The Night the Linemen Lit the Sale Barn

His father got up at five out of habit, put his boots on, and then sat back down on the edge of the bed because there was nowhere left to go.

Daddy said he never forgot the sound of those boots coming back off.

Daddy spent the next thirty years buying ground back, quarter by quarter. Some of it was the same ground.

He married my mother, Evelyn, when he was twenty-four and she was twenty-two, and the two of them worked like mules and never took a vacation that was not a cattle show.

So when he said ground, he did not mean money. He meant safety. He meant a floor nobody could take out from under me.

I knew that, even standing there by the pens with my face burning. Knowing it did not make it hurt any less.

Grant Mader came into my life in the middle of an ice storm two winters before.

The power went out at the sale barn on a sale day, which is about the worst thing that can happen to a sale barn, because the scale goes dead and so does the heat.

His crew rolled in about an hour later. I remember a tall, quiet man with a frozen beard who climbed that pole in a wind that would have peeled paint, and I remember that when the lights came back on, the whole barn cheered like he had won a ballgame.

He came into the office afterward to ask if we had any coffee left.

I gave him the last cup, and he said, very seriously, that it was the worst coffee he had ever had in his life and he would like to come back next week for more.

He did. He came back every week. He sat on the bench by the office window and drank my bad coffee and asked me questions about cattle that I later found out he already knew the answers to, just so I would keep talking.

Grant is a journeyman lineman for an electric co-op that covers four counties.

He grew up in town, the son of a mechanic, and he spent four years in an apprenticeship before he topped out.

He is twenty-nine, and he is the steadiest person I have ever known.

Daddy was not wrong that he is gone a lot.

When storms hit, the co-ops send crews to help each other, and Grant has worked tornado damage in Oklahoma and ice in Missouri and wind in Nebraska. He sleeps in motels or in the truck.

He calls me every night no matter how late, even if all he can say is goodnight.

Some nights it is midnight and his voice is so tired it barely makes it through the phone. He has never once missed a night.

That Wednesday he was a hundred and fifty miles west, out past Dodge City, where a windstorm had snapped a long line of poles like matchsticks.

He had been gone nine days. I called him from my car at the end of the sale, with the lot emptying out around me.

“Hey,” he said. I could hear a generator and men talking somewhere behind him. “You sound funny.”

I told him. I tried to tell it flat, the way Daddy had said it, without making it worse than it was.

When I finished there was a long silence on the line, long enough that I thought the call had dropped somewhere out on the high plains.