The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

The weeks after

Jace bought his own gear with his father’s check the next Saturday.

Arlo drove him the three hours to the line supply store, and the two of them came back with a new belt, a new strap and a set of climbers with the gaffs still sharp from the factory.

He gave Arlo his son’s belt back, oiled and clean. Arlo took it, looked at it, and handed it back. “Keep it in your truck,” he said. “Somebody’s going to need it.”

He gave me back my hooks, too. I told him to keep those.

He said no, they belonged on the wall of my shed, where his granddad’s initials could keep an eye on things. So that is where they are.

Two weeks before Christmas, an envelope came in my mailbox with Jace’s name on it and no return address.

Inside was a check for three hundred dollars from Tawny’s bank, and nothing else. No note. Jace looked at it a long time and then put it in his Bible.

“That’s not nothing,” he said.

“No,” I said. “That’s not nothing.”

I will not tell you Tawny and I are friends. We are not.

But she sat on the same side of the church as me on Christmas Eve, two rows back with her boys, and when the service ended she nodded at me. I nodded back.

The buckle

The buckle is still on the spare pole. I have thought about taking it down.

Jeanine asked me once if I wanted her husband to pry it off with his cat’s paw. But I keep leaving it there.

It does not mean what it meant the first morning. It does not mean anger anymore.

It means a young man climbed past it until he reached the top, and his granddad’s initials went up the pole with him, and an old foreman sat at the bottom of it all afternoon.

My knees are worse for that weekend. I will not lie to you about that.

I iced them for a week and limped around dispatch like a woman twice my age. I would do it again tomorrow.

The view from the top

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Jace came by in his own truck with his own gear in the toolbox.

He said he wanted to climb the old pole one more time, just for fun, now that he was climbing real ones every day.

It was another clear day, cold and bright, and the oaks along the fence were bare. I sat on the tailgate with my coffee.

Arlo had heard he was coming and showed up with his folding chair, because of course he did.

Jace went up that pole like it was a flight of stairs. Short steps, heels in, hips out, never thinking about his feet.

At the top he set his gaffs, leaned back into his strap and looked out over the hollow toward the north.

The farms on that side of the valley sit on the next ridge over, and from twenty-five feet up, with the leaves down, you can see a long way.

Arlo shaded his eyes and looked up at him. I set my coffee down on the tailgate.

He put one hand up flat over his eyes, against the sun, and grinned down at the two of us.

“Mom!” he hollered. “I can see Dad’s barn from up here!”