The Lightning Keeper by Starling Lawrence

in the race. They could only guess at the big picture in Bigelow’s—or, more accurately, Harriet’s—mind, whatever the talk might be of the new contract for cast car wheels in such quantities that a man might walk on them like stepping-stones all the way from Beecher’s Bridge to New York City.
    The decision to shut down the wheel was Horatio’s: he was the only man in the works who could give such an order aside from Mr. Bigelow, but even Bigelow would not challenge him, nor ask a question about what was done. Horatio, any way you looked at him, was not aman who invited questions or small talk, for you knew that you could expect nothing in reply. The back of him was forbidding enough: not so tall, but wide, like a boulder, with the head set down on his shoulders like a man who expected to be struck from behind at any moment. And the face, although he smiled as often as any other man, inspired a kind of uneasiness even in those who had known him for years. He knew things about you, or about the world itself, that were best left unspoken.
    Toma had kept his distance from Horatio during his weeks at the mill, for he was respectful of any man’s privacy just as he guarded his own, and besides, there was the plain fact that Toma’s presence was a challenge to the man who kept the wheel.
    Owing to this caution, Toma, who had inspected every dusty corner of the furnace and the forge, and spent hours at Harriet’s side in her tiny office inspecting the ledgers, had never until this moment seen the inside of the wheel pit, much less the wheel itself. He had tested the tension and wear of each link in the power train, from the yard-wide leather belting of the journal or central axle—three ox hides he guessed—that took the strength of the river from the wheel, on and up through the rickety housing of the furnace as those slow, irresistible revolutions were retailed through complex gearings and ancillary belts, faster and faster but with ever-diminishing force, to serve the various functions of the ironworks: bellows; trip-hammer; conveyers of fuel, ore, and flux; lathes and grinders. It was like a tree, he thought, dedicated to motion rather than growth, or like a river moving in reverse. At the farthest tributary—he puzzled over this, thinking there must be a word for its opposite—a gloved hand could act as a clutch or brake on the driving belt of a grindstone; touch the main belt and those three oxen would take your arm and maybe your life.
    And yet he had never seen the engine itself, this vast idle thing whose farthest edges were lost to sight. He had a candle end in the pocket of his shirt and matches that were still dry, but he waited for his eyes, trusting the darkness.
    The surface of the wood under his hands, though nearly dry, had an odd, slippery resistance, as if both wax and oil had been applied to an articulated wooden sculpture. The wheel moved soundlessly in response to his touch and each bucket, stretching away from him fartherthan his hand could reach, moved through a small range of motion against the resistance of a spring he could not find. He puzzled over this detail, made the wheel revolve in his mind, felt the water cocking that hidden spring, which would, near the bottom of the arc, act in concert with gravity to cast the water away. And was the speed of the wheel increased by this articulated tension? Or was the device simply to cushion the architecture of the wheel against the assault of the water? He was impatient with his inability to resolve this question in his mind: any fool could do it with a pencil, and he was not any fool.
    His impatience blossomed into a deeper discontent that touched on many things but centered inevitably on himself. What had he expected to find in this sanctuary other than a carefully tended antique? And how could he justify the time he had spent elsewhere in the works, putting off the discovery of what he already knew? What