The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

The burn barrel at Monty’s place sits behind the machine shed, a rusted fifty-five gallon drum with holes punched low in the sides for air.

I knew that barrel. I burned feed sacks in it for fourteen years.

On Friday morning my son was standing beside it with a long stick, raking through the ashes.

He had called me at seven and said only, “Mom, can you come out here.” When I pulled into the lane he did not look up.

It was the first week of November, sunny and cold enough to see your breath.

Smoke was still curling off the top of the barrel, and it smelled wrong. Not paper. Not brush. It smelled like a saddle left in a house fire.

“Jace,” I said. I got out of the truck and left the door hanging open. “Honey, what happened?”

He lifted the stick. Hanging off the end of it was a buckle, black with soot, and a scorched steel D-ring with nothing left around it but a curl of ash that used to be leather.

“That’s my body belt, Mom,” he said. “And my hooks are in the bottom. She put the whole bag in. The strap, the pads, the gaff guards, all of it.”

My son is twenty years old and six foot one.

He had finished line school at the technical college in August, top third of his class, and the co-op had hired him on as an apprentice lineman. He was to report Monday morning at seven.

That bag in the barrel was everything he owned for the job. Body belt, fall restriction strap, climbers, pads, the canvas bag he carried them in.

He had paid for it with hay money and two summers of fence work. It came to a little over twenty-three hundred dollars.

I have climbed poles. I know what that gear costs, and I know what it means to a young man to buckle it on for the first time.

I stood there with my hands in my coat pockets and could not say a word.

“Where’s your dad?” I finally asked.

“Sale barn,” Jace said. “He left at five with the calves. He won’t be back till dark.”

“And Tawny?”

He tipped his head toward the house. The kitchen curtain moved and then went still.