The Lightning Keeper (7 page)

Any child knows the difficulty of taking a handful of water and holding it aloft: the water will find its way out through the cracks. This, in essence, was the fate of Aaron Bigelow's canal, for it was—quite inexplicably—improperly lined, or the force of water underestimated. Over the stones that formed the bottom of the canal was laid a thick blanket of clay, carted in from some distance, our own soil being thin and sandy. On top of the clay a mosaic of flat stones was set down, as one would do to finish a terrace or courtyard. No cement whatever was used. Perhaps it was considered and rejected as a pointless extravagance.

Aaron Bigelow was in all respects and in all matters a forceful, persuasive man, but the water would not do his bidding. When the great day arrived—there were already eight factories built, and another seventeen at some stage of completion—the spillways of the main dam were rammed home and the sluice gate to the canal cranked open. The water rushed down the topmost straightaway, and when the cheering of the crowd abated, each witness wondered privately what that ominous noise might be that so resembled the rattling of giant dice. It was
the paving stones, plucked out of their bed of clay by the onrushing water, smashing against the walls and each other, raking and rending the clay beneath.

At the bottom of the slope, where the new silk mill occupied the last site before the canal debouched into the riverbed, a smaller crowd, including the proud proprietor of that establishment, awaited the rush of water that would start the wheel turning. The mill was already stocked and fitted, the shafting, pulleys, and looms awaiting only the motive power of the Buttermilk to begin their business. Eben Cartwright, envisioning his future requirement of raw materials, had even purchased fifty acres of prime bottomland in the next township and set out ten thousand mulberry seedlings to feed his silkworms. The building, according to the diary of Cartwright's nephew, who recorded the incident, was suffused with the subtle aroma of the brand-new leather belting that connected the driver and all subsidiary shafts, gears, and pulleys.

The hoarse cheering, punctuated by a few firecrackers, rolled down from above, the signal that the sluice gate had been opened, and they waited. Seconds passed, seeming like minutes or hours, and eventually Cartwright consulted his watch: Surely it couldn't take water this long to flow downhill? When the water arrived it came from an unexpected direction…not by the canal, but flowing straight down the slope through the underbrush, a muddy trickle at first, and eventually a torrent that scoured the hill of leaves, deadwood, and some impressive boulders, all of which fell into the canal, plugging it and overwhelming the new wheel in its flume. A short while afterward a little water made its way down the canal bed and came to rest in a spreading pool behind this landslide.

The explanation for this debacle is already clear to the perspicacious reader, as it was clear enough to the onlookers once the sluice gate had been wrung down: those flat, heavy stones, though they might serve to keep a stone wall fixed and dressed for one hundred years in spite of the urgent thrust of the frost, had yielded in an instant to the rush of the Buttermilk, exposing the clay below, which was only a temporary defense, and in the blinking of an eye muddy water began to pour through every crevice in the rock wall on the downhill side of the canal.

The ensuing silence comprised the shock, mortification, and embarrassment of the spectators and the principals, and there may have been those gray heads in the throng who had heard and paid heed to the minister's words years ago: the history of failed enterprise had reasserted itself with a vengeance. At the top of the canal, Aaron Bigelow faced the situation, and the crowd, with a forthright, almost defiant air. The construction was defective, he proclaimed, but not the idea: purer clay and a more reliable subcontractor would be found, and the stones allowed to set in the clay until it was as firm as cement. And if that didn't work, a concrete lining would be installed, in spite of the expense. At the bottom of the hill, Eben Cartwright was heard by his nephew to mutter: Someone will have to pay for this.

The subsequent history of the canal was no more encouraging or profitable than this beginning, and far from being a source of revenue to the town, it must be seen as a rankling, debilitating thing, a succubus that fed on dreams, fortunes, even lives.

The purer clay was tried and found wanting. There was brief hope that a reduced flow of water might stabilize the canal bed, but it soon became apparent that such a stream would never support the full complement of factories, and Bigelow was not of a mind to tailor his ambition. Two years later, one of the principal backers of the canal died of natural causes, and the heirs sold his portion to Increase Lyman, a local iron maker of note, and long a rival of Aaron Bigelow's. One wonders, inevitably, at the motivation of the purchaser in this transaction: it was an odd time to be buying into the project, and perhaps he regarded the few thousand dollars—less than half of what had been paid in originally—as the acceptable price of being a thorn in Bigelow's side. This would not be out of character, for the house where Increase Lyman lived, near Salisbury, was called Spite House, and was known to have been built in order to block his neighbor's view of a pretty bend in the stream.

With the advent of Lyman, the affairs of the Power City Canal Company entered a new phase of acrimony and self-strangulation. Bigelow was no longer the only spokesman and anointed champion of the project, for Lyman was always there to commiserate with the frustration or anger of smaller investors, to play devil's advocate by suggesting that this or that thing had been done badly by the founder, and
perhaps even knowingly so. All of Bigelow's plans for repairing or altering the work met with scornful opposition from Lyman, and these rebuffs were repaid in kind whenever the latter had a proposal to make. The opposing parties exhausted themselves in spirit and in purse. A stalemate ensued, and for ten years no work was done on the canal. Weeds began to reclaim the mill sites, and in 1878, Eben Cartwright, his hopes and mulberry bushes reduced to dead stalks, his silk worms long since rotted in their cocoons, slit his throat with a straight razor. His nephew continued the pursuit of legal redress.

The toll on Aaron Bigelow was inexorable. He had to defend himself in court; he had to rally his supporters—not simply the investors who still listened to him, but those persons of local and regional importance who stood to gain by the long-term success of the canal project, and whose influence must be the foundation of that success; he had to worry about the energetic machinations of Increase Lyman; and he had also the affairs of his own business to attend to, when he found time. The Bigelow ironworks still turned out railroad car wheels of exceptional quality and durability, thanks to the seemingly magical properties of the Salisbury ore, which proved, when the process of chemical analysis was developed, to consist simply of low impurities and a high natural manganese content. But the cost of Bigelow's ambition, and its complications, eventually outran the productive capacity of the works and began to feast on his fortune.

Bigelow had never known poverty, and would never taste its bitterest fruits. But he certainly knew what it was to suffer a reversal of fortune that encompassed his entire life, and perhaps it was disappointment that killed him in the end. The vast, sudden wealth of the Bigelow Rifle was dribbling away—like the water through the canal walls—and along with it the slower, surer wealth of the Bigelow wheel. But instead of cutting his losses and repairing at least his own personal affairs, Aaron Bigelow—riding his cannon to the end—risked all on a dramatic gesture that was based more on the need to salvage reputation and self-respect than on any clear-eyed business plan.

He offered to redeem any shares in the Power City Canal Company for sixty cents on the dollar, and in order to do so he secured from the Iron Bank, run by his old friend Oren Truscott, a mortgage not only on the Power City site but on the ironworks, and even on the vast
acreage he held on Great Mountain, comprising tributaries of the Buttermilk, numerous holding ponds, and the charcoal-cutting reserve of the ironworks. This property on the mountain was known by its old name, the Bigelow Plantation.

The smaller investors, to a man, accepted the offer, not without grumbling, but with inward gratitude for Bigelow's unaccountable foolishness. Increase Lyman accepted the buyout as well. Perhaps he had tired of his sport; in any case, he had made a decent profit on his investment.

Bigelow celebrated the event by having a photograph taken. He stood directly behind his cannon with some workers ranged alongside the barrel. At the head of the file stands Amos Bigelow, the present ironmaster, who, like his father, deigns not to face the camera. The elder Bigelow presents a curious figure, still of impressive bulk—just as the vast barrel reduces him, so does he dwarf all other figures in the photograph—but slumped in the shoulders and, if one looks closely, drawn in the face, as if all flesh had begun its decline into the dust.

Three years later, in 1888, the banker Truscott, whose son is, of course, none other than Fowler Truscott, the senior United States senator from Connecticut, declined, with all heartfelt apologies, to extend the loan to the Canal Company. After reviewing the situation, he concluded that all of Bigelow's assets were fully valued in the mortgage, and not even the friendliest eye could discern any successful outcome to the canal scheme. (That the canal had descended to this equivocal or even pejorative labeling in popular parlance tells us much, in one word, about its history.) Negotiations proved fruitless, as did Bigelow's reluctant appeals to the ties of friendship. Both parties retreated into acrimonious silence, and at a reception for the railroad commissioners, who had a stake of sorts in the fortunes of Power City, Bigelow pointedly refused to shake Truscott's hand.

A week later, the ironmaster, much disheveled, arrived at the works and had his men reposition the rusting Bigelow Rifle with crowbars. They raised the barrel by means of freshly cast iron pigs so that it pointed at the Iron Bank, just visible through the elms at a range of some eight hundred yards. With his own hands Bigelow triple charged the barrel and rammed home the wadded ball, and with his own cigar, as of old, he lit the fuse. In the truly tremendous explosion that followed,
the barrel failed in its final duty and burst asunder, sending Aaron Bigelow to his Maker virtually in one piece, for no trace of him was found other than his left boot and a bit of the shinbone. No one else was injured, and the ball came to rest embedded in the trunk of a sugar maple that stood just next to the post office. It is lodged there still, an object of bittersweet curiosity.

Well, that is the sad history of the peaceful town below, or at least the principal narrative, which has served as the cloth of much subsequent embroidery. But life in Beecher's Bridge did not come to a halt in that great explosion, any more than the bank was destroyed by the ironmaster's ball. There were cows to milk, children to feed, and iron wheels that must be cast, for the fire in that furnace must never be allowed to die out, else the belly becomes fatally plugged with ore and flux and the cold iron.

Amos Bigelow took over the works from his father, and with the help of the insurance money, grudgingly paid, he staved off the financial crisis, at least for a time. He was ever a careful man, and had grown up in the large shadow of his incautious parent. He made two vows and has kept them to this day: he would be a maker of bar, plate, iron wheels, and such modest implements as the townsmen required for their daily business; and he would never again set foot in Power City, or what was left of it.

There is his house, the home of the ironmasters for well over one hundred years, and you may see what sacrifice was necessary to bring the railroad through our town, for the grade cuts off the bottom part of his garden. And over there, around the corner of the mountain marked by the odd outcropping of Lightning Knob, the manse of the Truscott family lies on a green sward sloping down to the lake where the senator takes his morning exercise a-rowing in his sleek scull with his bulldog, Sousa, perched on the bow. The senator will shake any man's hand, but there is a particular tone in the cordiality he extends to the ironmaster: so much difficult history comprised in that clasp, to say nothing of the outstanding mortgages, and for the most part our Montague and our Capulet maintain a polite, wary distance. I will say this, however, and trust it will not be received as any vulgar tale-carrying but rather as a thread in the warp of our history: the senator, although he is a lifelong bachelor and a man not so distant in years from the ironmaster him
self, has a particular care for the daughter, Miss Harriet Bigelow, a graceful and accomplished young woman who, in addition to her discreet competence in the accounting and disbursements of the Bigelow Iron Company, is a musician of note and a principal in the affairs of the local chapter of the Temperance Union.

In a very correct and unobtrusive way, the senator has become her patron in the matters of nearest concern to her: he has hosted a fund-raising gala in the Manor, as his house is called, for the Temperance Union, and has forbidden any alcoholic beverage to be served at his political gatherings; his pew in the Congregational Church, which affords a convenient, oblique view of the Bigelows', is in regular use when the senator is not attending to affairs in Washington, and he has requested of her the favor of a needlepoint cover for that little stool whereon he kneels; he has organized more than one musical soirée at the Manor, where Miss Bigelow charms the audience with her voice and her mastery of the piano, and where afterward the senator exerts himself in a vigorous reel with that young woman as his partner, to the applause of all present; and, of course, there are those private audiences in his office in the bank, when the mortgage papers are withdrawn from their iron box to be shuffled, discussed, and put away again with smiles on both sides.