The Lightning Keeper (11 page)

“But you think it's all crap, don't you? Just tear it down and build something else. And with what? You don't know enough to ask the right questions. Where is that man anyway?”

Horatio stomped across the office. “Look here at this picture. Learn something while you're waiting.” Toma followed him to the far
wall, next to the ironmaster's desk, and Harriet rose to stand just behind her door. Again she admired the particular set of Toma's shoulders and neck, wondering as she did so if it was possible to conclude from such a glimpse that he came from a foreign place.

“What is this?”

“That would be the Bigelow Rifle that used to sit in the yard here, and the big fella standing right behind it is Aaron Bigelow, the old man's daddy. Everybody in this picture is dead now, except that boy standing out in front; he's the man here now. And down below is the wheel, where you can't see it, same as I found it when I came here, and no house on it or nothing. They were worthless, those paddles. Worthless.”

“So that much you have changed.”

“I did what I could, but by the time I got here it was all rundown…wasn't much that could be done. The time this picture was taken, you could have built your factory or bought yourself any turbine you wanted, if they'd had such a thing. But the old man had different ideas on how to spend his money, and now it's all gone.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Maybe. What else do you see in the picture?”

“Well, the workmen….”

“Look at the ironmaster. See how big he is? Not just the gut on him? Makes all of his men look like boys? That's ambition you're looking at, and pride, and dreams of something so big it broke him. His son didn't have that, or if he had it once it's long gone.”

Horatio seemed to have talked himself out of his bad temper, and Toma was looking not at the photograph itself but at the glass in the frame, where the half-closed door behind him was reflected, and where something had moved.

“Tell you what else I see,” continued Horatio, in a tone that was almost friendly. “I see a man so big and so sure of himself, why he's master of the world and not just some damn factory. And you know what he's thinking standing behind the cannon, or what he wants everyone else to think? That thing's his dick, never mind it's the wrong color: a big black dick aimed at the world. In his dreams,” Horatio mocked. “In his dreams.”

To Harriet's relief, Toma made no reply at all.

 

H
E HEARD VOICES WITHIN,
a thin, querulous demand and a grudging monotone in response. He knocked tentatively at first, then more forcefully. The echo spoke of a generous space, perhaps the whole of the old mill, one hundred feet by forty. Stone piers punctuated the vertical wooden siding, and a sagging monitor ran the length of the roof, many of its windows patched with board or roofing paper. It looked to Toma as if the roof would go in a good snowstorm.

He waited, hearing no footsteps. Now the clank of a skillet followed by an expletive. Not a good time to call, it seemed. He sighed and wondered if he should go. But there would not be another chance, so he called out, “Mr. Washington, are you there?”

The door opened violently and Horatio Washington stood there in his trousers and bare feet, the suspenders caught between his legs. He looked at Toma as if he did not know him and blinked in the bright sun. The eyes did not look good.

“Who is that?” A woman's voice.

“What do you want?” Horatio's voice was thick with sleep, or drink, or both.

“I thought we could talk. But I can come back…”

“I have one day off a week, and this is it.”

“I will wait until you eat your breakfast.”

The woman came to the door, staying in the shadow. Toma nodded to her and took off his cap. He had seen her before, in town at Wright's store, but had not connected her to Horatio.

“Who are you?” The voice, in spite of its tone, had a strange music in it. Toma squinted to see her face, but could make out only the shape of it in a shock of dark hair.

“My name is Thomas.”

“That isn't your real name. Tell her the other.”

“Toma. Toma Pekočevié.”

“Tell her where you're from.”

“I am from Montenegro.” Toma watched Horatio's face as he said the words. Horatio smiled at him.

“Just wanted to hear it said the right way.”

The woman stepped around Horatio and into the light. “My name is Olivia.” She offered her hand and Toma took it, admiring the fine bones and the chapped cleanliness of her almond skin.

“Olivia is my wife.”

Toma nodded respectfully. The word surprised him. Daughter, his eyes told him, in spite of her color.

“I ain't his wife,” said Olivia, looking still at Toma, and only now releasing his hand. “Not 'less he marries me.”

“There isn't another word, Olivia, not one I'd care to use.”

Olivia sighed and glanced at Horatio, at his drooping suspenders. “You eaten, Mr…?”

“Toma.”

“Did you eat, Toma?”

“No, but I came to talk to Mr. Washington.”

“Mr. Washington is going to eat now, so you might as well. Horatio, we need more eggs, and then you'll want to put some clothes on.”

 

H
E GUESSED THAT NOBODY
, guest or stranger, ever came here. Her hands were busy, but her eyes followed him as he made his way like a visitor in a museum from one exhibit to another, trying to grasp the ordering principle in the piles of salvaged material, some in shadow, some lit by shafts of light from those high windows.

“All that is Horatio's stuff, and I don't touch it. I keep my kitchen clean, that's all. How do you like your eggs?”

“The way you will make them for him.” He walked back to the table, uncertain of the forms of civility here, remembering how she had held his hand for longer than was necessary.

“In the country where I was born this building would be very grand indeed.” She looked around her as if she too were a stranger: the vault of dusty air, the far wall covered in spools and bobbins of fading silk, the figured cloth that curtained off the corner behind her.

“It's big, maybe, but it don't seem like a house. I'd sleep better if Horatio would put me up a wall. Always wanted a real bedroom. It don't matter to him 'cause he hardly sleeps anyway…up all night doin' this, doin' that.”

“He works very hard,” said Toma, steering the conversation away from the personal. “Everyone at the ironworks says so, even…”

“Even the ones who hate him?”

“Even the ones who are not friendly to him.”

“There must be plenty of them. Horatio never had no trouble making enemies. Being black is all it takes.” She looked up from her work and caught Toma's eyes. “Oh yes, I am that. Almost white, you're thinking. Almost white, and ain't it a pity?”

“No man, I think, would want you different.” It was a foolish thing to say, and he knew it.

“Is that so? Sometimes I wish I was something else. I'm what Horatio wants, nothing more. Maybe that should be enough.”

She tried to blow some hair from her face, then raised her floured hands to him.

“Will you please? Should have tied it up.” She closed her eyes as he took the strands of hair and tucked them back into the dark tangle. Just above the right temple was a patch of pure white hair.

“How did that happen?”

“What? Oh. In Cuba, when my mother died.”

“You are from Cuba?”

“No, Louisiana. My mother followed Horatio there when the war broke out. She worked in the laundry. Seems that was the only thing them Spanish soldiers could hit with their cannon. Like to blow us both up. I hate to think about it.”

“So he is your father?”

“No. It ain't so bad as that.”

A heavy clumping of boots was followed by the door opening. She lifted her hands out of the bowl. “See? That's what I'd be if I was white.”

“I'm clean,” announced Horatio. “Where's my shirt?” He put seven eggs on the table.

“Wait.” She wiped her hands and disappeared behind the curtain. “Here is a clean one. For company. For Sunday.”

 

H
ORATIO HELD UP HIS MUG,
wrapping his hand around it to show Toma the handle in profile.

“How thick is it? The handle.”

“A quarter of an inch, perhaps.”

“That's five-sixteenths, just shy. How do I know?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

Horatio drank from the mug, set it down, and put his thumb and index finger to the dimension. “I can feel it or I can see it, either way. But you put a caliper to that and you'll see I'm right.” Toma said nothing, drank his own coffee, waited for Horatio to speak again.

“There was a man I swept for over at the brass factory in Torrington when I was just starting out. Ran away from home and all those fucking tobacco plants and I was living under a bridge. A tube threader, he was, and he never let me touch that machine of his, just looking was all he let me do between fetching the raw pipe and taking away the sweepings back to the foundry. And he had his calipers and gauges on his belt, and this old rule there too, older than he was and beat to hell. He'd hit me with it a couple of times, and I thought to tell him: You want to get my attention you got to use something bigger than that. I laughed at him, not letting him see, but thinking of the broken shaft or harness straps my daddy had used on me. One day he
shows me the rule, and you can just barely see that it's marked out in tenths. And when he was a boy like me, see, he'd worked in a shop, an apprentice, he said, and they made boilers and steam engines and such, and this rule was what they used to measure, making machines like that with a tenth of an inch of slop. A wonder they weren't all killed. And he kept that old rule on his belt 'til the day he died.”

Toma registered polite interest with a noise in his throat. “You were an apprentice, then?”

“Sweeper, I said. Never had a nigger apprentice in that shop.”

Horatio took Olivia's arm from the table as if it were a piece of pipe or a tool. “Hold that thing up there, girl. See that?” He jiggled his hand so that Toma could see how the wrist rattled in the loose circle of his fingers. “Imagine your cylinder like this, and that's your piston, with a tenth of an inch of slop all around, or maybe, if the man's got a steady hand and good eye, only a sixteenth or a thirty-second difference in the bore of your cylinder and the diameter of the piston. Me, I can see it right down to a sixty-fourth. Well, you can pack that piston with leather rings or something so it fits better, and all your steam won't blow out, but in the long run your rods and gearing and cranks are bound to wobble and break down because they are a little shy somewhere, and in a couple of hours you will have to fix that fucker, and in a couple of weeks or months you might as well build a new one from the ground up.” Horatio shook Olivia's wrist again. “Doesn't matter if it's a coupling, tie-rods, or a cylinder, what you want is tight.”