The Man at the Hired Help Table

There was a thunderstorm Friday night, a hard one that took lines down across the county, with one crack of lightning just before midnight that he said shook the dishes in his kitchen. It put a surge down the buried line that feeds the barn, the one that runs from the pole at the road, under the gravel lane, ninety feet to the building. Saturday morning at a quarter to six he walked out to open up for the wedding and smelled burnt plastic from the lane to the back door. The main breaker would not hold. When his electrician, Marty, got there at six and put a meter on the line, the cable was dead to ground somewhere under the lane. A full run of it, cooked.

The power company, he said, was fine. The crew had checked the pole and their transformer at daybreak. But that buried cable from the pole to the barn belonged to him, not to them, and a lineman can’t touch a customer’s line on the clock.

No power in a barn on a well means no water, no pump, no toilets. It means no walk-in cooler for a hundred and forty chicken dinners and a three-tier cake, no ovens for the caterer, no sound for the band. At six in the morning on a wedding day, he said, he stood in his own yard and thought he would have to call a girl he had watched grow up and tell her the wedding was off.

Marty said he could not get that size of cable until Monday. The supply house in the next county did not open Saturdays. Mr. Deel called the rental yard in town for a generator big enough. Their one big generator was already booked for another wedding across the county. The caterer had a small one that would run his ovens and nothing more.

“And I’d about given up,” said Mr. Deel. “I was standing in the lane at ten after six with my phone in my hand. And Earl’s truck pulled in.”

My father had come that morning at six, the way he had said he would, to deliver the cedar arch. He had been out on the co-op’s storm call-out until after two in the morning.

I should say something about the arch. He had built it himself in his pole barn over four weekends in July, cedar posts cut and notched and pegged with no screws showing. He built it because Nina had said, once, offhand, that she wished we could be married under something made by someone who loved us. I came by one Saturday and found him with a plane in his hands and cedar curls to his ankles. He never said a word about it.

He had loaded it into the truck bed at five that morning and driven out to set it up.

He found Mr. Deel standing in the lane and asked what was wrong.

“Told him,” said Mr. Deel. “And Earl looked at the pole. And he looked at the lane. Then he said, ‘Harold, how long is that run?’ I said ninety feet. He said, ‘I have a three-hundred-foot reel of triplex service cable in my barn that I bought at a surplus sale six years ago. I’ve been saving it for something.'”

There was a sound in the barn, a kind of hum. I realized it was Dale. Dale Pruitt, my father’s foreman at the electric co-op, was sitting two tables from the front in a sport coat that did not fit him, and he was nodding slowly, over and over, like a man agreeing with a verse of scripture.