The Lightning Keeper (39 page)

The noon whistle sounded, and the men cleared out either to the saloon or to a good dinner at home. Toma had moved one block to his
site, heaving it end over end, but the other, a dark brute shot with streaks of quartz, was simply too heavy for him. He was glad and surprised to hear Stefan on the road below the crown, talking to himself as he usually did.

“Hurry up!” called Toma, “I need a hand here.”

“Hurry up…always hurry up. Even to the top of this mountain Piccolomini is following me.”

Toma let the rock fall back and stood up. Stefan made the last few steps up onto the crown, carrying a carton more or less the size of Toma's rock.

“Here it is, everything, I think. You won't starve and you won't freeze, at least not before Monday.”

“Thank you, Stefan, but why didn't you let one of the young fellows carry this for you?”

“Ah, the exercise is good for me.” Toma smiled at this unlikely thought. “And I want to see for myself how goes this wonder of the world. There are seven of those, ja?”

“Yes.”

“So this is the number eight. Maybe I call it that and Piccolomini has no idea. He listens, you know?”

“Listens to what?”

“The telephone, when you call me.”

“He is spying on my groceries?”

“I'm just telling you what I know, so be careful what you say.”

“This is your first time up here, I think?”

“Yes. I am curious to understand, but it looks like a mess to me. Too many things going on at once. Can't you get rid of some of these rocks?”

“Those are the blocks for the tower.”

“No, the little pieces there.”

Toma looked where Stefan was looking, at the hill of broken stone that the excavator had spat out of the hole.

“That's nothing. I can rig a drag line and it will be gone in half a morning, over the edge and out of sight. You should have seen the subway tunnels in New York when we were blasting under the river. What do you do with a carload of dirt that's maybe one hundred twenty-five feet down? This is nothing.”

After they had moved the block of stone Stefan settled himself against it with his sausage in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. Toma rummaged in the box.

“I ran into your friend at the store when I was getting this stuff for you. She didn't speak to me, but she gives me a look, and I'm sure she knows exactly what I'm doing. I am hoping she doesn't look at me. What do I say?”

“Maybe there is nothing to say.”

“If I have a woman like that I don't throw her away.”

“I didn't throw her away. I am just staying up here so the work is done right, and as soon as it can be.”

“And you have been up here how long now?”

“Five weeks? Six, I think.”

“The way she looked at me, I bet you haven't seen her in that time.”

“No. Stefan, I have lived without a woman before. You live without a woman. This is good for me. I am thinking very clearly.”

“About a woman?”

“No. About the work here.”

“You need to think about this? What's to think? Steinmetz is the one who does the thinking.”

“Most of it, but he has other things that concern him, and he is not so practical a fellow. He wanted to put an iron pole one hundred feet high up here.”

Stefan looked up, trying to imagine the top of the pole in the clear sky, and shook his head.

“I told him it would not be stable, and he shows me his notebook full of figures, and down at the bottom of the page there is a box drawn around the number one hundred. That's what he needs.”

“So you told him no?”

“I told him if he will sink the pole in the ground he can have more than one hundred, and so we dig.”

“And he was happy?”

“The thought of more lightning makes him very happy. His head shakes as if he is having a little fit, then he says to me, ‘You shall be my lightning keeper.'”

“And what will you do with all this lightning you catch?”

“That is for Steinmetz to say, but I can tell you it's not what you're
hearing in town. You can't keep it, or store it. It is simply a way of testing equipment.”

“I tell you what I hear, and I don't have to go to the saloon to hear it. Piccolomini says it's all a waste of time and money, and the only reason for all this nonsense is that Dr. Steinmetz is in love with the lady, Mrs. Truscott.”

Toma's eyes slid away from Stefan's and down to the Truscott house, where a car was just pulling up to the door. “The man has a foul mouth. In my country, in the old days, the blasphemer's tongue was cut out of his head to make him pure in the sight of God. Perhaps you should tell this to your friend.”

Stefan dismissed the suggestion and the thought of Piccolomini with a wave of his hand. “Do you have a blueprint of this thing you are building, or an elevation?”

Toma went to his pallet and reached under the corrugated metal sheet for a roll of papers, wrapped in oilcloth. Stefan wiped his hands and anchored the drawings with bits of rock. He worked his way through the stack, talking to himself in German, then returned to the section rendering showing the tower rising above Lightning Knob and the iron embedded in the rock beneath.

Toma spoke first. “I don't think the final structure will resemble this very closely.”

“You know what this thing looks like to me?”

“A bad idea?”

“No. I am not making a joke. Think: where have you seen such a thing before?”

“A tower?”

“Not just a tower. Here…” and Stefan took from his pocket a pencil end. Before Toma could protest, he had drawn several boldly crooked lines suggesting a great energy emanating from the tower, or perhaps attacking it.

“There. Now what do you see?”

Toma turned the papers to put the tower right-side up. He looked, then drew a deep breath. “It seems that wherever I go, Dr. Tesla is looking over my shoulder, or I over his. This is Wardenclyffe, you are thinking?”

“You cannot deny the likeness, even if your purpose is different from his.”

There was a long silence between them now, during which they reflected on the great disappointment named Wardenclyffe, a technological dry hole that had consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars—much of it J. P. Morgan's—in pursuit of Tesla's dream, the wireless transmission of energy in limitless quantities from his tower on Long Island to any other point on the face of the earth. No one but Tesla understood exactly how it would all work, how that great spike in the earth would tune the magnifying transmitter aloft to the geophysical resonance of the terrestrial globe, augmenting and channeling that energy the way one may increase the loudness of a well-cast bell by tapping it at a precise and accelerating rhythm.

In the end it hadn't worked, or at least the money ran out, and perhaps something died in Tesla along with this dream. The derelict tower on Long Island still stood, a mockery of brave ambition, and the laboratories had been vandalized.

Stefan spoke first. “I did not mean to discourage you.”

“I am not discouraged.” He tapped the drawing. “There was something else…tunnels of some sort?”

“Yes, the radiating spokes of the buried antenna. I guess if you are going to ground the wire, you might do it right, ja? But it didn't work, did it? He was just a Croat with a big idea that didn't work.”

Toma was staring at the drawing. “What do you have on it?”

“On what?”

“On Tesla's tower, Wardenclyffe. You have a book, some drawings?”

“I look around. An article, maybe. The papers were full of it. Maybe
Scientific American
. I bring you what I find.” Stefan took a folded piece of paper from his pocket and started to write on it. “Oh, sorry…this is for you. On your desk this morning when I went in to check. A lady, perhaps?”

Toma glanced at the note just long enough to recognize Harriet's hand, then put it away. “Good.” He stood up. “Thank you for this, and for the box.”

“My pleasure, boss. I come again if I find something, or I leave it on the desk?”

“The desk is good. And, Stefan—” Toma put his hand on his friend's shoulder—“Tesla is a Serb, not a Croat. A Serb.”

“Ja, okay. If it makes a difference.”

“And he invented, or discovered, the applications of alternating current, among other things.”

“Sorry, okay. He was a great man.”

“And he is not dead.”

 

A S
ATURDAY IN THE
Truscott household was like any other day, except that letters had to be at the post office by noon and one of the maids, upstairs or downstairs, would have the afternoon off. Harriet had no letters to write, and found nothing of interest in the mail on the table in the front hall. An invitation to tea, which she might accept, and another to dinner, which she would decline. In the afternoon there would be callers, but the maid would say that Mrs. Truscott was not at home, and put the white calling cards in the silver tray on the same table, each to be answered with a note early in the week. Harriet did not know how she would get through the hours until…until it was time to go. She would do something with her hair.

She hardly touched her lunch, and her father surprised her by taking notice.

“You're not eating.”

“Of course I am, Papa. Look.” And she made a show of cutting her chicken breast into many pieces, of which she ate two. “There. I shall hope to have a surprise for you this evening.”

“What?”

“A surprise. You'll have to wait.” There was no harm in this, she thought. If she came back without the ledger he would have forgotten anyway.

She left the house at the same time she had left the day before, and it pleased Mrs. Evans to see that her advice was taking hold.

“You are looking better, dear, with that bit of color in your cheeks. You must do this every day.”

Harriet smiled and slipped out the door, grateful that she had not seen Olivia.

She did not know if she was too late or too early, or if he even came down from the mountain at all. From the condition of the office, it would be foolish to count on anything. She thought of the ledger again, and wondered if it was a foolish idea. Perhaps her father would be upset to see it. Perhaps it was too soon to awaken those particular memories, though he seemed now to have no sense of time, and even called her by her mother's name, which gave her a little shock that was disturbing but not entirely unpleasant. And then she was there, in front of the door.

She knocked and heard no reply, so she entered again, hoping to find a note in answer to hers. The desk, which had been dusted or wiped clean, was bare except for a ledger and the green bottle that used to sit on the window ledge in her office. She went to the desk and picked it up. She could not remember if she had brought it for him or the other way round, only that it sat there against the light as they pored over the ledgers, struggling with those pitiless numbers.

“You do not approve of Stefan's housekeeping, then?”

She startled, but stopped herself from turning around.

“Are you in the habit of spying on people, then frightening them?” She put the bottle down.

“Are you in the habit of breaking and entering?”

“I broke nothing.”

“That is true, and thank you for your help. But must I speak to your back? There, that's better. You are looking very well.”

“And you.” It was true. He was clean and shaved and wearing a fresh white shirt. She had expected something more in keeping with the state of the office as she had found it.

“You must not stare at me as if I had two heads. Mrs. McCreedy, who is my source of hot meals, allows me the use of her tub, and I keep a few clean clothes there.”

“I see. But what about…?”

She did not finish her question and he ignored it, taking a chair and placing it near the desk. He held it for her. “Will you sit?”

He took his own chair—in fact her father's chair—and his suppressed smile hinted at some advantage or superior knowledge.

“You are staring at me again. Is this good manners?”

“Did you not stare at me the last time we saw each other?”

“It was normal, no? Everyone else did the same. I must congratulate you. It was very fine, the whole performance, but yours in particular.”

“If it pleased you so, why did I not see you afterward? I felt certain you would come, if only for a moment.”

“I could not.” The irritating half smile was gone now.

She put her hand on the ledger. “I did not expect to see you today. I thought you would send word about this. May I?”

“Of course. I wonder who actually owns it. Perhaps it is really yours anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because your husband bought everything.”

“Yes. You are right, but I wish you hadn't said it. Of course you are right. It seems so long ago, and I don't like to think about it.”

“Nor I, so what shall we talk about?”

She looked at her lap and remembered how she had once worried about the charcoal dust in the creases of her knuckles that exaggerated the size of her hands. “We never used to have this problem, wondering what to talk about.”

“In those days…in those days we had only the future to consider, what might happen. Now we know what has happened, and cannot pretend otherwise.”

“For Heaven's sake, Toma! You make it sound as if everything is over, your life and mine. I don't believe that, do you?”

“No.” He spoke with his eyes cast down, and might as well have said yes.

“You have a great work to accomplish, a work that Dr. Steinmetz has placed in your hands. That is your future now, and if there is anything I can do to help…” She couldn't go on. She had said too much already.

“It sounds to me as if you want a job. I think you proved yesterday that you are up to the task. Well?”