Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (31 page)

T
hey buried Mose in a casket big enough for a grand piano, made of the finest mahogany, with brass fittings that gleamed as bright as a fire engine’s. A team of Clydesdales drew his hearse down Delancey, followed by five wagons full of funeral wreaths. The mean streets of New York were filled with mourners, and even the leader of the Dead Rabbits doffed his hat as the King of the Firemen’s funeral cortege rolled by. For to be lord of New York City’s firefighters, one had to be as strong and brave as they come.

And while they may have built them stronger than Mose, they could never build them braver.

M
y father’s hand tightened on my shoulder as we reached the impressive stone and mortar entrance to Professor Widgerty’s home just outside the city. It looked to me like a castle, and I glanced around for the moat as Da took off his cap and smoothed his hair. The hard lines etched into his face by years of work in mines and foundries grew tight and he gave me a quick shake to “buck up,” then turned to the massive door.

I had never known Da to be afraid of anything, but I thought I saw his fingers tremble a bit as he raised the heavy brass knocker and sounded it three times against the door. We waited, listening to the echoes die away in the cavernous home, and I did my best to control my own shaking from both worry and wonder.

Da had just reached to knock again when the door opened and a grizzled, white-haired manservant glared down at us and said, “Well?”

Da grabbed the back of my neck to keep me from running. “Beggin’ your pardon,” he said with a slight bow. “I heard that Professor Widgerty is looking for hardworking young boys.” He
glanced down at me. “To help with experiments and constructions and such.”

The manservant twisted himself around to give me a better look, one eye squinted nearly closed. “What, this little monkey? He’s not big enough to piss on.”

“Oh, he’s a clever lad,” Da said. “Good with his hands, he is. Been helping me with repairs since he learned to walk. Knows a spanner from cog, he does, and he can tote twice his weight a full block before setting it down.”

The old manservant snorted, then reached out and grabbed my arm, squeezing the muscle against the bone hard enough to make me wince. I felt anger boil up inside me, but Da’s hand tightened around my neck, reminding me to behave myself, so I just stared right back at the old codger, daring him to do it again.

His face broke into a grin and he cackled like an escapee from the asylum. “He’s got pluck, I’ll give him that,” he said. He gave me another intense look and then nodded as if in answer to his own unspoken question. “Room and board plus two bits a week if he don’t run away.”

I looked up and saw my father’s face brighten. I could tell what he was thinking:
One less mouth to feed, and two bits a week extra to boot.

I sucked in a breath. Room and board—that meant I would be living away from Ma and Da, and the rest of the family. I had tried for months to find work at the mills and foundries and other places throughout the city, but because of my size, and my habit of getting into fights, no one would take a chance on me.

But now I had that chance. Unfortunately, it was to be working for Crazy Professor Widget. I had heard stories about the strange contraptions being built at Widget’s Workshop. Nobody who actually worked there would verify anything about what they were building. But whispers got out…whispers of strange, wonderful things; experiments, contraptions of all sorts; copper and brass constructions; glass tubes and panels; gears and springs; boilers…and steam, all the stories talked about the constant hiss of steam.

The thought of having to live and work here made my stomach flutter, not from fear, but from excitement.

“I’ll just have a word with the lad, if that’s all right?”

The manservant nodded once.

Da pulled me away a few steps and turned his back to the house so that only I could hear what he said. He leaned down and I could smell his tobacco and his aftershave and other smells that was “Da.” “This is your last chance, Donny,” he said through clenched teeth. “How someone as small as you can get into so many fights I’ll never understand.”

“It’s not my fault,” I pleaded for the hundredth time, though I knew it would do no good. Da was a big man and had been a big boy. He’d been already six feet tall at fourteen; nobody had ever picked on him. He could never understand why I had to fight even the slightest insult or push, why I had to prove myself every hour of every day against the bigger boys. He could never understand what it was like to be small.

“Well, you better do something to change your attitude, ’cause your ma and me can’t keep you anymore. Got yourself kicked out of school, so now you have to work like the rest of us. You get kicked out of here…and you’re on your own.” His face seemed to soften, his eyes growing damp, and then he was all business again. “You hear me, boy?”

He pulled me roughly back to the doorway where the manservant was waiting. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and said, “You do the professor right, you hear?”

I could only nod. A painful lump in my throat kept me from speaking.

Da gave me a slight push toward the door and asked in a hard voice, “When does he get paid?”

“Every Saturday, five o’clock,” the manservant said, taking a step back and holding the door wide.

My father nodded again, then looked down at me. “I’ll be back Saturday to collect your wages.” He kept his hard gaze on me until something got into his eye and he had to blink and turn away. “Make us proud, lad,” he said in a thick voice. He pulled on
his cap as he stepped down the walkway. “Your mother,” he said over his shoulder, “will miss you.”

I watched him heading off toward town as if he had somewhere to be. He didn’t look back.

Finally the manservant said, “Well, come on, get yourself in here, then. We’ve got things to do.” I wiped at my eyes and sniffed once as I looked over my shoulder toward the retreating figure of my father, then stepped into my new life.

“All right, then,” the manservant said as he closed the door, “come along. I’m Jarvis. No mister, just Jarvis. I run the house and I don’t like little urchins tramping dirt and metal filings all over my clean floors, so wipe your feet. The others have been out in the workshop since sunup.”

I followed him through the big house, which, although cluttered with stacks of books and papers, rolls of large charts and drawings, and clockwork contraptions of all sorts, was nonetheless clean and polished and smelled of lemon oil.

We walked out into a small garden and down a winding path until I heard the sounds of clanking metal and the hiss of steam.

As we came around the end of a tall hedge, I saw the workshop. It was a building the size of a small warehouse, with windows all along the sides and skylights in the roof. The clamor of noise grew as we approached, then burst out upon us like a wave as Jarvis opened the door. The morning sunlight slanting in through the windows cut through clouds of steam and glinted off the polished brass and copper piled and stacked around the shop. A handful of boys, all older and bigger than me, were busy banging and clanging away at worktables, forges, bellows, boilers, presses, and cutters. The place smelled of sweat, hot metal, and steam. It was wonderful.

The manservant led me over to an older boy who looked to be around fourteen working with some copper pipe. “Corbin!” the manservant yelled above the racket. The boy looked up, then scowled when he saw me. He put down the pipe and tools, wiped his hands, and came over and frowned down at me. He had a face like a bulldog and flaming red hair.

Jarvis leaned over so Corbin could hear him better and said, “Here’s the new boy Professor’s been wanting. Try to keep him alive and out of trouble until lunch.”

Corbin nodded. The old manservant watched me as I stared around wide-eyed at all the wonderful machines. Suddenly he burst out laughing again, then turned and headed back toward the house.

Corbin crossed his arms and gave me an appraising, disgusted look and then yelled, “Name?”

“Donny,” I said through cupped hands.

He rolled his eyes, then waved me over to the worktable. A copper pipe and a flair tool lay on the table. “You know what this is?” he asked, pointing at the tool with his thumb. The incessant clamor and banging made it hard to concentrate. I nodded. “You know how to use it?” I nodded again. He stepped back and said, “Show me.”

I had been helping my father with his work since I could walk. We had repaired all sorts of plumbing and small steam engines and such, so I knew how to flare out the end of a copper pipe.

The worktable was so high I had to pull a wooden crate over to stand on. Once up to a more comfortable level, I grabbed the flaring tool and clamped the bar around the pipe, adjusted the yoke, and started turning the handle on the feed screw until the pipe had a nice smooth flare at the end. When I finished, I showed it to Corbin.

He gave a grudging nod, then pointed to a box of arm-length pipes on the floor. “Get started on these. Only one end for each. We’ll bend and cut them to length later.” He smacked me on the arm with the back of his hand and said, “Don’t mess this up.” Then without another word, he sauntered off to another part of the shop.

I had been around boys like Corbin most of my life. To him I was nothing. He would talk to me only if he had to, give me only the barest of instructions, hoping I would mess up, and if he felt he needed to smack me around, he would. So I started right to
work with no lollygagging or complaining. I did take a look over my shoulder whenever I got a chance, though. Even with all the noise and steam, the shop did not feel as oppressive as some of the big factories I had been in. The boys and men were not dancing or playing around, but neither did they look sad or overworked. Just guys doing a job.

About an hour later, Corbin came back to check my work. He picked up a few pipes and looked them over, then without a word, headed off toward the other end of the shop.

A moment later he was back and dropped an armload of pipe into the box and walked away. “Pleasant fellow,” I said, under the cover of sound, then began talking to myself. “Nice job, Donny. Here’s some more when you’re ready. I’ll smack you around later when I have the time.”

All the noise and chaos around me seemed to fade away as I started on the rest of the pipes and became engrossed in the task. Whenever I got the chance, I would sneak a glance at the other boys around the shop. Some were working on a big metal press forming sheets of metal. Others would take the metal pieces and polish them on another machine. Another group were bending pipes of all sizes. And in the center of the shop, a huge boiler roared and hissed steam.

Everyone was busy doing something; they weren’t rushing, but nobody ever just stood around. I was in my own little world of flaring tools and copper pipe when a steam whistle screamed loud enough to make me jump. The banging and clatter began to taper off as everyone stopped what they were doing and started heading for the door.

I saw Corbin heading my way, but I knew better than to stop working before he told me to. He bumped me with his shoulder hard enough to almost knock me down, then yelled over his shoulder, “Lunchtime…Dummy,” and laughed.

I sighed. I was sure he thought the change from “Donny” to “Dummy” was something new and creative, but I had been called the same and worse by bullies all my life. It still hurt, but not nearly as much as it used to.

We walked around back to a small pavilion beneath the shade of a giant oak where a rough plank table was piled high with various sandwiches and fruit. A bucket of cold water and a dipper stood at each end. Soon everyone was sitting or lying in the shade, eating and relaxing, talking quietly.

A tired-looking boy with straight dark hair and a splatter of freckles across his nose and cheeks came over to me. “You’re the new guy, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said around a mouthful of food, “I’m Donny.”

“Russell,” he said with a nod. “I guess you met Corbin, then?”

“Yeah.”

“He give you a name yet?”

At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I got it. “Dummy,” I said with an embarrassed smile.

“Aw, too bad,” he said, shaking his head. Then he batted his eyelashes and made his own sickly sweet smile and said, “I’m Bustle. Funny guy, that Corbin, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said with a snort. “He’s a regular card.”

Russell nodded in agreement, then gave me a warning look. “Hey, uh, don’t cross him, though, okay?”

I nodded and looked down at my sandwich, knowing exactly what he meant. “He looks like he could be mean.”

“Mean is not the word. Cruel bastard, more like. If the professor yells at him ’cause of you, then you’re shit. He put a kid in hospital last week. Broke his arm.”

My face must have shown my distress because Russell nodded and said, “Yeah….”

Russell chewed on a big bite of his sandwich, pushing it around in his mouth so he could talk. “Now, Algert,” he said, jerking his head toward the table where the others sat, “big guy with the bald head…”