Meeks (18 page)

The tailor tried to remove the pinned jacket, and I balked. He snorted derisively at my fear. It's just a jacket! I knew rationally, or I had persuaded myself over the years to accept, that certain feelings and ideas, not to mention other internal phenomena, were merely the indigenous creatures of my head who had no real jurisdiction in the real world, whose rages were harmless to outsiders and whose fears were rooted in nothing, but they were all I had, and so I listened.

Ben

The factory buildings loomed like the hulls of warships lined up on the horizon. Municipal banners snapped against the line, slack as sheets and then taut as sails. Thick white clouds spewed from the narrow stacks, dimming the bright yellow lights of the factory behind drifts of smoke. The Brothers of Mercy marched Ben and the other men through the factory gates and into the industrial courtyard. Ben stopped to try to catch his breath. His progress was slow; two of the Brothers stayed behind with him, jabbing him occasionally with a stick, goading him down the buckled asphalt path. The smell of burning or boiling tar filled the courtyard; dying beetles spun through the air, crashing headlong into the dry grass on either side of the main path. The towering windows of the factory were the ramparts of empires of light. Love and dread: the mysterious familiar finally met.

The Brothers shoved and shouted, moving Ben and the other men through the long, loud rooms of the mint factory. Past boiling vats, past pale sacks packed with powdered tints (yellow, red, blue), past undernourished-looking men running mints through machines that stamped them with the municipal seal (a hunk of precious ore crossed by swords?).

They reached what looked like a packaging room—stamped mints tumbled into the troughs of powdered sugar before being sent through a massive cylinder that shook them violently, tumbling the mints out the other side like jewels; the dead-eyed men scooped them by the handful into the municipal mint bags that would make their way into every home.

The Brothers ordered Ben and the other men to sit against the back wall of the last room, in which they manufactured chewing gum. Beneath the peppermint oils used to infuse the mints, Ben detected stale blood and thawing meat, smells from the cold rooms of the slaughterhouse across the courtyard. From where he sat, he could see the courtyard through a hole in the reinforced glass: butchers stepped out into the courtyard to smoke, their faces bright with the cold air of the freezers. They wore black knit caps and bloodstained coats over doubled-up black sweaters. They sheathed their massive carving knives in their belts and lit their cigarettes. Ben could hear workers sweeping up the powdered sugar along the broad plank floors of the factory with stiff-bristled push brooms; he sat down against the wall again and looked down the row of men who had been brought in with him. No one spoke; they didn't pace; they didn't argue; they just watched the mints tumbling through machines, bouncing along the factory belts. Some men pretended to sleep. One man was ashamed to be crying and punched himself repeatedly in the head as if it was simply malfunctioning, leaking through the eyes. Ben struggled to swallow in the arid, powdery air of the factory. Somewhere in the countryside, the innocent trees had been slashed to bleed sap so that everything in the city could be avalanched with sugar.

Throughout the day, the Brothers of Mercy marched men into the room and ordered them against the wall. At dusk, a loud, long horn blasted through the rooms of the factory, and the machines all died at once, as if some great brain had turned black, and the body had fallen slack, and there was silence. More men were brought in, until there was no space left, and Ben was pressed between the wall and the shoulder of an enormous bachelor, and he tried to take sips of fresh air from the little crack in the window.

Ben woke before dawn and listened. The man beside him was snoring; he heard the occasional cough, the hiss of a freezer leaking air in the courtyard, and then the start of a low, intense conversation that spread to dozens of voices, until the room was buried in the din of conversation, halted instantly by the loud cry from outside the doors: “Thanks be to God! It's Independence Day!"

The Brothers of Mercy marched them out of the factory, through the courtyard, and past the hard-set, cold-faced butchers blowing trails of smoke. They marched them through the city streets, so that children could take their rotten aim and men and women, full of mirth on Independence Day, could jeer or frown disapprovingly, depending on disposition. Ben could hear the clamor of the construction site, even before they reached the park. The scrape of shovels, the shouts of men, the racket of machinery operated at full power.

The Brothers of Mercy marched them through the park gates and toward the Independence Day stage. Men in gray smocks were everywhere; Ben had never seen the park so overrun with activity and bodies and confusion. A Brother yanked Ben out of line and said, “Wait here.” Ben could hear the trains, leaving frequently for the Sheds, disappearing underground and popping back up again on the other side of the park; he could see the water rushing out into the harbor, see the sheets of lace formed by currents crossing and disrupting one another in their seaward rush. Then the sounds of the train closer, the long, morose horn, the loud, heavy chains bouncing on the empty flatbeds of city trucks. The Brother grabbed Ben again. “Wake up. Come with me.” Ben and two other men were taken to the back of the great stage and told to wait. They waited. Ben could smell the burned sugar caught in the engines of the portable icing mixers, the shovels hitting asphalt as workers struck road beneath the mountains of sugar. Workers with sacks of tint walked the line of the icing mixers, inspecting the color, making adjustments, feeding the colored powder into the mixers. A fumigation truck circled the park. The wind picked up and blew apart the clouds of thick smoke that hung in the air. The truck turned and entered the park, rumbling through the muddy, grassy ground, carving out wheel-sized channels. The man standing on the flat bed of the poison truck aimed his poison sprayer at the work crews as he passed. Ben and the other two men took shelter beneath some scrap plywood slanted against the latticework and watched the clouds of chemical smoke spread out. The men in charge dragged them back out—Ben couldn't be sure they were the same men: they had tied handkerchiefs across their faces.

One of the Brothers said, “Line up!” Ben and the other two men lined up. The Brother assessed them, shook his head in disgust. “Listen: you're building steps, the steps up to the stage. The frame's in place—hammer down the planks that form the steps. Do you understand?” The man pointed at Ben—"You hand planks to him” (he pointed to the man at Ben's left); “and you,” he said nodding at the man on Ben's right, “stand under the stairs to catch any fallen nails.” The odd little man seemed to be entertaining himself with private conversation—"What do you do, Oh, I'm a nail-catcher, I catch nails, Do you ever miss, Well, no one's perfect, but then I collect the nails, I become something of a nail-collector, which is a kind of demotion, but every step of the process is critical . . .” He certainly hadn't stood a chance; at least Ben had been a contender.

The men got into position; the hammerer tested the weight of the hammer in his hand. The little man stood blandly under the framework of the stairs and stared up into the heavens. The heavens watcher turned to the man in charge. He said, “I'm still a man who works with men, my brothers."

"No. You're garbage, and I'm a garbageman,” said the Brother in charge. “I'm leaving you to do this work. If you slack off or make a mistake, no matter how minor, I will personally see to it that you are hanged for the crowds this very day. Do you understand?"

Once the Brother was out of earshot, the hammerer turned to Ben. “Ha! Garbageman. ‘Yes, ‘tis true that I had but one chance to save myself with words,’ said he, ‘yet I did not choose wisely. Thus begins our sad tale . . .'?

"Please be quiet,” said Ben.

Meeks

I sat at the feet of Captain Meeks. Someone had flung a garland of yellow and lavender flowers across the great man's broad metal shoulders; someone had laid bouquets of the same flowers at his feet. The hammering continued as ever.

A few curious onlookers stood in the street and strained to see the state of the park, swarmed over by crews of workers and policemen and a few enterprising merchants who had fibbed their way past the policemen at the gate. I thought of the sacrifices Captain Meeks had made, all those years ago, for these people, myself included, and I hoped that beneath the seasonal excitement crackled a gratitude and a deep acceptance of the terms of his sacrifice. The great man had detected something beautiful, even in the darkness of those days, and the great man had seen that there was something worth salvaging in the city, worth saving in his people. I was mindful of the ominous responsibility that had been placed on my shoulders by Bedge, to represent, as a mere human being with limited time and other resources even more strictly curtailed, so massive and complex and world-altering a set of circumstances as those that surrounded the Captain. I considered, too, that I would be playing my namesake, stepping, as it were, into my own shoes at last.

I pressed my hand flat against the cool grass and closed my eyes and managed to summon the eerie certainty that my mother's palm was pressing against mine from inside the ground. I stood. I was due at the station for the final fitting of my jacket and for other preliminary matters. As I walked toward the station, dragging my feet (my body felt heavy and my legs weak), I passed city artisans detailing the cake. One pair of workers was encrusting the dark boughs of the icing trees with yellow sugar flowers, while another layered the blue-gray frost of harbor waves advancing.

Ben

Ben and the hammerer removed their smocks, and the heavens watcher gasped. “My, God. You're bleeding . . .” Ben looked down at his undershirt—a map of blood. He touched it tentatively. “It's OK. This is old; it's dry."

Ben handed the hammerer a plank, and the hammerer held it close to his face and inhaled deeply. “I love the smell of just-sawed wood.” He placed a few nails carefully between his teeth and hammered the first plank onto the framework of the stairs. “Plank,” he said, and replaced the nails in his mouth. The heavens watcher stood under the open stairs and shifted his gaze from the open sky to Ben. “I'm awfully hungry,” he said. “Aren't you hungry?” Ben and the hammerer ignored him.

Then Ben said, “I wish I had something good, like an orange or a plum."

"Why not wish for an entire tree?” said the hammerer. “Besides I prefer apples."

"Everyone prefers apples,” said Ben.

"The other man did what?” shouted the heavens watcher.

"What?"

"Not you."

"Another."

"Bananas, plums, oranges,” said Ben. “Something more interesting."

"Another plank,” said the hammerer through clenched teeth.

Ben handed over another plank. “We had an apple tree in our yard when I was a boy."

"Plank."

"Actually—want to hear a funny story?” said Ben.

"You wouldn't listen to me,” mumbled the hammerer through a mouthful of nails. He hammered down another plank. “You told me to be quiet."

"But it's a story about apples; you'll like it."

"Fine, tell a story. Everyone likes a story. But I'm not following you down some private memory lane, letting you bring us down."

The heavens watcher interrupted. “There once was a man marooned on an island. Everything on the island was black: the sand, the rocks, the cliffs that plunged down into the black water."

"Interesting . . .” said the hammerer. “Go on."

Ben thought of Finton's drawing. “Where is this story from?"

"It's from his
brain
. What do you care?” snapped the hammerer. “Now be quiet, so help me God, and listen—the story has started. Give me another plank, and you,” he said, pointing the handle of the hammer at the heavens watcher, “go on."

"The man watched the black waves creep along the black shore and tried to think. He couldn't remember anything about himself—his name or where he had come from or what had happened to him. He seemed to be alone except for three gaunt horses standing in the mouth of a shallow cave. Salt had encrusted their manes and their backs, and the gray horse looked as if it had been cast in metal. The two chestnut horses carved from dark, oil-smoothed wood. A heavy, freezing rain rolled over the island; the black waves bloated with green air crashed and sizzled against the rocks. The swells rolled ahead: all the great moments of history were passing him by. He had fallen out of the world somehow—"

"Through sin!” said the hammerer. “Plank."

"That's right, Brother.
The world has forgotten about me,
the man thought bitterly. The horses stood in a row, rain dripping from their bony heads and their tangled manes; they watched him, and the man came to think of them as his disciples, and sometimes he thought of them as the judges of his life.
I've done nothing wrong!
he shouted at them whenever a black rain rolled over the little island and drenched the black soil, the black rocks, the black—"

"The black clouds, the black pebbles, the black leaves,” said Ben impatiently. “We get it."

The hammerer and heavens watcher studied Ben. “You'll note, I said nothing about trees on the island,” said the heavens watcher and continued. “The man's mind started filling up with the pictures of another life, another place—sometimes they seemed like memories and sometimes like prophecies, but he hid from the horses that he was often confused. He felt that he was descended from a great people, and he spoke often about the greatness of his people, but the horses only watched him sleepily through heavily lidded eyes. Their heads hung low, giving them an air of skepticism. They were beasts. The man imagined the horses swarming the fields and wrecking the doors of the ancestral home he suddenly remembered. If the chestnut horses had their way, the waves would be lathed from soft, smooth wood; the metal horse would have the clouds careening like ships and collapsing like bridges.