Set in Detroit during the Great Depression (1930s) , Doerr tells the affecting story
of Tom, meant to die of a weak heart before he is 18, who is cossetted by his
mother, but shown a world of possibilities by the flame-haired Ruby.
'The Deep'
By Anthony Doerr
Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father
is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, under-insulated
boarding house populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim
possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colours of mice, tattered
mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange.
Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by
another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world
continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty
tobacco pouches, bladeless jack knives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable
of memory.
Tom is four when he starts fainting. He’ll be rounding a corner, breathing hard,
and the lights will go out. Mother will carry him indoors, set him on the armchair,
and send someone for the doctor.
Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right
side. Lifespan of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky
Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the
left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Lifespan
of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.
Mother trains her voice into a whisper. Here you go, there you are, sweet little
Tomcat. She moves Tom’s cot into an upstairs closet—no bright lights, no loud
noises. Mornings she serves him a glass of buttermilk, then points him to the
brooms or steel wool. Go slow, she’ll murmur. He scrubs the coal stove, sweeps
the marble stoop. Every so often he peers up from his work and watches the
face of the oldest boarder, Mr. Weems, as he troops downstairs, a fifty-year-old
man hooded against the cold, off to descend in an elevator a thousand feet
underground.
Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding,
cables rattling, a half-dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him,
each thinking their own thoughts, men’s thoughts, sinking down into that city
beneath the city where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and
glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of
the light.
Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.
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