The Lightning Keeper (25 page)

He did not know where to begin. “I hope your father is well.”

“He is well enough, thank you, though he is sad. He does not know quite what to do with himself.”

“I am sorry.”

“Oh, I don't think there was anything to be done, in spite of all we had hoped. We must not dwell on it.” Her kindness was a punishment. She too now seemed at a loss for words, but, caught in the corner of his eye, how she glowed. Was she blushing?

“What a happy accident that we should meet here. I thought we might never find a time, you see.”

“Yes,” he said, though he had no idea what she meant.

“I thought you would not want to speak to me.” She was looking away from him now, her profile chiseled against the trellis of new oak, the hair loosening in its prison of pins.

“And why would that be?”

“Well…,” and now she was certainly blushing.

“Well?”

She looked at him. The blush and the radiance had vanished. She was angry. At him? “Will you make me say it? Is it of no consequence to you that I will marry someone else?” He said nothing. “But surely you knew?”

He took her hand. “Do you remember when I told you this would happen?”

“I didn't believe you. I didn't know.”

“Now you know.” He stood up and helped her to her feet. Then he kissed her on either cheek. “It is as it must be.”

Now, a year later in the spring of 1916, Toma sits in exactly the same place and stares at the water, with the same scene running through his mind over and over, or fragments of it, as if he might by a concentration of will bring it to some different conclusion. What might he have said to make her realize that she would not be happy with this man, and that her purgatory would be the mirror to his own? In some reconstructions of their encounter all barriers are thrown down and the consummation of longing takes place by the brook, with her shawl for a bed on the tiny flowers. But by whatever route they arrive at that moment there is no surprise or discovery in the unveiling of her flesh, the convergence of their pleasure, but instead a sense of connection with something known. Home, he thinks at this unlikely moment, home.

Three months after their chance encounter, Toma attended the wedding of Harriet Bigelow and Fowler Truscott. The note enclosed with his invitation made it clear that he must not fail to come.

The event was agony for him. Dressed in Horatio's black suit and in a white shirt borrowed from Mrs. Glatt's bundle of laundry, Toma felt light-headed in the church. At the reception, he found that the
pain of smiling could be eased by champagne. He observed the other guests, saw that the distance between two people engaged in casual conversation was greater than in his own country. Why had he never noticed this before? He took particular note of the gentlemen—Senator Truscott's friends—and of the senator himself. He thought of Harwell, thought: He would know how to do this…and I shall learn.

Later, after more champagne, Toma had a conversation with the groom, who was in an expansive mood. Truscott asked after progress on the wheel, and Toma was able to report that he had a prototype and some encouraging readings from the newly acquired gauges. The senator's face was flushed, but Toma's answer clearly interested him. “We shall speak soon,” said Truscott, pressing his shoulder.

Yes, thought Toma, but not before your wedding trip. He raised his glass. “Your health, sir. Or as it would be said in my country,
ziveo
.” They both drank.

He did not wait for the departure of the bride and groom. The champagne was beginning to lose its anaesthetizing effect. But as he passed through the doorway onto the verandah he saw the cousin, Lucy, disengaging herself from two young men with the promise of a swift return. “Be a dear, Cecil, and hold this glass for me? I will look in for a moment on little Caroline.” She must pass within inches of him, and he stood his ground.

“Mr. Peacock, what a pleasure to see you again.”

“It is an honor to me, Miss Lucy. You are an important person on this day, yes? The…maid of honor.”

“No, Mr. Peacock, the matron of honor, as I have won the race to the altar with my dear cousin.”

“Yes, of course. I forgot that you were to be married. I congratulate you.”

“Not only married, but a mother, too. And now Harriet. Did she not look like an angel today? Quite unbearably beautiful?”

“You have found the perfect word.”

“What I meant…”

“Yes. It does not matter now. And if it is proper to say it, you were a fitting companion to her.”

“How kind of you, Mr. Peacock. May I introduce you to my…?”

“Another time, perhaps. I must go. Good-bye.”

When he got back to the silk mill he gave his clothes to Olivia, who had no curiosity about the wedding. Horatio's suit was brushed and swathed in an old sheet. Mr. Glatt's shirt was subjected to examination.

“Hope you didn't put anything on this I can't get off.”

 

T
HERE ARE SEVERAL TRAILS
leading down the mountain from Pothole Falls, some no more than silent thoroughfares of the white-tailed deer, and the one chosen by Toma this day was an indirect route back to the silk mill. Down through the cathedral of great hemlocks and tumbled stone he went, then veered left, and in a few minutes he climbed out onto the scarred eminence of Lightning Knob. From this height he could see part of the town, the lines of the river and the railroad, the idled works, and practically beneath him, the Truscott house, which had been the object of renovation in the months since the closing of the ironworks.

Toma had marked the progress of the glass and iron addition, a conservatory that extended the house in the direction of the mountain. The work had begun in the fall, but could not be completed before the onset of winter owing to a late change in plans. Mrs. Truscott had decided that the new room must accommodate exotic houseplants as well as the grand piano, and adjustments to the temperature and humidity required the installation of a new furnace.

The workmen were back at it now, having got an early start after the mild winter. A week, perhaps two, and they would be finished, well before the Truscotts returned from Washington for the summer.

Olivia was waiting for him at the door of the silk mill. She handed him the envelope that Mr. Watrous, obligated by the ostentatious display of postage, had carried down from the post office, special delivery.

“Aren't you going to open it?” There was a tone in her voice that suggested an imminent argument. He had heard it more often lately.

“I will take a mug of water first and see how Stefan is coming along with the new couplings. The senator can wait for a few minutes.”

The silk mill had undergone a transformation since Horatio's death. A new bay had been opened out to the south. It was a sunny, pleasant space, despite the confusion of wires, and the new wheel, the
gleaming metal prototype, sat in its well. Stefan Sazlo, an acquaintance from Toma's evenings at the Franklin Institute, had brought a crucial skill in metalworking to the job. He was a quiet, sober man of middle years; he grew excited only when Olivia preempted the water supply in the middle of one of his tests.

“Well, Stefan? Any happiness?” It was almost a joke between them, for if Stefan were to discover happiness in any sphere, he would be at pains to disguise the fact.

“Some progress, my friend, that is all. In an hour or so I shall need your advice or opinion on the couplings.” He continued in a lower tone: “But it is good you are back. I think you were expected sooner.”

All the improvements to this place, and all the instruments—apart from those that Mr. Stephenson's loan had provided—came through the generosity of Senator Truscott. He, Toma, would frame the request in writing, with the briefest explanation, and Truscott would send the money. Although there was always a provision for Stefan's wages, it was understood that Toma's living expenses would not be part of this accounting. Olivia was the only source of real income in the household.

What might be in the envelope he did not know. He had not asked for money, and would not until he had run a complete set of tests on the new prototype. But there had been an evolution in Truscott's letters from the original disclaimer of technical incompetence toward an intimate knowledge of the project and some sophisticated questions. Was it another obscure point of American manners to so thoroughly disguise one's intelligence?

The letter was brief and it enclosed a sheaf of crisp currency.

“What's he say?” Olivia asked.

“He wants a report on the progress of the machine.”

“And that money?”

“He wants me to report in person. I am to go to Washington to meet someone very important, a Mr. Coffin.”

“I never heard of him.”

“I think Truscott mentioned him before.”

“What does he say about his wife?”

“Nothing, except that she sends her regards.”

“Regards. What does that mean?”

“Nothing. It is a way of being polite.”

“Will you take me with you? To Washington?”

Toma shrugged. He was thinking of the two technical points raised in the letter as topics for the upcoming meeting, and wondered how Truscott could make head or tail out of such a discussion.

But Olivia had taken the shrug as a yes, and her mind was working through the details of what must be done in order to get away, of the train trip to Washington—which must go through New York—and even to where they might stay in the nation's capital.

“Always wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, just to get away from here. I did ask Horatio, asked him until he told me to quit because he was done traveling, nothing more he wanted to see. But I ain't seen anything. And you know what I want? Are you minding me?”

“Yes.”

“I want to sleep on sheets that I don't have to wash. I want to sleep in a real hotel.”

“A hotel,” Toma repeated. His own experience of such places was limited. “I don't know the cost.”

“The cost…” She made a dismissive sound with her lips. “Look at all that money there in your hand. Seems to me you'll be staying in a hotel.” Now she looked at his face and saw that she had won, or nearly so. “You can tell them I'm a white woman.”

With one hand she pulled the mass of her hair up and held it there for him to admire. She glanced in the direction of the bay where Stefan worked, then smiled at Toma and with her other hand began to undo the buttons of her shirt.

 

H
E IS LODGED SO
deep in her that even when he is perfectly still she feels the heat of him like ice in her spine, and piercing chills ripple through her. He puts his hand over her mouth to silence her and she fights him, thrashing side to side, hips arching clear of the sheets to meet him, holding him aloft on the bow of her body until he finishes. This time, like every other time, it is like finding something she didn't know she'd lost. All she'd been trying to say was I love you.

He rolls away, leaving her with a slick of sweat on her belly and cold air between her legs. She listens to his breathing, wondering if he
is asleep or just faking it, and she wants to touch him, run her hand down over his stomach, the thought and the smell of him filling the pool of her desire. She likes the second time better. Slow, deliberate, almost tender. She thinks that in one of these moments he will tell her that he loves her.

The silence is what she hates. If he would only talk to her so that what they have just done is more than the coupling of beasts, so that she doesn't have to think about Horatio.

She has told him about her mother because she thought he would want to know what she had been through. All these years of holding it in, wondering how God could have let her mother die in Cuba—the shell landing in the laundry cauldron that nearly killed her too—and how He could have left her to the mercy of a man who would rape her every day, or nearly, from the age of twelve on. Now that she is safe from all this, now that he has saved her, doesn't he understand how she loves him?

However she frames these questions, the answer does not come out right, and there is no door in the blank wall of his silence. He does not love her: there is her answer, and this knowledge deadens her mind even as she feels him growing hard in her hand. She bends and takes his nipple in her teeth, feeling the jolt run clear through him like the time he made her touch the wires. He's more than ready now and so she impales herself, rocking back and forth, using her fingernails like knives, until she tears the seed out of him again.

Such ferocity, though it is her own, makes her think again of Horatio. She falls back from him and wraps herself in the sheet. “At least,” she says, “at least I didn't love him.”