The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

How we got here

I should tell you who I am, so you understand why I did what I did next.

My name is Lorrie Ebersole. I am forty-six. I kept the name after the divorce because it was Jace’s name too, and because I had worn it on a hard hat for eleven years and was not about to scratch it off.

My daddy was a lineman for the co-op his whole working life. When I was twenty-three and told him I wanted to go to line school, he did not laugh.

He drove to the pole yard, talked a foreman out of a thirty-foot pole with a split in the top, and set it in our side yard himself.

He dug that hole five feet deep with a spud bar and a pair of post hole diggers, because the rule for setting a pole is ten percent of its length plus two feet.

He tamped it every six inches. Then he set a second one eight feet away, a spare for practicing pole changes. Both are still standing straight, twenty-three years later.

I climbed it every evening that summer until I could go up and down it without thinking about my feet.

Then I climbed real poles for eleven years, in ice storms and July heat and everything between.

Then my knees quit. The doctor said I could keep climbing and walk with a cane by fifty, or I could come down.

I came down. I have worked the dispatch console at the co-op ever since, taking outage calls and keeping track of every truck in four counties.

Monty and I were married for fourteen years. He is not a bad man.

He is a quiet man, a good cattleman, a man who would rather fix a fence than have a conversation. When we split, we split as decent as two people can.

Jace was twelve. At sixteen he asked to live out on the farm with his dad, and I let him, because he loved the cattle and the hay and the early mornings, and because a boy that age needs his father.

Four years ago Monty married Tawny. She is thirty-four, with two boys of her own, nine and eleven. I have tried with her.

I sent the boys birthday cards. I sat on the same side of the bleachers at Jace’s last ball game.

But Tawny had a plan for that farm, and in her plan Jace was the hired hand who never got paid.

He fed the cows, put up the hay, fixed the waterers in January, and every time he talked about line school she would say the farm needed him more.

When the co-op letter came, Jace read it to me over the phone twice. Tawny read it too.

And three days before he was to report, while his father was at the sale barn, she carried his gear bag out to the barrel and lit it.

The steel in the ashes

I walked over to the barrel and looked down into it.

Underneath the ash I could see the shanks of his climbers, the long steel pieces that run up the inside of your calf. The gaffs were still on them, black and blistered.

People think steel is steel. It is not. A gaff has a temper put in it so it will hold an edge and bite into a wood pole without bending.

You put it in a fire like that and the temper goes right out of it.

“Can we save the hooks?” Jace asked. He already knew the answer. They teach you that the first week of line school.

“No, honey,” I said. “Steel that’s been in a fire doesn’t go up a pole again. Not with you on it.”

He nodded and set the stick down very carefully against the barrel, like it mattered where it went. His jaw was working.

My son does not cry, not since he was about nine, but I could see what it was costing him.

The back door opened. Tawny came out on the step in her house shoes with a coffee cup, and she stood there looking at us like we were stray dogs in her yard.

“He left that bag in the mud room for a month,” she said. “I asked him to move it. I’m not running a storage unit.”

“You knew what was in it,” I said.

“I know there’s eighty head of cows that need feeding Monday morning,” she said. “And somebody’s got to do it. Maybe now he’ll figure out where he belongs.”

There it was. She had not lost her temper. She had made a decision.

She wanted Jace on that farm working for nothing until he gave up on anything else, and she wanted the place to go to her own boys when the time came.

I could have said a lot of things. I have a mouth on me when I let it go, and eleven years on a line crew did not make it any sweeter.

But I looked at my boy standing there, and I knew he did not need a fight. He needed hooks.

“Get a feed sack,” I told him. “We’re taking what’s left.”