The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

Topping the pole

I went back up at two o’clock, frozen peas or no frozen peas.

It was the warmest part of the day, maybe fifty-two degrees, and the sun was coming in low through the oaks along the fence.

I climbed to the halfway mark and set my gaffs and leaned back. Jace was above me, a few feet up, with his orange shirt bright against the sky.

Arlo was in his chair at the bottom. My pickup sat where I left it, the toolbox catching the light.

“You’ve got nothing to prove to that pole,” Arlo called up to him. “It’s just a pole. Climb it like it’s Tuesday.”

Jace laughed. Then he looked up at the top and started climbing again. Short steps. Heels in. Hips out.

He moved his strap up as he went, smooth, the way you do when you stop thinking about it.

Twenty feet. Twenty-two. He passed the spot where he had stopped twice before and did not stop.

At the top he set his gaffs, leaned back into his strap and put his palm flat on the top of the pole.

“That’s it!” Arlo hollered. “That’s a lineman!”

I could not see very well for a minute. Something about the sun in my eyes.

I hung there in my daddy’s hooks, halfway up the pole he set for me, and watched my son sit at the top of it like he was born there.

He climbed it four more times before the sun went behind the hill. On the last one he came down smooth and fast, the way you come down when your legs know the work.

Arlo stood up out of his chair and shook his hand like he was shaking the hand of a grown man.

Which he was.

Saturday evening

My neighbor Jeanine came across the road that evening with a pan of cornbread and a pot of beans, because news gets around in the country faster than the mail.

Her husband came with her and stood with Arlo by the pole, talking about poles the way men talk about fishing.

We ate on the porch with our coats on. Arlo stayed for supper.

Jace ate three bowls of beans and half the cornbread, and Jeanine said that was the best compliment she had had all year.

When Arlo left, he stopped at his truck and called back to Jace. “Pole-top rescue tomorrow,” he said. “After church. They’ll make you do it Monday, and you might as well know you can.”

Sunday

We went to the early service. Jace sat next to me in the pew, which he had not done since he was sixteen.

When we sang the old hymn about the solid rock, I heard him singing under his breath, and I did not look over, because I did not want him to stop.

After church Arlo was already in my yard with his folding chair and a coil of rope over his shoulder.

Jeanine and her husband came over too, and stood by the fence with their coffee to watch.

Pole-top rescue is what you train for and pray you never do.

If a man gets hurt at the top of a pole, the man below climbs up to him, ties him off with a handline, and lowers him to the ground. Every apprentice has to show he can do it, quickly.

We used a feed sack stuffed with sand for the hurt man. Jace and Arlo rigged the handline through a block that Jace hung near the top of the pole.

Then Jace climbed up, tied off the sack, and lowered it hand over hand while Arlo timed him on his wristwatch.

“Again,” Arlo said. “Faster this time. A man up there doesn’t have all day.”

They did it four times. By the fourth, Jace had it under two and a half minutes from the ground to the sack touching grass. Arlo said he had seen journeymen slower than that.