The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

The noon truck

He made it to twenty feet on his first climb, came down clean, and went back up. Second climb, twenty-two.

The top of my daddy’s pole is about twenty-five feet off the ground, and he kept stopping a few feet short, like something in him would not let him go the last bit.

I came down after the second climb because my knees had made their point.

I sat on the tailgate of my white pickup with a bag of frozen peas on each knee and called directions up to him like I used to call them to new hires.

Around noon a gray farm truck pulled into the lane, and a man got out slow, the way men get out of trucks when their backs have done forty years of the same work.

He was wearing an old canvas coat and a seed cap.

It was Arlo. He was my foreman for nine of my eleven years on the line. He retired two years ago.

I had called him at seven that morning and told him what happened, and he had said four words before he hung up. “I’ll be over directly.”

He did not say hello. He walked to the pole, looked at the buckle stapled to the spare pole for a long time, and then looked up at Jace hanging off the side at fifteen feet.

“Who taught that boy to set his gaffs like that?” he called up. “Heels in, son. You’re climbing like you’re scared of it.”

Jace grinned, the first grin I had seen on him in two days. “Yes sir.”

Arlo turned to me. “I’ve got something in the truck,” he said. “Don’t you dare cry, Lorrie Ebersole. You never cried on my crew and you’re not starting now.”

What Arlo brought

What he had in the truck was a body belt. Not new, but close.

It had been his son’s, back when his boy tried the line for two years before deciding he liked running a backhoe better.

It was a size twenty-four, which was close enough to Jace’s waist that it fit on the second hole.

Arlo also had a brand new fall restriction strap still in the plastic, which he said he bought before he retired and never used.

“I can’t take these, Arlo,” Jace said when he came down. “This is too much.”

“You’re not taking them,” Arlo said. “You’re borrowing them until you’ve worked long enough to buy your own. And when some kid on your crew gets in a bind someday, you’re going to lend him yours. That’s how it works.”

Jace looked at me. I nodded. That is how it works, and it is how it has always worked, and it is about the best thing I know about the trade.

We inspected Arlo’s belt together, all three of us, stitch by stitch, on the hood of his truck.

Then Jace put it on, buckled my old hooks back on his boots and walked over to the pole.

Arlo did not go up. Arlo was sixty-six and had two new hips.

But he pulled a folding chair out of his truck bed, set it at the bottom of the pole, and sat there with his hands on his knees for the rest of the afternoon.