The Lightning Keeper (37 page)

The colorful place name is catnip to the amateur historian. The more colorful the better; and the more lurid the surrounding tale, the more urgently he embraces his self-appointed task of verification, a task that, in most cases and for one reason or another, will end in failure. It is, often, like chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.

Let us start on a positive note at the top of the mountain. The etymology of Dead Man's Lake is secure. Josef Vereinskellen was a Revolutionary War veteran who had been invalided out after an encounter with a cannonball at the battle of Monmouth. The ball had taken off his left ear and a bit of his cheek and scalp, and deafened him because he was so close to the cannon's mouth. He was a woodcutter and lived a solitary life up on the mountain; one of his pleasures was ice fishing—perhaps it reminded him of home. There was no witness to the critical event, but the old soldier stopped making his weekly runs to the general store in February 1792, and in the spring a couple of boys reported seeing his fishing shack floating in the lake. It should be Vereinskellen's Lake, of course, but the name hardly trips off the tongue.

A little further down we come to Rachel's Leap, and no one alive can state with confidence who Rachel was and why she jumped. There is no relevant piece of paper in the archives of Beecher's Bridge, and no such name on a headstone in our cemeteries. Well, in fact there are two, but they lived to such ripe old ages—seventy-four and eighty-eight—that one has difficulty imagining them as candidates. Perhaps
someday a document, or a letter, or a diary will turn up that sheds light on this. But more likely not. In the meantime, the name of that spot is enshrined, and Rachel and her unhappiness are as real to the people of the town as if she walked among us today.

In any case, the historian has few tools in a contest against entrenched opinion. Were it possible to prove beyond doubt that Rachel merely sprained an ankle, or that her name was really Rebecca, it would make no difference. People will believe what they want to believe. But still it is a matter of honor and of personal satisfaction to make the attempt at precision. I have searched in vain for Jack's Rock, said to stand up out of the swamps south of the mountain, where a solitary fellow was found dead. Who was he? Why was he there? How did he die? These questions elicit many blank stares, and any answers forthcoming hardly inspire confidence. Even the topographical maps are mute: there is no bundling of contour lines to suggest the whereabouts of this fabled rock.

Or consider the matter of the alleged Viking graves. On a low rise overlooking an old beaver meadow two graves are laid out, with weathered stones marking the head and the foot. One, having less than four feet of grass between the stones, belongs to a child; the other is over seven feet long. They were a famously tall race, the Vikings, and Elmer Brown claims to be able to discern a runic inscription on the headstone of the larger grave. But Mr. Brown says many things to entertain the patrons at the saloon, and that is no forum for rigorous thinking.

What would the poor Vikings be doing here anyway, so far from the sea and the safety of their ships? A forensic dig, with myself and a qualified fellow from the University of Connecticut directing the work, turned up no supporting evidence in the way of artifacts, and the skeletons did not seem to have been in the ground for hundreds of years. The adult was a woman, certainly tall, and young enough to be the child's mother. The rise and its beaver meadow are not far from where Meekertown is thought to have been located, and the tithe records at the church indicate that a man named Halverson farmed in Meekertown for several years just after the Revolutionary War, long enough to have come to this grief.

Local history, by the long or the short way, leads us back to questions about human nature. No doubt Mr. Brown's audience at the sa
loon would choose the Viking warrior over poor Mrs. Halverson. It adds mystery or dignity to their lives to believe in the Viking. As for Rachel, I often wonder if the sprained ankle isn't a perfectly likely scenario. Perhaps she was out with friends on an excursion and came to a point of rock where she made a show of bravado.

“You wouldn't dare,” one calls out.

“But I would!” cries Rachel, jumping and landing awkwardly. It could have been much worse.

The incident would have been reported with humor and admiration, and perhaps the friend said to his friend in jest, “I thought she meant to do away with herself.” Time passes and the tale or the name is passed on. The exact exchange of words is blurred or lost, and the circumstances too. Someone who has never known Rachel hears the story, someone with disappointments of her own: from that point on Rachel is alone on the mountain with her sorrow, and it is bleak November, not springtime. What motive would there be for such an alteration? Perhaps none at all. The story she has heard touches the listener in a strange way: she knows what she would have done in Rachel's place, and thereafter their stories are entwined.

All this is speculation. There are no facts beyond the name of the place, and I am filling in the blank canvas to amuse myself. How unfortunate that one can hardly utter the word “speculation” without qualifying it as idle.

Peacock's Folly is quite a different kettle of fish. The half-finished building—a stout tower when complete—sits on the crown of Lightning Knob and even at this stage may be seen from almost any part of Beecher's Bridge. Its official name, the Lightning Laboratory of the Experimental Site, is a cumbersome one. Its popular name was given before the first stone was laid, in a meeting of the town selectmen. Ordinarily there would not be any such meeting: the Truscotts might erect whatever they please on their property. But it was Mr. Peacock's plan to utilize the abundant cut and dressed stone available in the various ruins of Power City, and the cartage was in progress when someone asked whose stone it was. The answer, owing to the situation of taxes long unpaid, was that at least some of the stone was the property of the town. Mr. Peacock made a vigorous presentation to the selectmen of the scientific principle and the economic benefit involved. The
second item the selectmen grasped perfectly well; but in response to the first, one gentleman whispered the phrase that took on a life of its own.

Peacock's Folly it is, then, and one cannot imagine that such a mischievously colorful name will soon be abandoned. But what exactly is meant?

Connecticut could hardly have achieved its reputation for invention if every initiative, every effort to expand our scientific frontiers, were treated thus.

Why such sudden judgement? Some allowance must be made for the apprehensions of our people. Many families, having worked at the Bigelow foundry for generations, suffered as a result of its demise. The iron company, like the church on the green—and the Catholic Church too, of course—seemed to be part of our bedrock, an institution that could not fail. Fail it did, however, thanks in part to the efforts or omissions of Mr. Peacock. The Bigelow bankruptcy gave advantage to those who had always said that it was the Devil's work being carried on down below the falls.

The principal engine of our local prosperity is now, as Senator Truscott had hoped, the engagement of the General Electric Company in matters of research. That activity has taken a new course. The work below the falls was one thing: waterwheels are familiar objects, after all, and anyone who reads a newspaper or a magazine must be aware of the potential benefits of electrical service. But given the long history of lightning in Beecher's Bridge, the collective memory of fatal or near-fatal incidents, of herds on the mountain driven mad in the storm and plunging to their death, can anyone look on this tower with a neutral eye? Where many of us hold our breath and hope that the disturbance will pass us by, Mr. Peacock's scheme is to bring the lightning to us, to make it play over Lightning Knob like the tamed lion. The more the better, he says, while assuring us that it is all perfectly safe. And some of us respond with mutterings about the Devil's work.

Still, the economic activity is real enough. An old charcoal cutters' road has been cleared up the eastern slope of the Lightning Knob so that the stone may be hauled up from Power City to within a few hundred feet of the crest. From that point a railed hoist and a gasoline motor lift the blocks up to the construction site.

The same equipment runs the compressor, the pump, and the hydraulic system necessary to the Bucyrus Excavator boring vertically into the mountain to house Dr. Steinmetz's aerial, or lightning rod. One would have to be a man of science to understand all the details, but Dr. Steinmetz, on his visits to Beecher's Bridge, is not shy about saying that great things will come of this work. Word has it that his nickname in Schenectady is
Loki,
after the pagan Norse divinity associated with lightning.

Mr. Peacock is relentless in directing this activity, calling on that same energy with which he once attacked the obstruction in furnace number 3. If the excavator should balk, he will fix it; and if an instant repair is not possible he will lead the men down into the shaft with picks and buckets rather than wait on the new part. The work must go on. At the end of such a day he comes down to his office in the old ironworks to deal with his correspondence.

One cannot help admiring such single-mindedness; perhaps it is necessary to the accomplishment of a great work. But to those of us who aspire to no greatness there is something unsettling in Mr. Peacock's refusal to acknowledge either fatigue or the notion of his own mortality. Might this be the surest etymology, after the fact, of the name Peacock's Folly? It is generally unwise, and certainly unwelcome, to opine on the condition of our neighbor's soul, but who can glimpse Mr. Peacock in his nocturnal comings and goings—the haggard abstraction of those features in the lantern's glare—and not wonder if this be the face of a man possessed?

 

H
E AWOKE TO THE
perfect peace of the mountain. It was past the season of birdsong. At dusk he would listen for the raven and the migrating geese; at night sometimes an owl would wake him; and at noon, when the excavator shut down, the red-tail's solitary shriek would skewer the silence.

He had claimed this angle of the construction as his campsite, and depending on the progress of the work he would have to move his things in a day or two. He liked sleeping where he could see the stars; if it rained he could shift the pieces of corrugated metal to keep himself dry.

He rolled over and sat up with his back against the stone wall. When he buttoned his coat and pulled the hat down tight he wasn't much colder than he had been on the pallet. In a few minutes he would light the sticks already laid under the pot of water and add a handful of coffee, but for now he wanted nothing. He waited, looking down at the lake and the lawns and the dark outline of the house, waited until he saw the soft flare of light in that second-storey window.

When the coffee had come almost to a boil he set the pot aside and put a pan with a little butter over the coals. He had heard one of the older hands in the forge, a man who had spent a winter on the mountain with the raggies cutting and splitting hardwood for charcoal, boast about living on whiskey and eggs—a dozen at a sitting. He couldn't eat a dozen eggs, but as he looked in the box and saw only four, he wondered if it would be enough. He threw a couple of shells into the coffee to settle the grounds.

He ate deliberately, scraping the pan with bits of broken bread. He wondered if she ate her breakfast alone, as in the old days, or if someone brought it to her bed. He looked over at what passed for his own bed and imagined her sitting there with the disreputable blankets drawn up around her shoulders, putting forth her hand to accept the scalding coffee, trying to keep her hair out of it as she drank.

Her light had become his clock. When it went out at night he felt his strength fade; he awoke in expectation of it. He wondered now if he had been dreaming of her again, or had the light in the window put these things in his mind?

It was the accident of her singing that sent him to the mountain. He had known nothing of the choral society event until Steinmetz mentioned it at the end of a long afternoon of discussing the lightning project. He was working day and night on the specifications and the costing of the project, and he would not have bothered to go if Steinmetz had not asked him to save a copy of the program.

The price of the ticket surprised him—this was a fund-raising affair for the fire department—and as he settled into his seat at the back of the library the evening seemed more an obligation than a pleasure. He sighed and sat back in his chair to admire the barrel vault of the roof and the wooden galleries just below. There was an element of ostentation in this architecture: a town the size of Beecher's Bridge needed no such
building to service its literary curiosity, but the Truscott family had money enough to memorialize its enthusiasms. The senator's father had erected this monument to his wife's love of books, or at least the idea of books. From these shelves had Harriet Bigelow borrowed the volumes on metallurgy that Toma must read; in this same great hall or reading room had Harriet formed her nodding acquaintance with Olivia Toussaint while exercising her gift for the still life in pencil and charcoal. In a few moments another Mrs. Truscott, that same Harriet, would sing for him. Toma shifted his legs to find a more comfortable position.

The names in the program meant nothing to him; but that fellow Schubert must be a German, which perhaps explained Steinmetz's interest. The thought of her singing a German song brought a smile to his lips, and he made a little snorting noise to frame this irony. The older gentleman to his left turned to look at him.

When Toma raised his eyes, the chorus had filed onto the makeshift stage. Harriet Truscott, in her green velvet, was among those in the front row. He had never before seen so much of her throat and shoulders. It was the line of those shoulders and the expressionless set of her features that betrayed her uneasiness. What was wrong? He stared at her, and if he had not been so aware of his neighbor he might have muttered encouragement, as if she were a horse lagging the field.