The Lightning Keeper (14 page)

Or two ghosts? In some ways Harriet was an orphan in this world, her father hardly more alive than her mother, owing to his deafness, and certainly no easier to argue with or cajole. She would always be a child to him, even if they lived together another thirty years; time had stopped for him at the moment of his wife's death.

Some women would have been more accepting of such a situation, or would have thrown off the shackles and made a brutal divide between the past and some new life. Harriet did neither: she had too great a sense of obligation to her father, too strong a yearning toward that ruined happiness, to make any such break. And yet she was a
woman, not a child, and she had an aptitude for the workings of the world, as she had discovered to her surprise in that elbow of the ironmaster's office.

As a result of negotiation with the true ghost of her mother and the living ghost of her father, Harriet had developed a system of coping with the practicalities of life. There were things that had to be done, feelings she could not deny, and to look too closely into motive, or to measure the actions against the ideal, could only lead to confusion and perhaps to a kind of paralysis.

As soon as her father had signed Mr. Stephenson's document, she placed it in the waiting envelope, and when the discussion of furnace number 3 had run its course, she made her excuses and put on her hat and gloves, leaving the men to their lunch. From the decrepit saloon that Martin McCreedy had kept for twenty-five years just across Mill Street from the entrance to the works, she had ordered hot sandwiches and a bucket of sarsparilla, but she knew, or guessed, that the sweating pail by her father's desk contained something else entirely.

Fowler Truscott, freshly shaved and smelling of the best that the barbershop had to offer, ushered her into his office in the cool stone recesses of the Iron Bank, where the necessary papers were already laid out in neat order on his desk. The room had an unused, ceremonial aspect, for with the exception of the Bigelow Company affairs, Senator Truscott's time was devoted to his political career, and the day-to-day operations were handled by the able and deferential vice president, Mr. Smyth. Harriet nodded to Mr. Smyth on her way, conquering her aversion. He knew everything there was to know—nearly everything—about the Bigelow Iron Company, and she read a menace in his pale accountant's eye that was ineffectually cloaked in servility.

“This matter is between us. That is my condition.”

“Condition? Well, this is a serious sum of money.”

“I should not have put it that way. What I mean is that I would like this transaction to be confidential. I place my trust in you.”

“Of course you do, my dear Miss Bigelow, dear Harriet, and that is why I am here. And when the affairs of the Senate require me to be in Washington, Mr. Smyth will—”

“It would relieve my mind greatly to deal only with you, as you have responded to my trust. I do not think that Mr. Smyth can have
the same attitude or delicacy, which is what prompted me to speak rashly of a condition. Of course it is you who are acting so generously toward my father, and it is your right, not mine, to speak of conditions.”

“Mr. Smyth has many other matters to attend to,” said Fowler Truscott, with a broad smile that embraced every nuance of this conversation. “This matter, unusual as it may be, will be our concern alone, our secret, though surely an honorable one.”

This honorable secret, touched on in the contract and explicated more fully in the papers on Truscott's desk, might be summed up as Stephenson's prepaid insurance policy against the failure or inability of the Bigelow Iron Company to deliver all the wheels on the agreed date. Stephenson, who faced penalties and considerable inconvenience should he fail to complete the cars on time, had required an escrow deposit of ten thousand dollars, which, steeply prorated for the number of wheels in default, would be available to compensate him for breach of the contract. This sum of money must come from some other source than the ready cash reserves of the Bigelow Iron Company, and Fowler Truscott seemed ready, even eager, to put the bank's money at risk.

“Now then, my dear, to business.” Senator Truscott drew a visitor's chair to sit by Harriet's side, an informality that spared them having to confront one another across that expanse of red leather, tooled and gilded around the border. He was a large man, particularly so when seated, and he towered above her as he leaned close to place the papers where she could read and then sign them.

“I must ask, first, if you have considered all the terms laid out by Mr. Stephenson. These documents are very thorough indeed, and quite out of the ordinary for business in Beecher's Bridge. Your father has read them all?”

“Yes, of course. We have spent a great deal of time going over all this, and Mr. Stephenson, on his part, has gone to some lengths in order to direct this business to the Bigelow Iron Company. He has shown great confidence in us.”

“And you can do it? This is a great number of wheels.” He laid his hand on hers to emphasize the gravity of the negotiation.

She turned to look up into his face, hanging there like an expectant moon.

“We can do it, Senator Truscott, and we will do it.” The grip on her hand tightened in reassurance, and Senator Truscott leaned closer, as if this important moment might be sealed by something more than a handshake. “And as you are aware, we have taken the precaution of reopening the old furnace, number 3, which will yield more than the required additional capacity. The answer was right there under our noses, but it was Toma—”

“Who?”

“Thomas Peacock, the young man who drove me to your house.”

“Indeed. Your chauffeur?” The features of Truscott's face registered both tolerance and amusement.

“Yes, he was, for a period, our driver, but he is in fact Mr. Stephenson's trusted employee, and he has done most of the work, the physical labor of freeing number 3 from the forest and from the bloom of old iron that had blocked it for all these years.”

“A foreign fellow, as I remember.” Truscott sat back in his chair.

“Yes, foreign. We met under the most unlikely circumstances years ago in Italy, and then again in New York, quite recently.”

“I would not have guessed Italian, such a tall, well-set young man, quite fierce in his appearance.”

“A Montenegrin,” said Harriet, rolling the word in her mouth the way Toma had taught her to do so long ago. “He is very ambitious, and very scholarly too.”

“The point, I take it, is that he has the quick perception and the broad back that are the necessary foundations of so many great American enterprises, or, in this case, the rebirth of an old and honorable one.” Senator Truscott perceived the raw material of a speech here, or at least a new ingredient to flavor his usual offering. He would mull it over this afternoon on the train ride to New Haven, where he was to meet with the Elk's Club and the Manufacturer's Association before dining with his old friend and classmate, the president of Yale. The creak of her chair brought him back to the business at hand.

“This must all be enormously gratifying to your father, to whom you will please remember me.”

“I will.”

“And you have discussed all of this with him?”

“Of course,” said Harriet, coloring slightly. “He would have come himself but for all the pressing arrangements at the works.”

“I cannot regret his absence. Here then,” and he put a document in front of her, which she signed as Harriet Bigelow, Vice President of the Bigelow Iron Company.

“It is our secret,” he said, and in spite of her reservations, she allowed him to kiss her.

 

W
HEN HE HAD FIRST
seen furnace number 3 Toma had not recognized it for what it was. It had been his habit, during those weeks when he was studying the ironworks by day and reading his texts on metallurgy and hydromechanics far into the night, to clear his head by walking the old canal when the noon whistle sounded. It was a vigorous walk, for there was no clear path; the waterway, now dry, was choked with the mint green of new brambles and saplings of maple and beech as big around as his forearm. On one occasion, his mind entranced by the complexities of imaginary gearings and waterwheels, he reached the very end of the canal, where the great stones were lapped by the spring runoff of the river, and he saw a face like a ghost staring at him from the window of the last building, where the canal had become a midden of old bottles and bobbins of thread. This was the silk mill, and the face in the window, he now knew, was Olivia's.

It was a sedentary life he had led in this place, compared to the brutalities of tunnel work or shop labor in New York. His job consisted of reading books and inspecting things, a daily ebb and flow of the theoretical and the practical. He was always ready to lend a hand, whether in the Bigelows' garden or when castings or pieces of equipment had to be moved at the works, but though his willing strength may have impressed the stokers and teamsters, he felt himself going slack from inactivity. Hence the regimen of this energetic walk, and hence, when the limb of a tree presented itself at a convenient height, the exercise of pulling himself up so that his chin touched the bark. Thirty, fifty, even a hundred times during the course of his ramble. There was no shortage of trees here, and the pleasure of physical exhaustion was an antidote to the circularities of thought that infected his mind.

It was at the end of one such walk that Toma stopped by a maple at the top of the canal, and he was determined to push himself beyond the limit he had achieved previously. On the thirty-fourth instance, which would bring his total to one hundred and fourteen, Toma hung for a long moment with his chin on the branch, wondering if he could pull himself up once more. His eyes had been focused only on the branch, willing it toward him, but now through a gap in the leaves directly ahead he saw the massive stones and tapering profile, a tower of some description that reminded him in that instant of the ruin at the edge of the Sand
ak where he and Harwell, the English, as he had called him, had taken refuge from the pursuing hussars. He let himself down from the branch; the strength was gone from his arms, his mind was full of wonder.

When he stood at the foot of this tower it was still difficult to make out exactly what it was. He guessed it to be about the height of the canal's retaining walls, but sumac saplings had rooted so freely in the crevices of rock that he could not get a good view of the top. When he worked his way to the downhill side and saw the casting arch he knew it for a furnace, an older, dwarfed version of the main furnace in the works just a few hundred feet off through the thick undergrowth. He could hear the voices of the workers against the clang of the trip-hammer and the deep rhythm of the compressors.

He made a circuit of the furnace, saw that the rough fieldstone was held in place by rusted iron plates and tie-rods from corner to corner. Stepping back to get a fuller view of the construction, he staggered and lost his footing, falling backward into the old race, now a choked ditch, and was saved from a serious injury by catching a sapling in his left hand. A few yards farther into the brush he found the remains of the old waterwheel collapsed into planks and struts, and the ruin of the bellows, where the shreds of blackened leather clung to the frame, nailed there like the rotting pelts of so many small animals. There were other foundations here as well, whose timbers and boards, he guessed, had been scavenged for use in the newer outbuildings of the forge. Under a thick matting of bindweed, just beginning to bloom, he found the slag heaps, one comprising some broken pigs of cast iron and forge scrap, the other, much larger, a muted rainbow of glasslike lumps and shards, the most arresting of which were a green the color of sea foam,
or cobalt shot with marblings of pure white. In such beauty were the impurities of silica, phosphorus, and sulphur drawn from the ore by the fire and the limestone.

He made his way back to the works a little dazed by what he had found, by those relics that reminded him of the primitive furnaces and forges of his own land, where iron had been extracted and shaped, first into spear points and swords, later into crude firearms, to do battle against the advancing might of the Ottoman Empire. But he did notice one other curiosity on this day of discovery: at the top of the failed canal, a stone's throw away from the works, a pool of water had collected behind a plug of stones, trash, and brush. Knowing the sorry history of the canal, he was puzzled by this little body of water that seemed permanent enough to have its own modest growth of weeds. Just above the water level on the wall opposite, he noted the dark line of what looked like tar. He gave it no more thought. The fate of the old furnace seemed to him a more compelling mystery.

On a Sunday, Toma borrowed an axe from the tool shed at the works and, laboring alone, to no clear purpose, he cleared the ruin from the clutch of the forest. When he was finished, it stood in the sunlight of the clearing like a bizarre planter, for the sumac saplings still flourished in its cracks and made a wreath of green at its brow.