The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

“To the job. To his school. We’re closing the last line up there today.”

“You’re taking a ten-year-old boy out to a live power line?”

“I’m taking him to stand behind the cones next to Elvin Sizemore and watch his mother work,” I said. “He’ll be on the ground the whole time. Elvin cleared it with the office.”

At Elvin’s name, something changed in her face. Just a flicker.

“Elvin,” she said.

“He said Arlis trained him.”

Roberta looked down at the beans. She picked one up and snapped it and dropped the pieces in the pan, and then she did not pick up another one.

“Arlis trained everybody,” she said. “Arlis was out there training everybody while I was in here with three kids and a sick cow and no lights.”

“I know,” I said. “Elvin told me.”

“Did he tell you about Christmas of eighty-nine? The ice storm? I had all three of them in front of the woodstove for four days and Arlis was in Paducah.”

“He told me some of it.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady. “I don’t want that for Gavin. I don’t want him sitting in a window every night waiting for headlights that don’t come. That’s all I meant.”

“Then you should have told me that,” I said, as quietly as I could. “Not him.”

She did not answer. I went around back.

Gavin was throwing a tennis ball against the side of the barn and catching it in his glove. He saw me come around the corner and the ball went right past him and rolled into the grass.

“Hey, buddy.”

“Hey.”

“You want to come to work with me this afternoon?”

He squinted at me. “To work? Like on the truck?”

“In the truck. Not on it. You’ll be on the ground with Mr. Elvin the whole time. But you’ll get to see.”

“See what?”

“See your school get its lights back.”

He thought about that. I could see him wanting to say yes and not wanting to want it. He crossed his arms.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess.”

He did not talk to me on the drive back to the pole yard. He sat in my pickup with his arms crossed and looked out the window at the torn-up fields and the sheds folded in half and the trees with their tops twisted off.

At the yard, I moved him over to the cab of the bucket truck. It was a white forty-foot bucket on a big diesel chassis, and the cab smelled like hydraulic fluid and old coffee and sunscreen.

He had never been inside one. He looked at the radio and the outrigger controls and the clipboard of switching orders on the dash, and he did not touch anything, but I saw his eyes go everywhere.

I reached behind the seat and pulled out my spare hard hat. It was white, like mine, a little scuffed on the brim.

“Rule one,” I said. “Anywhere near a job, you wear this.”

I put it on his head. It came down to his eyebrows and sat on his ears. He pushed it back with one finger and it slid right down again.

He did not smile. But he did not take it off, either.