The Lightning Keeper (41 page)

“Where is she?” he wanted to know. Olivia did not reply. She went on cutting his food very small, as Harriet had told her she must do, but she did not care whether the old man ate. He hit the edge of his plate—perhaps an accident—sending the meat flying, along with gouts of gravy that spattered her. She wiped her face and asked him please to pick up his plate. It was as if she had not spoken.

How long must she sit there waiting on this defiant child? She took his fingers in her grip and squeezed. She did not intend to hurt him, but she knew of the arthritis there, had seen his daughter rubbing his hands with ointment of arnica. “Do as I ask, Mr. Bigelow. Do it now.” From that moment he did as he was told, but in silence, and always with his eyes averted, as if the sight of her might do him harm.

She no longer worked in the laundry but supervised the new girl hired there, and was a stern critic of hasty folds, hints of damp. She was given a room on the third floor on the servants' side, warmed by the rising heat of the kitchen. It had a view out over the frozen lake and another window on the end so she would have a cross draft come summer. The old man often dozed during the day and his nights were restless. She left her door open when she went to bed and also the door through to the main staircase, so that she could hear when he stirred. If it sounded as if he was trying to put his clothes on, she would go down, put ten minims of the belladonna tincture in the cup of milk left to warm on the radiator, and make him drink it. Sometimes Harriet came, a ghost in her nightgown, to stand with her as the old man sank back into sleep.

“You are very good with him,” she might whisper, and Olivia would climb the stairs to her bed and try to find sleep. The scent of the other woman made her think of Toma, and of the many nights in her own bed when she had waited for him.

During the day she sat in a small room between the kitchen and the back door that had been equipped with a bench and certain tools, where Amos Bigelow indulged his obsession with work, perfecting in his mind the wheels that had been his undoing. The clanging was
acutely aggravating to the cook, a dour alcoholic Finn who held Olivia responsible for this chaos.

When she saw he had exhausted himself and he rubbed his knuckles in a certain way, she made him put away the tools and sit in the comfortable chair. There she wrapped his hands in lint impregnated with capsicum, spirits of turpentine, gum camphor, and sulfuric ether, a liniment known as King of Pain that she had found in a book.

There were always a few minutes at the beginning and end of Olivia's shift when she overlapped with Harriet, and it would have been impossible not to notice the effect of the daughter's presence on the old man.

They might be playing a last hand of cards, and if she had to correct him—“No, Papa, that is not a trump card. You need the other red one, the diamond”—a furtive delight transformed his vacant expression: he had nearly succeeded in outwitting her. Or she might be reading to him in a very loud voice, sometimes from Scott but more often from the Bible, and when she came to a familiar passage she would pause in mid-sentence and let him recite from memory.

“See how he remembers the Word,” she said to Olivia in a whisper. “Will you read it to him after I leave?” Olivia nodded, but did not keep her promise. Later, when the old man dozed in his chair, she took the heavy volume in her lap and ran her hands over the gilded leather. She had never held such a thing. She opened it, and there on the first page was a list of Bigelow forebears, starting with Increase, born three hundred years earlier in Litchfield, in the parish of Berkswich. What impressed her more than lineage was the fact that these people had dared to write their names in the holy book.

She saw also how, at the end of the day, the daughter took delight in the sight of her father, that querulous, unresponsive old man in Olivia's keeping, a delight that could not be feigned. The currents of feeling and caring were as mysterious to the silent witness as the operation of electricity itself.

Olivia had discovered, thanks to the careless gossip of the cook, where Harriet spent her afternoons, and had these hours to turn the matter over in her mind and impale herself upon possibilities. Although she knew nothing of what happened in the office—not even, to a certainty, that Toma was there—she could imagine almost anything.
She considered and rejected the idea that they were physically intimate. Each day she made an inventory of her rival's dress and appearance, just as she would check a shirtfront for stains.

If not that, then what? The expectation of it? She did not hate Harriet, though she had tried. But if she could understand, she might know what to do.

 

T
HE WEATHER IN
Beecher's Bridge, famously unpredictable, continued clear and cold through December, as the
Farmer's Almanac
had suggested it might. The planes and angles of stone on the face of Great Mountain had yet to be softened by a snowfall; the fields were petrified wastes of windblown stubble; and on every pond and tributary stream an armor of black ice had settled, so translucent that little fishes in the shallows could be seen to wriggle between the invisible ice and the mud, caught in that vise. Only the river ran free.

The cold made little difference to Toma; his stone shelter was warm enough when he made a fire. Down in the shaft of the excavation, out of the wind, the temperature was above freezing, and a man could break a sweat in his shirtsleeves. The work continued on schedule, the only absentees being the uninvited onlookers, who had no shelter from the wind.

December 25, a Monday, was a bleak day on Great Mountain, the brilliant cold weather of the past week having given way to damp lowering clouds that promised snow before evening.

The excavation of the vertical shaft had been completed on the sixteenth, and at eleven o'clock this morning the last nail had been driven in the rough staircase that hugged the side walls and allowed access to a point about eight feet above the floor of the pit. Below the last platform the tunnels would fan out in four directions, and the men, like moles, would probe the mountain with pneumatic hammers. Once the compressor was in place and its ventilation pipe secured, he sent the men home to their holiday. He waited for them at the top of the shaft, under the metal roof, and shook each one by the hand, wishing him a Merry Christmas. But not too merry, he said, for he also passed out the envelopes. The work was on schedule: each man received a
note and a gold eagle, a personal expression of thanks from Steinmetz himself.

“What about you, chief?” asked Hawley, the foreman.

“I'll be all right,” said Toma, his eyes on the last envelope, the one with his name on it.

“Would you like to have supper with us? We're a crowd anyway, no trouble.”

“I have other plans, thank you, but you are kind to think of me.”

“All right then, I'll be off. Merry Christmas, and if it comes down heavy, stay put somewhere. I always think of old Anderson's fingers, and how he lost 'em drunk in a snowdrift on Christmas Eve.”

“I'll be careful.”

Toma had no plans other than dinner in the saloon with a good scrubbing beforehand. He didn't want any reminders of Christmas. His companions tonight would be a like-minded crowd.

He made preparations for his return. He carried an axe to the stream coming down between the Knob and the mountain from Rachel's Leap: it was easier to chop ice from the rocks than to get his pail into the hidden water. He set the ice on the edge of his hearth and emptied the kettle into a bottle, which he wrapped in the down quilt Mrs. McCreedy had given him. A snow of feathers eddied and settled: he would sew up the hole tomorrow. The bottle would not keep his bed warm, but neither would it freeze.

In Montenegro, in the high valley of the crazed monk Vasili, the winters had been hard, and the daily rituals of fire and water were familiar to him. The animals must be watered, and many times he had helped his father chop ice for them. The fire must be tended, and if the wood ran short they would remove the wheels from the cart to make a kind of sledge, and hitch the oxen to it. Down into the sparse forest of the Sand
ak they went, and when they had cut as much wood as the team could manage, they fitted the oxen with clumsy, iron-spiked wooden shoes to give them purchase on the grade. His father walked ahead with the reins in his hand, and Toma struggled along in the unbroken snow at the side, with his hand on the brake lever, just in case.

At Christmas they would walk to the monastery at Moraca to hear mass, stopping for the night with relatives near Kolasin. An ox carried
their belongings and the presents they brought, and Natalia also when the snow was too high for her. Occasionally his mother would persuade Danilo to ride, to rest the stump of his leg. She never rode, and neither would Toma. A heavy snow had come down on them once, and they could not make it to Kolasin or to any shelter. Danilo took the packs from the ox and made him lie down in the snow. With one canvas he covered the ox; the larger one he laid out for them, and they dozed until dawn, packed together like salt fish, wrapped first in the canvas and then in the snow.

The office was stone cold, yesterday's ashes in the stove, but there was plenty of kindling and wood. He remembered the formality that had descended on them yesterday, when she announced she would have to leave half an hour early to meet the senator's train. That was how she always referred to him. She didn't know exactly which day she would be able to return, but with Dr. Steinmetz arriving on the twenty-eighth it probably wouldn't be until after the New Year.

“You will be all right, won't you?” she asked when she got up to leave.

“Why not? It's only a few days, and if Steinmetz is with you he won't bother me very much.”

“No…I meant because it's Christmas, and you are alone.”

“Yes. Well, under the circumstances…”

She gave him her restless hand. “I must be off. One never knows if the train might be a minute or two early.”

He held the thermos out to her. “You did not drink your tea.”

“Thank you, no.” She eyed the thermos warily. “You finish it, and I'll fetch it later.”

The thermos stood where he had left it in the middle of the desk. When he had laid the fire and lit it, he went to pour a cup of the cold tea. The desk was bare of fresh correspondence—Stefan must have dealt with whatever had come in this morning—but tucked under the thermos was a blue envelope. The color of the paper lifted his spirits, but on top there was a scrap of white paper, and in Stefan's hand: “Sorry, boss.” Sorry?

The envelope had his name on it, but it was not Harriet's handwriting. Whose then? He remembered the crude lettering on the door of the laundry, Olivia's laundry.

“Merry Christmas from Olivia. Hoping your work goes well, and that we can be together soon.” The childish lettering and the ornate capitals filled the page.

He scanned the shelves and cabinets hoping that there might be another blue envelope. He opened the drawers of the desk. Nothing. He drank the tea and put the letter in the fire, where it was consumed in a greenish flame. He buried the ash with a fresh log and pulled a chair close to the heat.

He woke to the whistle of a train. It was dark and the snow had begun.

In the front room of the tavern Mrs. McCreedy had made an attempt at holiday cheer with red and green bunting over the long mirror, and Toma told her that it looked nice.

“More like flowers at a funeral, wouldn't you say?” There were only a few other patrons, and no talk: they were looking off into the smoke or into their glasses.

“And you, dear, you look like you've seen a ghost. What can I get for you? Something strong, I think.” Mrs. McCreedy was a red-haired woman, sturdy, cheerful, and observant, but what Toma most appreciated was the fact that she never asked questions.

“Something strong, and a bath if possible. What is your dinner this evening?”

“We've got a stew, nothing fancy, but I told the girl to put parsnips in it so it'll be a little different. And there's mince pie. I made them myself. Not a proper Christmas dinner, but it'll see you through until tomorrow.”

Toma stepped out of the bath glowing with the pleasure of the hot water and unsteady on his feet. The strong drink that Mrs. McCreedy had in mind was a toddy of whiskey, lemon, hot water, and maple sugar, and she had filled the glass again without being asked.

“Second one on the house, seeing as it's Christmas.”

He felt through his pockets before pulling on the clean clothes she had laid out for him, and so he came upon the envelope he had forgotten since this morning. No gold coin for him.

Mr. Coffin's congratulatory note was brief and to the point, thanking him warmly for his efforts in keeping the work on the mountain on schedule. Furthermore, in light of the very favorable progress on
adapting the Peacock Turbine to commercial requirements, the board had authorized a payment of $20,000 against participation in several licensing agreements recently negotiated. Dr. Steinmetz joined him in expressing wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.