This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page B

working clothes too: tattered shirts, dungarees, and their favorite caps.
    Many of the men have never met before, having worked different shifts. Their wives and children are with them, carrying unlit candles. The families descend the steps of the subway station and move quietly toward the platform. They walk to the front of a train where the boss, William Randall, is standing. Randall is waiting for the photographers’ flashbulbs to catch him smiling. It is his first time below, and he is telling the reporters and dignitaries how proud he is of his underwater tunnel. More than anything he cannot wait to chop the red ribbon and send the first train through. As he talks, Randall preens himself for the cameras. He smells of shaving soap and hair oil, an arrogance to the smell, something the tunnel has never known before.
    But instead of ducking under the black hoods of their cameras to catch Randall’s smile, the photographers turn to watch the men, women, and children filtering down the platform.
    As the families move alongside the train, the tunnel is plunged into darkness, the power sabotaged by the sandhogs for an hour. Matches flare and candlelight illuminates the faces of the workers as they file past. Randall lets out an indignant yell and shouts at a group of men in suits. They hold their hands up in supplication, saying, “Nothing we can do, Mr. Randall, sir.”
    At the rear of the group of workers, Walker grins.
    One by one, the sandhogs and their families duck under the red tape at the front of the train. The men don’t even look at their boss as they file past. Randall tries to stop them, but they move like water around him.
    The workers tug at the brims of their hats, telling the photographers not to accompany them, just to let them be for a while; this is their moment, and they would rather be left alone.
    Someone lets out a low whistle, and the sandhogs enter the tunnel carrying the candles.
    â€œYou built all this, Pa?”
    â€œWell, bits of it.”
    â€œWow. How long is it?”
    â€œCouple thousand feet or so.”
    â€œExactly, Pa?”
    â€œGive or take an inch or two.”
    â€œIt’s dark.”
    â€œOf course it’s dark, it’s a goddamned tunnel.”
    Walker watches as two boys throw a baseball back and forth. The ball thumps in their catching mitts. Walker smiles to himself, thinking this is probably the first sub-aqua pitch in the history of the world. He steps between the boys and ducks the flying ball. The boys cheer.
    â€œSpitball!” says Walker, and he goes further into the tunnel.
    A few of the women, including Carmela Vannucci—heavily built with a pile-up of hair at her neck—carry rosary beads that leak through their fingers. They whisper to Saint Barbara, the patron of miners. There is melancholy in the movement of the women—they are praying for the tunnel dead—and yet a relief that it wasn’t their own men who were spirited away. Long dresses swishing, hair in bonnets, the wives slip their arms through their husbands’ elbows as they walk down the side of the track.
    In the candlelight, Walker finds Sean Power limping along, holding his nephew’s hand. Power turns and puts his hand on the boy’s head.
    â€œMeet Mister Walker.”
    The boy stretches out a grimy hand. “Hello.”
    â€œMister Walker was around that day God farted,” says Power.
    â€œHuh?” says the boy.
    â€œThe day we got blown from the tunnel.”
    The boy chuckles but still holds tight to his uncle’s hand. Walker follows behind them. He listens as his fellow mucker points out parts of the tunnel to the boy.
    â€œThat’s where the foreman with the glass eye sat,” says Power. “His hair went on fire one day.”
    â€œDid his eye melt?”
    â€œâ€™Course not,” says Power. “And the welder went on fire here. Tomocweski. Up in a ball of flames. Smelt like roast