The Walking People

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: 2007

  Part I: 1956–1957

  1

  2

  3

  Part II: 1963

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part III: Letters

  Part IV: 1977

  9

  10

  Part V: 1986

  11

  12

  13

  Part VI: 2007

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2009 by Mary Beth Keane

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keane, Mary Beth.

  The walking people / Mary Beth Keane.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-12652-4

  1. Women—Ireland—Fiction. 2. Irish Americans—Fiction. 3. Family secrets—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Ireland—Fiction. 6. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.E165W35 2009 813'.6—dc22 2008053290

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO MOM AND DAD

  or, as they will be known by the time they

  read this, Mamó and Daideó

  How perilous is it to choose

  not to love the life we're shown?

  —from "Badgers," Seamus Heaney, 1979

  Prologue: 2007

  AT EXACTLY 6:16 on a Friday morning the front attendant at Champion Parking Garage looked up from the nine-inch monitor of his television screen and watched Michael Ward steer his car onto the lot of the construction site at the corner of Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue. This one is always first, the attendant thought as he strolled over to stand under the fluorescent light at the garage entrance. When Michael looked over at him, the attendant nodded. Michael raised his arm and nodded back. It was getting close to a shift change for the sandhogs, and as he did every morning of the five weeks the attendant had been working at Champion, he watched the cars arrive in the hope that there would be too many and some would be forced to come over and park with him.

  If there was nothing good on television, the attendant sat, peered out across the faint dawn light, counted the sandhogs' cars as they parked and then the men inside them as they got out, stretched, disappeared behind the sixteen-foot aluminum fence that marked the boundary of the site. The guys who shuffled and reshuffled the cars downstairs had told him that the sandhogs had been working across the street for years now, but from where he sat there was no sign of what they could possibly be building. As he watched Michael attach the club to the steering wheel of his little red Corolla and then circle the car to make sure the doors were locked tight, he remembered Mr. Zan from the business office telling him that they were digging, not building. They were digging down, down, down below the city, below the subway tunnels, below the riverbed all the way over on the East Side, below Roosevelt Island, below Queens. "Take the highest building you've seen since you came to America," Mr. Zan had said. "Now pretend it stretches down instead of up. That's how deep they dig." When the attendant asked why, Mr. Zan shrugged, threw up his hands. Who knew? In America they dig just to keep busy.

  The sun, risen now for twenty minutes, had not yet reached its arms across the city to the westernmost stretch of Thirtieth Street. Michael Ward angled his wrist to catch the dim light and narrowed his eyes to read his watch. He had forgotten something, he felt sure of it, but he couldn't remember what it could be. It was a feeling that kept stopping him lately, like a tiny, nagging hair that kept brushing his skin but he couldn't find. He stood in the middle of the parking lot, hoping it would come to him, and then, after ten seconds of stretching his mind back to earlier that morning, to Greta in the kitchen, to the lonesome curves of the Palisades before rush hour, he abruptly wondered why he'd stopped walking. He looked down to find his lunch hanging from his fist in a plastic Pathmark bag—one roast beef sandwich, one Granny Smith apple, one banana, two slices of brown bread, one can of ginger ale, two bottles of water. As usual, Greta had wrapped everything neatly, even the soda can, which she'd covered in two layers of tinfoil. "Keeps it cold," she said almost every morning when she showed him what she'd packed. She'd learned the trick back in 1969, the year their oldest daughter, Julia, started kindergarten. Julia had come home one afternoon and told Greta what she'd seen in the other lunch boxes, and Greta had been wrapping soda cans in tinfoil ever since. After thirty-seven years working underground, Michael didn't have the heart to tell her that down in the tunnel it wouldn't get a chance to get warm, foil or no foil.

  Everything else he would need for his shift was in his locker. The code to his lock was written on a small piece of paper in his wallet—Greta's idea, and a good one. He'd had to go to that piece of paper quite a few times in the past months. Recently he'd forgotten that the code was in his wallet and had had to use a sledgehammer to break the lock. The guys on his shift had joked that he'd need another reminder—on the back of his hand or pinned to the steering wheel of his car—to remind him where the reminder was. Standing motionless in the half-empty lot, he recited the numbers quickly: 26 right, 3 left, 9 right. But the nagging feeling was still there, as if someone had stolen part of his morning and he couldn't figure out which part was missing.

  A low-grade buzz still sounded in his ear from the blast of the day before, and he cupped his hand over the side of his head as he started walking again. He pressed hard with his palm and tried to suction the noise away. When this failed, as it had failed fifty times already that morning, he jammed his index finger into his ear as far as he could, hoping to steady the vibration. With his finger working its way deeper, he glanced over at the hoghouse, which was lit up on the outside by a tripod of industrial floodlights. It reminded him of a school play he'd seen once. Which of the kids was performing? He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember the story either, but there was a handsome American barn painted red with pure white along the eaves, and that barn was in the background of every scene, lit up like Christmas by the lights at the foot of the stage.

  "You might be sad," Greta had said after dinner the day before. "Last days can be sad, you know." He'd laughed, nearly had to spit his tea back into his mug. Then that morning she'd all but asked if there would be a farewell party. The things she came out with sometimes. And yet, once he'd navigated the car through the local roads of Recess and finally hit the Palisades, he couldn't get the possibility out of his mind. Not a cake or balloons or that kind of thing, but something. Not many had lasted as long as he had. As he did every morning—winter, spring, summer, and fall—he'd rolled down the car windows to breathe in the Hudson as it flowed south to meet the Atlantic. He'd seen a lot of rivers in his life, but this one was mighty. Broad, solemn, abused, the Hudson was a special case. In the years when he'd worked the overnight shift, he would insist to anyone who challenged him that it was the Hudson that carried him home each morning. When his eyelids refused to stay open and the dust that rimmed them burned as he blinked it away, he would position his hands on the steering wheel, let the speedometer fall to sixty, and follow the sound and smell of the river.

  Keeping his focus on the low-slung and windowless building that was not a building, really,
but a simple shelter, a runty eyesore stuck in among the brick and brownstone of the much taller buildings that surrounded the site, Michael knew he wouldn't be able to tell if anything was unusual, not from a distance, not with the ringing in his ear. Still, the hoghouse looked quiet. He laughed, the sound breaking up the steady crunch his new loafers made on the gravel. It was a thing Greta would say: that something looked quiet. Once, at a benefit dance in the Bronx, she'd spotted an American woman they'd both known when they first came to America, a woman they hadn't seen in almost forty years. Greta had rushed up to the woman and said, "Is that you? Here at the dance?"

  The world knew New York as the city that never sleeps, but it seemed to Michael that there was an hour each morning, maybe less than an hour, maybe only fifteen minutes, that were so singularly still and silent that those minutes stretched out until they felt like an hour, when there were no cars on the avenue, no horns, no dog walkers, no one hosing down the sidewalk, no one sweeping, no heels clicking, no brakes squealing, no nine-to-fivers weaving in and out of pedestrian traffic, because there was no pedestrian traffic, not yet. The commuter trains were just beginning to trickle in. He'd passed only a dozen or so cars between the George Washington Bridge and Thirtieth Street, and now, as he continued the walk from his car to the heart of the site, despite the damn ringing in his ear, he would be willing to swear he heard the Hudson lapping up against the pilings two avenues away.

  He looked again at the plain off-white structure that housed the lockers, the showers, and a small table they called the breakroom even though it wasn't its own room at all, only a corner inside the larger room. As he got closer, he told himself to smile, to shake a few hands. Not smiling and not shaking hands, instead turning red and nodding, letting them see that he was touched by their gestures, would make him the mickey for the entire shift. After too, at the union picnics and memorial services and all the other occasions that would keep bringing them together. Maybe they'd even had a joke trophy made for him. There were shops that did it. His son, James, had one with a baseball figure on top of a toilet paper roll. Across the gold plate it said FOR ONE POOPER OF A SEASON.

  Now, as he went for the knob of the hoghouse door, he agreed with Greta: a cake wouldn't be unheard of. Who else had been working as a sandhog since the very first day the water tunnel project began? Even when the construction contract passed from company to company and the work site moved from borough to borough, Michael moved with it. Who else had lasted thirty-seven years? No one he knew. Twenty, yes. Thirty, sometimes. More than thirty, barely ever. One of the wives might have suggested it, might even have volunteered to pick it up and run it over at the end of the shift. Yes, cake was a possibility, but it was his locker he prepared himself for as he pulled the door wide, and them playing cool until he opened it. One of the young guys had been down in the tunnel with a camera a few weeks back. Maybe they'd had a photograph blown up and framed.

  Inside, nothing seemed unusual. The showers were on and the air in the long room was thick with steam and the smell of soap. Half a dozen muck-covered rain slickers hung from the hooks that ran across an entire wall. A row of steel-toed rubber boots, also covered in muck, were lined up underneath. If he'd told them once, he'd told them a million times: rinse your gear before you rinse yourself. It was easier. It was more logical. But no, he thought, day after day they just peel off and head for the showers, and later, when the muck gets on one of their nice clean shirts, they curse like the devil. Then their wives curse them again when they get home. He walked farther into the room and saw two men from the overnight shift sitting at the breakroom table, the television on low. They'd already changed back into civilian clothes, the teeth of their combs visible on their damp hair. In an hour, when they finally reached their homes, they'd strip once more, down to their clean undershirts and shorts, and try to sleep out the day while their wives and children tiptoed around the rest of the house, reminding each other to talk in whispers.

  "How's it goin', Ward?" one of them asked. Michael nodded, stood and watched what they were watching for a minute, and then made for his locker. One of them snakes that pops out, he thought. Or something that makes a loud noise. They were always riding him for his hearing.

  Finding he needed the reminder after all—damn it altogether, but that was strange, didn't I just now have those numbers in my head?—Michael removed the small piece of paper from his wallet and, after reading it, turned the dial of the combination lock. He fiddled with the latch for a moment, then lifted the little metal handle and pulled hard so the door wouldn't stick in the bottom corner. There were his boots, his thermal socks, his work jeans, his flannel work shirt, his yellow rain slicker, his hard hat, his flashlight, his fold-up ruler, his nail clipper, all arranged as they'd been arranged in similar lockers all over New York City for the past thirty-seven years. He stared at his things for a moment, then unbuttoned the top two buttons of his blue shirt—a golf shirt, Greta called it, though he'd never picked up a golf club in his life—and pulled it over his head. He unzipped his khaki pants. He slipped off his new loafers. He hung everything but the shoes on two hangers where they'd wait for the next eight hours. Limb by limb he put on his work clothes, rough and stiff from industrial strength detergent and years of fine gray rock dust embedded in the cotton fibers. He pulled on a pair of white kneesocks, then the thick gray thermal socks. May or December, the weather was always the same in the tunnel.

  With ten minutes to go, he was at the shift check-in board, flipping the tag under his name so it was red side out. He looked over at the midnight shift board; no red tags meant that they were all up top. All up top meant there hadn't been any problems. There were three others from Michael's shift already in the steel cage, including Ned Powers, a sandhog for twenty-nine years and Michael's closest friend. They waited for him. "Losing your step, Ward?" Asante, one of the power guys, asked. "It's your last day so you figure what the hell, they can fire me?"

  "Greta was up. Wanted me to take my vitamins. Am I late?"

  "Ward, wait just a second," Powers said as he stepped out of the cage to stop Michael from stepping in, and to the engineer who operated the lift he said, "Hold it a minute." He clapped a broad hand on Michael's back and steered him toward the hoghouse.

  "What's happening?" Michael asked. It could be now—a party when he least expected it.

  Ned pointed down at Michael's feet and then said loudly, so the others could hear, "I know you said you don't plan to do a lick of work today, Ward, but I don't see why you have to ruin good shoes just to stick it to us."

  Michael looked down and blinked. There were his double-socked feet shoved into his new loafers. One step into the tunnel and he'd be ankle-deep in muck. The two waiting in the cage laughed as Ned said gently, so only Michael could hear, "Go on, now, Michael. Get your boots. Put those shoes in your locker. Will I go with you? No, you're grand. All the commotion of last day, isn't it? Makes a person lose his head."

  Michael hurried back to his locker and, not wanting to fiddle with the lock again, grabbed a spare pair of boots from storage and left his loafers on a bench. When he finally got back to the cage and the engineer latched the door, the steel platform swayed above the hole for a moment and then with a loud groan began to descend.

  The men looked down through the darkness at the murky light more than six hundred feet below. It was a woman's department, Michael decided, goodbyes and gag gifts and that kind of thing. It made sense for nine-to-fivers, office workers, where there were rooms you could have a little party in and desks you could decorate. But in the tunnel? Maybe he'd been watching too much television lately. It was just that one of the Jamaicans had retired in February, twenty-five years in the tunnels, and they'd made a to-do out of it, passing around a card everyone had to sign, chipping in for a gift certificate to a restaurant uptown.

  The cage picked up speed. "One hundred," Powers shouted. Michael heard Powers say something, saw his lips move, but wouldn't have known what was said if he hadn'
t taken the same ride five, sometimes six, days a week for almost four decades. Despite the damage to his ears, he could usually tell if someone was shouting at him over the roar of the machinery. Human voices were weak compared with so many other sounds, but often, when someone yelled over the machines, there was something in the pitch, some quality added to the noise that did not quite fit, and that made him look up. Other men had made the same discovery, and no one could explain it. Down below, when the machines were off, the men's shouts ricocheted inside the tunnel, hitting the dead end and bouncing right back like a rubber ball thrown hard against a wall. When the machines were on—the shaker, the mole, the muck train, the conveyer belts, the pumps, the fans—they filled the tunnel with sound in a way that felt almost physical, and was physical, actually, when the ground began to tremble.

  "Two hundred," Powers called after another thirty seconds. What little daylight had begun to creep in at street level disappeared entirely. At four hundred feet the dim light at the bottom of the hole became brighter, though it remained hazy, as if Michael were looking at it through the oily gauze left on his car windshield after a rainy commute, truck after truck kicking up grit and greasy puddles from the road. At five hundred fifty they were nearly there. At six hundred twenty-five feet the cage came to a stop. As always, the journey had taken just over three minutes. The exposed bedrock wept constantly, big, wet tears that fell in heavy drops or streamed down the rock face in rivers. The air was dense with moisture and dust. The thermometer read fifty-five degrees. The men stepped out of the cage and walked the last twenty feet down the wet aluminum staircase, single file, each making sure to hold tight to the railing.

  The week before, Michael heard the walking boss yelling at one of the new guys that only a fucking moron would walk across the bottom of the shaft—hard hat or no hard hat. It took years for the new guys to be as careful as they had to be, and it usually took a tragedy to make them cautious. Once, in 1988, a man on Michael's shift was passing across the bottom of the shaft with his hard hat tucked under his arm when a socket wrench fell from six hundred feet above and cracked his skull as neatly as if someone had gotten him from behind with a cleaver. Every year on the job brought a new tragedy. And then, only a few months ago, there were the stories out of West Virginia, newspapers left open in the breakroom, articles tacked up to the board, novenas said before each shift for nine consecutive shifts, men who hadn't set foot inside a church since they were children, who'd never been south of New Jersey, bowing their heads, clasping their hands, asking God to save the coal miners, to protect them and their families, just as they felt sure those men in West Virginia would ask God to protect New York's sandhogs if the tables were turned.