The Afternoon the School Lights Came On

I could see Dorsey Whitlow standing in the front door of the school with her clipboard pressed to her chest. She had her other hand over her mouth.

And down by the handline, my son was jumping up and down.

He was not clapping. He was jumping, holding that hard hat on his head with both hands, and yelling something I could not make out over the horns. Elvin had one hand on his shoulder so he would not jump himself right off the spot.

I brought the bucket down slow. My eyes were blurry and I had to blink twice to see the controls.

When the bucket touched down, Gavin was right there at the edge of the cones, where Elvin let him come.

“Mama,” he said. “Mama, you did the whole school. You did the whole school.”

“We did,” I said. “You sent it up.”

He threw his arms around my waist, hard, over all my gear and my belt and my rubber sleeves. I peeled one glove off and put my hand on the back of his neck.

I had wanted that hug for seven days. I held on to it as long as he would let me.

He did not take that hard hat off for the rest of the day.

He wore it while we packed up the cones. He wore it while Dorsey Whitlow walked across the schoolyard and shook my hand, and then shook his.

“Mr. Kincer,” she said to him, very seriously, “I believe I owe you a favor.”

He wore it while Netta brought him the last slice of pound cake and told him her husband was going to sleep in his own bed with his own machine running that night, and that it was because of his mama.

He wore it on the drive back to the pole yard. He rode in the cab of the bucket truck with me this time, and he talked the whole way.

He wanted to know what the hum was. He wanted to know how heavy the transformer was. He wanted to know how high the bucket went and whether I was ever scared and how many poles were in the whole county.

“Was Papaw scared?” he asked.

I thought about it. “I never knew him,” I said. “But Mr. Elvin says he was the calmest man he ever saw on a pole.”

Gavin looked out the window. “Mamaw has his old hard hat in her closet,” he said. “It’s yellow. It’s got stickers on it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“She doesn’t let anybody touch it.”

I drove him back to Roberta’s a little before seven. It was still full light, the way it is in May, with the sun going gold over the fields and long shadows lying out from the fence posts.

Roberta was sitting on the porch in her rocker. The dishpan of beans was gone. She had changed her blouse.

Gavin was out of the truck before I got it in park. He ran up the steps with that hard hat bouncing on his head.

“Mamaw,” he said. “Mamaw, I sent up the fuse. I sent up the last fuse and Mama closed it and the whole school came on and everybody honked their horns.”

Roberta looked at him. Then at me, coming up the walk. Then back at him.

“You did?”