The Night the Linemen Lit the Sale Barn

Grant called the next Thursday night, two days before the wedding, late, from the motel in Dodge. I could hear a television going and the crew laughing in the next room through the wall.

“How’s it going?” he said.

“Better than I deserve,” I said, and I told him about Stan and the 4-H moms and the Methodist ladies and the Legion tables.

I could hear him smiling on the other end of the line. You can hear Grant smile. I do not know how, but you can.

“We’re still missing lights,” I said. “There’s the big yard lights on the poles, but they’re those orange ones. It’ll look like a feedlot at midnight. I wanted string lights. I priced renting some poles to hang them from, and it’s too much.”

“Huh,” Grant said. He did not say anything else about it.

He asked how Mama was and whether the dog had gotten out again, and then he told me goodnight and that he loved me and that he would see me at the church on Saturday.

He called back an hour later. I was already in bed with the light off.

“Crew’s headed home Saturday,” he said. “Hank’s letting me come home Friday, and the rest of them finish the last poles Saturday morning. Hank cleared it with the co-op manager.”

Hank is Grant’s foreman, a big gray-headed man with a voice like a gravel truck who has been climbing poles since before Grant was born. “Cleared what?” I said into the dark.

“We’re on call all weekend anyway,” Grant said. “When we’re on call, the trucks go home with us. That’s the co-op’s rule. So wherever we are Saturday night, the trucks are going to be there too.”

He paused. “Hank asked the general manager if it was all right if wherever we were happened to be a sale barn.”

“And?”

“And the general manager said as long as we stay sober, stay off the power lines and stay ready to roll the minute the phone rings, he doesn’t care where we park.” I could hear him grinning. “He also said congratulations.”

I still did not quite understand. I was tired, and it was late, and I thought he meant the crew would come to the reception with the trucks parked out in the lot.

I told him that was sweet and that I loved him and went back to sleep.

Saturday came up clear and cool, one of those early October days in Kansas when the sky is so blue it hurts and the cottonwoods along the creek have just started going yellow.

By nine in the morning the sale barn yard was full of pickups and women carrying roasters.

Stan had pressure-washed every pen and alley himself on Friday. I did not know it until I got there.

He had dragged the dirt yard between the pens smooth and watered it down so it would not dust, and he had done it twice. When I thanked him, he said the diesel was covered and walked off.

The 4-H moms set up in the café and on long tables under the scale house eaves.

There was brisket from a man who smokes meat for the county fair, a whole roaster of bierocks, green beans with bacon, three kinds of potato salad and enough dinner rolls to roof a house.

The Methodist ladies brought nine sheet cakes. Nine. They lined them up on two tables by the office door, white frosting and yellow roses, and they stood guard over them like a color guard.

Nobody touched a cake before it was time. Nobody would have dared.