The Lightning Keeper (31 page)

He offered the first sip to Harriet. “Please, a good swallow, or it will have no effect at all.” Then to Toma, and he took the last gulp himself. “Now if only we had dry stockings. I am very afraid of making blisters on Mrs. Truscott's feet.”

They set off down the mountain, feeling the effects of the long day and the jolt of cognac. On the pretext of resting and warming themselves in the westering sun, Toma led them out onto the bare top of Lightning Knob, and Steinmetz was delighted to see the Truscott mansion, set like a doll's house below them.

“Is that not my host there?” inquired Steinmetz, and without waiting for an answer launched a vigorous “Hallooo!” that ricocheted off the side of the mountain and caused Fowler Truscott to stop in mid-swing. He waved back at the party above.

“This mountain has many wonders. And what is this pleasant little peak called?”

“Lightning Knob,” replied Harriet, her face suffused with the color of the late-afternoon sun. Steinmetz repeated her words as if trying to grasp her meaning.

“Is there a reason for this name, I wonder?”

“Oh, I believe so, Dr. Steinmetz. The stories that are told in town…. And in the short time I have lived in my husband's house I have been impressed, and sometimes fearful. Or I was, until I saw that it does not strike the house itself.”

Steinmetz turned to Toma and raised his eyebrows. “Is it so? I cannot doubt Mrs. Truscott, but is there an explanation?”

“Perhaps. I did once see, among the papers of Mr. Bigelow, who was—is—Mrs. Truscott's father, a geological survey that noted the extraordinary incidence of magnetite in the rock of Great Mountain, which accounts, I believe, for the uselessness of the compass in these parts.”

“So? Magnetite? I know the magnetite, it was long ago the basis of a patent of mine, for the magnetite arc lamp. I don't recall the number now, but it burns with a most pleasing light.” He knelt to examine the rock, brushing away the litter of mica chips and tearing at the dwarf blueberry bushes growing in a crevice. Out of his pack he produced a geologist's pick and began to attack the rock until he had prized away several chunks of it. Then he wrote in his pocket book.

They left the Knob soon after that, and for the rest of the way down the mountain Steinmetz seemed happily isolated in his own thoughts.

When they reached the bottom of Great Mountain, they were tired, but their clothes were almost dry, and Steinmetz was in an excellent mood.

“Such a day…such a day. If only I had seen the eagle.”

The summer of 1916 was a time of feverish activity in Beecher's Bridge. First there was the arrival of the two consulting engineers from Schenectady: a Swede, slab-faced and phlegmatic, named Larssen, and his polar opposite, Piccolomini, a sharp-faced man with the metabolism of a shrew.

Almost immediately, and on the basis of detailed instructions addressed by Steinmetz to Toma as manager of the Experimental Site, construction began on a substantial stone-and-reinforced-concrete extension of the mill to the north, and the woods rang with the hammering of the stonecutters. The new building would house the production model of the Peacock Turbine, whenever that should become reality, and would place the machine more directly under the source of its power, the reservoir that Horatio Washington had tapped into. The masons' job was less onerous than it might have been thanks to the ready supply of stone available in the ruins of Power City. The silk mill itself was henceforth to be known as the Experimental Site.

From the foot of the falls the improving work began its march uphill. New piping was installed—a gleaming black pair in eight-inch cast iron—and Horatio's salvaged plumbing became another relic of the mountain. Word soon got around that at full blast the jet of water from the nozzle would withstand the blow of a sledge and rip it out of a man's hands. The new pipes were strongly reinforced to withstand the pressure of that column of water. It was fitting and ironic that this
highly specialized and expensive pipe had been laid down within spitting distance of the old ironmaster's violent exit from the world.

The Bigelow works, already falling into ruin, were the next to be transformed, for as Steinmetz had foreseen, there was hardly room down at the Experimental Site for any important manufacturing operation, even adequate storage and warehousing facilities, and no convenient access from the railway line. The buildings of the old ironworks were torn down or modified to their new purpose. Toma was installed in Amos Bigelow's old office. A telephone line was his connection to the wheel.

All this was change enough to keep the conversation going at McCreedy's Saloon for years to come. And, as in those boom days of the Bigelow Rifle, there was money too: the new construction and the influx of General Electric personnel were the salvation of many a household, and certainly of the saloon, which had been nearly derelict two years after the closing of the ironworks. Not much was known about the work up there on the crown of Lightning Knob, where a team of engineers had hauled drums of fuel and some outlandish equipment. The deep core samples of rock were crated up and sent to Dr. Steinmetz in Schenectady, New York. Business was business, and the Schenectady men were good customers, but McCreedy's opinion was that there was plenty of rock lying about for the asking in Beecher's Bridge, so why would anyone go to such trouble?

In mid-June a small item appeared in the local weekly newspaper, near the end of a column entitled “Events in Beecher's Bridge,” announcing the relocation of Olivia Toussaint's laundry from the old silk mill to South Side Road. All pickups and deliveries, without exception, were to be made at Wright's General Store. A new schedule of prices would be available soon. The reason for the instruction in the article was that the new location of the laundry coincided exactly with the Truscott mansion, and it would hardly do to have Mrs. Breen's boy traipsing up and down the drive.

After the unpleasant shock of her eviction from the silk mill, Olivia had come to accept this new arrangement, and she had driven a hard bargain. Here she had conveniences that were previously unknown and unimaginable. Somewhere outside, and not too close to the
house, there was a gasoline-driven dynamo that was attended by the chauffeur between the hours of nine and three. The engine not only provided light in her basement space but powered both the washing machine and the mangle. As Mrs. Breen's sheets or Mr. Breen's drawers could not be displayed on the Truscott lawn, a special gas-heated drying unit was brought by rail from New York, and clothes or sheets laid over those heated tubes were dry in a fraction of the time, come rain or come shine. Olivia did not abandon her old charcoal-heated irons to some new technology, but that was the only holdover from the laundry in the silk mill.

On this warm day at the beginning of August, she was glad to turn off the switches and pull the cord to signal the chauffeur that the dynamo might be shut down. The dryer was doing its work, and the charcoal glowed merrily in the corner. Sweat gathered in beads on her brow almost as fast as she could wipe it away with the cool linen hand towel. But no matter how hot it got, she certainly wasn't going to shuck off her shirt here, as she would once have done without a second thought. She wondered now what would have happened—or not happened—if he hadn't got himself a good long look at her that day. He had only pretended not to look. Olivia climbed the stairs into the house, where porches and awnings kept everything dim and cool.

In the hall the smell of phlox was strong, and a vase of the white spires had been set on the table beside the tall clock. Where everybody was, she could not guess, for it was very still. They might both have gone out in the car, and she would not have heard it over the noise in her laundry. Up the main staircase she went, slowly so as not to break a sweat again, and she trailed one hand along the banister, the other grazing the dark panels. Her feet made no sound on the carpeted treads. She liked the smell here—wax and flowers and settled dust—and the fragments of colored light falling from the high chandelier reminded her of the window in the church behind the altar.

She must check now on her linens. What was the use of all her effort down below if the towels hung crooked or a pile of the master's shirts listed to one side? There were many different monograms, generations of the Truscott women and the Bigelow women, and they must not be carelessly mixed. Did the upstairs girl, Lily, even know
her alphabet? Then too there were the stains, and as her mother had taught her, the earlier you attended to them the better. Bleach would destroy the linen over time, but if you laid the washed sheet or garment on freshly cut grass in the sunlight, that would take care of most stains, even blood. Harriet Truscott could look out on the lawn on a warm summer day and feel well cared for. There was her best nightgown, the one trimmed with lace eyelets, lying on the cut grass like a fallen angel.

At Harriet's dressing table Olivia paused now to look at the array of beautiful objects—the cunning hooks, brushes backed in ivory, little blue glass bottles with silver wrapped around them like tendrils of a vine—and to see her own reflection, head to toe, in the pier glass, an object she had never seen before she entered this room. She touched what lay there, and then took up the earrings. Moonstone and sapphire they were, in a setting that seemed very old-fashioned. These, she thought, must be Harriet's mother's; but whatever they were that slut of a maid should have put them back where they belonged. She held them to her ears and stood before the mirror, lifting her head and turning so that her hair fell just beside the earring. It was too hot for this. She put the earrings down.

It had started with the earrings. Not these earrings, but another pair of simple gold ones, a leaf pattern of some sort with a tiny dot of emerald in the center, like a bud. They were far in the back of the box, and she thought they would not be missed, at least for a day. In her imagination these were earrings for a young woman, perhaps a girl, perhaps the first pair of earrings Harriet had ever worn. When would that have been, she wondered, before or after he knew her? She had put them in her apron, one in each pocket so they would make no noise, and she had taken them home. Yes, he had noticed, though he said nothing.

She had gone on to borrow other things: other earrings, a scarf, and then a drop of perfume. That was when he knew. She said Harriet had allowed her to try it. She could tell that he did not believe the lie, but neither did he challenge her, and their complicity was sealed in sex. After he had finished in her it took almost no time to get him hard again, and when she was on top of him and could tell how near he was,
she leaned down with her breasts over his face and buried him in the valley where she had put the stolen scent.

The perfume always worked, and it was perfectly safe. All she had to do was make sure that Harriet had already used it that day. Once, just after she had helped herself, she got a funny look from the upstairs girl. But Lily was lazy and no match for Olivia, and at least she had the sense to know it.

A laundress knows things about a woman—her time of the month, what she wears under her clothes—and one day Olivia came across a gossamer undergarment in the back of the press that she had never seen in the wash. She put her hand inside to feel the fabric, saw the shadow of her skin through the airy stuff. She put two drops of perfume on the silk, and hid it in her apron, where it made no show at all. On her way back down the stairs to the laundry, she felt faint with desire.

Tuesday was the night that they both bathed, and when she was finished she slipped into the silk and put on her robe, then emptied two more kettles into the metal tub for him. She brought him a tin cup of whiskey and sat behind him on the stool, kneading his shoulders as he lay there like a dead man. She had had a long day herself, but this was something she never tired of. When she began to soap him he started to grow hard until it floated there in the murky water like an old cottonmouth in the bayou. She rinsed him off and made him stand on the braided rags to be dried, ignoring that insolent thing staring her in the face as she knelt down for his feet, pretended that it was an accident that her cheek grazed it on the way back up, and then with a good grip on his buttocks she took him in her mouth until he grew completely hard and it like to have choked her. Now she held it to one side and took his balls in her mouth, very gently, the way Horatio had showed her, with his hand wrapped in her hair to hurt her if she did it wrong. The skin was soft from the heat of the bath and they were as slippery as oysters in her mouth.

When he was good and ready she stood and held her arms out and down.

“Take it off me.” The robe dropped to the floor and she could see that he was startled by the silk, then shocked as he made the connection for himself.

“Where did you get that?”

“You know.”

“This is crazy….”

“Ain't nothing crazy.” He put his hand to her and she leaned against it, whispering in his ear, “You tear this, I'll have to hurt you,” and began to laugh.

They got to the bed and she made him wait, taking her sweet time as she inched the silk down, him staring like a madman, and then he finished, just like that, shooting it all over her, and she laughed again. “Who you think you're with, honey?”

He was quiet then, and she did not ask him what he was thinking. He was always quiet afterward. Maybe he was thinking that she had gone too far, but she wasn't finished yet, could not leave him alone. The next time really was better, for now the silk smelled of them both, and of her.

 

“W
HAT IS IT,
O
LIVIA?”

“Nothing, ma'am, I was just checking like I usually do when the laundry is drying. Mr. Truscott see those things, the plus fours, and how the grass come out?”

“He did when I brought it to his attention. Thank you. I doubt he has any idea of the work in a household, but I certainly do. I can't think how we got along before you came.”

Olivia looked down at the floor as she murmured her thanks, and Harriet had cause, again, to remark on how beauty often seemed an accident of circumstance or feeling.

“Mrs. Truscott?”

“Yes, Olivia?”

“If you don't mind me asking, which of these beds do you use?”

“I sleep in my own, of course.”

“Yes, but I meant…”

“Oh.”

They looked at each other, Harriet chewing her lip. She could not answer the question; she did not want to give offense. Perhaps she had misunderstood.

“Why do you ask?”

“It's just I can't tell, and I do know that sometimes a sheet wants changing afterwards: get to the stains before they set. I do that in my own house, though it means extra work. I'm not carrying tales, but Lily isn't always careful about things.”

“I don't think I follow you. Is there a problem with Lily?”

“I don't want to start trouble. I just want everything to be right for you, and it's no good my ripping up both beds to see. You have such nice things, and things don't keep themselves unless there's somebody looking after them.”

“Thank you, Olivia. I am sure this is meant kindly, but I cannot…I cannot answer your question. I suppose I shall have to make it clear to Lily when the sheets…when the bed…somehow. Oh.” Harriet took a handkerchief from her pocket, though she was blushing furiously rather than crying.

“I didn't mean to upset you, Mrs. Truscott. It's just that men, like you said, they don't notice things. But a woman does. I do. So if you change your mind, you let me know. It's not that I mind the work.”

She was gone then, and Harriet was left staring at the dressing table. The question she could not bring herself to address had a perfectly clear answer. They had “used” both beds, twice in each one, to be exact, and twice in her bed in Washington. This accounting was memorably simple, the more so because she had dropped the gentlest of hints to her husband that she hoped very much to have children for her father's sake. Fowler had kissed her brow, as if rewarding her bravery, but things hadn't changed much. And there had been the time, too, on their honeymoon, but that didn't count because…well, as Fowler had said, it had been a very strenuous day, walking all those miles to see the great cataract of Niagara from every possible point of view.

She had not known what to expect, though Lucy, given half an opportunity, would surely have told her everything she needed to know and much more besides. She supposed things were “normal” between Fowler and herself, but she could not know for certain. It was pleasant to have him there in her bed, and the scent of fresh talc with the deeper layer of pine tar soap was reassuring. She liked it when he fell asleep afterward, and sometimes they spent the whole of the night together, or at least until he got up to find the bathroom.