Clockwork Canada Page 7

  “My friends,” she said, “there is always more labour.”

  No one answered her. Eyes flicked down and away; heads tilted awkwardly. A minute or so later someone made a joke Emiliana’s altitude-dull ears could not pick up, and the lads went back to shoving at each other, or yawning hugely to relieve the pressure in their heads.

  Emiliana caught a gangly fellow looking at her, and she smiled and then yawned in sympathy, but he only flushed pink and pretended he had not seen.

  When the airship moored at a station north of the crater, the young men jammed shoulder to shoulder in their hurry to get to the ladder, not looking back.

  Emiliana offered to carry Manuel’s luggage for him. He refused her politely enough, but she saw the downward flash of his eyes toward her graspers, the whitening of his knuckles as he clung to the canvas strap of his bag. He hefted it over one shoulder, turning away already. The fine muscles of his forearm pulled taut beneath the skin.

  Emiliana lifted her own carpetbag, hearing the winding of gears and the hum of wire beneath the leather of her arm as her right grasper clung to the handle. Her left steadied her, grappled to one of the cables criss-crossing the inner wall, as the airship rocked gently against its moorings.

  Her arms were more than a decade old now; they needed oiling each night, and the brass was scarred bright here and there with the scratches of heavy work, just as the boys’ hands showed the white scars of fishing accidents. They were not so different. Time left marks on metal just as on flesh.

  As Emiliana descended the ladder, though, she felt the ache of the bones within her knees, and the swelling that came and went about her ankles. And her graspers, painlessly locking and unlocking on the rungs, bearing most of her weight.

  She gained the solid platform, and followed the young men out of the wind, into the station tower, and down a few narrow stairs. She caught up again at the end of a queue before a red-hatted immigration official: he was stamping papers busily, with the same crest that had decorated the airship’s curved flank, a Union Jack surmounted by a red leaf.

  “How many in your party?” he asked Manuel. “Are you all together?”

  “Everyone except her,” Manuel replied, as if he did not even know Emiliana’s name; maybe he had forgotten it already, although she had told him only that morning.

  Emiliana waited until the herd of young men had stampeded out into their new country. She had her papers stamped alone by the official whose pale gaze lingered on her arms. He slid the packet back across the counter to her and said, unsmiling, “Welcome to the Canadian Territories, Miss Da Silva. Proceed through the gates.”

  * * *

  The young men sat shoulder to shoulder on the tram exactly as they had on the airship, jostling, giggling. None of them looked at Emiliana when she boarded. She took the last seat, right behind the driver, who nodded, and did not meet Emiliana’s eyes.

  She dropped her bag between her feet and used one of her graspers to poke at the ever-present ache in her lower back. The tram rang its bell and belched out a gust of steam and rumbled off southward down twin steel tracks. Over the driver’s shoulder, Emiliana could see the clinging pall of ash and smoke over the heart of the city, shrouding the pale sun.

  Their boarding house turned out to be in the west end, in a grid of streets where each block was a solid row. The roofs were lower, the lots narrower, than the others the tram had passed. Chimneys clustered together in threes and fours.

  “Oldest gets dibs on the best bed,” Manuel called out to a chorus of groans. The youngest-looking one on the tram, a raw-boned boy with lips too soft for his face, theatrically covered his eyes and said it was just like living with his sisters. No one laughed.

  The tram stopped on a corner where the tracks curved lakeward, and everyone piled out, slinging cases to each other. Emiliana grabbed a trunk before anyone could stop her, passed it out to the nearest lad and bit back a smile when he staggered under the weight.

  The boarding house had four bedrooms, each with several cots. Manuel bulled his way into the largest, and tossed his kit on the cot by the window.

  Emiliana followed him in, puffing a little from the steep stairs, her own carpetbag clutched in one of her graspers. She deposited her bag on the window cot, plucked up Manuel’s and set it on the floor nearby.

  He was staring at her, mouth open, looking not so much angry as utterly bemused.

  “Oldest gets dibs on the best bed,” Emiliana said.

  Manuel grabbed up his kit bag from the floor. For a moment Emiliana wasn’t sure where he was going to put it.

  “I didn’t realize you were with us,” he said finally, face stiff. “Of course you should have the best bed, ma’am.”

  He turned and left, taking his bag with him.

  Emiliana sat down on her cot, kicked her feet out of her elastic-sided boots and rotated her stiff ankles. Her stockings were torn again; her graspers didn’t have the smoothness of hands. She rooted through her carpetbag for her ancient sheepskin slippers.

  As she was bending stiffly to put them on, the raw-boned lad came in, sidling along the hallway, ducking his head as if to hide his height.

  He glanced at Emiliana, eyes half-hidden by his unruly hair, and placed his case – a kicked-in, rotted leather suitcase – on the smallest of the room’s cots, closest to the door. Then he disappeared again.

  At sundown, when Emiliana returned from a solitary dinner at the nearest public house, the bedroom’s wood stove had a log in it, but the other two cots were still empty.

  * * *

  Morning in Toronto, late March, proved to be blisteringly cold. A tram took the crew downtown, over roads white with ash and the remnants of winter’s salt. Emiliana saw some of the young men tucking their fingertips into their armpits or blowing steaming breaths over them; her own graspers didn’t have feeling, but she could see the brass dulled over with frost, could sense the stiffness to the mechanisms as their oil congealed.

  The factories along the lakeshore sent up billowing towers of smoke into the clear cold sky. Emiliana had no idea what they were making, or who was working in them now, with so many of the working folk committed to the massive rebuilding of the downtown.

  The airship crash, so she had heard, was the largest to occur in the world. Two zeppelins, each with a hydrogen capacity of sixty thousand cubic metres, had become entangled while trying to dock in high winds. One had collided with the mooring mast and caught fire; the other had nearly freed itself, but was set on fire by the explosion of the first.

  The first had been a passenger ship; fifty civilians had been aboard, all killed.

  The second, though, had been carrying explosives. Each of the rival newspapers had a different story, the bartender at the public house had another, and the charwoman at the boarding house still another: civilian explosives destined for the Sudbury mines; Allied munitions en route to the depot at Downsview; some kind of contraband shipped under a faked manifest destined for an enemy strike on New York.

  Casimiro – the young man who was the only one either brave enough or unimportant enough to share Emiliana’s room – thought it was not explosives at all, but some new and fearsome fuel, something that would give airships the run of the globe if it could be made less volatile.

  Up close, it all became irrelevant. The crater had looked much deeper from the air, but it looked much wider from the ground. Churches, banks, office buildings, and a brand-new department store: how many million bricks had been thrown down by the blast? How many square metres of construction laid waste, how many beams and trusses shattered, how many windows blown to shards?

  How many people were still missing?

  Casimiro didn’t know that one, and Emiliana didn’t press him.

  Their tram stopped a good half-mile from the epicentre, and they walked from there to a command post where they were issued lunch bags and heavy leather gloves.

  “No, thank you,” Emiliana said, brandishing her graspers, which were pincer-shaped
, lacking the complex fingers of a fleshly hand.

  “You want mittens instead?” the quartermaster asked cheerfully. She was a woman maybe the same age as Emiliana, round-faced and fat. She didn’t wait for an answer, just hauled a pair of scorched leather mitts out of one of her bins and handed them over. They were shiny and stiff with use, bigger than Emiliana’s graspers needed. Emiliana slipped them on anyway, an extra layer between the world and the most delicate bits of her metalwork.

  “Which one of you wants to be foreman?” the quartermaster said.

  Manuel stepped forward, shouldering in front of Emiliana even though she had not moved.

  When no one objected, the quartermaster tossed Manuel a whistle and a timepiece, and said, “You’re Crew 255. You’ll be clearing rubble. Wait by the yellow flag and someone will come fetch you.”

  So they waited by the yellow flag. Some of the lads stood flush up against each other for warmth, chest to back. Not Emiliana. Not Casimiro, who seemed to have been elected keeper of everyone else’s belongings, and stood alone over a heap of lunch bags.

  Other crews gathered, too, in eights or twelves, many of them bearing resemblance to each other in the same way Crew 255 did: people from the same village or county, people from the same extended family. Emiliana saw two others with mechanical limbs – one a very young man with a grasper like her own for his left arm, and one a severe-looking fellow with both legs brass from the thighs down. This man stood a half-head above the rest of his crew, and Emiliana wondered if he had been so tall on his old legs too. She thought so, from the length of his arms and torso. While she was measuring him with her eyes, he happened to look over and he scowled; the scowl leavened a bit, though, when Emiliana drew off one mitten to give him a wave.

  Her attention was shattered a moment later by Manuel’s whistle-blast, completely unnecessary and right beside her ear.

  “Crew 255!” he bellowed. “We have our work order. Follow me.”

  And Emiliana followed, all the way to the rear, behind even Casimiro, who was burdened with everyone’s lunch.

  She inched up behind him and said, “You won’t make friends that way. They’ll just give you more to do.”

  “You won’t make friends at all,” Casimiro snapped.

  “No,” Emiliana said. “But I’m not trying.”

  “Aren’t you?” Casimiro said, halfway between sulky and honestly curious.

  “I do only what I want,” Emiliana said, “and I want from others only what they give freely. Not scraps that must be begged.”

  She saw him recoil at that, and bit her tongue on whatever she would have said next.

  And here was their little square of the work site, anyway: their mounded rubble, their hand-trucks and dump-bins, and a tiny kerosene heater for them to take turns warming themselves on their breaks.

  Emiliana wiped her streaming nose on the cuff of her leather mitten, and listened to Manuel over-explain their day’s work.

  * * *

  The tram ride back to the rooming house was quiet, apart from the rumble of iron on track, the hiss of steam and the occasional clang of the bell. Even Rafa, wiry, pranking Rafa, smallest and loudest of the crew, had run out of things to say; he was drowsing in his seat now, head drooping toward his friend’s shoulder.

  All of them were grey with ash from foot to thigh and from hand to bicep. Emiliana’s graspers had taken in some grit, and the left one especially made a grating sound when she bent her elbow. Her left knee felt nearly the same, as if the kneecap scraped against the butt of the femur when she bent. Twenty-odd years of heavy lifting took a toll on flesh and bone and metal alike.

  She was well tempered to it in her mind, though. In her will. It was what kept her moving when some of the lads had gone glassy-eyed and stupid and slow near day’s end.

  They were quick enough to pile out of the tram and shove each other into the rooming house, but they stopped and milled about uncertainly when they saw the unlit stove, the dark kitchen.

  A couple of them looked to Manuel. Manuel looked to Emiliana.

  Emiliana crossed her mittened graspers over her chest and looked back.

  “Casimiro,” Manuel said. “You know how to make biscuits?”

  * * *

  The work got harder as the first week went on. Muscles and ligaments strained, joints compressed, feet chilblained, faces chapped. Little pains compounded and bigger ones took root. Emiliana began to wrap her knees with bandages made from torn stockings.

  The lads ate like starving hounds and Emiliana wasn’t far behind them. Casimiro could not cook worth a damn, really, but they all crumbled their burned biscuits into their oversalted stew and tucked it away uncomplaining against the next day’s work.

  At night Casimiro slept hard until the small hours, but then began to whimper in his sleep. Emiliana put up with it at first, not wanting to embarrass the lad after she’d already insulted his pride. But, when on the fourth night she was awakened, she threw a slipper at him.

  “What?” he said, snuffling. “What did you…did you just—”

  “You were whining like a pup,” she said, “and I need my rest.”

  Casimiro turned over; in the darkness all Emiliana could see was the long skinny shape of him, feet extending off the end of the cot.

  “I get hungry,” he said, through a yawn. “It wakes me sometimes.”

  “Then learn to cook better,” Emiliana snapped. “And there are two apples in my kit bag. Eat them and go back to sleep.”

  Casimiro caught his breath. “Are…are you sure?”

  “I don’t like them. My graspers get sticky,” Emiliana said. “Chew quietly.” And she stuck her head under her pillow, not waiting to see if Casimiro would take her up on it.

  After that, at the end of each workday she set her apple out on the windowsill, and each morning it was gone.

  * * *

  The crew had Sundays off. A few blocks away through the streets of workers’ houses, there was a church with services in Portuguese twice a day, where they would let lads in sooty jackets fill the pews.

  Not all of the crew went. Emiliana preferred to stay back and work on her graspers. It was a slow business, going over the joints with a rag to get the grit off and then applying oil with a dropper, which was difficult to squeeze delicately with the strength of her machinery. Half the time the oil dislodged more tiny cinders from within the joint, and then she had to rag everything all over again.

  Casimiro was devout enough that he had talked Rafa into taking over Sunday dinner for him, or else maybe the lads had done so in protest of Casimiro’s still-terrible cooking. Rafa would spend the morning and early afternoon on a spread of roasted meats, a soup of potato and kale and sausage, and a pot of rice with flaked fish and raisins.

  Manuel did not attend the church either; he spent his Sunday mornings composing letters to a sweetheart back home, who he said he was going to bring over if the crew received a second contract.

  Emiliana found Manuel alone by the stove as he finished up a letter, and she sat herself down in front of him and laid one of her graspers on the page to get his attention.

  “Some of your lads are being bullies,” she said.

  Manuel actually laughed a little, disbelieving. “You mean Rafa? I told him your stockings would tear if he tried to fit them over his damn goat-feet…”

  “Oh, was that him? I tear them myself all the time,” Emiliana said. “No, I meant Casimiro.”

  “Him, a bully?” Manuel shook his head definitely. “Not him.”

  “I’m glad we agree. No. I mean someone’s bullying him. He’s not getting enough to eat.”

  Manuel blinked.

  “Fix it,” Emiliana said. “You wanted to be foreman. They’re your crew.”

  She lifted her grasper off the paper then, but Manuel didn’t take it up right away.

  “I can’t make them like Casimiro,” Manuel said. “He’s always the odd one out. He was the one who put himself in your room. The rest of
them chose to recognize your seniority.”

  “Does that still rankle?” Emiliana said, laughing a little. “I don’t care where he sleeps, as long as it’s his choice. But you can make sure he doesn’t eat last every meal, and you can stop the other lads taking his share and then tossing it on the midden.”

  “Do they?” Manuel said. “Well.”

  He stayed in his seat, letter forgotten, while Emiliana pulled her chair closer to the stove to warm her joints, both flesh and not.

  * * *

  Slowly the work began to get easier. Arms and legs and backs grew accustomed to the motions of work. The chill lifted. Instead of huddling over the kerosene burner for their breaks, the crew could choose to sit on overturned buckets to play cards, though the cards grew almost illegible with soot.

  Emiliana, who had been fearing that her strength was beginning to wane, found that it was not. It came with a bit more pain these days but she could lift more than ever, the long bones of her legs dense with years of work, the muscles of thighs and calves grown heavy and practiced, the webbing around her spine not quite as supple as it had been, but just as sturdy. When the crew needed to move a massive beam or a cornerstone, Emiliana was one of the ones who always stepped up. Many of the lads had stronger legs or shoulders, but the muscles of their hands couldn’t hold as fast as Emiliana’s graspers.

  Neither she nor Manuel could quite figure out what was going on with Casimiro, though. Even after Manuel put a halt to anyone messing with his food, Casimiro stayed gaunt, the fleshy lips looking almost grotesque on his hollow-eyed face. He kept carrying lunches and ferrying water from the tanker that drove slowly between all the crews around the crater, but the other lads didn’t speak to him the way they spoke to each other, and they left a careful space around him on the tram and in the rooming house.

  He kept eating Emiliana’s apples in the night, and he kept awakening her with his nightmares.

  She began to feel too much sympathy for him to throw slippers any more. She did not want to frighten him with the touch of a chilly pincer, either. She settled for reaching her foot across the gap between their cots, and prodding him, very gently, with her wool-socked toes.