The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

“They’re the same,” he said.

“They are,” Roberta said. “They’re just the same.”

She stood at the porch rail with her arms folded and looked out at the fields going gold. I stood beside her.

“He used to bring me something back,” she said. “Every storm. A jar of sorghum from Tennessee. A pecan pie from Louisiana. Never flowers. He said flowers died before he got home.” She shook her head. “I’d be so mad at him, and he’d walk in the door with a jar of sorghum, and I’d forget to be mad.”

“I’m not much for sorghum,” I said.

She laughed. A real one this time. “No. I don’t guess you are.”

I stayed for supper. She made pinto beans and cornbread and fried potatoes, and the three of us ate on the porch with the generator humming out back, and Gavin wore both hard hats at once, one stacked on top of the other, until his grandmother made him take one off at the table.

Our power came back on the next morning. The crews finished the last of the county two days after that, and the mutual aid trucks from Tennessee and Indiana pulled out of the fairgrounds in a long white line with people waving from the shoulder of the highway.

The school opened again on the next Monday. Dorsey Whitlow cooked every pound of that chicken and ground beef she’d been worried about, and fed the whole north end of town on folding tables in the gym.

Gavin finished fourth grade. For the end-of-year project where they were supposed to write about a hero, he wrote about his Papaw Arlis and his mama. He got a hundred on it. Roberta has it on her refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like Kentucky.

His daddy got home from Arizona the week after the storm. When Gavin told him about the fuse, he made him tell it three times.

The next storm call came in late June. A line of thunderstorms came across from Missouri and laid down a mile of poles out by the lake, and I got called at five in the morning.

I drove Gavin out to Roberta’s at sunrise. I had my gear bag and my thermos and a sleeve of crackers from the gas station, which is what I always took, because there is never time.

Roberta was on the porch when we pulled in. She had a brown paper sack in her hand.

“Here,” she said, and handed it to me.

Inside were two ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, a sleeve of saltines, a big apple, and two slabs of pound cake. There was a note on top in her handwriting, on the back of an envelope.

It said: “Be careful up there. He’s waiting on you. So am I.”

Gavin was standing next to her with his arms around her waist and his old spare hard hat on his head. I had told him he could keep it. He waved at me as I backed out.

I ate those sandwiches at noon in the cab of the bucket truck, with the windows down and the sound of the chainsaws going. They were the best sandwiches I ever had.

That was a year and a half ago. There have been six storm calls since then.

Roberta packed my lunch for every one of them.