The Lightning Keeper (38 page)

Was it possible, with all the people gathered there, that she could have felt such intensity radiating from the back of the hall? That is what he came to believe. When her eyes found his her expression changed, and in the same moment the hardness he had brought with him melted away.

The program was an odd mix of styles and periods: something for everyone. When Harriet stepped forward to sing the Schubert there was a respectful, apprehensive silence. Toma held his breath until he realized that he knew this song, had heard it from her own lips. But during the more popular tunes the audience was encouraged to join in, and those who could not sing stamped their feet, sending tremors through the joists of the oak floor. And even over such a din Toma could distinguish one clear voice, at times half hidden, now soaring above the others.

“What is that?” he asked his stern neighbor at the end of the final number, before the applause died away.

“Sir, it is the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.' Do you not know it?”

“Yes, the song. But what is that…?” Here Toma's vocabulary failed, and with his hand he mimed a tremulous rise, a long swooping descent, the flight of the lark.

“Ah, the descant. That is called the descant, and very prettily done.”

“Thank you.” Toma closed his eyes, trying to fix the memory of light in the high note, that moment of joy tethered and drawn down to the embrace of other voices in the final chord. There was something so moving in this that he felt tears start in his eyes. People, still applauding, surged toward the stage, but he could not face her. He stood abruptly and left.

What was happening to him? He had heard her sing, not for the first time, and now there was no familiar footing for his thoughts.

The night was cold. He began to sweat as if he had been running or working with the sledge. He sat down on a stone wall, hoping this anxiety would pass. Olivia. She would be waiting up for him and would want to hear about the music. Harriet's voice, this night, was a forbidden fruit, and he was obscurely shamed by it. How could he explain any of this to Olivia, how the singing, or just that one high note, had broken something in him or set something free and he could not now bear the thought of touching her, or sleeping with her, or even being under the same roof. Better to spend the night on this rock than to face the ruin of her hope.

Well, thought Harriet as she laid down the pen, it hasn't taken me very long to come to complaint and self-pity. Shrewishness will be next. She licked the envelope, sealed it, and applied the stamp with a thump of her fist. Fowler had been gone only six weeks, and already the routine of her day was like a sentence, something to be obeyed without pleasure or hope of escape. She knew she must not put off her letter to Washington.

It did not help that this situation was of her choosing. She tried to keep up with the running of the house on Q Street, sending off the metal crate of eggs every two weeks and writing out instructions on storage of the summer furnishings. But the eggs would probably be eaten by the servants, and the advice was just a way of filling up the pages. She felt older in the absence of her husband and missed those little flatteries that had punctuated their daily discourse. Was it her imagination or were there more mirrors in the house than she remembered? Why should it matter, she argued with herself, have I not married an old man?

The letter she now wrote to her husband struck the usual cheerful tone. Her hand committed white lies to the paper, but her mind was free of the task. She tried to imagine herself living in Washington, in which case her father must be dead, or with her there, or here in the care of someone else. All summer long she had wandered among these choices like a person dreaming of a maze. Today she saw that there was a different aspect to the problem, which was that she had no wish to live in Washington under any circumstances. She shook her head violently and stared at the words she had just written about a storm that had stripped the swamp maples and littered the lake with brilliant colors, about the sweet smell of apple wood in her fireplace. Would he even bother to read these words? What did she want, then? She wondered if she had time to catch the post with these two letters.

“You going out, ma'am?”

“Yes. Will you tell Mrs. Evans? I shouldn't be long.” Harriet had expected to find the cook and Mrs. Evans in the kitchen, but instead it was Olivia, and that curious odor was the rock salt she had scattered on the cooking surface of the coal range.

“Where is Ingrid?”

“Oh, cook says the smell gives her a headache, but I tell her it must be done. Look.” She held out for Harriet's inspection the egret feathers she had been passing back and forth in the smoke. “Don't they look like new?” Beyond her was a pile of dark feathers that Harriet recognized as the collar to one of her coats.

“Yes, they are much improved, but it's a great deal of trouble to take over clothes I never wear.”

“When the master comes back you must look your best for him. It will all be resewn by tomorrow.”

“There is no hurry, Olivia, but thank you. Please tell Ingrid we'll have to eat at six, with the days getting so short. Otherwise he won't eat his dinner.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The business of the feathers stayed with Harriet all during her walk into town. Not just the feathers, of course, but the inexorable progress Olivia was making through her wardrobe, working to a standard of unsettling perfection, as if the house were a museum and she, Harriet, a doll or wax figure. The sharp odors of rectified spirits and sulfuric ether meant that Olivia was cleaning her silks, and in any room of the house, on any day, there was likely to be an undercurrent of silver polish. At the end of each week Olivia submitted a bill for her work in the laundry, which Harriet paid out of the household account. That amount had not varied by more than a dollar or two for months. Everything else was unpaid labor. Harriet knew this was not right, but her efforts to raise the subject with Olivia had been turned aside.

It was good to be out of the house—Mrs. Evans had become almost tiresome with her gentle suggestions about this—and now she did not want to go back. The mornings in Beecher's Bridge were late on account of the mountain, but for the same reason the evenings were long. After the sun went down behind the hills across the Buttermilk to the west, light gathered on the wall of the mountain, rising mist took the color of the clouds, and slow ripples in the current of the river glowed like dark mother-of-pearl.

She had bolted from the house in a coat that was too thin and shoes that were wrong for anything but a good road. She didn't mind the chill; she would be warm soon enough. Down along the river she went, on the road through the Bottom, wondering which of these
houses Toma and Olivia lived in. Would she be able to tell? Probably not. It would be an ordinary house.

Another few minutes and she came to the gate of the ironworks, standing just opposite the saloon. It was about that time when the lamps might be lit, or not, and she could not tell if Toma was in the office. She had written a note to him asking if she might have one of the old ledgers. She would use it as she used old photographs or household objects, to get a conversation started with her father, or at least to get him talking. She had not had a reply, and it would be much the simplest thing if she could ask Toma directly.

A couple of men she did not recognize tipped their hats to her in the yard. They did not know if Mr. Peacock was about; they had not seen him today. She knocked and there was no answer. The door was a splintered, heavy thing that wanted a bump with the shoulder because it had settled against the frame. Had it been any less familiar she might have thought twice.

How long had it been since he was last here? A day or two? A week? A dish of something lay in the center of the desk. Whatever it was, the mice had found it. She needed light. There were the matches, and on the other table she found a lamp with a cracked chimney. The precarious weight of kerosene was reassuring. Maybe things weren't as bad as they had seemed at first.

She worked steadily at the papers, stopping to deal with the mouse droppings or to coax the wick into a better position. The lazy curl of black smoke from the cracked glass made her think of Aladdin's lamp, but it also stung her eyes.

When she had the papers arranged by date into two piles—these opened, those not—she swept up as best she could, using pieces of cardboard as her broom and pan. The dish she could do nothing about, so she put it on the far table. The clock struck five.

First she read through the opened letters and put aside two that seemed urgent. Then she opened the other letters and made notations of their importance on the envelope. The one from Dr. Steinmetz she had to read twice: there was a hint of frustration that he had not had regular reports on progress up above, but the tone was cordial. That was the most important letter.

When she heard the half chime of the Congregational Church she
knew she must finish. On the back of a discarded envelope she left him a message explaining what she had done, adding her hope that this help was welcome. She would stop by tomorrow to see if he had left word about the ledger. She signed the note “in haste, H.” It was not a real letter, and she saw no harm in the familiarity.

The image that stayed in her mind as she walked home was the dish, with its suggestion of misery. How can it have come to this? she asked herself. At her own house, where the many lamps were lit and the air in the front hall was heavy with Ingrid's pot roast, she was met by Mrs. Evans. Only now did she remember the letters in her pocket.

“Wherever did you get to? Your father has been asking after his dinner these last fifteen minutes.”

“I'm sorry to have worried you,” Harriet said evenly. “I was helping a friend and I lost track of the time.”

 

T
HE WORK ON
L
IGHTNING
K
NOB
in the autumn of 1916 attracted not only humorous attention but real visitors as well. There was no ground-breaking ceremony, and the first few visitors were stragglers who thought there was work to be had if they were enterprising enough to climb the mountain on speculation; or boys who were willing to run errands, though their real interest was in the machine of monstrous proportions that would, in the course of a very few days, eat its way into the ground and out of sight.

There were no unskilled jobs on offer, however, and precious few errands either, but that did not stop the traffic of onlookers. Men who had nothing better to do made themselves comfortable against the blocks of stone warmed by the sun of an Indian summer, and made educated guesses about the design and consequences of the Steinmetz Aerial, as the lightning attractor had come to be known. Some worried about all that lightning upsetting the cows and souring the milk, others that business and visitors would be down.

The boys soon found that they could manufacture an errand in advance, and save themselves an extra trip, by hauling a couple of buckets of beer up the mountain, where it could be sold at a premium. The speculative conversation among them was influenced by talk of war, which they had from their elders, and by lurid technological improba
bilities absorbed from popular magazines. One thought that the machine in the hole could chew its way straight through to the other side of the world and grab the Kaiser off his gold throne. Another said that the stored-up lightning would fly out at the touch of a button and destroy any German airplanes or submarines within a hundred miles of Beecher's Bridge.

Women came too, borrowing their husbands' boots for the expedition; their interest was neither the burrowing machine nor the rising tower, but rather the one completed structure on that dome of scarred rock: a modest board-and-batten affair that might have been a single-hole privy but was said to contain a telephone.

It is true that the telephone never gave any evidence of its existence—they did not know quite what to expect—and no one ever entered the shed, which had a sign to discourage curiosity. All they had to go on was rumor and the black line that came all the way up from down below.

Toma was deaf to suggestions that he demonstrate the workings of this marvelous instrument. It is not a toy, he would say, or, It doesn't belong to me. He did not point out, as he might have, that with the noise of the excavator and its attendant gasoline engine and compressor, any demonstration of the marvelous telephone was impossible anyway.

The telephone came into its own in the hours before and after the operation of the excavator. At seven o'clock, morning and evening, Stefan would be waiting within reach of a phone, in case Toma needed to talk to him.

On this particular day, a Saturday in mid-October, Toma was looking forward to the peace of the afternoon, for the crew only worked until noon. He had his eye on some of the lesser blocks of stone piled for the tower, and also on the weathered slabs that had long ago broken off the shelving rock of the Knob and lay scattered in the scrub oaks below. Winter would come long before the tower was finished, and he thought he could make a shelter for himself like a Montenegrin shepherd's hut, with a hearth at one end and a blanket hung to keep out the cold, or maybe a canvas tarp thrown over the whole thing.