The Lightning Keeper (12 page)

He jammed his fist down. Olivia's elbow hit the table with a crack, and the blunt fingers were now locked on the forearm several inches above the wrist. Toma saw how pink those fingernails were, bright pink and bled white at the tips by the pressure of the grip. Olivia had made a sound like a cough, just one, but her face was a blank mask.

“Don't mind her,” said Horatio, “she's used to me.” He put her arm back on the table where he had found it. He fell silent and seemed so lost in reflection that Toma thought the conversation was over. He gathered himself to rise.

“What's your hurry?” Horatio looked up at him with an expression that Toma had not seen before, almost like a child. “If you ask me a question, you have to be willing to listen to the answer, the answer I want to make.” Toma could not remember having asked a question.

“You excuse me now for a couple of minutes. I've got to do my business. But you be sitting there when I come back.”

When Horatio had left by the back door, Olivia rubbed her elbow, looking at Toma as if she expected him to speak. He sighed, could think of nothing to say.

“You see how it is.”

“Was it always like this?”

“No. He was good to me after my mother died. Kept me because he promised her he would if anything happened. Keep me safe. Maybe he did. Anyway, it changed after he…”

“What?”

“You know, took me”

“And that was when?”

“I was twelve, that's when. Didn't know any better. ‘I need this' was all he said. Not like it was love.”

He stared at her without seeing, heard the blood ringing in his ears, felt the pull of his own need. He was by the pool under the pillar of rock, and Aliye was next to him, covered with fine dust and a filigree of his sweat and seed. Was that love?

“And does it shame you? First your mother, then you.”

“Maybe. I'm just glad she don't know.”

They heard Horatio whistling on the path.

“I oughtn't to tell all that,” she said low and quick, getting up and going to the stove. Then, louder, for Horatio's benefit, “There's more coffee if you want it.”

“Give it to him, he'll need it. I got a lot to say.”

 

A
ND INDEED HE DID,
a torrent of words from some broken dam, by turns a jeremiad, a local history, an autobiography, a comment on technology, an analysis of natural resources, a lesson on the virtues of self-reliance…and all of this barely punctuated by a word or question from Toma.

In the light of Horatio's reasoning, the history of American enterprise was the history of tolerances. Toma misunderstood the word at first, could not connect it to the tale of the measuring stick and the brass factory until Horatio put on the table before him another measuring
device, a precious thing in a velvet-lined case, like a jeweler's, that had calibrations down to one ten-thousandth of an inch. From a tenth to a ten-thousandth, and all in one century, said Horatio, two lifetimes if you put me and that son of a bitch in the brass factory together.

The study of cylinders was near to his heart, because the last job Horatio had before coming to Beecher's Bridge was shop foreman in the motor division of the Hartford Accelerator Automobile works, and it was there that the beautiful micrometer had been applied to engine parts milled to such a strict tolerance. Toma held the gauge in his hands. Now he understood the word, and he was beginning to understand his host.

Before Hartford Accelerator, Horatio had seen active service in Cuba with the Fourth Regiment of the Connecticut State Militia, the only black man among the noncommissioned officers. He had seen those poor boys—the Cuban conscripts, men of color, like us—cut down by the weapons he himself had helped make, for Horatio's job had been that of lathe operator in the Springfield Armory, where some of the first experiments in mass production were carried out, with the goal of creating interchangeable parts for all the rifles used by the United States Army. An interchangeable part, boy, being the truest test of your tolerances, your milling accuracy. You set that standard, and then you hit it every time. Every time, not seven out of eight, not nineteen out of twenty, otherwise you're going to get a bayonet up your ass while you try to jam the bolt home in a breech that's a hair shy. You follow?

Horatio himself, though skilled and experienced in metalworking, had ended up at the armory in the shop where the Blanchard lathe was turning out tens of thousands of identical wooden stocks for the 1893 model of the Springfield rifle. It was here that he learned about wood, about its various properties, the tricks it played on you, the memory held in its grain and forks that you could put to use only if you knew your job. Wasn't like iron or any other metal at all, more complicated for having been alive, and although Horatio was, by his own account, a man who never forgot anything, he could spend the rest of his life studying on wood and still not know all there was to know.

After Cuba—and now, although he did not mention it, with a nearly white child in tow—Horatio had found a position with Hartford Accelerator, and had worked his way up using his head and the
skill in his hands until management had no choice but to make him foreman in the motor division. And even then he'd had to fight for it, even with that piece of paper in his pocket. You ever seen men fight with pipe wrenches? No? And here Horatio rolled back his sleeve to show the furrowed flesh of his forearm, long since healed, and canted his head so that the light fell on the broken cheekbone covered by a long, smooth scar. That other fellow looked a lot worse by the time we finished. I never had trouble with any man there after that time.

And how did he succeed, in spite of his color? By using his hands, and his head, and by never forgetting or throwing anything away. You, boy, that's a lesson you could learn: you must know a thing inside and out before you try to change it, and even then you don't throw it away. It didn't do any good, said Horatio, to be asking why the Bigelow Iron Company didn't look like some picture out of an encyclopedia, or why they didn't put a hot blast to that fuel and ore, then send it through some fancy puddling or shingling furnace. Why not make steel in one of those Bessemer contraptions instead of plugging along with the warm-blast cast iron for wheels, and the hammered iron, the wrought, for tools and bolts and whatnot? The right question, the useful question, was why things
are
as they are.

There's a logic here, you follow? You have charcoal, not coke, for fuel: can't change that. For the ore you have the finest, purest stuff this side of Sweden, the Salisbury hematite, and you wouldn't
want
to change that. You don't want to go adding crap to it with a hot blast, you want to cook it long and slow, then cast it the same way, so the rim on that wheel is tough and the core of it hard, and no open hearth in the state of Pennsylvania can touch the Bigelow wheel for quality, even though they can make them as fast as doughnuts.

Did Toma know what it took to be an inventor? He did not. Well, according to Mr. Thomas Edison, it took imagination and an ample supply of junk. Here Horatio made a gesture with his hand to embrace the entire contents of the silk mill, to indicate his mastery of all that lay in view. Know what's in all those piles? Toma shook his head. Ideas. Toma did not agree, and ventured the word “solutions.” No, said Horatio, ideas, or parts of them, trapped, you might say, in the wood or the metal and waiting for me to come along and get it right: complete the idea, free it. Toma didn't have to take Horatio's word for this, but it
would be hard to argue against Mr. Edison if he said that's how it's done.

Horatio Washington seemed to have talked himself to a standstill, and they were both silent now. But Toma was thinking about Edison on the one hand, and Tesla on the other; Tesla, who did not look strong enough to pick up one of Edison's pieces of junk, and whose tools of creation, as Toma imagined them, were a spare white room, a piece of paper, a pencil. Or Rudolf Diesel, who imagined the engine that bore his name, deduced parts of the process from the laws of physics, inferred others, and never even bothered to construct a working model of his machine.

Horatio blinked and seemed surprised to see Toma still sitting at the table. He rapped twice on his mug with a spoon to show that it was empty, and Olivia came with the coffeepot. “No more questions?”

“Some other time, perhaps. You have given me much to think on.”

“Well, here's a question for you: what are you doing living up there with those folks? Learning to be a white man?”

“I am a white man.” Having said this, Toma blushed because he could feel Olivia's eyes on him.

Horatio laughed. “That's what you hope to be, just like Olivia there.”

“I know what I am. What's got into you today, Horatio?”

“She says that, but maybe she sees a pretty boy like you, no offense, who looks white, and maybe then she thinks she can be white too. And maybe when you're up there to the ironmaster's house, and using the right fork at the right time, then maybe you're thinking you can be one of them.”

“No. I think…”

“Speak up, boy.”

“It cannot happen.”

“See? We agree on something after all. You are as much a nigger as I am, or Olivia, and the sooner you understand that, learn to live with it, the better off you'll be. Won't go getting your feelings hurt, or hoping for things you can't have.”

 

H
E HAD LOST TRACK
of the time, but now the letter was finished and sealed. His clothes lay on the bed, folded and ready for the canvas satchel, beside them the painting that would have to be wrapped in his cleanest shirt, then wrapped again in further layers to preserve it on the train ride back to New York. One corner of it had been bent during the car journey as a result of his haste. He must not let that happen again. He wished he had a piece of cardboard, but he did not want to ask for such a thing because she would know what it was for, and he did not know how to say good-bye. The train would leave before dawn. The letter would explain everything. It would be easier that way.

He took off his shirt and took from around his neck the woven silk cross, laid it beside the painting. He would leave the room clean for its next occupant, whoever that might be.

He was on his hands and knees in the corner behind the bed, marveling at the accumulation of dust and mouse droppings, when he heard her tread on the stairs, a rapping on the door. He did not respond. Perhaps she would go away.

“I brought your dinner. I thought you were not feeling well.” She tried to cover her embarrassment by arranging the plate and the setting on his table, and there was the envelope with her initial on it. And there on the bed were his belongings.

“You are leaving.”

“Yes, tomorrow morning, very early.”

“I see. I would have wished to discuss Mr. Stephenson's letter with you, and the particulars of the contract.” He could not read the tone in her voice. Sadness disguised as reproof?

“I know the terms; he has written to me, as you know. It seems fair. If all goes well, Mr. Stephenson will have his wheels and the Bigelow Company will make a good profit.”

“If all goes well.”

“Yes.”

“And is that what you wrote in this letter?”

“No, there is more. I was asking you to return to the library those books, and thanking you for having me in your house. Also, I wished for your happiness. I do not know if the words in my letter are the right ones.”

“And we would not see each other again?”

“I did not think you would want that. Your life will be different soon.”

“If I marry Mr. Truscott?”

“Yes. It was easier for me to write that.”

Harriet sighed. “Everyone has decided that I will marry Mr. Truscott, although he has yet to ask me.”

“And if he asks? Will you not do this?”

“I don't know.”

“I am thinking you will do it.”

The effort to feign interest in the objects on the desk was unbearable, and so she faced him, the bed and his belongings between them. The light was failing, the color of his eyes already lost. Soon those fine chiselings of flesh would dissolve, leaving only his luminous outline, and by morning he would have vanished altogether. The shaft of the broom might have been a spear, the pan his shield. “I do not think I can love him.”

“Perhaps it is the thing you must do. Perhaps love will come later.” How much better to have left without seeing her, without this humiliation. He dropped the implements to the floor and moved around the bed to stand facing her, an arm's length away.

“What do you want from me?”

She could not miss the anger in his voice, or the sharp smell of him. It would be better for her, too, to order her thoughts in a letter, but by then he would be gone, and that was the fact that no pretty phrase would change. In this moment of bewilderment, she fastened on his imminent departure as the only certain thing, the beacon on the rocks.

“I want you to stay.”

“And do what?”

“Make certain that all goes well. You know we are ruined if this thing fails.”

“You could choose a safer course: let someone else manufacture those wheels.”

“My father has fixed his mind on this contract. It is an obsession with him. And you have seen my ledgers. There does not seem to be much safety there.”

“Mr. Stephenson…”

“I will make it a condition of the contract. He will not refuse, and if you are here he will be more forgiving.”

“I cannot betray him. You cannot ask that.”

“If you leave, you betray me. Would you do that?”

“Never.” He could no longer see her face distinctly, and this moment between them had lost its boundaries. “Never.” He spoke the word softly this time. It was, as she saw it, the seal of her triumph.