The Lightning Keeper (18 page)

She could not leave his clothes behind. She gathered them into a bundle with one of the cleaner garments as a wrapping, and tucked the portrait under her arm. She walked the few paces to the top of the road and found that she was nearly at the door of the mill.

She knocked. The door opened suddenly and she did not know how she should address the severe, unwelcoming woman who stood before her.

“What is it?”

“I am Harriet Bigelow”

“Yes.”

“And I have come to see Toma, Mr. Peacock. Is he well?”

“He is better now. The foot will heal.”

“Mr. Washington told me that you have experience with this. Herbs or medicinal plants, I suppose?”

“Do you want to see him?” There was no welcome in Olivia's voice, but a veneer of deference. Harriet noted this and wondered at it, for she had always felt, on the basis of their occasional encounters, that this was a person she would like to know, even have a kind of friendship with.

“If he will see me,” she replied.

 

G
AZING ABOUT HER AT
the interior of the mill, with the shafts of afternoon light illuminating the disorder of scrap metal and rusted machinery, Harriet wondered how these people lived, and in particular how Toma, the patient, could be accommodated in such chaos. She would not imagine the relationship between Olivia and Horatio, though she knew well enough what was said about them at the works. She paid no mind to it. But here she was confronted with a domestic reality: this was the kitchen, and there the salvaged leather armchair where Horatio no doubt sat, and behind the calico curtain must be where they slept. A clearing of the throat from that corner told her that Toma was awake, and that their chamber, such as it might be, was now his sickroom. What did she know of relations between men and women? Nothing. But she was sorry that Toma was here and not in the spare room at Iron Hill, where she and Mrs. Evans could take proper care of him.

“Oh, how pretty,” she said to Olivia, then pointed to the rainbow of silk spools on the far wall when she saw that Olivia had no idea what she meant.

“I guess so. They've always been there; I don't look at them. He's over behind the curtain. I'll be in the laundry if he needs anything.”

Toma greeted her warmly, raising himself higher on his pillows and making room for her to sit on the bed, which she did, her face flushing, as there was no chair. He did certainly look the part of the patient, with his bandaged foot and the gauze wound round his forehead, even a seep of blood on the pillowcase.

“You have come to see me,” he said with evident pleasure.

“I have brought your clothes. And we owe you so much. I am very grateful.”

He took her hand. Though his touch was cool and brief, it reminded her of so many things. She blushed and took her hand back into her lap, thinking: What a prim gesture for a woman sitting on a man's bed here in the middle of nowhere. Why should I not hold his hand?

“And furnace number 3?” He was looking at her with an expression of what might be amusement.

“Furnace number 3 survives. Two days ago the power train failed: the vibrations knocked over a supporting post and some gearing was nearly ruined, so the whole day was a loss. But yesterday we made almost four tons of iron, all told, and cast twenty-three wheels. Horatio is pessimistic about the water, and of course about his machinery. He wants to reduce the rate of the bellows to avoid another mishap, and Mr. Brown will not hear of it. He says his iron will be soft or brittle—I can't remember which—with the most dreadful consequences. I'm sorry to say they had some very sharp words for each other.”

Toma looked at his foot, and her eyes followed his gaze. “Here I am talking about machinery and I haven't even asked you how you feel.”

“It is better today, but there may be pieces of the glass still in there, so we will see. Horatio thinks some bone has been damaged, perhaps a tendon. For now, I am of no use.” He smiled, and she saw the effort that was required.

“But shouldn't the doctor see you?”

“Olivia thinks there is no need. It is in God's hands, as my mother used to say.”

“Like the rain, I suppose. I don't see how we shall get on without rain, and unless your foot heals. I shall ask for both things in my prayers, as perhaps you do.”

“I do not pray. It was simply an expression that I use because I have heard it so often.”

“You do not pray?”

“I have lost the custom of prayer, though there was a time when I believed God heard my prayers and answered them. He delivered my enemy into my hands.”

“One must pray for mercy, I think.”

“I shall leave that to you. If there is a God, and if he listens to anyone, he will hear you.”

“He hears all prayers.” It was time to go now. She and her father would have the long, hot walk home from the works, and she would have to find a reason, a false reason, for the absence of the Packard. God would have to hear that too. She stood up.

“I have been meaning to ask you about this portrait that I always seem to end up carrying. Is it someone you know?”

He seemed reluctant to answer. “No. It belonged to a friend, a countryman of mine who was dying, and he urged me to keep it. Perhaps the painter was someone who was remembering the icons in his village church. Or perhaps it is the face of his mother, his sister, his…I do not know. It reminds me of my home. Thank you for taking such care.”

There was a truth buried somewhere in his words, but she did not know where it lay.

 

H
ORATIO
W
ASHINGTON WAS ON
his way home after stopping at McCreedy's Saloon, as was his habit on payday; his step was sure on the steep path, and the pitcher of beer had put him in a good mood. The front room of the saloon was a pleasantly lit, smoky, convivial place, and it suited him to make these visits. Was there a man in the works, except the abstainers, who did not stop off here after being paid? Was he not as much a man, and was this not a free country? His private view was that it was not, but all the more reason for him to stand at one end of the bar and drink his pitcher of beer with the chaser of rye offered by McCreedy. He would speak if spoken to, but more often he got a nod and a smile. That was enough for Horatio, who knew, if not his station, at least the limits of tolerance. But he also took satisfaction from the occasional cold stare of a stranger, some man unused to drinking with Negroes and resentful of his presence. There was never a confrontation because when inquiry was made about that nigger down the bar, the man was given no encouragement at all by McCreedy or his patrons, and Horatio didn't have to say a word.

The figure on the path took him by surprise; there were no casual visitors in this steep wood, and even Olivia's laundry had to be picked
up or dropped off at the general store. He had not remembered Harriet's intended visit because he had not believed it.

“Oh, Mr. Washington, I am so glad to meet you here. I have left my automobile just by your house, and I shall need a couple of men in the morning, as it is stuck to a tree. Would you help me with that? And not a word to my father?”

Horatio nodded and would have spoken, but she plunged on: “And please thank Mrs. Washington for me, as I'm sorry not to have said good-bye to her.” And then she was gone past him up the path with her rapid step, her bright eye, her flushed cheek.

He turned to watch her, weighing in his mind the phrase “Mrs. Washington,” which struck him with its sadness. Too late for that now. Was there ever a right time?

He thought again of his power train, jury-rigged through the woods from the wheel to number 3, and imagined revisions to the linkages to reduce the strain and accommodate the low water. In a couple of days he'd have to send someone out to tap the last holding pond up on the side of the mountain.

The sun was down below the line of the trees as he approached the mill, and there was Olivia, the lamp already lit, chopping vegetables with savage strokes of the knife he had made for her. She looked different somehow, but he could not put his finger on it. The severe expression perhaps, or was it just that she was older? It had been a long time since he had looked at her with that eye that could discriminate down to a sixty-fourth of an inch. Perhaps not since the day he had judged her old enough to give him what he needed.

What had he given her in return? He had given her a home, kept her out of trouble, educated her. It was the last that he took pride in, for he knew it was his own education, an act of will and dearly bought, that made him the equal of any man in Beecher's Bridge. You're nothing without that, he had said once, pointing to the book she had thrown down, and had slapped her face, not hard, when she persisted in using “ain't” even when she knew the right way to say it.

He had never told her that he loved her. He had never said that to her mother or to any woman; the words had no place in his careful vocabulary, for they did not signify. But looking at her now, with the suggestion of age in her unsmiling concentration on the task, he thought
that he could have said it, and it wouldn't have cost him so much. But it was too late now. The girl was gone, grown up into a woman he didn't quite recognize.

 

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG
time since Olivia had been to confession, so long that one priest had retired and another had taken his place. She wondered if there was anyone else she could talk to, as the priest would have to know about everything, and what she cared about was this one thing. She spat on the iron to test its temperature and glared at the red eye of the charcoal in the brazier. The perspiration beaded everywhere on her bare arms, prickled her scalp, turned the pale cloth wound around her hips almost transparent, and the blue flowers looked like tattoos on her thighs. It didn't seem right that the hotter it got the more clothes had to be washed and folks wanted them back sooner. She couldn't go on like this. There was only the priest. He would have to do.

When Horatio had run the pipe up the hill to tap into the top section of the old canal, he wasn't even thinking of her or her laundry. Whatever he said about it now didn't change that, but it did annoy her when he said she shouldn't always be asking him for things. She never asked him for anything because she knew better, and the one thing she had asked for—a real bedroom with walls and a ceiling and a window—well, sometimes he was as good as deaf. She wondered if the man in her bed now was God's way of showing Horatio he should have given her what she wanted. Maybe He had a sense of humor. But the priest probably didn't.

Originally the pipe had run right through her laundry and into Horatio's shop, where he had set up a hand-carved wooden wheel in one corner to run his grindstone or a lathe. At night he would sometimes sit in his chair with a pencil and the paper with a faint blue grid, drawing wheels with whorls and scallops like seashells, or sit at the bench with his carving tools translating from paper to wood. Those were the good evenings, when he did not drink, and he came to her afterward without bitterness. Those were the nights, she now realized, when she almost loved him.

She sighed and shook her head. Drops of her sweat fell on Mr. Breen's drawers and were cooked away with a swipe of the iron. A fire
in August. A fucking fire in fucking August: these words she said aloud, and the thrill of Horatio's imagined outrage produced a shiver down her spine.

Horatio, on his own initiative, had rerouted the pipe so that it swooped down into the middle of the laundry room at the far end of the mill, beyond his workshop and junk piles. A present, he said, with a smile that made his face almost unrecognizable. She had no idea of what he meant until he showed her how the cock turned and the jet of water, fine and fierce, shattered and bent on the new-carved vanes of wood, and the axle of the wheel drove those gears salvaged from someplace up on the mountain and the paddles churned the water in the vat to a soapy froth.

Never have to touch that soap again, he said, holding one of her reddened hands in his own, a moment of affection that surprised them both.

The wheel had seemed a miracle, and at a certain hour in the late morning, on a clear day, the angle of the sun through the windows in the roof produced a rainbow where the water jet found the knife-edge of the vanes and was forced back upon itself in two curves like a swan's neck.

But it was a fragile miracle. Leaves or debris got caught on the grating of the intake pipe and she would have to climb all the way up there to clear it, or ask Horatio if he was going that way; sometimes a possum or raccoon drowned in the backwater and rotted away until her laundry stank of sweet death, and she worried that customers might complain of the odd smell of their pillowcases. Horatio had explained to her in a stern voice the danger of taxing the machine with heavy loads and stripping those gears.

She tried to show him in small ways that she was grateful, knowing that being told so would make him uneasy. Then one night—how was she to know he had been drinking all that time?—she emerged from her laundry exhausted and stumbled over a piece of scrap left lying in her path. Maybe her voice sounded angry. She was wondering if she had broken her toe.

The odd thing about Horatio was that it was hard to tell what effect the drink would have on him. Sometimes he did not drink at all, and sometimes he drank and seemed not much changed. She could see
no pattern in it. He talked no more than usual, slurred no words if he asked about what she had read or what she needed carried down from the town. The liquor seemed to make him no happier, she thought, but perhaps more attentive to her in a way that was not unpleasant. And there were the other times too, and one thing the drink never did was take away his desire for her. And even if he could not finish—especially if he could not finish, for that must be her fault, her lack of desire for him—he knew how to hurt her, and took his satisfaction from that.