Dudek!” It was strange, beyond strange, to see this big man, whose strength and toughness had once seemed limitless to me, reduced to pleading; and pleading not even for himself, but for …
“Of course, Mischke,” I said. “I’ll bring extra food tomorrow.”
Things stayed like that for three days. During that time I saw that Mischke had taken one of the empty gunpowder boxes for his own. These were sturdy little wooden crates that the men often used as stools to sit on while eating. Mischke had whittled a few holes in the box, and had tied the lid on with a crisscross of rope. Watching him from a shadowy distance, I saw him dropping bits of food in through the holes. When I left the caisson at the end of the shift each day Mischke would stay behind, hiding in one of the far partitions so the foreman wouldn’t notice.
On the morning of the fourth day, a man approached me as I was eating breakfast. It was an Irishman named Quinn, who worked the evening shift and who I’d shared a few drinks with recently. “They caught your crazy friend Mickey,” he began. From the story that followed I gathered that Mischke had been noticed as he tried yet again to stay behind in the caisson as the work shifts changed. The foreman had called him a dozen foul names and ordered him into the airlock and off of the jobsite. “So he came up with the rest of us,” Quinn said, “but as soon as he was out in the air you could see he was sick—sick with caisson disease. He walked a few steps, and then he was on the ground, like a dead man. They took him to the company hospital on the dock.”
Asking after Mischke at the hospital, I was led to a room where there were six men, all lying in narrow beds that were lined up along one wall. More and more men had been getting the disease as the caisson went deeper under the bottom of the river, and there was space in the room for many additional beds.
“Young Dudek,” Mischke said to me as I approached, making a weak smile. His head was propped up with pillows, but his body was so limp it looked as if he had been crushed into the mattress by a great weight. “Who would think that I would get the Grecian Bends, eh? I’ve been down there as long as anyone, and never had even a twinge before.” He attempted another smile, and then just lay breathing for a time. “Not a good disease, Dudek. I can barely move. My legs are like dead sticks of wood. They say I will get better, but they don’t know. … Some get better, some don’t.” I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t have been an insult to Mischke. We both knew that two men had died from the bends in the past few weeks.
Then Mischke’s eyes sharpened, fixing on me. “Listen Dudek. I need your help. My box—what I have in the box—I need you to …” He stopped, perhaps because of something I allowed to show on my face. Another span of time passed in silence, and I had the feeling that Mischke was gathering himself for some effort. But when he finally spoke again, it seemed that he was changing the subject.
“They have some nurses here,” he said, shifting his eyes to the doors of the big room. “Nice women, very good and kind. But they keep talking to me about prayer; they will pray for me, they want me to pray for myself. Do you pray, Dudek?”
“Not often.”
“I used to. I used to feel close to God, sometimes, like he was … ” with painful effort, he lifted one arm, vaguely indicating a space somewhere beside him. “Like he was right there, with me. I thought about becoming a priest when I was a boy. Then I grew up, I got a wife, and we … we had …”