We drove up the hill in a line, the bucket truck and the digger and Elvin’s pickup and the material truck. The sky had been gray all morning but it was starting to break up, with blue showing through and the clouds pulling apart in long rags to the east.
Gavin sat in the cab while we parked and set the outriggers and laid out the cones. I had told him to stay put until Elvin came for him, and he did.
Through the windshield, I could see him watching everything.
He watched the families clearing debris across the street stop and wave when our trucks pulled up. He watched a man in a seed cap walk over and shake Elvin’s hand and not say one word, just shake it and nod and walk back to his chainsaw.
He watched Netta come across the street again with her jug of tea. This time she had a paper plate of pound cake wrapped in foil, too, and she set it on the tailgate of Elvin’s pickup.
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He watched her stop at the cab window and say something to him. I could not hear it. Later he told me she said, “Is that your mama out there? You tell her my husband says thank you.”
Her husband was the one on oxygen.
Elvin came and got him after about twenty minutes. He walked him over to a spot by Elvin’s tailgate, a good fifty feet back from the pole and well clear of anything that could fall or swing, and he set a five-gallon bucket upside down for him to sit on.
“This is your spot,” Elvin said. “You don’t move off it unless I say. Deal?”
“Deal,” Gavin said.
“Shake on it.”
They shook on it. Gavin’s hand disappeared in Elvin’s like a coin in a pocket.
The last pole by the school went in at about half past two. It was a new forty-five-footer, standing right where the old one had snapped off at the ground line, at the corner of the schoolyard.
We framed it, hung the transformer, ran the service drop to the school’s meter base, and made up the jumpers. Then I went up in the bucket to set the cutout.
If you have never seen one, a cutout is the little fused switch that sits on a crossarm between the main line and a transformer. When a fault happens, the fuse blows and the barrel drops open, and that protects the rest of the line. When you want to energize a transformer, you close the cutout with a hot stick.
The main line over my head was already hot. We had energized everything up to that pole an hour earlier. It carried 7,200 volts to ground, which is what most distribution lines out here run.
Before I touched anything live, Elvin let Gavin stand at the foot of the new pole for one minute, hat on, while I strapped my belt around it up in the bucket. My boy grinned up at me like it was Christmas morning, and I grinned right back. Then Elvin walked him back to his bucket by the tailgate.
Then I worked it the way you always work it. Rubber gloves, rated for it. Rubber sleeves up to my shoulders. Cover-up on the line. Every move slow and thought out ahead of time.
There is a thing that happens to you up in the bucket. The whole world gets small and quiet. You hear the wind and the hum of the line and your own breath, and that is all.