Electric City: A Novel (13 page)

His older cousin Isaiah had been employed as a welder for the Company, working a full year before convincing Martin to get an assembly-line job there too. “Would you rather dig ditches all summer?” Isaiah asked him.

“Come on,” Martin said, for once testing out the role of an optimist. He’d been the only one in the family singled out by the statewide motivational programs, targeting “underachievers” who could be rescued by extra math and science classes. “You know as well as I do that
Sputnik
changed a few things.”

“Yeah, you might get a diploma from the white school,” Isaiah said. “That doesn’t mean you can actually use it to get anywhere.” He slapped Martin on the shoulder as if to wake him up. “There’s always hauling trash, selling shoes.
Enlisting
.”

As an experiment for the summer, Martin took his cousin’s advice. Now they nodded when they passed, holding their time cards for punching in and out. The
thwack
of the machine stamp and the nearly relentless din of the factory were the cancellation of every sound Martin loved and reminded him that the collar and leash he never used for Bear were on his own neck now, jangling with an ominous prediction of the rest of his life.

Men his age who were heading off to basic training didn’t look to him like heroes in the making. And Martin couldn’t ignore a kind of gray pallor spreading across the faces of his coworkers, a grim portrait of the inescapable. Assembly lines and lifelines, vitality draining off the way the factory floor was hosed off at the end of the day, taking a little of their sweat and blood too, all of it down the drain and lost for good.

Company men. Company town.

Working six days a week, he made a point of getting to the library every other day either before or after his shift. The second time he met Sophie among the stacks, their conversation had veered toward music, toward geography, toward poems. During her break, they sat side by side wearing headphones and listening to Robert Frost recordings or Dvorak’s
New World Symphony
. When Sophie closed her eyes, Martin watched her lids tremble along with the sounds.
Someday
, he thought,
you can share Joseph’s stories with her
. Someday.

The geometry of himself as well as Henry leaning toward Sophie rattled him as dangerously as a broken windowpane. He forced himself to imagine some collision in which all three of them could be friends without friction, a blending of ancestry and melody like the kind Dvorak wrote into his music. Some casual but perfectly synchronistic arrangement. And then it turned out that the river actually wanted to flow that way. Because of a canoe.

For three years, Martin’s father had stopped returning to Electric City altogether. The way Annie tended her garden out back was the only true reminder of a reliable tempo now. If Joseph had lived long enough to teach him the craft of canoe building, maybe that would have been his doorway to an autonomous future, but there were already too many factory-made canoes coming from Maine and Vermont, not to mention the scarcity now of cedar and ash.

He had to do what was necessary to keep Annie’s home repaired, the screen and storm windows alternating through the changes in season, the persistent supply of firewood for the stove. She braided rugs for the house’s bare floors, using scraps of old denim and wool that had once
made up Joseph’s wardrobe, simple colors and textures to memorialize a well-loved utilitarian life. The ovals made from Joseph’s shirts were the softest ones, placed on the floor beside her own bed and Martin’s.

The other day, Annie had come in from the garden with an armful of tomatoes and squash, saying she planned to start canning early this year.

“Bounty now will get us through any kind of winter ahead,” she smiled.

To Martin she often sounded like a mystic even when she was referring to vegetables. When he saw the altar in the hallway with a freshly placed scattering of marigold petals, he realized this was the anniversary of her marriage to Joseph. She confirmed it when he asked.

“Today is sixty years,” she said.

Martin tried but failed to comprehend that amount of life shared with anyone. His parents had been together maybe three years, or four. Long enough to conceive and give birth to a son, but basically leaving him to become what they had woven together.

“You know there’s his last canoe,” Annie said, turning to Martin after preparing her stewing pots, wiping her hands on her rough faded skirt. “You have to take that one out onto the river to let it breathe, and then sell it. Joseph’s spirit told me it’s time.”

Martin thought he heard a quiver in her voice, saw the tender gleam of tears at the corners of her eyes. Speechless at her request, he searched her face for an explanation that could make some sense.

“I could drop out of school to work full-time, you know,” he said.

She put her hands on his chest, stopping him from saying anything else. “No arguing,” she said.

When he reached out to hold her, the sudden frailty of his grandmother’s bones surprised him. Had it been such a long time since he’d embraced her? The years were spinning faster now that he’d grown
so much taller than she was. There was a bunch of lavender hanging upside down above the kitchen sink, and he breathed that in alongside the earthy scent of the garden beyond the open door.

He had planned other activities for his day off: changing oil on the truck, a long walk with Bear. But Annie’s decision obviously belonged at the top of the list. After washing dishes from his breakfast and leaving his grandmother cloaked in a veil of steaming vegetables, he whistled for Bear and headed outside.

In the shed, the canoe had been patiently waiting. Unlocking the door, Martin’s first glimpse took in the radiant beauty of his grandfather’s handiwork. Air and light—streaming in from the windows and now the shed’s open door—stirred up clouds of dust motes that reminded him of mica chips glittering in river water. Suspended from the rafters and bone-dry from lack of use, the birch-bark canoe still exhaled a kind of vitality, a living, breathing body. He reached up to touch the hull, caressing its hand-rubbed seams, silently counting its ribs, imagining Joseph’s fingerprints on everything.

Ready now, he lifted the canoe free of the hooks and placed it right side up on his left shoulder, grasping the paddle from its resting place on the wall. Bear was bounding ahead of him on the well-worn path that led from Annie’s land to the water’s edge. Within a few minutes’ walk, the smooth surface of the river welcomed the canoe’s arrival—no, its return—now doubling its beauty. Martin removed his sandals and allowed himself to envision Sophie at the edge of the water alongside him, her bare legs reflected and rippling.

Still, it was right and necessary to be alone for this part of the farewell. Martin told Bear to wait; they would be leaving together soon. Holding the craft steady, he knelt inside its cradling shape, and pushed away from the shore.

Paddling, pausing, he saw how his own hands had grown to resemble what he remembered of his father’s and grandfather’s too, his younger skin merely awaiting the eventual imprint of a worker’s tasks. In contrast, at least for now, the work of his hands was in the service of machines rather than boats or bridges. Joseph’s calluses wouldn’t be repeated on Martin’s body. The one-at-a-time art form his grandfather had pursued was nearly obsolete now, and it saddened him to think there was probably no one else in Electric City who felt the loss. Midge, perhaps? He would have to ask her.

Martin’s thoughts wandered further as he passed the place where Camp Mohawk used to perch on the cliff. Joseph would have known how to measure the distance between the river and the treetops, tracking the arc of hawk vision and the amount of moisture in the air. Even the soil held such memories, fossils buried by time. For once Martin wished he had a recording of Steinmetz to add to his collection, a conversation blending the past with the future. All these voices so as not to be alone.

He trailed his fingers in the soft water, imitating the wavelets made by a family of wood ducks nearby. There should have been fish, at least an occasional brown trout or smallmouth bass, but they were disappearing, yet more evidence of a disturbing trend of losses. Streaming through his mind were questions he never felt comfortable asking in his classes, whispers of his own heart.

Electromagnetism everywhere, long before we knew how to harness it. And then what happened? DC and AC, the terrible stories about Edison who was so sure of his convictions about DC that he was willing to electrocute animals—
dogs! an elephant!!
—to prove that AC was the “death current.” He was wrong. This was the way science could make monsters or monsters could make science.

What about Oppenheimer and all the others willing to pretend it didn’t matter how their science would be used, or who mostly avoided talking about the uses they couldn’t control? “Destroyer of worlds,” Oppenheimer said. Yes, but it was already too late.

Tesla, the genius whose troubled mind turned against itself. And Steinmetz, whose body was a kind of curse. But still he held the dazzle of mathematics inside him, and he knew how to love other human beings, even if he wouldn’t allow himself to father any.

Lightning paints yellow white across the canvas of night, and it’s the gods who are doing it, the ones who determine fate and food and famine and plenty. The ones who give symmetry to some and disease to others, beauty and failure, in equations that never quite balance.

The dreamers were speaking to him—not only about the skies but also about the human kind of electricity. Reminding him to rest in a trusted current, and to release what couldn’t be held.

C
HARLES
P
ROTEUS
S
TEINMETZ
, dressed in suit and tie, stared straight at the camera with his arms neatly folded and a cigar resting between the fingers of his right hand.

And in Martin’s favorite photograph: Steinmetz in his own birch-bark canoe. Joseph’s elegant mastery, even though he was nowhere to be seen. Leaning intently over a plain board stretched across the gunwales, Steinmetz was wearing a white cotton undershirt, revealing rounded shoulders and tanned arms.

This photo was in black and white just like the others, but somehow seeing the man so relaxed and alert, as though he had just looked up during the space between calculations, always made Martin imagine the blaze of sunlight on the river, the heat-shimmer rising, colors he could have painted with his eyes closed.

Midge had told Martin some of what she knew existed beyond the edges of the photos. “Steinmetz kept piles of pebbles scattered on the bottom of the canoe, handy for weighing down his papers on a breezy day,” she said. “Every once in a while they escaped, grabbed by wind and vanishing underwater. He used to tell me that the ideas retained in his mind’s eye were the ones meant to be kept.”

For his cigar, he always brought along waterproof matches, even if he just needed to feel the Blackstone clenched between his teeth, not for smoking but for concentration. His jaws were like his intellect:
determined and strong, chewing on whatever needed digesting. From the time he was in Zurich, all those years ago, he had more mental stamina than all of his friends; he wouldn’t sleep until he had solved a problem, completed a formula.

And this river always reminded him to be patient and not give up. The camp he had built along the banks was home to several beloved pet crows and an ever-growing assortment of lizards and orchids and cacti, but mostly what he loved about the canoe was how he could be absolutely alone with the sky and the water and the silence.

“I was too young to understand some things,” Midge said to Martin. Joseph Longboat was the only one who could visit with the emptiness.