The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

But that afternoon I kept looking down.

Gavin was sitting on his bucket by Elvin’s tailgate, with that big white hard hat pushed back on his head, and he was looking up at me. He was not looking at the trucks or the families or the debris. He was looking at me.

By four o’clock everything was ready except the last fuse.

I had the cutout mounted and the barrel opened and the transformer all made up. We had walked the line from the substation side and checked every tap. Elvin had called the dispatcher and gotten everything cleared. There were no grounds left on anything. Every man on the crew was in the clear.

All that was left was to send up the fuse barrel and close it in.

Usually, the groundman ties the barrel onto the handline, the rope that runs through a pulley on the boom, and the lineman in the bucket hauls it up. It takes about fifteen seconds. Nobody thinks about it.

I looked down. Elvin was standing at the handline with the fuse barrel in his hand. He looked up at me, and I nodded.

Then he walked over to my boy.

I could not hear what he said. I saw him crouch down so he was eye to eye with Gavin, and I saw him hold out the fuse barrel, and I saw Gavin look at it like it was made of glass.

Later Gavin told me exactly what Elvin said. He said, “Your mama needs this one sent up, son. And I think it ought to come from you.”

Gavin looked up at me.

Then he uncrossed his arms.

Elvin walked him over to the handline. He stood right behind him with his big hands on Gavin’s shoulders, and he showed him how to clip the fuse barrel into the canvas bag on the end of the rope.

It was not live. It was just a fuse and a piece of fiberglass. There was no danger in it at all. But Gavin handled it like it might go off.

He clipped it in. He checked it twice, the way Elvin showed him. Then he looked up and gave me a thumbs up, his whole arm straight up over his head.

“Haul it up, Mama,” he yelled.

I hauled it up. My hands were shaking a little, and they never shake in the bucket. I set the barrel in the cutout with the hot stick, lined up the hook, and looked down one more time.

Gavin was standing next to Elvin with both hands on top of that too-big hard hat, holding it on.

I closed the cutout.

There was a little click and a hum from the transformer, the sound I have heard ten thousand times. And down below me, every window along the front of that old brick school lit up at once.

For a second there was no sound at all.

Then somebody across the street started clapping. It was the man in the seed cap. Then Netta, standing on her porch steps with her hands together. Then the whole street.

People put down their rakes and their chainsaws and came out to the curb. A pickup at the end of the block laid on its horn, and then another one, and then somebody’s car, and for about a minute that whole hill sounded like a ballgame.