Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

Old Halicek, the porter, was a bent, slow-moving fellow who lived with his daughter and grandson in a suite of rooms somewhere in the unreachable lower regions of the house. He too had lost a part of his body to the great mill in his youth — his left ear. It had been reduced, by a device that Halicek called a Dodson line extractor, to a small pink ridge nestled in the lee of his bushy white sideburns. His daughter, Mrs. Eibonas, oversaw a small staff of two maids and a waiter and did the cooking for the dozen or so faculty members who took their lunches at Murrough House every day. The waiter was Halicek’s grandson, Dexter Eibonas, an earnest, good-looking, affable redhead of seventeen who was a favorite among the college faculty. He was intelligent, curious, widely if erratically read. He was always pestering me to take him out to dig in the mounds, and while I would not have been averse to his pleasant company, the terms of my agreement with the board of the college, who were the trustees of the site, expressly forbade the recruiting of local workmen. Nevertheless I gave him books on archaeology and kept him abreast of my discoveries, such as they were. Several of the Plunkettsburg professors, I learned, had also taken an interest in the development of his mind.

“They sent me up to Pittsburgh last winter,” he told me one evening about a month into my sojourn, as he brought me a bottle of Ring and a plate of Mrs. Eibonas’s famous kielbasa with sauerkraut. Professor Brown-Jenkin had been much mistaken, in my opinion, about the best-laid table in town. During the most tedious, chilly, and profitless stretches of my scratchings-about in the bleak, flinty Yuggoghenies, I was often sustained solely by thoughts of Mrs. Eibonas’s homemade sausages and cakes. “I had an interview with the dean of engineering at Tech. Professor Collier even paid for a hotel for Mother and me.”

“And how did it go?”

“Oh, it went fine, I guess,” said Dexter. “I was accepted.”

“Oh,” I said, confused. The autumn semester at Carnegie Tech, I imagined, would have been ending that very week.

“Have you — have you deferred your admission?”

“Deferred it indefinitely, I guess. I told them no thanks.” Dexter had, in an excess of nervous energy, been snapping a tea towel back and forth. He stopped. His normally bright eyes took on a glazed, I would almost have said a dreamy, expression. “I’m going to work in the mill.”

“The mill ?” I said, incredulous. I looked at him to see if he was teasing me, but at that moment he seemed to be entertaining only the pleasantest imaginings of his labors in that fiery black castle. I had a sudden vision of his pleasant face rendered earless, and looked away. “Forgive my asking, but why would you want to do that?”

“My father did it,” said Dexter, his voice dull. “His father, too. I’m on the hiring list.” The light came back into his eyes, and he resumed snapping the towel. “Soon as a place opens up, I’m going in.”

He left me and went back into the kitchen, and I sat there shuddering. I’m going in. The phrase had a heroic, doomed ring to it, like the pronouncement of a fireman about to enter his last burning house. Over the course of the previous month I’d had ample opportunity to observe the mill and its effect on the male population of Plunkettsburg. Casual observation, in local markets and bars, in the lobby of the Orpheum on State Street, on the sidewalks, in Birch’s general store out on Gray Road where I stopped for coffee and cigarettes every morning on my way up to the mound complex, had led me to estimate that in truth, fully half of the townsmen had lost some visible portion of their anatomies to Murrough Manufacturing, Inc. And yet all my attempts to ascertain how these often horribly grave accidents had befallen their bent, maimed, or limping victims were met, invariably, with an explanation at once so detailed and so vague, so rich in mechanical jargon and yet so free of actual information, that I had never yet succeeded in producing in my mind an adequate picture of the incident in question, or, for that matter, of what kind of deadly labor was performed in the black mill.

What, precisely, was manufactured in that bastion of industrial democracy and fount of the Murrough millions? I heard the trains come sighing and moaning into town in the middle of the night, clanging as they were shunted into the mill sidings. I saw the black diesel trucks, emblazoned with the crimson initial M, lumbering through the streets of Plunkettsburg on their way to and from the loading docks. I had two dozen conversations, over endless mugs of Indian Ring, about shift schedules and union activities (invariably quashed) and company picnics, about ore and furnaces, metallurgy and turbines. I heard the resigned, good-natured explanations of men sliced open by Rawlings divagators, ground up by spline presses, mangled by steam sorters, half-decapitated by rolling Hurley plates. And yet after four months in Plunkettsburg I was no closer to understanding the terrible work to which the people of that town sacrificed, with such apparent goodwill, the bodies of their men.

I took to haunting the precincts of the mill in the early morning as the six o’clock shift was coming on and late at night as the graveyard men streamed through the iron gates, carrying their black lunch pails. The fence, an elaborate Victorian confection of wickedly tipped, thick iron pikes trailed with iron ivy, enclosed the mill yard at such a distance from the mountainous factory itself that it was impossible for me to get near enough to see anything but the glow of huge fires through the begrimed mesh windows. I applied at the company offices in town for admission, as a visitor, to the plant but was told by the receptionist, rather rudely, that the Plunkettsburg Mill was not a tourist facility. My fascination with the place grew so intense and distracting that I neglected my work; my wanderings through the abandoned purlieus of the savage Miskahannocks grew desultory and ruminative, my discoveries of artifacts, never frequent, dwindled to almost nothing, and I made fewer and fewer entries in my journal. Finally, one exhausted morning, after an entire night spent lying in my bed at Murrough House staring out the leaded window at a sky that was bright orange with the reflected fire of the mill, I decided I had had enough.

I dressed quickly, in plain tan trousers and a flannel work shirt. I went down to the closet in the front hall, where I found a drab old woolen coat and a watch cap that I pulled down over my head. Then I stepped outside. The terrible orange flashes had subsided and the sky was filled with stars. I hurried across town to the east side, to Stan’s Diner on Mill Street, where I knew I would find the day shift wolfing down ham and eggs and pancakes. I slipped between two large men at the long counter and ordered coffee. When one of my neighbors got up to go to the toilet, I grabbed his lunch pail, threw down a handful of coins, and hurried over to the gates of the mill, where I joined the crowd of men. They looked at me oddly, not recognizing me, and I could see them murmuring to one another in puzzlement. But the earliness of the morning or an inherent reserve kept them from saying anything. They figured, I suppose, that whoever I was, I was somebody else’s problem. Only one man, tall, with thinning yellow hair, kept his gaze on me for more than a moment. His eyes, I was surprised to see, looked very sad.

“You shouldn’t be here, buddy,” he said, not unkindly.

I felt myself go numb. I had been caught.

“What? Oh, no, I–I—”

The whistle blew. The crowd of men, swelled now to more than a hundred, jerked to life and waited, nervous, on the balls of their feet, for the gates to open. The man with the yellow hair seemed to forget me. In the distance an equally large crowd of men emerged from the belly of the mill and headed toward us. There was a grinding of old machinery, the creak of stressed iron, and then the ornamental gates rolled away. The next instant I was caught up in the tide of men streaming toward the mill, borne along like a cork. Halfway there our group intersected with the graveyard shift and in the ensuing chaos of bodies and hellos I was sure my plan was going to work. I was going to see, at last, the inside of the mill.