The Lightning Keeper (10 page)

“No denying the man is black, but who's to say what the difference is.”

“Ahh….”

“Come now, bucko, do you think there's another man, black, white, or green, who knows what Horatio Washington does, and could keep that thing cranking three hundred days out of the year? Have you never been down there to the place he keeps below the falls, that workshop of his? Sure he's rebuilt this thing piece by piece without anybody's help, and old Mr. Crawford—d'you remember him? or was he dead before your time?—old Mr. Crawford, who kept the wheel before, and was a fair hand at it, even he'd tip his hat to Horatio.”

Silence, punctuated by several savage hammer blows, answered this remark, and the other voice continued, “And as for white, who's to say about that? The woman down there…wouldn't she pass for white with you?”

Flaherty groaned. “Sweet Jesus, what an ass on that woman, though I'm thinking you're too old to notice such details. An ass like some statue, I tell you, and a face. Well, now you've put the thought in my head, there's the answer to my week off: while Horatio is up here tin
kering with his wheel, I'll be down there doing a bit of tinkering on my own, putting the pole to her every hour like the chimes in the church. I guess I'd have to say she's white enough for me.”

“Your pole, Flaherty, your pole…and you wanting respect. If you're asking me, the closest you'll get to her is having her face or some other part of her in your mind as you're putting that pole of yours to your own wife, meaning no disrespect. And as for the church bells, maybe you can tell the father next Sunday what goes through your mind when you're lying in your own bed at home.”

The door to the shed of the wheel pit opened abruptly, dazzling Toma, and a voice, neither loud nor hushed, demanded: “Who are you?”

“Good morning, Mr. Washington. It is Toma Pekočevié.”

“Who?”

“Peacock. Thomas Peacock, and I am here…”

“Oh, I know what you're here for. What I don't know is why you didn't ask me. Nobody touches that wheel but Horatio Washington. There is even a sign on the door.”

“I saw the sign. Mr. Bigelow said that I may go every place in the works, see everything, ask any question.”

“I don't remember you asking me any questions.”

“I thought I should see the wheel for myself.”

“Yes, a man of science. Well, now that you have been looking at it with the lights out for a while, what questions do you have?”

“I have not yet found my questions. I have been thinking.”

“Mr. Peacock, why don't you get your sorry wet ass out of that water and do your thinking on dry land? I don't want to be picking pieces of you out of my wheel when we start her up again. Jesus Christ, first it's a stump knocking my head race all to pieces, and now it's some damn Polack with his hands all over my wheel, trying to find his questions. Get out, I said.”

“I am not from Poland, Mr. Washington. I am from Montenegro.”

“What?”

“Montenegro.
Crna Gora
in my language, Montenegro in yours.”

Horatio Washington snorted at this information, and more than any of his words, the laughter grated on Toma.

“Monty Negro. Monty…” and here Horatio's voice broke again to a giggle. “So you're not a Polack after all. I apologize for that. You come from Monty Negro, so I guess that makes you a monty nigger. What do you think: is a Polack dumber than a monty nigger?”

Horatio bent so that his face was just inches from Toma's. He did not flinch when Toma's hand came slowly out of the water, not clenched but open, and understood that Toma wanted to be helped out of the wheel pit. Their hands clasped, clasped but were not released once Toma stood dripping on the stones. The younger man now thrust his face close to Horatio's and exerted a grip that might crush or cripple.

“In my country, in the Kingdom of Montenegro, a man who uses such words is prepared to die for them.”

Horatio was caught unprepared. He was himself a strong man, but he could not shift his hand to take purchase on the other.

Toma released his grip and turned his back to Horatio, offering any revenge the other might care to take. “Here is my question: why is this thing, your wheel, made of wood at all? Steel would be lighter, faster, stronger.”

“Sounds like you have the answer to your own question.”

“And why this design? This is what they have in the old books, when America belonged to the English: it is called a breast wheel, yes? A maximum efficiency of sixty percent, yes? But that was more than one hundred years ago. No one builds such a thing today. You build a turbine, even the very simplest on the Fourneyron model, and you have seventy-five percent efficiency. And the high-pressure turbine, a Leffel, with double draught pipes and runners, even higher.” In the grip of his enthusiasm Toma now turned back to Horatio, to that expressionless face that was the color of the shadows in this place. “I have a book with pictures of these engines, if you wish to look at them.”

“Pictures. That's nice, somebody paying you to look at pictures. You won't get your face broke or your hands dirty that way, won't even raise a sweat. You have anything else that needs saying?” Although Horatio's words had an edge, he sounded tired rather than angry.

“Nothing more. That was my question, if you would please to answer it.”

“If a man knows the answer, then he isn't asking a question. Or if he is, then he's going to use the answer on the other fellow, hurt him with it. I don't want any part of your questions.”

“You will not answer?” asked Toma, registering shock.

“Tell you what, Mr. Engineer, why don't we move this discussion up to the office, where you can ask the man himself why this place is what it is, why we've been doing the same old things pretty much the same way—without your fine ideas, of course—since before you were born, or your daddy neither. And what do I know? Maybe you're so smart you'll look under his desk and find a sack with a million dollars that he just plumb forgot, and then you can build your toys and we'll all live happy 'til the angel blows his horn.”

“You mock me.”

“You could say that. And maybe when you get finished changing everything to your liking, then I'll have more time to do the job right…sit there all day and make jokes about Mr. Engineer. But in the meantime, you get out of this house. After you, boy.”

 

I
N SPITE OF THE HEAT,
in spite of the piles of dusty account books on her table and the brimming tray of correspondence, Harriet Bigelow sat in a cocoon of pleasurable reflection occasioned by her father's absence, by the enveloping silence of the works, and by the catalogue of plumbing fixtures open upon her lap. She felt as if she had slipped through a crack in her world, like a child in the attic who lifts the lid on a trunk or finds a curiously carved malacca cane and lives a lifetime in the span of a forgotten hour.

It was a guilty pleasure to which she surrendered, comprising vanity, a measure of avarice, and, as she was most uncomfortably aware, hypocrisy with respect to her father. Had she not spoken somewhat sharply to him about the lure of those catalogues, of the wasteful and fantastic ideas that proceeded from such reading matter? She loved him with all her heart—a phrase she sometimes repeated aloud to herself—but cherished him most in the abstract. Today she was grateful for the overlapping accident of the stoppage of the works and her father's toothache.

She had arrived at ten, glowing from her walk and from the gentle stimulation of her breathing and posture class at the Hooker Gymnasium. At eight-thirty the heat had already been too oppressive for exercise with the Indian clubs or quoits, and even the more energetic elements of posture were, by tacit agreement, deferred until the following Tuesday. So intent was she on the task of drawing every iota of goodness from each deep breath, on keeping the shoulders square, the spine centered, and the abdomen taut, that she did not notice the silence of the works until she had her hand on the latch of the office door.

She was curious but not alarmed. There had been no siren, as there would have been to summon help in case of a serious accident. She heard now the clanging of hammers and saw below her Flaherty and Jessup among the torn stones in the empty headrace. She had a practiced eye, and calculated that they would not finish in time to start the wheel again before the end of this shift. A day lost, she thought. Inside, on the corner of her table, she found a note from her father, detailing the accident to the headrace and the good humor of the boys when he sent them home. He was off to the dentist to see to that tooth. A day lost, but a day paid for.

Harriet's duties at the Bigelow Iron Company were unsanctified by any title or compensation. She had come to help out in the wake of Mr. Burdick's sudden demise three years since, and the tidying of papers soon gave way to a reading of same, then to tracking certain invoices to entries in the ledgers in the passageway off the ironmaster's office. She was impressed by the precision of Mr. Burdick's mind—so at odds with the chaos next door—and by the fact that his copperplate hand so closely resembled her own.

Through gradual mastery of the accounting functions of the works, and through her ever-expanding practical knowledge of its production, Harriet's role came to be acknowledged by every workman in the Bigelow hierarchy whose understanding extended beyond the hammer or shovel in hand. It was not acknowledged by the ironmaster himself, who took an uncomplicated delight in her presence here each day but remained ignorant of what she actually did in her little space. His deafness served as a convenient barrier between him and the
many consultations that took place just out of sight around that corner, for there was a second, interior door to what she referred to, with subtle emphasis, as my office rather than the office.

Her father's absence meant that Harriet found herself, now, without anything that absolutely required her attention until tomorrow. Her ledgers were current as of yesterday, and the payroll was a cloud three days distant. There was the correspondence, of course, but that could wait; on the very top of the pile was a letter that she was particularly disinclined to open, as it would ruin her day to receive the monthly advisory from the Iron Bank. Inside that cream envelope there would be a sheet of figures recording the deposits, withdrawals, loan and mortgage balances, and interest charged. In addition, there would be, quite probably, a note from Fowler Truscott himself apologizing for such exigencies of the business world, and dismissing them as well, or nearly so. She wasn't to worry: he, Fowler Truscott, had a special concern for the financial situation of the Bigelow Iron Company.

Her annoyance at the unread letter from Truscott was brought to bear upon the catalogues at the bottom of the pile. She consigned all but one of them to the wastebasket beneath her table. Her father would, in a week or so, inquire about this one or that one, and she would have to tell him a little fib. But the last catalogue of all was not discarded. At first she wondered what this display of plumbing fixtures could be doing here. A mistake, she concluded, given the primitive facilities available at the works. She had used the little shed only once, making all possible haste, and on the way out had encountered that poor hulking fellow with his flies already unbuttoned. He covered himself with his hands and mumbled apologies in a language she could not identify. Never again, she vowed, and ever since had used a chamber pot tucked in a corner of the supply closet upstairs.

Durock
. The very name on the commode in the Madison Square Garden Hotel. And here it was with an oak water tank above and solid brass piping connecting the two items. She laughed, as if to dismiss the idea, for the ironmaster's house, with the exception of some primitive piping and drains in the kitchen, was unplumbed, and her father had expressed disapproval at a neighbor's remodeling to include a bath and an indoor water closet. God did not intend such things to happen in a
Christian house, he said. Harriet had said nothing at the time, but in the most recent issue of
McClure's Magazine
there had been an article on the Comforts of Home that had struck a chord: Might not her own home include such elegance? A warm tiled chamber with tub and shower enclosed in a curtain, a porcelain pedestal sink before the mirror, and, yes, a flush commode set discreetly in its own closet, windowed for proper ventilation. Her experience of such things was limited: a couple of hotels and, most recently, the little wallpapered chamber in Fowler Truscott's house that he referred to as the powder room.

Harriet nudged the door with her foot so that she would have time to put the catalogue away in case her father returned. A quarter of an hour later the door to the outer office did open, but she knew at once that it was not her father's step. Two men, at least, with much shuffling of feet and a constricting silence. She did not rise or move. A shadow squeezed through the crack in her door.

“Where do you suppose that man went to?” demanded Horatio in a tone of hollow anger. “The one time I want him he isn't here, God damn it.”'

“I did not see him go,” answered Toma, “and the car is still here. Perhaps he is…you know….”

“Well, I guess we can wait for him to do his business down there. Will you look at this stuff on the table? Amazing. What does he need this shit for…build another factory?”

“Another factory would be a good idea,” said Toma, almost to himself.

“Don't get me started, boy. The reason we are here and not down in my wheelhouse is so you can tell him what's wrong with his setup. I haven't the time to explain why water runs down the hill instead of up.”

“You do not understand me. I did not give you any insult.”

“Not directly, maybe….”

“You were too angry to hear my words.”