The Night the Lineman Came Home
I got Rick back on the radio. “Rick, we’d like to run it to four. We’re inside our sixteen. If it’s not done by three forty-five, we button up and walk away. I give you my word.”
There was a long quiet on the radio. Then Rick said, “Kyle and Tom too?”
I looked in the side mirror. Kyle and Tom were in the second truck behind us, and Kyle had already climbed out and was walking up to my window with the chainsaw. He gave me a thumbs up through the ice.
“Kyle and Tom too,” I said.
“Four o’clock,” Rick said. “Not four oh one. And you call me every half hour.”
The cedar came first. It was an old windbreak cedar, forty feet tall, and the ice had split it right down the middle, and half of it was lying across the primary with the wire buried in the branches.
Kyle cut it off in pieces while Tom and I pulled the brush clear.
Before any of us touched that line, I tested it dead and we hung our grounds on both sides of the work.
You do that every time, even when you are sure, even when it is three in the morning and you are tired and the whole county is dark. Every time.
Then the three spans. The wire was on the ground in the ditch, frozen into the snow, and we had to chip it loose with a shovel.
Then I went up in the bucket and we pulled it back up and sagged it and tied it in, one span at a time, my fingers stiff as clothespins inside the gloves.
I stopped feeling my fingers around one. That is not a figure of speech. I would look down to see if my hand was holding the tie wire, because I could not tell by feel.
Luis would hold the light for me and call out what he saw, and I would do what he said.
At one thirty I called Rick. At two I called Rick. “Two spans up,” I said. “We’re on the last one. And then the far end.”
“You’ve got two hours,” he said. “What’s at the far end?”
“I’ll know in fifteen minutes.”
The far end was the pole at the end of Brad’s driveway. I knew it the second the headlights hit it.
A big green box mailbox with Kessler painted on it in white letters, and a broken crossarm hanging off the pole by one bolt, the primary sagging almost to the snow.
I could see their house from the road. It sat back about two hundred yards, a ranch house with a big red machine shed off to the side.
One lamp was on in the living room, a yellow little square. I could hear the generator from the road, coughing and catching, coughing and catching.
I went up. The wind up there was something else. The bucket rocked on the boom, and every gust threw ice off the wire and into my face.
I got the old arm off and lowered it to Kyle on a hand line, and I bolted the new one on, and we raised the wire back up to it.
At two fifty I called Rick. “It’s done,” I said. “We’re closing it in.”
“Good,” he said. And then, after a second, in a voice I had not heard Rick use before, “Good job, Jake.”
I rode the bucket up to the cutout at the top of the pole, where the tap fuse sits. Kyle and Tom pulled the grounds.