The Lightning Keeper (9 page)

The journey home was a misery to them both. She had never seen Toma in such a cold, imperious mood: not only was he silent, he would not look at her. If only he knew what warm, if hopeless, feelings toward him lay shrouded in her silence. Conversation was too difficult in these circumstances, and might take an awkward turn. Instead she reflected on the puzzle of her meeting with Truscott, with two pieces in particular that, could she turn them around or over, must fit together. Although he had expressed himself warmly and almost intimately—his hand on hers was certainly an intimacy—there was no explicit mention of marriage. Was she to infer such a thing? Did not the man go down on his knee and produce a ring from his pocket to take her breath away? She stole a look at the perfectly impassive Toma, wondering how such matters were governed in his country, what looks, words, or touches would pass between a man and a woman there. And the other thing prickling her mind was that if Truscott had intentions toward her, and if, as would be proper, he intended to take the matter up with her father, was it not odd that he made no mention of the fact that they were about to dine together?

Harriet shrugged her shoulders: nothing made any sense on this day. (And here Toma did steal a glance at her out of the corner of his eye.) This afternoon, after her dinner, she would plant her peas, the onion sets, and her lettuces, with the beets and turnips in reserve if she had the strength. The seeds would sprout, bear leaf and root, be harvested. There could be few surprises or disappointments in that.

It happened otherwise: there was one more surprise in store for her that day. Instead of stopping the Packard at the steps to the porch, Toma drove into the open bay of the carriage house and let the car come to rest in that pleasant must of hay and horse punctuated by the sharper fumes of the automobile. It was chilly in this shadow, and the only sound was the ticking of the engine block surrendering its heat. This silence was pleasant to Harriet after the torrent of Truscott's earnest professions. Although she looked straight ahead, she could see that Toma had turned to her. She felt the weight of his eyes. Words would spoil the moment, but she spoke them anyway.

“Well, I suppose I should go in.”

Toma came around behind the car to open her door, but stood directly in front of her, so that she had no way to step down from the
running board. Instead of making way for her he stepped closer, took her hands in his and drew them gently behind her back so that their faces were nearly touching. And after a measurable pause that seemed to express confidence rather than uncertainty, he kissed her.

This was what she wanted from a man, she thought, and knew in the same instant that she would never have it from Fowler Truscott. Was she being mocked? She turned her face away to catch her breath but did not try to withdraw from his embrace, which now seemed somehow more intimate than when his mouth was upon hers. She spoke into the collar of his coat, her cheek grazing his.

“That must never happen again.” When he made no sign or word, she continued, “Do you understand?”

He was shocked by the temperature of the water. Beyond the flimsy wall of the wheel pit, out in the bright sun, the temperature had soared into the nineties. A violent rain during the night had brought no relief but rather this pall of humidity, and peonies that had opened only days ago drooped on their stout stems. The draft horses at the rail of the depot seemed to have gone to sleep for the summer.

The wheel was down and the forge silent. The rhythmic plink of hammers, so close to his head, had slowed to the point where they might almost be the chimes of the church. The wheel was down—Horatio's precious wheel—and as a result a holiday had been declared by Amos Bigelow. The men streamed out of the gate shortly after the shift began at eight, one joking loudly that he'd soon know what the missus was up to with the postman, another commenting, to general assent, that Bigelow was as decent an employer as a working fellow could wish for. It had been announced that they would all be paid full wages for this day.

Harriet would not approve of this expense, would have frowned upon it silently as wasteful, an inefficiency whose toll would be added to others in those ledgers of which she was the sole mistress. He tried to imagine such an expression on her face. Had he ever seen it? The memory of her smiling face seemed to banish all other possibilities until he remembered Boylan and their first meeting in the New World. In the moment before she was aware of his presence, and well
before she recognized him, he had seen such fury written there, a look that would have stayed the hand or frozen the heart of any man with an ounce of imagination. And if not the heart, then the reproductive impulse, as surely as such freezing water as this would shrivel a man's stones. But Boylan was different, or perhaps he himself was different, for in the time since he had left New York, he had not met a single man who seemed familiar, whose features or gestures or tone of voice reminded him of who he was or where he had come from. There was only Harriet, who was both part of the past and of the present, and whose regard, smiling or frowning, made him most painfully aware that he was different.

The sluice gate had been closed after last night's heavy runoff yielded a vile yellow water in the race and a turbidity near the chute that Horatio Washington knew immediately to be the result of some submerged peril to his precious wheel, the heart of the works. Toma had arrived at the usual time to an unsettling silence. Mr. Bigelow knew immediately what it meant: “Oh, for the love of God, what is it this time?”

Horatio had gotten there first, drawn from his bed, so one man said, by the distant reverberation of that stump entering the millrace. Ah, said his friend in a whisper that could be heard by many, if I was in bed with that colored gal I'd be making so much noise you could blow that cannon to Kingdom Come all over again and I wouldn't hear it. There was a murmur of laughter in response, but the fact was that shutting down the wheel was seen as bad luck, paid holiday or no. They would rather work than entertain the possibility that the wheel might never start again: other furnaces and forges, as they well knew, had shut down for good, and for no better reason than a stump caught in the race. They could only guess at the big picture in Bigelow's—or, more accurately, Harriet's—mind, whatever the talk might be of the new contract for cast car wheels in such quantities that a man might walk on them like stepping-stones all the way from Beecher's Bridge to New York City.

The decision to shut down the wheel was Horatio's: he was the only man in the works who could give such an order aside from Mr. Bigelow, but even Bigelow would not challenge him, nor ask a question about what was done. Horatio, any way you looked at him, was not a
man who invited questions or small talk, for you knew that you could expect nothing in reply. The back of him was forbidding enough: not so tall, but wide, like a boulder, with the head set down on his shoulders like a man who expected to be struck from behind at any moment. And the face, although he smiled as often as any other man, inspired a kind of uneasiness even in those who had known him for years. He knew things about you, or about the world itself, that were best left unspoken.

Toma had kept his distance from Horatio during his weeks at the mill, for he was respectful of any man's privacy just as he guarded his own, and besides, there was the plain fact that Toma's presence was a challenge to the man who kept the wheel.

Owing to this caution, Toma, who had inspected every dusty corner of the furnace and the forge, and spent hours at Harriet's side in her tiny office inspecting the ledgers, had never until this moment seen the inside of the wheel pit, much less the wheel itself. He had tested the tension and wear of each link in the power train, from the yard-wide leather belting of the journal or central axle—three ox hides he guessed—that took the strength of the river from the wheel, on and up through the rickety housing of the furnace as those slow, irresistible revolutions were retailed through complex gearings and ancillary belts, faster and faster but with ever-diminishing force, to serve the various functions of the ironworks: bellows; trip-hammer; conveyers of fuel, ore, and flux; lathes and grinders. It was like a tree, he thought, dedicated to motion rather than growth, or like a river moving in reverse. At the farthest tributary—he puzzled over this, thinking there must be a word for its opposite—a gloved hand could act as a clutch or brake on the driving belt of a grindstone; touch the main belt and those three oxen would take your arm and maybe your life.

And yet he had never seen the engine itself, this vast idle thing whose farthest edges were lost to sight. He had a candle end in the pocket of his shirt and matches that were still dry, but he waited for his eyes, trusting the darkness.

The surface of the wood under his hands, though nearly dry, had an odd, slippery resistance, as if both wax and oil had been applied to an articulated wooden sculpture. The wheel moved soundlessly in response to his touch and each bucket, stretching away from him farther
than his hand could reach, moved through a small range of motion against the resistance of a spring he could not find. He puzzled over this detail, made the wheel revolve in his mind, felt the water cocking that hidden spring, which would, near the bottom of the arc, act in concert with gravity to cast the water away. And was the speed of the wheel increased by this articulated tension? Or was the device simply to cushion the architecture of the wheel against the assault of the water? He was impatient with his inability to resolve this question in his mind: any fool could do it with a pencil, and he was not any fool.

His impatience blossomed into a deeper discontent that touched on many things but centered inevitably on himself. What had he expected to find in this sanctuary other than a carefully tended antique? And how could he justify the time he had spent elsewhere in the works, putting off the discovery of what he already knew? What would Mr. Stephenson think if he knew that the real reason for this delay was that he could spend an indefinite amount of time with her in the claustrophobic intimacy of that antechamber where the ledgers were kept, so airless on these close days that they seemed at times to be inhaling each other?

He had seen how the dark hair trembled when she shook her head in annoyance over the total of new purchases; had noted that the exertion of shifting the ledgers brought a flush to her face and even a beading of perspiration to her upper lip, which she dismissed with a brusque, mannish gesture; had felt desire as an emptiness, a void into which he might disappear at the suggestion of her breasts against the gray fabric when she reached to take an old account book down from the shelf; had taunted her with the impassivity of his eyes as he made her explain, not for the first time, how the price of Bigelow bar was determined, or the provision of charcoal balanced against the projected requirements. The walls pressed in upon them; the open door admitted air like a draft to their furnace; her father, a deaf sentry behind the turning of that post, coughed and muttered to himself, punctuating their silences.

In the two weeks since he had driven her to Truscott's house, Toma had watched her for some sign. Away from her office, he had no advantage at all, could compel nothing except polite inquiries or responses, seemed almost to vanish from her horizon. She had kissed him in the
carriage house, where the shadows reminded them both of the baths at Herculaneum. But in the light he was a different person: he saw it in her eyes, felt the distance between them like a garment, as shabby as his own, that could not be cast off.

Fowler Truscott's clothes had made an impression upon him. Mr. Stephenson had worn the same black frock coat to work every day, and while it was a clear sign of precedence and authority, he cared not if his sleeve brushed the idle gearing, and would take a sample or a piece of broken machinery upon his striped knee to have a better look at it. The ironmaster of Beecher's Bridge wore a suit of shapeless black rusted with age and mended many times over. But Truscott's flannels were the color of fresh butter, his open blue shirt set off the mottled carmine of silk around his neck, and the linen jacket, elegantly belted, hung as weightlessly from his shoulders as if it had been painted there. He himself had worn such finery once, and though his silken vest with its brilliant piping in no way resembled what Truscott wore, its gaudy uselessness, too, had been a kind of advertisement. When he had come around the rear of the car to open the door for Harriet, she did not seem aware of his presence, although she thanked him. She was looking at Truscott, who had thrown down his golf club and was crunching across the gravel to greet them, and in her expression he saw no pleasure or anticipation, but a kind of measuring calculation, as if she had just looked up from her ledger in a moment of abstraction.

He estimated the wheel to be over ten meters in diameter, the sort of behemoth that he had read about in the old
Scientific American
s but thought to be as extinct as those great reptiles buried in the deserts of the west. And at least a meter and a half wide, with tons of water in those buckets or troughs. He smiled at the thought of the little mills in his own country, buildings on stilts with the wheels flat in the water beneath and a simple vertical pole driving up into the belly of the mill to turn the stones. The wheels turned lazily in the river's current, the flow catching the angled vanes on one side and overcoming the drag of the returning vanes on the other. Such a simple thing: a child could make one for his own amusement, and it was called a butterfly.

But there was a man, Toma remembered, a kinsman of his father's who lived half a day's journey away on the road to the monastery nearest their home, where the snow fed a river that ran for four kilometers
before vanishing into a chasm in the ground. The mill in this place looked like all the others from a distance: the same pitch to the roof, the same arthritic poles holding the precious machinery up out of the current. But the wheel itself was not the same, for his cousin, a man with bright eyes and a lurching gait, had sited it differently. He had placed two great rocks so that the water must bypass the wheel, except for an angry jet that issued from between the rocks, caught one side of the wheel, and was hurled down and away by those whirling blades. Because there was no water to drag on the blades as they turned to meet the jet again, his cousin's wheel spun on into the early months of summer, when the flow in the streams had dried to a trickle and the men were grinding the grain by hand. His wife, a woman who always found fault, complained that the stones ran too fast, and the flour had a singed taste.

With his hand on the behemoth, Toma wondered about his cousin, about what was in his mind when he placed those stones. Where do such ideas begin? and where do they stop? Perhaps the old wheel had simply broken, and the man, partly out of frustration, had rebuilt it in a different way. Perhaps those rocks had been there all along, or nearly in the position that produced the jet. Perhaps also, the man had other things in his mind, and only the necessity of gathering and grinding the barley prevented him from experimenting further with his design, positioning the wheel vertically, which would have required belting or gears to drive the machinery. Tesla, in his lecture, dressed like a wizard, his eyes burning with unseen things, had declared to his audience that what he would show them—he gestured here in the direction of the glowing tubes and the friction generator at his back—would find no practical application for years to come. They are now without use, he said, challenging his listeners to follow his mind, taunting them, perhaps, but this is the future, make no doubt on that. Tesla, too, was a Serb, and perhaps as much his kinsman as the man with the bad leg.

And why was this wheel now not more than it was? Why not a gleaming steel turbine a fraction of this size? He imagined Tesla, in his place, contemplating the wheel: Burn it, he said…there is enough wood here to keep a house warm for a month in the winter.

Toma slapped the wheel with the heel of his hand, and the report filled the shed.

“What was that, d'you suppose?” The mason's voice surprised him: he had forgotten how close they were.

“Maybe it's just Horatio's wheel falling down by itself, in which case we needn't be fussing with these God-damned rocks. Maybe we'll be having the whole week off after all.”

“You wouldn't know what to do with a week off, Flaherty, and I don't think the wheel is falling down. I think there's somebody in there.”

“Well, it's all the same to me if it keeps that black bugger busy and off our backs. I says to him, ‘Why me? Can't I go home like everybody else?' And the man just looks at me, like I'm not worth the breath it would take to answer. The man has no respect.”

Soft laughter greeted this pronouncement. “Well, Flaherty, you're a good enough fellow and all, but I'm not sure I respect you, exactly.”

“And maybe you're as ignorant as he is, then, and you being bog Irish. But you don't turn your back on me when I speak my mind to you, or say good morning. And besides, you're white, which makes a difference as I see it.”