The Power They Cut In The Freeze

The meeting

The Tamarack Valley Electric Cooperative sits in a low tan brick building out on the county highway, with a lighted sign and a pole yard behind a chain link fence. A framed sign hangs in the lobby over the payment window, black letters on white. Owned by the members we serve.

My mother stopped in front of it with her cane.

“Daddy used to read that out loud,” she said.

“I never thought I’d have to,” she said.

The conference room was a long room with a laminate table and a coffee maker on a counter. Elmer Gaines was already there, a big slow man of seventy-four in clean coveralls with his hair still wet from the wash. He pulled out a chair for my mother and would not sit until she did. Norma took a chair across from the door and laid a pad in front of her. Bob sat at the head of the table with his seed cap on his knee.

At three thirty-one the door opened, and Dennis Prentice walked in with a legal pad.

He was younger than I had pictured, forty-five or so, balding, in a quarter-zip pullover with the co-op logo on the chest. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had been up since three on storm calls, and I realized, with a small unwelcome jolt, that he had.

He saw my mother. He stopped for half a step.

“Mrs. Sperry,” he said.

“Dennis,” my mother said.

“Sit down, Dennis,” Bob said. He didn’t say it loud.

Dennis sat. He set the legal pad on the table and squared it with the edge. “Bob, I’d have appreciated a call before. With the ice storm…”

“I’m calling the meeting to order,” Bob said. “Siler, Stoddard, Gaines. Three of five is a quorum. Norma, put it in the minutes.”

“Dennis, what’s the temperature outside right now?”

Dennis looked at him.

“Seven degrees,” he said.

“How long has Mrs. Sperry been without power?”

Dennis looked down at the legal pad.

“Since two p.m. yesterday. Twenty-five hours.”

“What’s the forecast tonight?”

“Twelve below.”

Bob Siler put both hands flat on the table and looked at the man who worked for him.

“Tell us,” he said, “why.”

Dennis Prentice did not answer right away. He looked at the legal pad as if the answer were written on it.

“There’s a written disconnect policy,” he said finally. “The board tightened it last fall. Past due and a final notice, the meter comes off. I have to be consistent, Bob. The one time I let somebody slide, I stood in this room and was told in front of everybody that I was running a charity.”

“I remember,” Bob said quietly.

“That was a man named Hatcher. I carried him five months, and he owed $9,000 when he moved to Oklahoma.” Dennis rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “So I made a rule. No exceptions. Most weeks the Wednesday sheet has two or three names on it. This week it had nine, because of the fall push, and I printed it at six and signed it before the storm calls started, and I did not read it line by line.”

“And the note on Cindy’s screen?” Norma said.

“I never saw it. I found out at ten to nine this morning when she called me. I should have gone out there myself then, and I didn’t, because I told myself the queue was the queue.” He looked up. “That’s the truth. I’m not offering it as an excuse.”