What was truly extraordinary was the work of another man, who stood atop the casing itself, as high and confident as a flying trapeze artist at the circus—except he wore no safety harness, and there was no net beneath him. Holding the chain, he called directions to the crane operator while simultaneously using the weight of his own body to ease the casing into position, taking a few steps one way, a few steps another way, making subtle adjustments. Astride that massive casing, he looked like an ancient hero, Hercules perhaps, taming a monster.
“This is the new generator my chief engineer, Karl Speyer, was working on before he died,” Tom explained. There was a catch in his voice—from regret or guilt, I couldn’t tell. “It produces four times more electricity than the others, with the same amount of water. I wish he was here to see this.” He sighed. “Well, it will have to serve as his memorial, along with the others we’re building from his plans.”
Suddenly, the casing swayed as the crane shifted too far to the right. Everyone gasped. But the man gripping the chain simply shouted a few choice words to the operator, who gave a good-natured shrug. Relaxing, the other workmen laughed, glancing first at Tom to gauge his reaction. He was smiling too.
“Isn’t that Rolf up there?” Squinting to see better, Maddie took a step forward.
“Yes, I think it is,” Peter said. He placed a hand lightly on her shoulder to stop her from going closer.
Maddie turned to me, her eyes alight. “Rolf was a friend of my father’s,” she explained. “They used to play chess together. He lives near us.”
The first hint of what was to come was an aching sound like a deep, slow groan. With that groan, the chain ever so gradually began to slip from its ties; gently, as if its moves were choreographed—a dance of metal and men—until abruptly the casing angled steeply to one side. Rolf gripped the chain above him with the strength and confidence of the god he was. For a long moment he swayed. Then the chain began to slip through its bounds. He struggled to climb it, to reach the steadiness of the crane itself, but as the chain cascaded through its ties, Rolf cascaded with it, desperately trying to pull himself up until all at once the chain ended.
And then, like a scientific experiment on gravity, the chain and the casing and the man began to fall, coming toward us, closer and closer, until all appeared to reach the floor at the same moment. The man expelled his breath in a long “ahhhh” as he landed on his right shoulder, his head hitting the dirty floor like an afterthought. The long, slithering chain rattled around him. The casing hit on its edge, making a hollow, reverberating ping. Then it began to fall over. Toward the chain. Toward the man. In that millisecond, the man might have rolled over and escaped. In that millisecond, someone might have reached for him and pulled him to safety. But he was dazed. We were all dazed. And perhaps the millisecond only seemed that long, as it burst into eternity.
The casing fell on the man’s arm. He didn’t call out. He simply looked at the chunk of metal that pinned him down, looked at it with surprise and confusion, as if not exactly understanding what it was, or how it got there. Someone screamed, and screamed again, and I realized that the screaming came from beside me, from Maddie—“Rolf! Rolf!” she cried—and I clutched her as Tom and Peter and the workmen ran forward. I gathered my girls and pushed them into a corner, out of the way. I turned them, so they wouldn’t face what was happening, and they obliged like marionettes I could arrange for my pleasure.
All except Maddie, who wouldn’t turn, who wouldn’t stop screaming. An alarm sounded. The workmen tried to rig another chain to pull the casing off the man’s arm. A bottle of whiskey appeared, and Tom held it to Rolf’s lips. Tom held the man’s hand and spoke to him softly. Finally a medical crew arrived. Tom shifted to make room. His suit, from knees to ankles, was seeped through with blood. Then the chief of the medical men opened his case and took out a saw.
“Peter,” Tom called with a preternatural calm, never taking his attention from the man stretched on the floor beside him, “escort the ladies to their carriage, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Peter came to us and wrapped Maddie in his arms, pressing a handkerchief over her mouth to quiet her crying. He took us outside, into the frosted, ice-bearing air, the sky deep blue, the high clouds white and sailing, as if we’d entered heaven itself. But I didn’t sense the presence of any god in this heaven.
On the walk to our carriages, I steeled myself to absolute calm. There would be time enough later to cry. Time enough to talk, to try to find explanations. At this moment, we had only our dignity to protect us, only propriety to guide us.
As we approached the power station gates, I saw the demonstrators who had been standing in the cold for hours to protest the theft of Niagara’s waters to make electricity. “What the Lord has given, let no man taketh away,” their leader exhorted his followers. He was a thin man, with a white beard and long, wispy white hair. He was small but stood on a crate to make himself tall. “The waters of God’s river belong to God. The falling waters lead to God! God sees, God knows, God has sent me here!”
Quietly I asked Peter, “Who is that?”
“His name is Daniel Henry Bates.”
“Would Thomas Sinclair put himself in the place of God?” Bates shouted. “Would he? Yes, he would. Do not doubt it: for I know the secrets of Thomas Sinclair, I know the desecration he plans. Nothing, nothing, can he hide from me!”
Peter said, “He’s the founder of the Niagara Preservation Society. His followers call themselves preservationists. He’s from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.” Peter too had taken refuge in propriety. “I hear he collects roses; he has hundreds of kinds of roses in his garden. Well, he won’t find many roses around here.” Peter sighed. “Each day when I come to work, I hear him invoking the name of God in his protest against us. But isn’t God light? Am I right on this, Miss Barrett? Isn’t it God’s work we’re doing here, by making light? Or is it a sacrilege? Are we just imitating the power of God? Trying to take God’s power onto ourselves? Does God approve or disapprove?”
His earnestness brought me close to tears. “I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know. Perhaps your priest …”
“Oh, yes. Father Mroz. He has dinner with Mr. Sinclair every other month. He’s got a beautiful church at Echota and the most beautiful vestments any of us has ever seen. I’ve never heard Father Mroz criticize the power station or speak up for better safety. You must forgive my sister,” Peter said abruptly. Maddie walked alone, ahead of and apart from the rest of us. “Our father died that way—close to it, at least, when Powerhouse Two was built. She wasn’t there, of course. She could only imagine the accident. Until now.”
“I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t—”
“After that, when Henry Perky started building his factory for Shredded Wheat, well … the rest of the men in the family went to do construction work over there. Except for me.”
Like a carnival barker selling nutrition, Henry Perky had come here two years before. He’d advertised that his factory would be utterly modern, absolutely clean, and astoundingly well-lit. With missionary zeal and apparent sincerity, he claimed that Shredded Wheat, which he had invented, could not only transform individual lives but would save the world. He called his factory, which was scheduled to open in May, a “temple,” so I suppose Shredded Wheat was the deity worshipped therein.
“My mother and my sisters—excepting Maddie, of course—have already got jobs lined up over there to make the Shredded Wheat after the factory opens,” Peter continued. “Now I’m sure Maddie will start in on me to make the move too. I could probably get some kind of supervisory job there. But Shredded Wheat’s not exactly on the same level as electricity. Not to me, I mean.”
“Hey, Fronczyk! You robbing the nunnery?” a man shouted from the other side of the road. Judging from the placard, he was with a group from the National Brotherhood of Firemen and Oilers who walked a picket line.
“Not the nunnery!” another man called. “Mrs. Monroe’s more like
ly!” This was greeted with guffaws. A few of the girls bit their lower lips, struggling to control the giggles that couldn’t be suppressed despite what they’d just seen. Poor Abigail, though, looked around at me in confusion, as if to say, “Mrs. Monroe, who’s that?” Evelyn took her elbow and whispered an education in her ear.
“Greetings, gentlemen,” Peter called to them with a wave.
“How kind it is of management to say hello. Glad to see you haven’t forgotten your old pals.”
“Oh, think nothing of it,” Peter said, putting on a British accent.
“He’ll come running back to us someday, just wait and see.”
After we passed them, Peter said, “I was an organizer once; O’Flarity was right about that. I suppose I did get enticed away by the bosses; sending union organizers to management training is one of Mr. Sinclair’s favorite tricks. But I’ve got to think of my own future, and my family, not just the movement.”
I was surprised that work could continue with one of the unions on strike. “Don’t the unions all strike together, in sympathy with each other?”
“Oh, this is more of a slowdown than a strike. Got to keep everybody in practice. There’s always somebody out here, marching around.”
Three open carriages waited to take us back to the train. Peter gave Maddie a hug before helping her into her seat. She had stopped crying, but her face was a blotchy red. Strands of hair had fallen from her bun. The other girls shied away from her as they took their places.
When the girls were settled, I took Peter aside a few steps. “Thank you for looking after us. I’m so sorry.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“The man’s family, perhaps the school could—”
“That’s not for me to say. But don’t worry yourself, Miss Barrett. This sort of thing happens all the time. Falls, drownings, electrocutions. Two or three a week. More, sometimes. During the unlucky weeks.” He stared toward the river. “It’s all reported in the Gazette, except nobody reads the Gazette but us! Tourists don’t read the Gazette; they’re too busy searching the Falls for some kind of ‘holy experience.’” Suddenly he turned to me, words rushing from him. “Please—don’t think I’m ungrateful for the work. The work is good. The pay is good. Mr. Sinclair makes improvements when he can. He even pays for medical care—personally pays—when men are injured on the job. Guess he couldn’t get the other directors to agree to having the company pay; I never heard of Morgan, Astor, and that crew paying for amputations.” Peter gave a short, bitter laugh. “We’ve got safety classes we’re required to go to, teaching what to do when someone’s in electric shock—which isn’t much, but still …” He paused. “The accidents we have inside the powerhouses are nothing compared to what the men outside suffer. The linemen, the cable splicers: They’re climbing thirty-five-foot poles and falling off every day. They have to deal with kids who think it’s fun to throw stray wires onto the lines and short them out. I wonder why the nature lovers haven’t figured out how to do that yet; maybe they haven’t taught themselves enough about electricity to know how it works.” He shrugged at the irony. “Anyway the men outside, they’re dealing with the thing itself: eleven thousand volts flowing through the lines. ‘Hot stick men,’ we call them.”
I remembered a newspaper article that had stayed in my mind because it had seemed so strange: Last year in Baltimore, the “hot stick men” had gone on strike, not for higher wages but for a reduction in the voltage.
“Hot stick men,” Peter repeated meditatively. “One false move … well, that’s true for all of us in this world, isn’t it, Miss Barrett? No matter what we do.” His face seemed ready to crumple. “One false move and it’s over.”
The girls were subdued as we waited for the train. The Buffalo and Niagara Falls Electric Railway, the line was called, fifty cents each way, a half-hour trip. We boarded and spread out through the car, most of the girls wanting a window seat. Maddie sat opposite me, staring out, Peter’s handkerchief crumpled in her hand. I sat quietly waiting for her to show a readiness to talk.
The girls said nothing during the trip. I too said nothing, because soon I would be called upon to say something—clear, cogent, and comforting. When we arrived back at school, we would gather for class, and I would need to give the girls an explanation. I was responsible for them; responsible for the kind of adults they turned into. I had tried to teach them to feel the anguish of others, to think for themselves, to search, evaluate, and take action in order to make some contribution to the world. What could I say to them, in the face of what we’d just seen, to reinforce all that?
If I were a minister, I’d tell them that what we’d seen was God’s will and Rolf would have his reward in heaven. But I found that argument offensive. When I first came to Macaulay a twelve-year-old student was killed, her body mangled, at a railroad crossing. “Emily looks down at us now from heaven. Happiness glows around her. She tells us to be happy for her, not sad, for she is in a better place. She is at peace with the Lord,” intoned the Reverend Holmes at her funeral service at Westminster Presbyterian Church. At that moment I lost faith with organized religion.
I looked out the window and saw that we were passing the power station: a group of lovely buildings arrayed along both sides of the river. The long windows reflected blue sky and billowy cumulus clouds. If I were a unionist, I’d tell the girls that we must fight harder now for safety standards so such an accident would never happen again. If I were an industrialist, I’d say that Rolf had made his sacrifice for the greater good of mankind. If I were a preservationist, I’d say that God himself had allowed the chain to break, to prove the sacredness of nature and the hubris of man.
The train curved away from the river, following the double row of power lines. Like an artist’s exercise in perspective, the rhythmic alternation of poles and cables created a stark beauty across the landscape. Up ahead a horse-drawn cart was parked in the snow between the double row of poles. As we passed, I saw on the side of the cart a sign for “The Niagara Frontier Power Company.” Directly beneath it was the company symbol of the Falls shot through with a lightning bolt. The horses’ breath steamed. Two men climbed the poles, the “hot stick men,” making repairs and checking the lines.
At that moment, past and future seemed to merge: the silver-black lines cutting the sky with their burden of electricity; the wooden cart with its horses stamping their hooves impatiently; and the men, frail as ever, climbing the thirty-five-foot poles without safety harnesses, working with wires that carried eleven thousand deadly volts. As Peter Fronczyk had said, one false move and their lives were over.
CHAPTER VI
I’d give up everything for you. You know that, don’t you? Home, position … everything I have could be yours.” Amiable teasing filled Francesca Coatsworth’s voice; she always concealed what was most important to her in a veil of irony. “I’ll take you around the world, if you like.”
Sitting side by side at her drawing table, we were about to review the architectural plans she’d prepared for the addition to Macaulay that Tom’s endowment had made possible. On this Friday afternoon in early April, the warming light was soft through the mullioned bay windows as the time neared six o’clock. The wind-roar amid the giant maples around the house muted all other sounds.
“We can start by spending a few weeks sleeping the day away on the deck of a ship.”
Every year at this time Francesca pressured me to go off with her, and every year I refused, no matter how tempting the proposed journeys might be. I had to refuse, because for Francesca, more was involved than simply the trip itself. She expected something in return … a degree of intimacy that made me uncomfortable, and her continued expectation brought a line of tension to our friendship. Margaret Sinclair and I had never made demands on one another. We were simply best friends, our relationship a given. With Francesca, however, I felt her shrewd looks upon me, her evaluations and calculations, her apparent confidence that somehow, some way, she could convince me t
o change my ways. Nonetheless, I clung to her friendship: She had brought me to Buffalo; we shared a wealth of memories and a similar way of life; and I relied on Francesca to be my cover if ever a wife began to question her husband’s presence at my salon.
“We can dine at the captain’s table every night; a mixed blessing, granted, but some people think it’s fun.”
We were ensconced on the top floor of her family house on Cottage Street. It was an eclectic mansion of huge pocket doors, long windows, mansard roof, and spiky turrets: a stereotypically brooding combination of Beaux-Arts and Gothic. After the deaths of her parents, Francesca had turned this third-floor ballroom into an art studio, a retreat of hanging silks, Persian rugs, and wide sofas, her work area spread beneath the arched windows. From her drawing table, we gazed across the tops of the trees, at Lake Erie and the Niagara River; both shimmered with sailing ships. Beyond the water was Canada—so close, like a touch away in a painting. Canada made Francesca’s dreams of flight seem real, for there it was, a foreign country at her doorstep.
“You need only say the word, and poof!” Like a sorcerer, she opened her fist in the air, flinging magic. “We’ll be gone.”
“It’s easy to threaten to give things up when you’ll never be asked to do so,” I said.
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