The Night the Lineman Came Home
Luis checked everybody was clear and called it. I took the hot stick and reached up and closed the fuse in.
There is a sound when it catches. A little snap. And then a hum in the transformer, a sound you feel more than hear, like a big animal waking up.
Down the road, every house on that tap came back at the same instant.
I could see them strung out along the section in the dark, yard light after yard light flickering and catching, blue at first and then white, one every half mile or so as far as I could see.
Then I looked at Brad’s place.
The yard light on the pole by the machine shed flickered, and buzzed, and came on. Then the kitchen.
Then the porch light. Then the living room, all of it at once, the lamp swallowed up in the bigger light.
And then one small window on the north side of the house, over the furnace, came on soft and yellow. It was a night light, I think.
Nicole had helped Kara paint that room in September. I knew the walls were a pale yellow, because I had carried the paint cans in from the truck.
And then, in that window, a tiny green light came on and stayed on. The baby monitor.
I want to tell this part right, because it is the part I think about.
I was forty feet in the air, in the ice, with my fingers dead and my glasses fogged, and I saw that little green light come on in Harper’s window, and I had to stop.
I just stopped. I put my hand on the rail of the bucket and stood there. Somewhere behind that window was a baby girl six weeks old, in a snowsuit in a bassinet, who had no idea any of it had happened.
Who would never know. Her furnace was just going to run, and she was going to sleep.
“Jake,” Luis called up. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine. “Give me a minute.”
That was when the front door of the house opened.
I saw the light spill out across the snow, and then a man came out onto the porch and stood there, looking around, the way you do when the power comes back and you cannot quite believe it. Then he saw the amber lights flashing at the end of his drive.
He came down the driveway. He was walking slowly, because the driveway was glare ice, and he was wearing a bathrobe over sweatpants and a pair of house slippers, the kind with the fleece inside.
He had a coffee mug in one hand. I learned later he had been heating water on the gas range.
It was Brad. Of course it was Brad.
He came to the end of the drive and stopped beside his mailbox and looked up.
He looked up at the bucket truck, and up the boom, and up at me in the bucket with the ice on my hard hat and the orange vest and my breath going up in clouds in the light.
He did not say anything for a long time. Long enough that Luis and Kyle stopped picking up and just stood there.
Long enough that I could hear the transformer humming and the wind going through the cedars and, back in the garage, the generator coughing one last time and going quiet.
Then Brad said, “Jake.”
“Brad,” I said.