The Night the Linemen Lit the Sale Barn

They ran a cord down to a little generator one of the boys had brought in his own pickup. They did not run anything off the trucks.

Hank told me later that if the phone rang, every light could come off in ten minutes, the booms could come down, and they would be rolling.

The sun was going down behind the barn, and the sky over the pens had gone the color it goes in October, soft and pink at the edges.

One of the linemen yanked the generator cord. It caught on the second pull. And the lights came on.

A woman behind me said “oh” out loud. That is all she said.

I have thought about it a hundred times since, because it is exactly what I would have said if I could have said anything at all.

The steel pens shone under them. All those small lights hung there in the dusk between two white trucks, and under them stood more than two hundred people from our county, farmers and teachers and truckers and 4-H kids and church ladies and every buyer I had ever typed a card for.

Grant came and stood beside me. He had changed out of his suit into jeans, and he had on his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the suspenders he had worn under the jacket.

He looked about as happy as I have ever seen a man look.

“You said you wanted string lights,” he said.

“I said I couldn’t afford poles,” I said.

“Well,” he said, and took my hand. “We had poles.”

We ate first, because the 4-H moms would not let anybody dance on an empty stomach. People came up to our table one after another all through supper.

An old man I had typed buyer cards for every week since I started shook Grant’s hand and told him he had married the best clerk in Kansas.

Stan sat at the end of the table with his wife and ate a plate of brisket without saying a word.

Once I looked down the table and caught him looking up at the lights with an expression on his face I had never seen there in six years. I would almost call it pride.

Then somebody’s cousin played the first dance. It was the slow Alan Jackson song Grant and I had picked in March, and Grant led me out onto the dirt between the pens while everybody stood back along the rails to give us room.

It was still dusk. The last of the light was in the west, the string lights were bright overhead, and my curls kept falling into my face.

I had on my lace dress and my boots, and Grant had his suspenders and his rolled sleeves, and we danced.

I could see the crew over Grant’s shoulder. Two of the younger men were still in their hard hats and canvas work coats, leaning on the pipe pen rail with their hands on the top bar, smiling at us like two boys at a county fair.

One of them, the apprentice, wiped his eye with the back of his hand.

When the song ended, Grant kissed me. And from the ring door, clear as a church bell on Sunday, Stan Kober rang the sale bell.

That bell had opened every sale at that barn for thirty years. I had heard it every Wednesday since I was twenty-one, and it had always meant work.

That night it meant something else. The whole yard laughed and clapped and cheered, and Stan rang it twice more for good measure.