The Lightning Keeper (16 page)

“And if I might continue on a more personal note…”

This he might have done had not Harriet seized the floor with an account of Toma's heroic success in clearing furnace number 3. When she paused for breath she saw a look of puzzlement on Fowler Truscott's face, amusement on Lucy's.

“To the ironworks, then, and to Herculean labors,” she said by way of recovery, and drank off a good deal of her own glass.

The conversation never did return to the personal note that Senator Truscott had intended, but his disappointment might have been tempered by observing how animated a conversationalist Harriet became with that swallow of champagne and with the succeeding sips.

Home at last after this very full day, Harriet had turned down the bed and was brushing out her hair when she heard Lucy call out to her.

“Cousin, you are not to leave me alone in this bed. There is loads of room for us both, just as there always was.” It was true that they had always shared the same bed wherever they happened to be, and bed was the place where secrets were told. Harriet would rather have kept her thoughts to herself tonight, but it would be silly to make a fuss over such a thing, and unfriendly too.

She settled herself on her side of the bed and without thinking put her arm under Lucy's pillow. This was how the housekeeper used to find them in the morning, after they had talked and read the night away: Harriet on her back and making a whisper of a snore, Lucy curled on her side, pillowed by her cousin's arm.

“I know you did it on purpose.”

“What could you be thinking of?” It was no use: Lucy knew her too well, and she felt the beginning of a smile.

“You know very well that Senator Truscott was on the point of proposing marriage to you.” Lucy turned her head to study Harriet's face, then tickled her. “You faker…admit it!”

“Yes, yes! No, stop, or I shall go away to the other bed and leave you to your nightmares. I just didn't want it to happen. He kissed me.”

“Where? I mean when?”

“The other day, in his office. And he didn't ask me, he just did it.”

“Well,” said Lucy, reflecting on her own broader experience, “it has to start somewhere, and the responsibility does seem to fall heavily upon them. Cecil had to be guided to the mark, though he does it very well now.”

“Lucy! I mean you haven't told me a thing, and now…”

“I'll tell you all about him later. He's nice, and I'm sure you'll like him. It's just that he's not very interesting in the abstract. Maybe when he's older and has made a success of his career, or, I don't know, been to Africa.”

“You mean like Senator Truscott?”

“Well, it was fascinating, the bit about the water buffalo and all the natives falling down and running away, and only President Roosevelt's shot, at the very last minute, to save him. Do you think every word was quite true?”

“Dear Lucy, perhaps it is you who should be marrying Senator Truscott, and give me Cecil, or nobody at all. Something was wrong tonight, and I don't think I can bear to talk about it any more just now.”

“Oh, you'll sleep on it and everything will come out right. Anyway, what I really want to know is who this Toma fellow is. He sounds to me like a character from Grimm: desperate and heroic and doomed. And you did positively glow when you were talking about him.”

 

I
T WAS A CONVERSATION
that could not be exhausted in the course of a single night, unless they were prepared to sleep the following morning away, and Harriet, mindful of all the things waiting on her desk, retreated drowsily before Lucy's cogent questions and concerns, yielding ground to experience and common sense, saying at last—Oh, I'm sure you're right…and you are so kind to worry on my behalf. But we'll talk about it tomorrow night, after you have seen him. She fell asleep as she was saying these words, and in her dream the dinner party was replayed, with the dramatic revision of Toma's entrance, an uninvited guest but not unexpected, and when he took her hand and asked her to marry him, no one was surprised.

Meeting Toma in the flesh did not produce the anticipated effect on Cousin Lucy, who arrived at the ironworks shortly after noon, as Harriet had suggested. Toma did not show up until one o'clock. Harriet had been keeping an eye out for him through the long morning at her ledgers, and with Lucy there, admiring the cunning space and seated in Toma's chair, Harriet made an attempt to hide her concern under a show of busywork.

“I won't say a word,” said Lucy, and proceeded to make conversation as if someone else had uttered the vow of silence. Harriet bent her head to the ledger and felt an odd sensation in her stomach that she attributed to hunger. Lucy broke off in mid-sentence: “I don't suppose this could be him coming along now.”

The window gave onto the dusty yard, which allowed Harriet to
keep an eye on the daily routine of the works, the flow of deliveries and expedited goods. As soon as she saw Toma she had a premonition of awkwardness. His face was set in an uncharacteristic expression of ill humor, and there was something about his gait that suggested pain, or the sudden onset of age. Before a word was spoken she began to formulate excuses and lines of defense.

Lucy talked too much and too brightly, Toma hardly at all. He would not eat lunch with them, even though Harriet had sent out for his favorite sandwich of pot-roasted beef. He had no appetite, he explained, for in addition to his great fatigue, he had seen the newspaper in the general store, and the headlines told of the assassination of an Austrian archduke, the crown prince himself, by a conspiracy of criminal Serbs in the city of Sarajevo.

“Sarajevo!” said Lucy with emphasis. “It doesn't sound like a real place at all. Wherever do you suppose it is?” She caught a look on Toma's face that almost silenced her. “Well, I have, of course, heard of Austria, so I suppose this must be something serious.”

“Serious, yes. Serious.” Toma had turned away from Lucy to gaze at the dust in the yard. “There must be a war. It is what the Austrians want, and now they have their excuse. I would say it is very serious.”

“Will you…?”

“No. There is nothing to be done yet, here or there. My friend Harwell will write to me if he can, and I will ask him for news of my people.”

There were desultory attempts to lift Toma's gloom, but for the most part the cousins ate their sandwiches in silence, ashamed of their hunger. His distraction gave Harriet the opportunity to study his face as if from behind a screen or through a knothole. Lucy's words, so gaily spoken, came back to her: desperate, heroic, doomed. Never had she felt such empathy for him; never had she felt so far removed.

They retired to bed that night after an early supper. The heat had taken all appetite away, and Amos Bigelow declared that a week of dining with Senator Truscott would kill him. Now, even with the windows wide open and the candles snuffed, the bedroom was oppressive. Harriet was conscious of a sheen of perspiration, a dampening of her sheerest nightgown. They had come to bed not to sleep but to talk.

“He is, it must be admitted, a striking presence.” Lucy's words hung in the dark, close air. She giggled: “The strong, silent type, I suppose.”

“It was just that he was so tired, and I think he may have hurt himself. And that wretched business in the papers.”

“My dear, he's positively monosyllabic. I'm sure I've never met a man with more limited conversation. And on top of it all, I had the distinct impression that he was judging me. Did you see how he turned his back on me?”

“You must make allowances, Lucy; he is not as he seemed today, and I'm sure he likes you.”

“That's the silliest thing I have ever heard you say. Ever, ever. There is only one explanation: you are in love.”

“I am not.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Harriet, do you think I wasn't watching? You had calf eyes for him as he sat there and brooded.”

“What are they?” asked Harriet, hoping to distract her cousin.

“You know, going all soft inside, lapping up his every word, and looking at him in…in invitation.”

“Lucy!”

“I'm just telling you how it looked to me, and I think someone must bring you to your senses. Think what you'd be throwing away.”

By way of rebuttal, Harriet drew out from under the mattress an envelope that was beginning to show signs of wear and lit her candle. She read to Lucy from Toma's farewell. Not the whole letter, of course, but the paragraph in which he wished her well and spoke in praise of the senator, framing it as a gentle valedictory to his own fallen hopes. Harriet thought the passage was quite exquisite; it reminded her of something she had read, an English writer, perhaps an essayist, though she could not put a name to him.

“That's all very pretty, but I think he's making my point for me, advancing the senator's cause.”

“Dear Lucy, I don't want anyone making up my mind for me, not even you. I don't think you can quite see how I feel.”

As if responding to a challenge, Lucy reached across and took the candle, holding it close to Harriet's face. Harriet strangled a shriek as the splash of hot wax struck her breast, burning her through the voile.

“Has
he
kissed you as well?” Harriet flushed and could not answer.
“Well, he has, then. You're not fooling me for a minute.” Lucy blew out the candle and Harriet drew a long breath in the dark.

After a minute or so, during which Harriet imagined that she was to be abandoned to a sleepless vigil, Lucy spoke again, all sternness gone. “I want you to tell me everything. Will you do that?” Harriet's tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She made no reply. “Then it must be worse than I thought, almost,” and here Lucy gave a throaty little laugh of complaisance, “almost like that boy in Italy who—”

“Lucy, for the sake of our friendship, do be quiet. Toma
is
the boy from Italy. That is all you need to know.”

There was another silence now, and Harriet, having opened the floodgate in her own mind, was afraid that she might, this once, have imposed her will on Lucy. There was something funny about the way she was breathing.

“Lucy?”

Lucy had been weeping, trying to hold it in, and she gave way now to her feelings. She threw her arm over Harriet and buried her face in the pillow, with the result that Harriet was suffocated in the mass of blond hair. Lucy sat up.

“Oh, it's much too hot for this.” She was half sobbing and half laughing as she said this. “I can't believe it, Harriet. It's like a novel, a bad novel, I hope.”

“Why bad?”

“Because in the good novels everybody ends up dead or unhappy, and in the bad ones…do you see? That's why I read the bad ones. And I don't want you to be unhappy. I couldn't bear that. I feel so stupid not remembering that name. I should have known all along.”

“It doesn't do any good for you to worry about me. Maybe I'll have a perfectly ordinary life.”

“Has he kissed you again, I mean here?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Harriet. I don't think poor Senator Truscott stands a chance. It will be a terrible shock to him.”

“Lucy, nothing is happening. It was just once, and it won't happen again.”

“I hope you're right, and you must be sure not to let it happen again. The third time would seal it, I think. There would be no going back.”

Harriet stared into the dark for a long time. Lucy, fast asleep, lay against her like an ember, and those warnings were like beacons in her mind, leading her to try such disaster and disgrace in the fire of her imagination. Distant flashes lit the sky, and she thought she could drowse off to the sound of rain on the roof. But there was no storm, no echo of thunder, only the distant lightning that kept her from sleep, and much later the whistle of the freight that woke her.

 

F
URNACE NUMBER 3
was charged with charcoal, limestone, and a carload of the Salisbury hematite early the next morning, and by six-thirty
P.M.
, with shadows of tall pines giving some relief to the sweltering workers and the crowd of onlookers, Mr. Brown satisfied himself that the iron—the first batch in forty years—was ready for the casting. Ever a cautious man, he would have preferred to run the first iron off into sows and pigs so that he could be certain of the quality. It was, to him, a new furnace, and any new furnace had its quirks. He wanted the first wheels, and all the wheels, to be perfect. There was the difference of working with the cooler blast to be considered, and the delicacy of achieving the desired degree of hardness, 4 or 4½, no more.

But Harriet, with an eye to her inventories and her schedule, persuaded him otherwise. Think of your long experience, Mr. Brown: I have absolute confidence in your abilities. And Horatio added a few words in support of this boldness, though he was less mindful of the foreman's excellence than of the dwindling resource of water and of the fragility of his improvised power train. There had been no time or money to invest in the piping to recycle the hot gases from the stack as was done in the main furnace, but it was known that the slower and less efficient cold-blast furnace yielded the best iron.

The men on the day shift had stayed to see the hearth unplugged and the river of iron run down the sand channel into the casting shed to the waiting molds. No matter how many years a man had been on the job, no matter how tired he was, there was something about the runoff that held his attention as if he were still a boy. The power of that incandescent flow, heralded by a spray of sparks like a comet when the furnace was tapped. How may times had the story been told about the fellow—not here but at a furnace just down the river or over the
mountain—who had tripped and fallen across the casting channel, and had lost his arm. Or was it his face? And the mystery of it too, for you never knew for sure what was happening inside the furnace until the plug was tapped.