The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

When we came out, half the shingles on the west side were gone and the big maple in the side yard was lying across the fence. We were lucky. Three streets over, people were standing in the road looking at slabs.

My phone was already ringing. It was the co-op. Every lineman, every apprentice, every groundman, everybody who could climb or drive or dig was being called out.

I have been a lineworker for fourteen years. I came up as a groundman at twenty-five, after the factory where I worked closed, and I topped out as a journeyman lineman at thirty-one. I am one of two women on our crews.

Storm work is the part of the job nobody puts on the recruiting posters. You go when the call comes, you work sixteen hours, you sleep eight if you are lucky, and you do it again until every member who can take power has it.

The tornado took down 140 poles in our county. Some of them snapped clean in half. Some of them were pulled out of the ground roots and all, with the crossarms and transformers still hanging off them like ornaments.

More than four thousand members were out. The co-op called in mutual aid crews from three other states, and by Wednesday morning there were bucket trucks from Tennessee and Indiana parked at the fairgrounds.

Gavin’s daddy drives a truck over the road. He and I split up four years ago, and we get along fine now, mostly because we both love that boy more than we ever loved each other. That week he was stuck in Arizona with a load of produce and a blown turbo.

He called Gavin every night. He called me too, and I could hear how bad he felt about it. There was nothing he could do from eighteen hundred miles away.

So Gavin went to Roberta’s. My house had a tarp on the roof and no power, and Roberta’s farmhouse out on the county road had come through without a scratch. She had a good roof and a whole-house generator her late husband had put in years ago.

She had kept Gavin plenty of times before. She loved him. I never doubted that, not for one minute, even standing in her kitchen that morning.

But love and good sense don’t always ride in the same truck.

Elvin Sizemore found me at the pole yard twenty minutes later. He was fifty-eight, our crew foreman, a big quiet man with a gray mustache and forearms like fence posts. He had been climbing poles since before I was born.

“Kincer,” he said, “you look like somebody ran over your dog.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. Get in the truck and tell me about it, or get in the truck and don’t. Either way, get in the truck.”

So I got in the truck, and on the way out to the job I told him. All of it. The doorway, the sock feet, the coffee cup, the mud prints on the linoleum.

He drove for a long time without saying anything. Elvin does that. He chews on a thing before he says it, like a man working a knot out of a rope.

“I worked beside Arlis Smoot for twenty-two years,” he said finally.

I knew that, but I had never heard him talk about it.