Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  The sun, which had been shining brilliantly earlier in the day, was overcast by the time they got to the Treverton house on the river, and the snow had begun falling again, softly, in big flakes that drifted lazily down from the darkening sky, dusting the rink with patches of snow that the older boys cleared away from time to time with the big scraper. Mrs. Steer loved the snowflakes. She told Tommy and Amy that each was different, that each, if you examined it closely under a magnifying glass, had a pattern, and that no snowflake was exactly like any other snowflake in the entire world, even though they looked much the same to the superficial eye. “Just,” she said, “like us. And just like the millions of cells in our bodies. No matter how much they resemble each other, each one is different, and different from anyone else’s, too. That,” she said after a pause, “is the meaning of unique.”

  “What about the snowball?” Tommy asked. “Every snowflake in the snowball is different, too?”

  “Yes,” she said, “every last one.”

  “That must be crazy for the snowball,” Tommy said, sticking out his tongue to catch a flake.

  “No more than it is for us,” said Mrs. Steer, laughing and taking off her skates to return to the house for a hot rum toddy. Tommy thought about twins, and wondered if not even twins were alike. They looked alike. He often imagined himself with a twin brother, a mirror image of himself in which he could see himself and his life, his thoughts and feelings, reflected back at him, but differently. He would have liked that, he thought, and someday he must ask Mrs. Steer about twins. But not now. Now he wanted to build a snowman with Jimmy Randolph, who had come to the party with his parents even though Jimmy’s father drank nothing but Coke.

  Tommy’s brothers, Nick Kingsfield, Vint Steer and their friends, Bob Griswold and Phil Meyer, even Lucien Wolfe, began a pickup hockey game, now that most of the older people had left the rink for the warmth of the house. Phil Meyer had helped Tommy make it around the rink three times without falling. Tommy was a very wobbly skater, and the skates that had been his brother John’s and then his brother David’s didn’t fit him very well. They were still too big. Amy Steer had gotten a new pair of white figure skates for Christmas—CCMs, the best kind. Amy was a better skater than Tommy, and he envied her ability to glide across the ice, almost as if she’d been doing it for years. But at least Tommy could use real skates now, instead of the double runners his parents had started him out with. “Let me tell you a secret, Tommy,” Phil Meyer said. “Nobody could learn to skate on double runners. The only way to learn is to get up on those single blades and wobble through.” Tommy wondered why, then, had his parents given him double runners to begin with. “Everyone falls at first,” Phil Meyer said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  While he skated with Phil, Daisy went around the rink with Tommy’s brother David, their arms linked behind them, and then David skated with Margie, and Daisy with Bob Griswold. Alone, Daisy Meyer was a very fancy skater. Everyone admired her skill. She didn’t look as if she had ever fallen in her entire life. Indifferent to the hockey game that flashed around her, she now darted onto the ice and leisurely carved a figure-eight, then flew across it, arms and legs extended like a bird, as if the law of gravity that had such a dire effect on Tommy had no effect on her at all. All other movement began to slow and slowly cease, the hockey game, the work on the snowman, as Daisy cut her graceful loops across the brilliant unyielding surface of the ice. And then, lowering her leg slowly to her other shin, Daisy began to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, until her body seemed a spinning blur that could go on spinning forever—when suddenly she stopped in a shower of ice and stood there poised for a moment, statuelike under the lights. Tommy could feel the sting of the ice in his nostrils.

  The hockey game could not compete with such intensity, and soon the players broke it off, and, except for Mr. Wolfe, who went inside for his hot toddy, they all helped work on the snowman. When it was finished, David and Nick began throwing snowballs, and within seconds everyone, Tommy and Amy and Jimmy included, was laughing and shouting and pelting everyone else with the snow that was now dropping thickly down from the black sky into the twinkling lights, onto the rink, the people around it, onto the winter trees and the frozen river in the distance, and onto the Treverton house, which beckoned them now with its bright windows, its warming fires, and its glowing Christmas tree.

  The tree was a fragrant balsam hung with hundreds of ornaments and cookies and chocolate wrapped in shining colored foil that the children were urged to take off the tree and eat, along with all the other good things that burdened Mr. Treverton’s table. It was fun, and Tommy ate a lot before his parents gathered him up to leave the party.

  “Now you, young man,” Mr. Treverton said to Tommy as they stood at the door, “did you have your hot chocolate and your eggnog?”

  Tommy said that indeed he had, and thanked him. He wondered who had helped Mr. Treverton with his party, since his wife was dead.

  “And you two,” Mr. Treverton said to his parents, “did you follow my rule—three hot rum toddies, followed by a cold one?”

  Tommy’s parents allowed that they had, his father having broken his Scotch-whisky rule for the occasion.

  “Then now,” concluded Mr. Treverton, “you’re fixed for the New Year.”

  “Yes,” his father agreed, “very well fixed indeed,” and Tommy, his mother, and his father departed. When they got home, Tommy went to the Steers’, where Mrs. Steer lighted the candles on the Christmas tree, as she had promised.

  4

  LATE THAT winter afternoon, there was a terrible explosion at the plant and three men were killed. Tommy saw it. He saw it happen. It was a little before five; the four-thirty whistle had blown a while before, signaling the end of the day shift. David was already home—he was always the first one out the gate, his father said—and Tommy had seen the last of the men with their empty lunch pails pass the Steers’ corner a few minutes before. He was standing at his bedroom window, the curtains filtering the glow from the furnaces against the sky. It was almost dark. Suddenly the glow from the furnaces intensified, like a surge of heat lightning, then immediately faded from the sky. Tommy parted the curtains with his hand and peered into the darkness. A second or two later there was a sharp, violent crack, followed by a cloud of black and white smoke billowing into the sky, and then the tongues of orange fire.

  “David! David! Something terrible’s happened. The plant blew up!” Tommy was trying to tie back the curtains. His brother was running down the hall to Tommy’s window. He had heard the explosion—the crack like his father’s rifle, and then the long thunderous roar—followed by the surging smoke and the flames that filled the air and reflected in the snow on the porch roof and flickered against the bedroom wall behind them. Tommy heard the sound of a siren from the plant—it was the alarm—and soon sirens filled the air.

  “It’s the fire trucks,” said David—“and the ambulance. My God, what happened?” Even Rose had rushed to Tommy’s window, and the three of them stood there transfixed, their eyes piercing the glass and the night.

  “The plant blew up,” said Tommy, his voice hushed. “The plant blew up.” Suddenly, “Daddy! What about Daddy?” Tommy raced into his parents’ room to call the plant. He had never called the plant before. He was not supposed to call his father at work, but he had heard the number often enough, and he knew it.

  “Don’t use the phone,” said David, grabbing it from his hand. “Dad will be trying to call. And Tommy, the plant didn’t blow up. There’s just something wrong with the furnaces.”

  In a few minutes the phone did ring. It was his father’s secretary, the one who’d told David that he’d gotten the infection in his elbow from bending it so much on the Northview bar, which wasn’t true. Neither Tommy nor his brothers nor his mother liked his father’s secretary, but his father did. She was loyal, he said, and she never repeated anything she wasn’t supposed to, the way Tommy sometimes did. Tommy seized the telephone,
but David snatched it from him.

  “Yes,” he said. “No, she’s playing bridge. . . . At the country club, I guess. What’s the matter?... Oh,” he said. “Oh. . . . Yes. . . . Okay. I’ll tell her.”

  “Tell her what?” Tommy screamed. “Tell her what?”

  “Dad’s all right. He wanted Miss Ernst to call and tell Mother.”

  “Oh, thank God,” said Tommy, who swore that never again would he have an evil thought about his father. “Thank God.”

  When his mother came home a while later, Tommy was the first to tell her. David was mad. “You know what they do with messengers who bring the bad news, don’t you?” he said. “They kill them.”

  “Mommy,” Tommy said, “David said he’s going to kill me. You just wanted to be the one to tell her,” he said to David.

  “Don’t be foolish, Tommy,” his mother said. “And David, for heaven’s sake, stop your teasing.”

  His mother hadn’t seen the explosion because she’d driven home the back way, and she guessed the country club was too far away for her to hear the noise.

  “Noise?” Tommy was incredulous. “It wasn’t a noise. It was a big explosion. A huge explosion! You can still see the smoke. Look!” Tommy pulled his mother into his bedroom and toward the clear view from his window, the clearest view in the house. “Look.” Across the way the clouds of luminous orange smoke still hung quivering in the air, like a living thing. They were all silent. Even his mother was shaken. “Dear God,” she said. “Dear God.”

  After a moment his mother said, in a voice she was trying to keep from trembling, “That’s enough now.” She released the ties that held the curtains from the glass. “Everything will be all right. Daddy’s all right—we know that—and he’ll call us soon. The plant didn’t blow up. There was just a problem in the furnace room. Rose,” she said, “would you get Tommy his supper—and see that he eats it—while I rest for a few minutes. I’m afraid it’ll be a long night.”

  “But Mother,” Tommy said, taking the curtains insistently from her hand, “I want to see!” He pushed them back to tie them.

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, pleading, “surely you’ve seen enough. Everything will be all right. There’s nothing we can do now, and there’s no point in standing here looking at it any longer. It’ll just make you upset.” The curtains fell in soft gauzy folds over the window, filtering the terrible smoke and flames and making them look quite pretty, like lamplight in a painting, like a sunset. But when his mother and David and Rose had left his room, Tommy tied the curtains back and stayed there watching—it did not look like a painting then—until Rose called him for supper, which he ate with David. His mother would wait to eat with his father. In the meantime, she was resting after her bath. Bridge was tiring. Often Mrs. Steer came home from the club with a migraine and had to go to bed; but she always won, too. She was the club champion.

  Tommy knew about the furnaces. He knew how dangerous they were, how they looked like a fiery lake. Although he had seen their glow in the sky for as long as he could remember, he had looked on them for the first time close up the Saturday after New Year’s. His father had taken him to the plant that afternoon, as he sometimes did on Saturdays or Sundays, to play at the adding machines in the outer office where a lot of people worked, but not on Saturday afternoon, and at the rolltop desk in his own office that overlooked the river. While Tommy played, his father worked at another desk, a big flat mahogany one whose top was covered with glass. He almost never used the rolltop anymore, but once he’d used it every day and he still liked it—it reminded him of the old times, he told Tommy—so he kept it in his office. Tommy was glad that he did. It was almost like the desk he had gotten for Christmas, only a lot bigger, and the top itself and all the drawers locked with a key. He loved to play there while his father worked at producing the things that made the tall brick smokestack—a free-standing chimney, really, taller than any building in town—give off its fragile plume of smoke and the furnaces give off their dust and fire. Tommy’s father had big jars in his office filled with chunks of coke and limestone, samples of the shipments that arrived by boat at the plant and, when the limestone had been made into lime in the clanking kilns by the tall chimney, went into the furnaces to make the chemicals that were then shipped all over the country by train. But when Tommy’s father worked, he worked at piles of paper, and sometimes with columns of figures from the adding machines that Tommy liked to play with. Tommy always brought his tapes home, and sometimes he showed them to David, who asked him what they meant. “What do you mean, ‘What do they mean?’” Tommy asked him. “They’re just my numbers.” But Tommy knew they had to mean something more than that, and it annoyed him that he couldn’t tell. They were just numbers that Tommy had punched out on a machine, and as David said, “By themselves they don’t mean a damn thing,” and as Tommy told him, “Well, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you in college like John?” and David would slam his door and that would be the end of that. So Tommy would pore over his figures, just as his father did, and he would make them mean something, at least to himself. They were his own secret.

  Tommy was playing at the rolltop desk in his father’s office that Saturday after New Year’s when his father’s phone rang. “MacAllister talking,” he said. He talked for a long time, and then some men from the plant came to see him in their work clothes and Tommy went to the adding machines, where he produced long tapes full of numbers, some of them in red. The men left, and after a while his father came out to get him. He was wearing a white smock and carrying an old shirt of his own that he told Tommy to put on. “We’re going out in the plant,” he said. “This will keep the dust off you. You must stay right beside me and not touch anything, anything at all. You could get hurt, or hurt someone else. And watch where you’re stepping, too. You’ll be all right as long as you do what I tell you.”

  They went out the door of the office, which was clean and bright, and into the plant, where dust covered everything and the light was dim. Tommy wanted to see it all. He had never been in the actual plant before, with its electrical shop and machine shop, the packing room and the shipping room and the drum factory where David worked, and the railroad tracks and the lime kilns and all those things Tommy had heard about but never seen, except from the outside, or, like the furnace room, as a light reflecting in the sky. Some places it was so noisy you could hardly hear, and in others it was quiet and empty. The air smelled the way it did after an electrical storm, and the dust burned. Tommy covered his mouth with his free hand so it was easier to breathe. His father held his other hand, and together they hurried along, Tommy wanting to stop, his father pulling him on, up and down stairs and past a lot of machines, some of them working and some of them quiet, through a lot of rooms and down a lot of corridors, and finally they came to the big doors of the furnace room, solid except for a tiny slit of dark glass too high for Tommy.

  His father stopped. “Tommy,” he said, “we’re going into the furnace room. Put on these goggles.” His father reached into a pocket of his smock and handed Tommy a pair of thick dark goggles. When he saw that Tommy had them on securely, he put on his own pair. Tommy was very excited. “When I open the door you mustn’t look at the furnaces. Even with goggles you’re liable to hurt your eyes. When we get to the control room, you can look through the windows. The glass is smoked, so the light won’t hurt you. Keep your goggles on, do absolutely what I say, and don’t talk and don’t get in the way of the men.” His father pushed open the heavy doors. Tommy recoiled from the heat and the blast. Taking Tommy by the hand, his father walked quickly to the control room. Tommy was afraid to open his eyes, but he did.

  What he beheld was astonishing: a vast, cavernous room partly open to the sky, and three great squares of molten fire like burning lakes, like something out of the Bible, fire and brimstone. He thought of the crazy man, the one who said, “Nothing is hidden from the scouring eye of God, and His hand shall smite the sinner down, and he will burn forever in the
unquenchable fire!” Tommy had forgotten that last part, but he remembered it now. He shuddered. At the same time, he felt very grown up, that he was allowed to be in a place of such danger, and he didn’t let on that he was afraid. He hardly noticed when his father introduced him to Mr. Anderson, the foreman. Tommy looked through the smoked glass and saw the three furnaces in a line and the tiny furnacemen who worked them from behind their big asbestos shields, bigger than the men. The shields moved back and forth on wheels, back and forth, as the men stoked the fires with very long rods—so long and so heavy that they were on rollers too—protruding from a slit in the shields that protected them from the heat and the light. Above the slit there was a tiny window of thick glass, like his goggles, and the men wore thick white suits and helmets that completely covered their heads, with the same glass over their eyes. Three men worked each furnace, pushing the shields before them. When one man moved forward, another went back, and the rhythm of the men was like the waves moving back and forth on the water, not in a line but separately. And then when the time was right, the foreman in the control room would pull a lever, and down from the roof would swing a long metal arm with a mouth at the end of it that would open and pour a stream of chemicals into the furnace, causing it to flare up with a white light while the men drew back before they continued their stoking and tending of the fire. Tommy had never imagined anything quite like it. When his father talked of the furnaces, Tommy had thought of something like their old coal furnace, only larger; and these were nothing like that. He thought his whole house could have fallen into just one of them.