No Facilities

There was no official Thursday Doors post this week, but there were still several entries. I will include those entries at the beginning of next week’s Sunday Recap.

As I write this post, there have been 35 creative works posted for the Thursday Doors Writing Challenge (the story below will be story No. 36. My story is inspired by a door from Brenda Cox at Thoughts of a Wander.

Ground Floor

The whirring and rumbling of the machine was barely audible, but Jason sat up in bed and peeked out the window. Light was seeping out around the shades of his father’s ivy covered workshop. He was working and Jason had time to join him before school.

Jason quickly pulled on his work jeans, and a pair of socks he picked up from the floor. He tucked the night shirt he had slept in into the jeans, slipped into his boots and twisted his arms into a wool shirt, pulling it over his shoulders as he walked.

“Where do you think you’re going.” His mother yelled, knowing the answer full well.

“Out to help dad. He says…”

“Yes, yes, I know what he says. ‘Work with me and get in on the ground floor of this machine.’” She scowled. “Just you remember that the ground floor is often wet and dirty and crawling with rats. I think you should at least have some breakfast.”

Jason grabbed an apple from the dish on the table. He ate the apple on his way out to the shop and wailed the core deep into the woods. Inside, the warm air and the smell of machine oil rose in familiar fashion. His father was lying under the hulking iron frame.

Without so much as a greeting, his father quipped, “Hand me that curved wrench.” The statement came out somewhere between a plea and an order, but Jason was happy to comply.

“Nine sixteenths or the five eights?” Jason asked, holding both.

“Five eights.”

His father didn’t talk much about his wannabe invention while he labored on it. He preferred to focus on the vision that was clear in his head. Nathan Sweatman was a gunsmith, but he had a longstanding interest in the printing industry. He had worked as a typesetter, and he had fashioned some handheld devices for improving the tedious manual process of preparing a line of type. The tools made the typesetter’s job easier but offered little improvement to performance. When he approached some men known to be investing in the printing industry, they told him that unless the tool could save much more money than it cost to make, they had no interest—they had to allow for a profit.

Jason held one of his father’s variations of a composing stick in which the typesetter composed a single line of type. His father’s version was easier to hold, easier to adjust, and would surely outlive the man using it. Nathan peered out from under the machine.

“No one will buy that, because a machine like this is surely coming. If I don’t invent it, the German in Baltimore will.”

He crawled out from under the machine and stood. There was a small potbellied stove in the corner of the shop. Nathan grabbed the coffee pot on top with a soiled rag. He refilled the ink-stained earthenware mug and pointed to a small rack with mugs hanging.

“Pour yourself a cup, son. Your mother never comes out here—she won’t know.”

Jaquelin Sweatman was a schoolteacher. She joked that she taught people to read, thereby building the basis for her husband’s ambition. She wanted Jason to pursue the ‘career of an educated man,’ as she liked to say. Nathan, on the other hand, was convinced that they lived in a time when the right invention could make them wealthy beyond belief. He had the skills necessary to build prototypes of almost any machine. He also had the mechanical drawing skills necessary to illustrate patent applications. He had several minor patents for gun parts and tools gunsmiths used, but automation had already rendered some of them obsolete. His friend, Jacob Worley, owned a small machine shop in town. He manufactured individual tools and a variety of replacement parts for older firearms—all based on Nathan’s patents. In exchange, he manufactured parts that Nathan couldn’t make in his shop. Both men saw the potential in Nathan’s work, but both men knew Nathan was in a race against scores of other inventors. Both had also received threats.

Jason believed in his father’s vision. He started out with only a rudimentary understanding of the elements of the machining process and barely any of the design of the machine his father was working on, but he had learned a lot by helping. When Nathan wasn’t working on the machine, he would describe the various parts and stages of operation. Jason knew about the threats, but he took them as a validation of the potential value. He picked a note off the workbench under the coffee mugs.

Printed with a random selection of typefaces. Jason immediately knew it was from a typesetter. The message was concise and clear:

Nathan saw his son reading the note.

“Don’t worry about that, Jason—but don’t show it to your mother.”

“Who sent this, pops?”

“My friends.” Nathan laughed. “It was stuffed in the crease of the door.” He pointed with his coffee cup. “That’s my problem, son. I know the men who would be displaced by this machine. I worked with them. I’ve been selling them tools for years.” He sipped his coffee, prompting Jason to do the same. “My competitors know the men who own the companies my friends work for. Those men, and men like them are investing in their work. Why, I even heard that Mark Twain has invested in one machine.”

“Mark Twain? The author? Why would he care about something like this?”

Nathan smiled. “He knows printers, and he knows that if printing was easier, books could be cheaper. If books were cheaper more people would buy them, and he’d be even more famous than he is today.” Nathan shook his head. “But I know the man whose work he’s funding. James Paige will never get his ‘compositor’ to work—I’ve seen the design, and it’s flawed.”

Jason grinned as he heard the disdain as his father called out the name of the machine.

“Will you be able to make yours work?”

Nathan shook his head. “No. Unfortunately, in this small shop, I won’t be able to make more than a model that proves the concept of the key parts. Still, it might be enough to attract an investor, or perhaps a competitor that wants a partner.”

Nathan looked up at the clock over his gunsmith workbench. “You’d better go get ready for school, and I better finish some of the jobs people are paying me to do.”

Jason ran to the house. His mother was banging doors in the kitchen. She poured Jason a cup of tea and put two biscuits leftover from dinner the night before on the table.

“I would have made you some porridge, but you won’t have time to eat it. Wash your hands, put on a decent shirt and get ready for school.”

Jason and his mother walked to school together. She taught one of the younger grades. When they got closer to the building, he might finish walking with some of his friends, but she liked to leave early.

“Don’t be angry with pops, mom. I wasn’t paying attention to the time. He sent me back in.”

“You need to learn the difference between frustration and anger. Your father should have sent you back in earlier.”

One thing Jason didn’t need to learn was that arguing with his mother was pointless and unwelcome.

“Yes Ma’am.”

As they approached the school, Jason saw some of his friends in the clearing where they liked to play. Hs mother noticed and bent down to give him a kiss on his forehead.

“I’m sure your friends didn’t see that. Be sure to come by my classroom after school. There are papers due today, and I’ll want your help carrying them home for me to grade.”

“OK. Do you get paid for working at night? I’m just curious.”

“I get paid for the job I do, Jason. Working at night is part of that. There’s more to life than being paid. Your life should have a purpose about which you can be passionate.”

─●─●─●─

As instructed, Jason stopped at his mother’s classroom after his class was dismissed.

“Did you have a good day today, Jason.”

The way she said Jason told him she knew he had gotten in trouble.

“Mrs. Norris complemented me on my homework, and she liked my answer to a science question. We had a quiz, and I got all the answers right…but I got yelled at for not paying attention later.”

“During a discussion about music, as I understand it.”

“Yes, Mrs. Norris was playing the piano, and I was trying to figure out how it worked and what the pedals might be doing.”

“You got that inquisitive mind from your father. I guess I can’t blame you, but you need to learn how to focus.”

“Are you bothered by Dad’s work?”

“No, Jason. Your father’s a dreamer. His dreams cause him to waste some time, but the world needs dreamers. He hopes that one day gunsmiths will only work on antiques.”

“Is that why he wants to make a typesetting machine?”

“Yes. He thinks more people should have access to the news in ‘it’s first form’ as he says. He thinks too many people have to rely on friends and family members to  learn about events.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“I do. I’d like to think that if more men had an understanding of the world, we could step away from wars. That’s why I became a teacher. I want to make sure children can read and that they can makes sense of what they read.”

As they approached the house, Jaquelin noticed a letter sticking out of the little post box her husband had made. When she saw the postmark—Baltimore, Maryland—a chill went up her spine.

She handed the items she was carrying to her son. “Jason, take these into the house. I have to go check on your father.”

The door to Nathan’s shop was slightly ajar. Jaquelin pushed it open farther. It stopped as it bumped against Nathan’s body. There was a puddle of blood on the floor, and she noticed the handle of some tool sticking out of his chest. Nathan was dead. She found a piece of ink-stained paper in his hand. He had written the name “Eric R.” in his own blood on the page.

Jason wandered back to the workshop and found his mother sobbing, still sitting in the doorway.

“What happened, mother?”

Through her tears, Jaquelin tried to manage a strong front. “Jason, you father is dead. I’m sorry, there’s no way to make that easy. But we haven’t got time for sorrow at the moment. You need to run into town to the police station. Tell them who you are and that your father was murdered by Eric Rothenberg .”

“Jason started to cry and stood frozen in place.”

“Jason! You have to be strong. Summon your strength and go get the police. Do you remember the man’s name?”

“Yes. Yes, mother, Eric Rothenberg .”

“Good. Tell the police to come here. Now hurry!”

─●─●─●─

Two policemen went to arrest Mr. Rothenberg and two others accompanied a horse drawn ambulance to the Sweatman home. Jaquelin was still at the entry of the shed. They helped her to her feet, and one of the ambulance attendants took her into her house. Nathan’s death was certified at the scene. The police recovered the note as evidence. Eric Rothenberg had been arrested. Later, when confronted with the note found at the scene, he confessed to the murder, although he said he had only planned to talk to Nathan, but things had gotten out of hand.

─●─●─●─

A few days later, after the funeral, Jaquelin showed Jason the letter that had arrived the day Nathan was murdered.

“I knew something had happened to your father when I saw this letter. He had been waiting for it for weeks.”

“Who is it from, Mother?”

“Mr. Ottmar Mergenthaler. He’s an inventor in Baltimore and he’s been working on the same kind of machine as your father was. Your father had heard that Ottmar was having a problem with something that your father had figured out, and he offered to help Mr. Mergenthaler.”

“What will happen now that Pops is dead?”

“I sent a telegram to Mr. Mergenthaler. I told him what happened, and I told him that my son,” she looked proudly toward Jason, “Knows everything about the machine his father was working on.”

She held up a second piece of paper.

“This telegram is his reply. He’s willing to honor the deal he was going to make with your father if you can explain your father’s machine to him. He will be visiting us later this week.”

She paused. “Do you think you know enough to help him, Jason?”

“I’m sure I do, mother. I’m sure I do.”

According to the research arm of Thursday Doors a.k.a. Wikipedia and Google, The Linotype machine, also known as a Line-o-Type, was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. Mergenthaler was a German immigrant who emigrated to the United States in 1872. He is credited with developing the first machine that could automatically cast entire lines of type from molten metal, revolutionizing the typesetting process.