The Lightning Keeper (20 page)

He remembered the day the dynamo had died, or at least been buried, and it was he who had called the cascade of sparks to Mr. Burden's attention. “Kill it,” he said. “Commutators or brushes are fucked, maybe both. Nothing but trouble it's been, long as I can remember, and who knows if it's worth fixing. Put it somewhere for a rainy day, and tell the boys they'll have to get on by hand.” Burden laughed. “You know, son, that thing's older than you by a long shot. Don't owe us a thing. I'll talk to the old man about it.”

Mr. Stephenson was in no hurry to throw anything out, so the old Edison machine gathered dust in the storeroom and passed from the memory of Mr. Burden and his crew, who had more than enough to do without tending to such antiquities. The rainy day never came.

It sat now on Horatio's bench, a hundredweight and more of iron sculpture with its casing removed, its shadow ballooning on the wall in the unsteady light. And it was, as far as Toma could determine, comfortable in its retirement and deaf to his call.

He had trued the commutators and buffed them with a fine abrasive to remove the grooves worn by the sparking brushes. Copper on copper: it was indeed an old machine. Then he trimmed the ragged ends of the brushes to the curve of the commutator rings and set the springs so that there was the gentlest contact. Still plenty of copper left to work with, and he would need it all, for even if he were successful—especially if he were successful—the dynamo would be running sixteen or eighteen hours a day, sparking all the while, each tiny arc fusing the tip of the brush to the copper of the whirling commutator, throwing
off an infinitesimal dust of copper that would wear like water on stone until the rings must be polished again, the brushes trimmed and reset. And still the current would not flow.

The machine was an old one, running on direct current, and quaintly shaped, with the identification EDISON ELECTRIC CO. in heavy cast lettering along the base. But it was not so old as to have been created in ignorance of the advantages, including beautiful simplicity, of alternating current in all its applications. Early in his career, when he was yet a student, Tesla had devised an experiment to demonstrate the elegance and feasibility of alternating current, and by inference its superiority to direct current. By means of that alternating current the poles of electromagnets set on the circumference of an iron plate were excited in sequence, and on the plate an iron egg responded to this revolving polarity by performing its own revolutions, faster and faster, obedient to the flickering currents and to Tesla's will, until at last it stood upon its end, offering that perfection of form, motion and stasis, in the same instant.

Toma had replayed this scene in his mind often, sometimes arraying himself in the colors of Tesla's genius, sometimes delving into the dismay of the professor or the amazement of Tesla's fellows. But the interesting point now was that the dynamo Tesla used to produce his magic show ran without the nuisance of sparking. Every dynamo under the sun produced alternating current as the wires on the drum revolved through the magnetic field—north, south, north…this was in the nature of things. The troublesome brushes and commutator converted the current, forcing it to flow all in one direction—direct current—because that was a concept more easily grasped by lesser minds. Tesla had dismissed all that—thrown away the brushes and the commutator and shown the back of his hand to lesser minds.

And yet here was this machine in front of him, a monument to direct current and the weight of custom, and if Thomas Edison could not be called a lesser mind, he could be called worse things. For Edison, who by exercise of a mere fraction of his intellect must have seen the advantages of alternating current, had not only ignored the genius of Tesla but spent millions contesting the issue with Tesla's employer, Westinghouse, staking his fortune and reputation on the effort to shore up the direct-current technology, whose days were numbered.
And why would he do this? Because of the even greater number of millions already sunk in the enterprise, in those cable conduits that ran under the streets of New York; in the machinery itself, layer upon layer of it, an entire system, a kind of theology written in steel and copper, and all dedicated to a single false assumption. The theology of a failed god. Edison must have seen the widening gap between the old technology and the new; but because he was shackled to his own success he could not jump, or chose not to.

Another element to Toma's discontent was this: he was, as Horatio had so pointedly observed, an outsider and almost an outcast here for all the talk about opportunity and however high the welcoming statue in the harbor of New York held her torch. Was not Tesla's otherness held against him? Did it not explain how slowly and grudgingly capital had flowed in the direction of his ideas? And, he thought, flipping the dead switch in merciless repetition, how much greater the resistance to feeling? His dream of Harriet coming to him over the water was no more than a wish, a very pretty wish with the elements of fable. And here was he, Tesla's sorry kinsman, mired in the real world.

He had fallen asleep, and Olivia touched his arm.

“I brought you some coffee, seeing how you fixing to sit up all night.”

“I hope not, but thank you.”

“You been sitting here a long time, not a sound, not a shadow on the roof, and I'm thinking: the candles burn all the way down, who knows what he's got lying on that bench?”

“I promise I shall not burn you up in your sleep.”

“I wasn't asleep.” She jerked her head to the side, in the direction of the erratic stertor behind the curtain. “Horatio be sleeping hard enough for both of us. I think you wore him out.”

She stood in her nightclothes. A new moth crashed against the screen and he turned the talk to Horatio's extraordinary efforts with the wheel and the jet and a new arrangement of belting to drive the dynamo. Olivia nodded her head. She might or might not have been listening to his every word.

“What I want to know is when do I get my laundry back. Mrs. Bryce's boy is due to drop off her things tomorrow, and I heard her family has been visiting with her.”

“Not soon. I cannot tell you a lie. Not soon unless I fail.”

She looked down at him, and he up at her, measuring each other. He had no authority other than Horatio's to do what he was doing, and Horatio was fast asleep.

“Drink your coffee,” she said, laying her hand on his arm. “And explain why what you do is more important.”

“Well.” He drank, buying himself time, and as he set the mug down, a thought about the dead machine tickled the edge of his mind and vanished. “This machine, this dynamo, will make electricity, and if I do my work as well as Horatio has done his, I can make the electricity generate a draft for furnace number 3, and Mr. Bigelow's contract for the wheels may be fulfilled. If that does not happen, perhaps Horatio will have no job. So you see, we want the same things, you and I.”

She listened carefully to this explanation, making no superfluous motions of agreement, and allowed his conclusion to hang in a moment of silence.

“Except that your machine ain't working.”

“Yes, but I have not lost hope.”

“And that thing with the wires on it? The whatchum. Don't that make the electric?”

Toma laughed. The battery, which was necessary to the operation of the Bigelow Packard, had also been appropriated—like Olivia's wheel—but under a subterfuge, and thanks to Horatio's sly disconnection of the positive lead.

“Yes, it does, but not enough for this purpose. For now it helps me investigate the problem, the sickness of the dynamo. Afterward it will supply the little portion of electricity to excite the workings of the dynamo, like the stone that starts an avalanche, or a lucifer to light a fire.”

“Can you show me the electric?”

“You can't see it; you can only see what it does. Here, watch the dial of the meter.” He took the leads of the battery, with which he had been trying to make a circuit through the various parts of the dynamo, and touched them to either end of a heavy paper resistor. The needle on the meter jumped almost to the end of its scale.

“Can I feel it?” she asked, her voice slow with wonder.

“No, wait.” He made a quick twist of two wires to incorporate the resistor and cushion the current to her. He offered the innocent tips of
the wires. “One finger on each. You will feel a jolt, perhaps like touching the stove.”

“Only a fool does that on purpose.”

He smiled at her. “You are afraid of finding out?”

“I ain't afraid to find out.” She touched the wires without hesitation and took the current, which wrung from her a long breath like a sigh or a groan. She looked at him not with reproach but with calculation, rubbing her tingling fingertips against her thumbs.

He dropped his eyes from her gaze and saw the distinct outlines of her risen nipples beneath the thin stuff of her nightgown. He cleared his throat and made as if he would stand. She put her hands on his shoulders.

“What about you? Are you afraid to find out?” Before he could answer she kissed him. It was an awkward gesture, as she had so little experience of seduction or tenderness. She watched his face for a moment before she turned away and disappeared through the curtain.

He sat back in his chair, trying to direct his thoughts to the unfinished business on the bench. He reached absently for his mug. The scent of the coffee, which had been reheated over a candle from this morning's brewing, put him in mind of an odor he could not place until this moment: the odor, very faint, of burnt insulation. That was it: the sparking of the dynamo had been so extreme, the rogue currents so out of phase and so violent, that the windings on the armature must have fused and shorted out.

It took him only a few moments to find the spot where the damage had occurred. By careful manipulation of the copper he restored the wires there to their original dimension and uniformity, and with a few careful twists of silk from the far wall he was able to reinsulate the wires. He thought of the same silk wound into Olivia's freshly washed hair, her arms around his neck.

When the armature was reassembled he again applied the leads of the battery and found that the voltmeter responded as hoped at every point: the circuits were complete. He went to bed. But, tired as he was, he did not soon fall asleep, nor could he will again the vision of Harriet's acceptance of him. Instead he turned over in his mind the possible consequences of his careless electrical jest.

From certain signs, including Horatio Washington's virtual disappearance from the ironworks, Harriet Bigelow had an instinct that something was afoot down below in Power City. She was not aware of the delivery of the dynamo, even though the crate had come from the siding right through the yard of the works. But the particular catalogue Toma had requested—page upon page of electrical fittings, gauges, capacitors, and windings—was one clue, and the disappearance of the battery was another. Of course a battery may fail, but Horatio's demeanor, the uncharacteristic evasiveness of his gaze, made her immediately suspicious of his explanation.

It would be simple enough to ask Toma what he was about. But Toma could not come to her, nor could she, having made the one uninvited call to the silk mill, go to him again.

She was in the act of writing a note to Toma when her father called out to her: “Harriet, my dear, what do you know about a length of cable from Mr. Stephenson?”

Harriet went to him, as she must do in order to be heard. He held up the telegram. “Twenty-five hundred feet of electrical cable. What can he mean?” There was confusion in his eyes and a gathering anger in his voice.

“It must be a mistake.”

“Well, I don't know about that. Mr. Stephenson is a man of business, and this would be a very odd sort of mistake. You must make the
matter clear to him, treading softly, of course. Electrical cable indeed, as if I could make wheels by black magic. Perhaps you should have a word with your friend, Stephenson's young man?”

“I shall take care of this, Papa.”

“I know you will. You have a way with letters and a very neat hand too.”

Harriet returned to her desk with the sense that events were unfolding in a way she could not control. Wasn't this what she had wanted? Hadn't she asked Toma to save the situation? What right then had she to question the means? It had seemed, in the shadows of that bedroom above the stable, exactly the right thing to say: it was on the one hand true—the Bigelow Iron Company must be saved—and it also had the virtue of redirecting the energy of that moment, the current of feeling between them that she was honest enough to admit she both felt and encouraged.

Harriet was more easily seduced by the happy eventuality than by imaginings of disaster, and liable to minimize any difficulties intervening between the present and some pleasant future. Could she have guessed that Toma's solution to the problems of the ironworks might involve a bold technical stroke? Perhaps. Could she represent to herself the reservations of her father about such a course? She did not want to. But now she had no choice but to acknowledge that her father's suspicious objection—though he knew nothing—was very forceful, and that she was engaged in an act of deception.

Finding little satisfaction in the prospect of corresponding with Mr. Stephenson—what was there to say that would not compound the awkwardness?—Harriet turned back to her half-written letter, hoping to find vindication of her course. But she found nothing of the sort: perhaps the shock of the Stephenson telegram had cleared her vision. The words she had written to Toma were inadequate. She had asked no direct questions. Of course she trusted Toma to do what was right and to exert himself to the utmost; that much she had seen in his eyes at the moment of her asking. But there was also the possibility of failure despite all extreme efforts. Who, after all, could change the weather? Or foresee an injury? She was prepared to be surprised by triumph; failure was another matter.

But something else had found its way into her letter. As a preface to her remarks about the progress of the casting—that part of the letter would have so little pleasure in it—she had described her garden to him, the garden he had helped her plant. For the amusement of the invalid she painted a deprecating portrait of its little corners and general aspect, so yellowed and fallen from the green glories of April when each new shoot had promised an earthly paradise. She thought this would cheer him up, because it was clear from her visit that he was melancholic. But beneath the wry flourishes she saw the ghost of her own regret. Might he not conclude from this letter that she missed him, and that her garden drooped in his absence? She stared at her handwriting and was reminded of a comment by Lucy, spoken very softly and with the mildest exasperation: My dear Harriet, I think you do not know yourself.

Harriet sifted through the other correspondence in her box until she came upon the Iron Bank stationery, an envelope addressed to her in Senator Truscott's hand. Was it his hand? The clerk's writing did bear a strong resemblance. She puzzled over this annoying ambiguity: How could she not know his writing? Also, she compared the unopened letter to an imaginary one, the one that Toma might compose in response to her own.

Senator Truscott and the letter in hand represented a kind of insurance. She would never mistake Toma's writing for any other, and she could summon a feeling, almost a physical sensation, simply by thinking about his response to her letter. Fowler Truscott's letter evoked no corresponding emotion, but it did, even unread, convey his benevolent attention. If she would but trust in him—thus spake the envelope—a way might be found out of these awkward circumstances, a wide and pleasant way that led, there could be no doubt, to that impressive white house with the lawn descending to the lake.

Harriet sighed. She would not destroy her musings to Toma—what harm could there be in them?—but would complete the letter on a different tack. These men were both her suitors; but while she had read enough popular fiction to know that a case might be made for either one, she had no experience or encouragement to place herself at the center of the drama. Such lessons as she had learned from life per
suaded her that caring and coping and self-improvement were the natural channels for her energies, and it was almost an embarrassment to consider too closely the question of what she might feel for a man who would be her husband, or to balance the claims of the candidates. She sealed her envelope with no sense of doing any wrong: she was protecting, as best she knew how, the things that were familiar and nearest her heart.

A commotion in the yard caught her attention. Several workmen from the idled forge descended the steps from the railway siding, linked to one another like mountain climbers. The cable had arrived.

She went to stand between her father and the window, rearranging the papers on his desk to distract him. “That would have been the eleven-twenty freight, then,” he said, commenting with satisfaction on the whistle of the train's departure. Any sound that reached him was to be celebrated.

“Yes, Papa, it must have been.”

“Are you feeling well?” he asked, gazing up at her. “You do not seem quite yourself today.”

 

T
HERE WERE MANY FOLK
in Beecher's Bridge apart from Harriet Bigelow who had a curiosity and some inkling of what might be afoot in the underworld of Power City.

Amos Bigelow's aversion to that place, coupled with his position as the town's largest employer, had the effect, over time, of rendering anonymous the land below the falls. Even though the large maps in the post office and the bank still carried the designation Power City, the name had dropped out of the vernacular of Beecher's Bridge, and that quarter was most often referred to as Down There.

Nothing had happened Down There in the last fifty years to arouse any curiosity. It is true that Horatio Washington and Olivia Toussaint—the Darkie and his Yellow Woman to those grown bold over a second pint of beer—lived in the silk mill. But they had no visitors and the place was all but inaccessible by road: the only souls who ventured there were boys old enough to be entrusted with an urgent bundle of laundry, and they generally congratulated themselves, upon their return, for having survived manifold threats of vague description.

But the Stephenson contract was a turning point in the dusty affairs of Beecher's Bridge and in how Power City was perceived. The men employed at the ironworks came soon to understand—as did their wives and the sharper children—how much was riding on this one venture, and they knew they were all in it together. No man had to be told twice, and when Horatio called out for a Stilson wrench or Mr. Brown for a puddling iron, there was a competition of eager hands for the task. The lamps in the kitchens were lit a few minutes earlier so that no shift should be delayed by the tardiness of the man of the house. Children were possibly more receptive to instruction by their elders.

Although the anxieties of a continued drought could never be put entirely out of mind, the infusion of hard currency coinciding with the signing of the contract had a wonderful effect upon commerce and optimism in Beecher's Bridge. Accounts at the general store were nearly current, and Mr. Wright was further encouraged by a flurry of sales from his jewelry case, which had been gathering dust for months. At the saloon, McCreedy noted that he was having to restock the premium ale sometimes twice a week.

By virtue of his efforts in opening up furnace number 3 for operation, Toma had earned the unspoken awe of his fellows at the ironworks. Now he was recuperating in seclusion and the water level in the Buttermilk was dropping still. Great things are expected of heroes, even wounded ones, and it was an interesting coincidence—or no coincidence at all—that the two men who might save the contract were living under one roof, putting their heads together Down There.

Nobody knew for sure what was going on in the silk mill, but curiosity and speculation more than made up for the want of fact. “Scientific” became a ready word to those who could not afford to be without information or opinion, and when uttered with a thoughtful expression usually sufficed to satisfy casual inquiries. Martin Flaherty entertained the pleasing fantasy that the Yellow Woman, who was said to come from New Orleans, was performing rain dances and wearing nothing whatever. And Mrs. Vernacci, who lived along the Bottom, which is not to be confused with Down There, but close enough to it, reported to her neighbors that she had heard a kind of crackling accompanied by erratic flashes in the crowns of the trees when she went to the outhouse well after midnight. Mrs. Ogden, her very prim and
reliable neighbor, confirmed this story from her own experience. Mrs. Vernacci and Mrs. Ogden were not friendly, had not exchanged words since the former intemperately expressed her belief that the Ogden tool shed infringed upon her backyard by some two feet. Mrs. Ogden's verification was thus as independent as Mrs. Vernacci could wish, though she regretted that this marvelous vision had not been granted solely to her. Opinion was roughly divided between those who thought that the Devil himself was at work in Power City and those who assigned the lights and the sound to some scientific experiment.

Fowler Truscott saw no flickering portents and no experimental noises disturbed his sleep. Mrs. Vernacci's story would, in some version, eventually reach his ears, but in the meantime he had access to all those papers relating to the finances of the ironworks and to his politician's instinct for which way the wind blew.

The summer had been a pleasant one for him, in spite of the heat and the drought, for he was able to imagine how much less bearable Washington would be in this season. Here he had his garden, somewhat seared, and the lake upon which he took early exercise in his single scull, with his bulldog Sousa perched precariously upon the bow platform keeping a lookout for fish. The morning was the senator's time for the newspapers and for his correspondence, and in the afternoon he attended to the affairs of the bank and to the perfection of his golf swing.

One of the affairs of the Iron Bank, of course, was its relationship with the Bigelow Iron Company, a connection now almost exactly defined by his personal interest in Miss Harriet Bigelow. The senator was not quite sure how or why this had happened. He had known the family for many years, and the iron company had always been an important client. But until last summer he had not seen Harriet as more than a charming and accomplished child.

The first tremor came with the accidental discovery that she was not merely the scribe but the author of all correspondence from the ironworks. He marveled at the efficiency of her thinking, at her command of each detail of production and inventory, at the sure leap of her mind from such details to their economic consequences. Most impressive, and most reassuring, was her deference to age and authority in the person of her father. This modesty, continually deflecting praise or
even acknowledgement, had the effect, in his eyes, of redoubling every other charm of her person or character. He had turned these thoughts over in his mind during the nine months when he was mainly in Washington, and had come to Beecher's Bridge in June with a determination to win the hand of Harriet Bigelow.

The senator was not a simple or coarse man, and he did not imagine that this enchanting girl's affection was to be purchased. Nor could he flatter himself that he might sweep her off her feet by the force of his personality or his physical charm. Once—and here he had a delightful recollection of another girl and that giddy fortnight following the triumphant conclusion of Yale's rowing season in 1884—once, but not now.

There were two mirrors in the senator's bathroom, one on the medicine cabinet and the other swivel-mounted on posts atop the vanity. A few weeks ago he had caught a view of himself in the mirrors, two views, one familiar and the other not. The unfamiliar reflection showed the withered flank and the tentative posture of a man approaching the limit of his middle age. He shifted his weight to the leg he could see but there was little satisfaction there. Could that possibly be his body? He drew himself up and considered the contours of the chest and belly, which were not shocking to him, for all that they could be improved by the stiff bosom and white waistcoat of evening dress. Mornings on the lake, he said aloud to the panting Souza. Do us both good, old fellow.

The exercise had made him feel more vigorous than he had for quite some time, made him feel almost young. But although the senator was inclined to excuse himself from the full rigor of examination and analysis that he applied elsewhere, there were certain signs that he could not ignore, signs that his suit could not succeed along the lines familiar from his youth. That kiss, to take the most obvious example, had not been well received. Should he have asked for permission? He did not know. The moment had seemed propitious and he had yielded to his impulse. Would she have responded differently to the twenty-two-year-old Fowler Truscott, stroke and captain of the victorious crew? He thought again of that girl whose every particular he remembered except her name.