The Kite and the Conservator

The blackout hit at 6:47 on a Thursday evening in October, and I remember the time because I had been watching the drum thermometer like a hawk for the past four minutes, waiting on first crack for a batch of Guatemala that Debra had come by to consult about, of all things, and when the lights died the display went black and I swear the coffee knew it was being abandoned. The roaster sighed down to silence, the fans quit, and the whole building dropped into a darkness so complete that for a second I could not see my own hand in front of my face. I heard Debra make a small sound somewhere over by the cupping table, and I was laughing, which surprised me, because there is not much funny about losing a roast, and yet there I was, forty-five years old, grinning like an idiot into the dark at a woman I could not even see.

"Ray?" she said. "Please tell me that was you laughing and not something else."

"It was me," I said. "Regional outage, probably. Everything in here runs electric except one thing."

"And what's that?"

"The burner. It's propane. Stand still, don't walk anywhere, I know this floor blind."

I had kept a storm lantern under the cupping table since the ice storm of a few years back, when I had spent nine hours sleeping on a pile of green coffee bags waiting for the power company to remember Vermont existed, and I got it lit in under a minute, and the little flame threw the whole roastery into this warm amber half-light that made the room look older and friendlier than it had any right to look. Debra stood up from her chair with her phone already out, thumbing the flashlight on, and her face in that cold white beam looked like a museum portrait, which fit, since Debra is a paintings conservator, forty-two years old, who spends her weekdays gluing flakes of paint back onto dead people's landscapes and her Thursdays consulting with me about humidity because the roastery shares an industrial park with the archive where her lab rents space. She had been coming around since June. We had worked out a comfortable rhythm of professional talk and unprofessional talk, and somewhere around September the unprofessional talk had started outnumbering the other kind.

She is an observant woman, Debra. I have watched her look at a hairline crack in a varnish layer from across a room and know the whole treatment plan before touching anything, and I have watched her look at me the same way a few times, that patient diagnostic stare, and I will admit here, to whoever reads these things, that it did things to me I did not have a plan for.

"Nine hours on a bag of coffee," she said, aiming her phone light around the room like she was surveying a crime scene. "Is that the story you tell everyone, or is that real?"

"That's real. I slept like a baby on a hundred pounds of Yirgacheffe. Woke up smelling like blueberries for a week."

"So what happens to your roast?"

"Ruined. That batch is done. It'll sit in the drum and bake and by the time power comes back it'll taste like cardboard and regret." I was already moving, because I had done this math before, months ago, on a slow afternoon, the kind of math a man does when he is bored and a little strange. "Unless it doesn't."

She followed me with the light while I went to the storage closet at the back, the one nobody opens except in spring, and I pulled the tarp off the shelf and there it was, my kite. A genuine vintage box kite, bamboo spars and paper panels, my grandfather's, seventy-some years old, flown every Labor Day for decades, and it had been sitting in that closet for three years waiting for exactly nobody.

"Is that a kite," Debra said. Not a question, really. More like a woman trying a sentence on to see if it fit.

"Box kite. Handmade. My grandfather built it in the fifties." I carried it out into the amber light and held it up and she tilted her head at it, and I could see her doing the same mental thing I had done, trying to connect the object to the room, and failing, and enjoying the failure.

"And you keep it in a coffee roastery because," she said, and let it hang.

"Because of the airflow problem. Watch."

The roaster's cooling tray and the drum both depend on forced air, and when the motor goes dead the drum keeps radiating heat and the beans keep cooking, and the whole trick in a blackout is to get air moving through the system by hand. Now, a normal person opens a window and prays. I had, over three slow afternoons, worked out something better, and I am not ashamed to say I had been hoping for a chance to show it to her, which tells you something about where my head had been since June.

There is a louvered vent above the roaster, and behind it a straight shot of duct to the outside, and on a night like tonight, with the wind coming steady out of the northwest at a good clip, that duct breathes on its own if you give it a reason. I cranked open the louvers, then I got the hand-crank fan off its bracket, the big old belt-driven one I had kept for no reason anyone could name, and I set it facing the duct, and then I unfolded the kite and rigged it with a short line so it sat in the throat of the vent, nose out, catching the outside wind, and the kite, being a kite, wanted to fly, and being jammed in a duct, it could not, so all that pull went straight down into the duct as a draft, and I cranked the fan to feed it, and the draft fed the fire, and the fire settled from its panicky climb back down to a steady growl.

Debra turned her phone light off and just watched, the way she watches a varnish removal, arms crossed, weight on one hip. "You're telling me that works."

"It's working right now. Look at the flame. Steady. It's crude, it's maybe fifteen percent as good as the blower, but fifteen percent is the difference between cardboard and drinkable." I kept cranking, one hand on the handle, the drum turning off the crank side by an old jury-rigged belt I had also installed on a slow afternoon, and I will not pretend it was elegant, but the drum turned and the air moved and the roast limped along toward first crack about ninety seconds behind schedule.

"That is the most ridiculous, competent thing I have ever seen a man do," she said, and she was laughing now, and the laugh did more to light the room than my lantern did. "You rigged a kite as a bellows. Who thinks of that?"

"A man with no television and too much inventory." I kept cranking. "My grandfather flew this thing off the beach at Salisbury every Labor Day until he couldn't. I inherited it and I couldn't just put it in a closet, so it went to work."

She came over and stood beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth off her arm, and she put one hand flat on the roaster's drum and held it there, feeling the heat, the way she probably touches everything she is deciding about. "It's warm," she said. "It's alive in here. The rest of the building is dead and this one corner is working."

"That's the idea." I gave the crank a few more turns. "You want to take a shift? My arm's going to fall off in about ten minutes and the roast needs another twenty."

"I have cranked worse things for worse causes," she said, and took the handle from me, and our hands overlapped on it for a second longer than the handoff required, and neither of us mentioned that, and both of us noticed it.

Outside, the whole industrial park had gone black, and past the tree line, the hills too, no gas stations, no distant sodium lights, nothing, just a broad silent county sitting in the dark, and inside, one propane flame, one turning drum, one woman cranking a hand fan with a kite in the window, and me standing there with a lantern thinking that the power company had just handed me the best evening of my year and I had not even told her so yet.

"So," she said, cranking, not looking at me, "how long does the power usually stay out up here?"

"Hours. Sometimes days."

"Good," she said, and I did not have a follow-up for that, so I busied myself with the roast log, writing numbers by lantern light on the clipboard I keep for exactly such occasions, and she cranked, and the drum turned, and first crack came through the drum wall like popcorn starting, little snaps, uneven and then even, and she stopped cranking for a second just to listen, head tilted, which is a thing conservators do, I have since learned, they listen to materials.

"That's the sound," I said. "First crack. Everything after this is negotiation."

"I like that. You spend weeks getting to this point and then it's all diplomacy." She took up the crank again. "My whole job is negotiation. Solvent, cotton swab, and a conversation that can last four months."

"With a painting."

"With a painting, yes. It never argues back, which is why I like it. People argue back." She said it lightly but not entirely lightly, and I let it sit, because I have been married and I know when a sentence has a door in it and when you should not push on the door.

The roast finished at 7:31, twelve minutes of development, a hair darker than I would have done on the blower, and I dumped it into the cooling tray and cranked that too, and the beans ticked and settled and the smell filled the room, that smell, roasted coffee at the moment of creation, which no one in the history of the world has ever gotten tired of, and Debra leaned over the tray and just breathed it in with her eyes shut.