The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

Friday night

That night I sat at the kitchen table with a can of neatsfoot oil and a rag and worked it into every inch of that leather.

I did my hooks, my daddy’s hooks, and my old belt. The kitchen smelled like a tack room.

Jace sat across from me with a mill file and the gaff gauge from my daddy’s toolbox. I showed him how to file a gaff, the way I was taught.

You file the two top bevels toward the point, long smooth strokes. You never touch the flat underside.

“Why not the bottom?” he asked, though I think he knew.

“Because the bottom is what rides on the wood,” I said. “You file that, you change the angle, and your gaff kicks out of the pole. That’s how people cut out.”

Cutting out is what linemen call it when your gaff breaks loose from the pole and you slide.

Before the fall restriction straps, a cutout could take you all the way to the ground. Now the strap around the pole catches you. Mostly.

He filed each gaff and checked it against the gauge, and when it was right he did what I taught him to do next.

He set the point on a scrap of pine at the angle you climb, pushed, and watched it bite and hold.

I had a coffee can full of spare parts on the shelf. New leg straps, still stiff, and two sets of pads I had bought the year before I quit and never used.

By ten o’clock my hooks had fresh straps and pads, and they looked like gear again.

The belt was the trouble. A body belt is sized by the distance between the D-rings, and mine was made for a woman of a hundred and forty pounds.

On Jace it would not even reach the first hole.

“I can buy one Monday after work,” he said. “Maybe they’ll let me climb in a loaner the first day.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll make a call in the morning.”

I did not tell him who. I did not want him getting his hopes up.

But before I went to bed I stood in the kitchen and said a prayer, short and plain, the way my daddy prayed. Lord, let him walk in there ready. That was all.

Saturday morning

Saturday came up clear and bright, with frost on the pasture and the oaks along the fence row gone mostly brown.

By nine the frost was burning off, and you could hear a chainsaw somewhere down the hollow.

Before Jace came out, I went to the feed sack and took out the charred buckle from his belt.

I stood at the spare pole beside the climbing pole with a hammer and a fence staple and I put that buckle up at eye level, right where a man standing at the base would see it.

I want to be honest about why. It was not to shame anybody. I just could not throw it in the trash.

It had been my son’s, and it had been burned on purpose, and I wanted it where it would remind both of us why we were out there.

Jace came out in an orange shirt and his white hard hat, with my old hooks in one hand.

He saw the buckle on the spare pole and stopped walking. Then he nodded once and kept coming.

I had on a gray thermal shirt, my oldest jeans and my daddy’s hooks.

I had pulled my hair back so it would not catch on anything. My knees were already letting me know they had an opinion about all this.

“You don’t have to go up, Mom,” Jace said. “I can do it by myself.”

“I know you can,” I said. “But I’m going to be right there beside you anyway.”