The Lightning Keeper (45 page)

A
FTER
H
ARRIET
T
RUSCOTT'S
departure isolation settled on the house like a blanket of snow. For Olivia Toussaint it was a time not of peace but of restless vigilance over things seen and unseen.

Mrs. Evans was recuperating slowly and had taken her first tentative steps only a few days before Harriet left. There were ways in which she could be useful, even as a semi-invalid; she was the focus of Amos Bigelow's mannerly instincts, those abiding pillars of his former self. The cook would send up two trays at mealtimes, and in Harriet's absence the old man would keep Mrs. Evans company. He made an effort to be tidy and helpful; if a scrap of food fell from his plate he would get down on his hands and knees to retrieve it.

Another sight to warm the sentimental heart was the ritual progress every afternoon from one end of the second floor to the other. At first their goal was the door closing off the staff side of the house. After a week Mrs. Evans felt strong enough to venture out into the main bedroom corridor, and they would rest for a moment at the railing of the stairwell, which was lit by the hoar-frosted dormers above. Soon, she said, she would be ready for the stairs; she didn't intend to spend the rest of her life as a caged bird on the second floor.

One day followed the next. There were no visitors, and when the real blanket of snow arrived early in February, they were cut off for
nearly a week, without the ordinary distractions of the mail and the milk. On the third day, the stable boy hitched Harriet's mare to the old sleigh to fetch lamp oil, milk, potatoes, cabbages, and sides of bacon from the store; but because the snowfall had smoothed the features of Beecher's Bridge, he missed the crook in the road not two hundred yards from the gate and overturned in a ditch. The mare was cut free of the harness and the house ran on short rations of eggs and black tea and a few moldly tubers from the root cellar until Barzel Treat's oxen and sledge made the road passable.

Now more than ever Olivia hated the snow, the inescapable and blinding whiteness without, the rank-smelling gloom within. She slept very lightly, with the door open and one ear cocked for sounds from Amos Bigelow's room. And as she lay in bed, aware that sooner or later she would have to go down and deal with the old man, she had a new worry: that the snow would come back in the night and swallow the house. As much as anything else she resented the way the old man could drop off to sleep like a baby, and like a baby awake at the most inconvenient time.

She did not have Harriet's affectionate patience with him, and unlike Mrs. Evans she commanded no respect other than fear. Every day the battle began anew, and the only thing that gave him peace was clanging one piece of metal against another, until she thought she would go mad. Anything, anything to stop that noise, but there was no reasoning with him, and he hid from her in the labyrinth of his deafness.

There was one thing that worked, as she found by accident. She had a pad of paper on her lap and a pencil in her hand. She was writing out a list of items that Carpenter would fetch from the store, but she knew she had forgotten one thing, and with that racket in her ears she could not think of it. The pencil, with a will of its own, wandered to the margin of the page, random lines there merging to the figure of a seated woman, facing away but turning back, as if to answer a question. Amos Bigelow rose from his bench and clutched the front of his trousers, by which she knew that he had to go to the water closet, had already done it by the smell of him. He was curious about her drawing.

“Who?”

She looked up at him, then at the figure she had drawn. It could be anyone, she thought.

“It's her, isn't it?”

She drew the figure again from another angle, and while the features were still indistinct, the carriage and the tilt of the head were surely Harriet's. The old man was pleased with this bit of magic, and she gave him the page.

The trick never failed. If he caught the flash of paper out of the corner of his eye he could not ignore it, and would soon lay down his hammer. She drew from memory, sometimes Mrs. Evans, occasionally the cook or the old man himself; but his favorite subject, of course, was his daughter. One day, thinking of those crumpled letters in Harriet's wastebasket, she added an infant to the composition; Amos Bigelow responded with inarticulate approval. For the rest of the afternoon he did not touch his hammer, and made a dumb show of his concern for the sleeping baby.

There was one drawing in the middle of the pad that she never showed him, and if the Madonna exerted a soothing power over Amos Bigelow's unquiet heart, so too was Olivia sustained by an image of love.

She drew him as he had been on her bed in the silk mill when she took away the sheet and gazed at his body in a tumult of feeling, terrified desire twinned with its dark other, hope. They were born in that moment and had died together, a cruelty as stark and incomprehensible as anything Horatio had done to her.

But in her drawing none of that had yet happened. The figure there was pale and perfect, except for the wound in the foot, and at any moment he might open his eyes. When she ran her fingers over the drawing, blurring it, softening it, she felt the shock of his whiteness under her hand.

She was not surprised when Toma appeared at the kitchen door a few days after the great snowfall. He had received a telegram from Washington, he said: Mrs. Truscott was anxious about the household, particularly her father. Come in, she said, sit down. It was the first time they had sat together in five months. Did he want to take off his coat? Have a cup of tea? He did not. It has been so long, she said, and when he had no other answer than a constrained smile, she got down on her knees to unlace his boot.

“Don't,” he said.

“It still hurts you in the cold weather.” He nodded. She peeled off the thick, rank stocking and took his foot in her lap to massage the scar. She did not hear the cook coming until she was there towering over them, saying to him: Mister, you keep your shoes on in my kitchen; and to her: You've your own room for this sort of thing. She moved slowly in the direction of the ticking coal stove, not deigning to look at them, but permitting herself a stage whisper: The nerve of them. And in broad daylight too.

 

T
HERE WAS NO TELLING
what to expect other than what she hoped, no timetable other than her urgency. The thought that he must come in the night took possession of her, and night became her day. This was also true of Amos Bigelow: he had the idea in his head that his daughter and the baby were being hidden from him somewhere in the house, and he watched for the moments when his keeper should be asleep. One day the cook called them to lunch, got no answer, and found them both dozing in their chairs.

Harriet's letter arrived on a bright morning in early March, when it was possible to hope that spring might prevail against winter. It was ten days since the spiles had been set into the maples, the thirteen colonial patriarchs along the road and the numerous smaller ones in the sugar bush under the mountain cleared by the senator's father. Every morning Carpenter and the stable boy drove the sleigh, fitted with a galvanized tank, out over the packed snow to collect the sap, and in the late afternoon they would fire the boiler in the shed behind the stable, working far into the night if the day's run had been strong. Olivia's drowsing vigils were bathed in wood smoke and maple steam, and sometimes she was jolted awake by a burst of light suggesting his presence; but it was not that glory, just the flaming heart of the boiler reflected off the snow when the doors were opened to receive the quartered lengths of oak and beech.

She was in the conservatory that morning, dazzled by the strong sun. Amos Bigelow was upstairs with Mrs. Evans. She had come in to arrange the pots that Carpenter had brought from the pit house, the gross thrusting amaryllis and the slender green fingers of narcissus that would rise too quickly to the sun unless she gave them shade. When
that was done she went to the piano, as she did whenever she came in here, and found the chords of Harriet Truscott's hymns.

Lily approached nervously with the letter in hand. Lily was terrified of her, she knew, and knew also that Lily disapproved of her sitting down to Mrs. Truscott's piano. But what did Lily matter, much less what she thought?

At what point did she know what she would do? Certainly she knew what was in the letter, had been expecting it ever since the big snow. Only the urgency of Harriet's mission to Washington could keep her apart from her father for so long. She belonged in Washington, not here. Again she played the hymn, her favorite: “Abide with Me.”

She gave instructions to Lily and the cook: it was, after all, a homecoming and there must be some sort of ceremony. One of those pots of narcissus was going to bloom in the next couple of days anyway; and perhaps this would be the occasion for Mrs. Evans to take her dinner downstairs, and the old man too. The letter had set these things in motion, along with airing the rooms, rinsing the mirrors with vinegar, polishing the silver brushes, setting a new pomander in the linen press. Leaving these things undone would not keep her away. Had she written to him? It was not until that afternoon when she was closeted with Amos Bigelow and his demented hammering that she realized the letter had made no mention of how long Harriet Truscott would stay in Beecher's Bridge.

She went to bed exhausted—there was nothing new in that—and with a headache too, but she dug her nails into her palms to stay awake, for the time was short and he must come tonight. The occasional illuminations from the sap house had, tonight, a sinister promise: flashes of hellfire, milestones of despair.

She slept in spite of herself, and woke to the unmistakable sound of the old man's boot on the floor. Where did he think he was going at this time of night? She went down to him, stopped at the radiator in the hall where the milk warmed, and reached into the pocket of her robe for the tincture. She heard angry mutterings. Perhaps he had seen the candle.

“That's enough, you hear? You quit that foolishness.”

She watched as the drops made dark starbursts that lingered on the surface of the milk, and lost track of the number. She had doubled the dose two weeks ago, when his waking at night had taken on this
new purpose. It was either that or put a bolt on the door. She made a pattern with the starbursts that reminded her of stained glass or the first and last pages of the books down in the library. How many was that now? It didn't matter as long as he slept, as long as she could sleep, for she knew it was past the time when he would come, and if not tonight, then never.

“I am coming now, Mr. Bigelow,” she said, squeezing the dropper hard, and the drops blurred together.

He had one boot on and was holding the other in his hand like a weapon. Why did he hate her so?

“Put the boot down.”

“I am going to find her.”

“I told you: she is coming here. Now drink.”

“I don't believe you.”

“If you don't drink this, I'll tell her not to come.”

He put down the boot and accepted the cup, but when he brought it to his lips he stopped and sniffed, looked up accusingly at her.

“Drink it, Mr. Bigelow,” she said almost gently. “Drink it and you will be able to sleep.” She didn't know if he had heard her, because he moved not a muscle and kept her fixed in his gaze, those pinpoint reflections of the candle.

“You,” he said at last, and offered her the cup, turning it so she could take the handle.

The first sip had an odd metallic sweetness, but she didn't think it was unpleasant, and there was no odor other than the warm milk. How had he known? She would have given the cup to him, but he was smiling now, not unkindly, and as she raised the cup to her lips again she imagined that she was doing so at his bidding, that he had said, very distinctly, “Drink it and you will be able to sleep.”

 

T
HE DATE OF
H
ARRIET
T
RUSCOTT'S
return to Beecher's Bridge was fixed in Toma's mind for another reason. On Friday, March 8, after several days of muttering and glowering and averted glances, the men, through the intermediary of the foreman, Aldren Hawley, made known that they would no longer work in the south tunnel, and that they would sooner lose their jobs than go back down there.

When Hawley came to him with a report of the tunnel workers' complaint, Toma had made the mistake of laughing at this information.

“Music, you say? It must have been a brass band for them to hear it over the racket down there.”

“No, sir,” said Hawley, twisting his cap in his hands. “Not a brass band at all, but softer, they say, and peaceful, and I think I heard it myself.”

“You think so, but…?”

“I wasn't in the same part of the tunnel, not so close like, and I am not so certain, not as certain as the men down at the face. They are pretty damn sure of it.”

“If it's peaceful music, as you say, then there's nothing to worry about, is there?” But if he was hoping to jolly Hawley out of this bit of nonsense, he was making no headway. Even as he spoke the words he remembered the odd notions that bloomed in the subway tunnels of New York: grim auguries from seepage or the phosphorescence of a vein of rock, even its color, even the cable falling from its coil in a figure eight. And who could blame them for seeing disaster at every turn? They were proved right often enough. The sweetness of the music was the seal on this particular disaster: the Devil would hardly be so foolish as to announce his work with gongs and cymbals, added Hawley with a sniff for emphasis.

Toma had made weekly calculations and charts with the help of the long-suffering Stefan, and he knew how thin the margin of his success must be, especially after the influenza had so reduced his work force. He had sent telegrams to Schenectady importuning that bureaucracy for skilled tunnel workers or miners, so that work could proceed on all four tunnels simultaneously. How like Steinmetz, he reflected bitterly in the answering silence, to show up when he was not wanted or needed, and turn a deaf ear when it most mattered. Do the best you can under the circumstances, was Steinmetz's response.