The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

We set nine poles that day. The digger derrick augered the holes, we stood the poles and tamped them, and then we framed them, crossarms and insulators and hardware, and pulled the new wire.

It is slow, heavy work. A forty-foot pole weighs about fourteen hundred pounds. A crew can only go as fast as its slowest piece of equipment, and that day the slowest piece was a pole trailer that kept getting stuck in a yard full of mud.

The families on that street were out in their yards the whole time. They were dragging limbs to the curb, raking up glass, pulling insulation out of the hedges. One man was using a chainsaw on what was left of his own carport.

Every so often somebody would walk over and stand by the cones and just watch us for a minute. They did not get in the way. They just wanted to see it happen.

Around three o’clock, a woman named Netta came across the street from a little white house with a blue tarp on the roof. She was about seventy, in a housedress and rubber boots, and she carried a gallon jug of sweet tea and a sleeve of plastic cups.

“Y’all have been out here since sunup,” she said. “Drink this before you fall over.”

We drank it. It was the best thing I tasted all week.

Netta stood by me while I drank mine. “My husband’s on oxygen,” she said quietly. “We’ve got a little generator, but it’ll only run the concentrator about six hours on a tank of gas, and I can’t hardly find gas. When do you think?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “Tomorrow afternoon. I promise you.”

She nodded and patted my arm. “I’ll be praying for y’all. Every one of you.”

That night I slept in my truck at the fairgrounds, because it was closer than driving home to a dark house. I lay there with the window cracked and listened to the frogs out in the drainage ditch, and I thought about what Elvin said.

The next morning, at the pole yard, he walked over to my truck with two cups of coffee and handed me one.

“Bring the boy,” he said.

“What?”

“This afternoon. Bring Gavin. The school circuit’s the last one we close, and it’s his school. Let him see it.”

“Elvin, he can’t be anywhere near the work. You know that. The co-op would have both our hides.”

“He won’t be near it. He’ll be with me, behind the cones, the whole time. I already called the office. They said with the job almost done and the boy staying on the ground with the foreman, they’d look the other way for an hour.” He shrugged. “It’s a tornado week. Everybody’s bending a little.”

I stood there holding the coffee.

“Let him see what his granddaddy did,” Elvin said. “Let him see what his mama does. He’s heard one side of it for a week. Let him see the other.”

I drove out to Roberta’s at noon. The crew was finishing the last framing on the hill and I had forty minutes before they needed me in the bucket.

Roberta was on the porch snapping green beans into a dishpan. She looked up when my truck pulled in, and her mouth went tight.

“He’s out back,” she said. “Throwing the ball against the barn.”

“I’m taking him with me this afternoon.”

She stopped snapping. “Taking him where?”