Specimen Days

He stood for a moment, confused. Had he dreamed of putting them there? He searched up and down the hall, wondering if they were only farther away. Perhaps he had gotten up during the night and moved them, somnambulistically. No. They were nowhere. He thought briefly that the mechanisms were more alive than he'd imagined, that they walked. Would they have found their way back into his parents' bedroom? Would the music box be sitting at his mother's side, singing a song she couldn't bear to hear?

He summoned himself. He was agitated, but he was not insane. Someone had taken the machine and the music box, as people did. Nothing of any value could be left unattended. He had thought they'd be all right for those nocturnal hours, but someone had carried them off. Someone would be trying to sell them, as the boy had sold the china bowl.

Lucas returned to the parlor. What could he say to his father that his father would understand? He could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. He left his father and mother in their bedroom together. He hoped that when he returned from work, they might be restored to themselves.

* * *

Here it was, then: his own machine. He stood before it in the enormous room. Dan and Will and Tom were at theirs, tending them as they ever did, with the steady dispassionate attention of farmers.

Lucas whispered, "You were unworthy, you must admit it. You were untrue. I'm sorry you're dead, but you can't have Catherine with you. You must stop singing to Mother about your sorrows."

The machine sang on. Its song didn't vary. Lucas still couldn't decipher the words, but he knew they were all about love and longing. Simon wanted more than he should rightfully have. Why would he be different dead than he was alive?

Lucas loaded a plate and fed it in. The machine took the plate as it always did. It made the impressions, four across, six down. As Lucas carried the first of the day's plates to Dan, he wondered if his machine spoke to the others at night, when the men were gone and the machines lived here alone. He could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I long for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will. But how could he tell them?

Dan was bent over his machine. He said, "Good morning, Lucas," without looking up.

"Good morning, sir."

Lucas lingered after he had dropped the plate in Dan's bin. Dan was the biggest man in cutting and stamping. He was massive and stooped. He carried his immense round shoulders like burdens; upon his shoulders, partly buried in them, his head looked out with drowned blue eyes. Lucas knew nothing of his life but could imagine it. He would have a wife and children. He would have a parlor with a bedroom on one side and a bedroom on the other.

Dan turned from his machine. He said, "Something wrong?"

"No, sir."

Dan took a kerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the gleaming red dome of his brow.

He was missing the first and second fingers of his right hand. Lucas hadn't noticed it before.

Lucas said, "Please, sir. What happened to your fingers?"

Dan lowered the kerchief and looked at his hand as if he expected to see something surprising there.

"Lost 'em," he said.

"How did you lose them?"

"Accident."

"Was it here? At the works?"

Dan paused. He seemed to wonder whether or not to reveal a secret.

"Sawmill," he said.

"You worked in a sawmill, before you came here?"

"That's right."

Dan wiped his brow again and returned to his work. Idling so, talking, wasn't permitted. Lucas returned to his own machine and loaded another plate.

A different machine had eaten Dan's fingers. That machine, one that split logs, contained a fragment of Dan's ghost, though the rest of Dan lived on. Would this new machine know of that? Could it hear that other machine, singing from far away in a sawmill, happy to have had Dan's fingers but lamenting the loss of the rest of him, wishing the new machine better luck?

Catherine must be sewing now. Lucas couldn't think how a sewing machine might take her. It would be an arm with a needle, ratcheting. It might prick her, it could do that, but it couldn't harm her truly.

There must be other machines at her work, though, machines that could maim. He struggled to picture it. He could imagine presses and rollers through which the garments must be passed. Did she go near those machines during her day? She might. He couldn't know. She might be asked to take bodices and shirts to be sent through a larger apparatus. It would be big as a carriage, he thought; white, not black; it would have a mouth through which the freshly made shirts and dresses were fed, to be smoothed and folded. It would exhale torrents of steam.