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snarls.
    Treefrog wraps the extra T-shirt around his face to protect himself from the blizzard. He moves through the park, along the bend of the highway where the cars are few and slow, and up the tunnel embankment. He dodges a few snowballs from teenagers, counting his steps as he trudges through the six-inch snow. In the playground near 97th Street he spreads a blue plastic bag over a picnic table that is chained to the chicken-wire fence and sits down, far away from the swings.
    A few children move delightedly through the snow. He doesn’t go nearer for fear of frightening them. Or their mothers. If they looked at him closely they might recognize him, although his hair used to be short, cropped tight to his head, and he didn’t have the beard.
    From the table he can look down onto the playground: two fiberglass dinosaurs for the children to sit on, a curved silver slide, two smaller slides, some monkey bars, a swinging bridge, a suspended tire, and six swings in a perfect row, three for small kids, three for older ones.
    The bitter cold chews at his body, and the wind freezes mucus to his beard.
    But when he takes off his sunglasses and puts them on his head, he sees his daughter. It is summer, years ago, and she is eleven years old, wearing an orange dress, beads in her hair, and the trees are green, the light is yellow, the playground is humming, and the earth is alive—those were the good times—and she is swinging her way merrily through the air, arms outstretched, feet tucked under the swing, white sneakers, blue socks, her hem to her knees. He stands behind her and catches the swing, pushes her higher, and then his hands move slightly and he feels the familiar huge hollowness in his body and he pulls away, wincing at the vision.
    A pang of hunger whistles through his stomach and rests in his liver. He needs to find some cans or bottles to redeem. Treefrog stands and billows air into the empty blue plastic bag; the cans will be heavy today with all the melted snow inside them. He should eat a sandwich, maybe. Or buy some chicken in the Chinese restaurant on Broadway. Perhaps another bottle of gin if he can afford it. He has heard that up north, in Maine, the places where you cash cans are called Redemption Centers.
    At the edge of the playground, Treefrog waves through the sheets of snow to his daughter, puts his glasses back down to his nose, wipes a frosting of ice from his beard, and moves on, shivering, up 97th Street toward Broadway, where he becomes a solitary man dipping into the garbage cans of Manhattan.

chapter 4
    1916–32
    Each weekday morning, when Nathan Walker descends the tunnel under the East River to continue the job of digging, he spends a moment alone and says a few words to the man coffined in the soil above him. The other sandhogs leave him be. Walker slaps his shovel against the steel ceiling, and it rings out loud and metallic.
    â€œHey, Con,” he says. “Hey, bud.”
    He moves on to the end of the tunnel, mud splashing up to the back of his torn overalls. At the Greathead Shield the digging has just begun. Vannucci is already hard at work with two new sandhogs. Sean Power can no longer dig, his body mangled by the accident. Walker steps through the door in the shield and tips his hat to the new men. They nod back. In just two weeks they have already formed the necessary bonds of muckers. Silently, Walker begins his day’s digging, but after a while he begins to feel the rhythm seep into him and he lets his tunnel song escape his lips: Lord, I ain’t seen a sunset since I come on down; no, I ain’t seen nothing like a sunset since I come on down.
    *   *   *
    Eleanor O’Leary is born at home nineteen days after the blowout, on Maura’s thirty-fourth birthday. Carmela Vannucci is the midwife. She brings the baby out with gentle ease and whispers prayers in Italian. There is an uproar of red hair on the baby’s head.
    Maura