The Lightning Keeper (15 page)

By making inquiries among the older workmen, he learned the identity of the furnace and the circumstances of its demise. Business had been down in the recession of '74, and furnace number 3, already some fifty years old, needed to be relined and fitted with a new wheel. Since the new furnace could meet the demand for iron in those hard times, number 3 was abandoned. Could it be used? he asked Horatio. Nothing much wrong with it, was the reply, but clearing the race and building a new wheel and power train was a labor of months. Horatio looked at him impassively: he was used to Toma asking questions whose point escaped him. And suppose the power train from your wheel could be extended to number 3: would it drive the bellows? Horatio was silent for a moment. It might do, he said at last, but you'd be pushing it, losing power all the way with the belts or gearing, whatever way you did it. Think about it, Mr. Washington, if you would be kind enough, and we will talk about this matter again.

Toma collected his information in small pieces and made his calcu
lations of what would be needed to put number 3 back into production. The foundation of the casting shed was still intact, and only a roof of light construction would be needed there: the Stephenson job would be finished, one way or another, long before the true cold set in. An old roadway between the old furnace and the works would have to be cleared, and the trestle from the top of the charging wall rebuilt so that the ore, limestone, and charcoal could be fed into the top of the stack. Above the charging wall the old spur from the railway line seemed serviceable: the rusted iron rails ran straight and true through the brush on a shaped bed of the same slag he had found in the heap below.

The greatest challenge would be to remove the salamander of iron and slag that had hardened within the furnace the day it had shut down. Several tons of material must be removed by drilling and fracturing, or the whole hearth and base of the furnace would have to be dismantled and rebuilt, a job that would require weeks to accomplish.

Once he had Harriet's approval, Toma attacked the salamander. While his recruits cleared access to the furnace and began construction on the trestle, he worked with a twelve-pound sledge and the long drills from morning to evening for two days, every so often changing places with the boy who held the drill and turned it a few degrees on each stroke. For the first two days the job seemed an impossibility, and a few chunks of the salamander were all he had to show for such backbreaking work. The men on the trestle and at the edge of the clearing would pause from time to time to marvel at the fury of those blows: work like that could kill a man, no matter how young or how strong.

But time and the slow drip of water from the open top of the furnace had done their work on the salamander too, and at noon on the third day Toma's drill found a deep flaw. The ring of the drill was muted, and with two more strokes the mass inside the furnace cracked roughly in half and settled several inches, exposing further veins and avenues of attack. By four o'clock the furnace was entirely cleared of the debris, and Mr. Brown took a candle inside through the casting arch and pronounced the firebrick sound enough; only a patch of a half dozen bricks would be necessary before firing the furnace. Horatio Washington offered Toma his congratulations and invited him to come home to the silk mill for dinner and some whiskey. But Toma declined,
saying his arms were too tired to lift a fork or a glass. He thanked Horatio and hoped he might accept on another occasion, perhaps when the first iron flowed in a red river from number 3 to the molds in the casting shed. He made his way to the drummers' hotel, where he slept for sixteen hours.

 

T
HE ARRIVAL OF
Amos Bigelow's niece, Lucy, was an inconvenient joy to her cousin. Lucy's mother, the ironmaster's only sibling, had married well—Mr. Morris owned a complex of spinning mills in Utica—and so had escaped the pall that settled on Beecher's Bridge and her family when the old ironmaster made his spectacular exit. Lucy was a few months older than Harriet and had been the dearest friend of her otherwise lonely childhood. They had not seen each other for two years.

The Morrises were very rich, at least in Harriet's perception, and although Uncle Henry had not managed to return to Beecher's Bridge since the day of his wedding, Aunt Rebecca had been a regular visitor, and sent Harriet extravagant presents at Christmas and on her birthday, shawls and fine gloves that made her other clothes seem dingy. Two years ago, on her eighteenth birthday, Harriet had received an elaborately articulated diamond-and-platinum pendant on a velvet choker that had belonged to her grandmother. It lay in a leather case in her top drawer, and whenever Harriet opened the box she thought of her mother, who would have worn the necklace with such delight.

Harriet knew nothing of society beyond Beecher's Bridge, though the trip to Italy would have been a starting point or cornerstone to a different life, had her mother not died, had the affairs of the ironworks flourished in the way the Morris mills had. If…If…Harriet had developed an aversion to this word that had such power over her life.

Lucy, on the other hand, knew all about society, having made her debut in Utica and attended the cotillions in New York City. Her letter, which scarcely left time to reply, was an announcement of her intention to visit Beecher's Bridge on her way up to Lenox, where she would be staying for a week at a very grand house party, to be joined there over the weekend by her fiancé. In the meantime, the heat of
Manhattan was unbearable to the point where she could not make any decisions about her wedding, or the dress, or the silver pattern, and so she would leave all that in Mama's hands and escape to her dear cousin in the hills of northwest Connecticut.

Such prattle, thought Harriet, with affection for the girl she used to know. She was a little envious of the ease of her cousin's existence: she wished she could abandon the decisions in her own life so carelessly to another, if only for a while. But the letter was stark proof of how their lives had diverged, and the advantages did not all reside on Lucy's side of the ledger. Could she imagine herself spending a week in Lenox, making the slow circuits of the garden with the other young women and wearing her jewel to dinner for the pleasure of her fiancé? Such refined and exquisite boredom. She tried hard to picture the face of the fiancé. Well, Lucy would tell her all about that, she was quite sure.

It seemed impossible that she and Lucy had, such a short while ago, seemed like sisters, or twins, or even the same being in two bodies. The identity of impulse and experience had been the bond willed by both: if Lucy had read
Little Women
, then Harriet must too. Each copied the other's tricks of fastening or braiding the hair, and for a few months they attempted, by letter, to coordinate their souls in the matter of addressing the Almighty.

The mention of the great house in Lenox set Harriet to worrying what Lucy would find to do in Beecher's Bridge and what she would think of such plain accommodations: no tennis court, no crème brûlée, no servants other than Mrs. Evans and the girl who came in to clean twice a week.

She would clear out the top three drawers and leave this sunny, pleasant room to Lucy, taking a single bed in the guest room. It was only three days: Mrs. Evans's cooking couldn't do much harm in three days. She would have to make time for the Chautauqua Circle, as a diversion for Lucy, and as for the rest of the day, when she must be at the works, well, there were a great many books in the library.

When she had written her reply, Harriet moved her clothes to the guest room and cut some Queen Anne's lace and larkspur for the bull's-eye glass pitcher on the table in the hall. Tonight she would find time to straighten up the rest of the house.

On the basis of Lucy's letter, and because she had not seen her for two years, Harriet had imagined a trajectory for Lucy's personality and appearance that fell quite wide of the mark. There was no awkwardness between them at all, but a great deal of talking, often at the same time as they struggled to find the rhythm of their old exchange. Lucy did not dominate the conversation with details of her own doings or of New York society, but seemed most interested in what had happened in Beecher's Bridge since her last visit. The ironmaster was very pleased to see his niece again, now grown into such a handsome young woman—beautiful, Harriet would have said, in all sincerity—and if Lucy did provide details on her adventures in New York with her mother, it was at Mr. Bigelow's suggestion, his reiterated suggestion, because he wanted to hear every word. Yes, she was beautiful, and Harriet was relieved to find that she did not in the least resent it.

The invitation to dine at Senator Truscott's came as a gift out of the blue to Harriet, for Thursday was an impossibly busy day, and dinner at home would have been anybody's guess. The Chautauqua Circle had gone well enough: Harriet arrived just in time from the ironworks, braking the Packard to a halt and plowing furrows in the pebbles of the Hatchers' drive. Lucy listened to the discussion of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
with an attentive, fixed expression. Afterward, Harriet drove Lucy home and returned to the works to learn that Toma and his crew had cleared the salamander from furnace number 3.

They've done it, was what she heard, and knew exactly what was meant. She stepped out onto the newly cleared road to intercept Toma and was taken aback by his appearance: shirtless, sweating, blackened by soot, flecked with the shrapnel of iron and shards of exploded slag. Some of those glassy fragments had opened wounds so that the sweat running down his chest was tinged with pink, and he carried one shoulder higher than the other.

“Thank you, Toma, thank you,” she said as he passed. He smiled at her but did not speak, seemed intent on the single task of walking. “Will you be all right?” She wondered what had become of his shirt, did not like to think of him walking through the works and on to the drummers' hotel as a sort of spectacle. He would need a shirt. He needed someone with water and a cloth and deft fingers to pull those
slivers, for the slag would splinter and the wounds might fester. She walked a few paces beside him, her handkerchief useless in her hand, and knew she could do nothing. “Thank you, Toma. Sleep well.”

There would be time for a bath if she hurried her father along, and if Mrs. Evans had remembered to make a small fire in the stove to heat those pipes. She thought with a sinking heart of Lucy's new perspective on the bathroom, with that green-and-brown oilcloth on the floor—a desperate attempt at a floral pattern—and those crude pipes jutting through the wainscot below her mother's wallpaper. Lucy had been to Newport, where there were three gleaming taps for each bath: one for hot water, one for cold, and one for water drawn up from the sea.

Her bath was cold, as Lucy's had been, and they laughed about it. More time to dress, said Lucy as she helped Harriet lace her stays.

“Will you wear this?” she asked, pointing to the jeweler's box she had found in the top drawer. “Tonight sounds like a special occasion, and I don't think anyone would be surprised if you
did
wear it. How old do you think he is?” Harriet did not know, had not yet entered into the finer calculations of a relationship that was neither definite nor wholly desired. “If he should by any chance propose to you this evening, you must look your best.”

Harriet's best turned out to be more Lucy's idea than her own, and Lucy's clothes too, the black velvet discreetly pruned here and there, and noticeably short to the wearer's eye. Don't worry about it, was her cousin's advice, he won't notice anything but this. She took the pendant from its case, and Harriet saw that the velvets of ribbon and dress were perfectly matched.

Senator Truscott's frank admiration of her appearance, expressed to her father and then to Lucy, did nothing to improve Harriet's mood. What is wrong with me? she wondered. They were the only guests; there was no crowd of constituents or important persons to distract Truscott's attention, no other agenda than the celebration of this moment that had such an odd feel to it, an expectant awkwardness in which her father and Lucy seemed to know their roles. Standing in the library with her glass of iced tea, Harriet felt a prickling in her neck where Lucy had drawn up the hair so the choker and its brilliant pendant might show to better advantage. Had Lucy put her finger on it?
Was this the night? Lucy had experience in such matters, whereas she knew nothing at all.

When they sat down to dinner, Harriet was surprised to find her card at the end of the table rather than the side, so that she was facing her host down that long display of candles and old silver as if she were already the lady of the house. Her sense of unease was raised another notch and she distracted herself by admiring Lucy's hands and the perfection of that ring in the candlelight. Truscott deferred to her father when it came time to say a grace over the chilled Sénégalèse, and after taking a moment to compose his thoughts, the ironmaster asked for blessings on this house and on the whole town, and on all the inhabitants thereof, concluding with a plea that the Lord should see fit to make rain.

As the fish course was being served, Truscott gave an instruction to the maid, who reappeared with a bottle of champagne wrapped in linen. Harriet was surprised, but she allowed her flute to be filled. Her father declined, saying that water was good enough for him. Lucy was delighted by the champagne, and by Truscott's courtliness. Her merry eyes flashed from one end of the table to the other, as if willing this connection. Truscott tasted his champagne and nodded to Lucy. To Harriet he made his apology.

“I thought we might make an exception to the rule on this special occasion.”

He raised his glass to her and offered a toast to the continued good fortune of the ironworks and to the wise management of that operation. He assured his guests that the financial resources of the Iron Bank along with whatever political influence he might possess were all at the disposal of the Bigelow enterprise. It was a difficult undertaking; but risks and Herculean labor were necessary to any ambition, and he was sure they would prevail. He paused and drank.