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A Novel
by John Griesemer
It was after her first concert in Washington, at the reception at the President's mansion, that she met Undersecretary of War Russell vanderWees and heard again of Chester Ludlow.
From the catwalk, poised and in command, Chester signaled the man on the gate to let the molten metal flow. Looking up at the catwalk had put Katerina in mind of the gantry over Joachim's model of London: a world spread below.
A moving glow caught her attention. A gold and red trickle at first became a rich, flaring stream of iron coursing out of the furnace and down into the mold built into the foundry floor. A cheer went up from the stokers around the building. Chester acknowledged them, and with his spectacles reflecting the crimson of the incandescent metal, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his cravat loosened, he stood luminous in the flaming metal's light.
"Vulcan," said vanderWees as he stood looking up beside Katerina.
"Vulcan was lame and ugly," Katerina said.
"My mistake," said the undersecretary, and bowed, seeming to enjoy his error.
It was an unimpressive hole into which the metal poured, a small hatch in the floor. The matrix for the cannon was a vertical mold, extending downward some thirty feet below the furnace. Water was flowing into the cooling core that would shape the bore of the cannon as the hot metal oozed down the sluice. Below, stokers were shoveling burning coke into the jacket of the matrix to keep the outer layers of metal hot and thus cool the gun from the inside out so each layer of iron would contract and grip tighter around the layers within.
Katerina could hear the stoker bosses shouting orders on the galleries below them in the basement of the foundry. Chester came down from the furnace catwalk, smiled to her, shook hands with vanderWees, and said that he must continue down to see how the casting was proceeding.
"It's marvelous," she said. "You are doing wonderful work."
"It's for war," Chester said, looking surprised, almost as if it were a thought that was coming to him for the first time. "It's an instrument of war."
"It's to end a war," vanderWees piped in.
Katerina took both of Chester's hands and pulled him to her, placing her cheek against his and whispering, "You are wonderful," and then darted her tongue into his ear.
She felt Chester jump in her grip, and she laughed.
She and vanderWees left Chester to continue work. In the month since their reunion, Katerina had managed to spend most nights with Chester, arranging her concerts to be near him. She had booked a program in Pittsburgh and performed to a sold-out house that evening. VanderWees, who was making trips over to the foundry, sent notes to her hotel as to the progress of the cannon's molding. All was going well.
On the third day after the casting, she hired a carriage and rode through the early-morning streets toward the river and the foundry. Chester had stayed all night with the cannon. The day was already hot, and the sun was barely up. The paving stones were dusty, and the Monongahela appeared so listless that it might have been a broad swath of brown flannel lying between the hills.
It was Sunday. The foundry was empty. The watchman waved her through the gate. The carriage rolled down alleys between equipment sheds and piles of coke, the horse's hooves emitting little puffs of dust. Even the harness made only a stultified clinking, like the sound of prisoners chipping stone.
Katerina went past the buildings housing the two smaller cupola furnaces, then she rounded an ash pile to see the large reverberatory tower. It was smoking, but like all the other furnaces, its fires were banked. Nothing about the place pulsed or throbbed. It was a beast asleep, taking slow, slumbering breaths.
She got out of the carriage, told the driver not to wait, and walked toward the furnace building. On one side, two enormous bulkhead doors sat open. There on a ramp descending into the darkness of the basement sat the cannon on a set of six trucks. In the shadows, Katerina could see the dismantled mold: heaps of lumber, iron banding, and sand. The cannon had been lowered with block and tackle from the vertical and now lay on the wagons, angling out into the daylight. With its dark, sand-mottled surface, it looked like some blunt, armored lizard that had just hatched from the detritus that lay behind it in the shadows.
Copyright 2003 by John Griesemer. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
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