The Hooks I Dug Out of the Shed

What Monty said at home

Monty did not stay. He shook Arlo’s hand and said thank you for coming. He tipped his cap to Jeanine.

Then he got in his truck beside Tawny and backed out of my lane slow, and the ticking lifter faded off down the road.

Jace stood in the yard holding the check. It was for twenty-three hundred dollars, the exact amount.

Monty had kept every receipt for that line school gear in the glove box of his truck, the same as he keeps every receipt for every calf.

Jace called his father that night, and his father told him something that made Jace sit down on the porch step.

Monty had gone home and sat Tawny down at the kitchen table. He told her the farm would be split evenly, three ways, between Jace and her two boys, the same as if they were all his.

And he told her Jace would be paid fair wages for every hour he ever worked that place.

“He said he should have done it four years ago,” Jace told me. “He said a farm that only works if somebody’s working for free isn’t a farm. It’s a trap.”

I did not say anything to that. I thought it was about the wisest thing Monty Ebersole had ever said, and I had been married to him for fourteen years.

Monday morning

I was at the dispatch console Monday morning at six thirty, an hour before my shift, because I could not sleep.

I had my coffee and the radio and the big map of the four counties on the wall, and I watched the clock.

The apprentices reported to the training yard behind the warehouse at seven. There were four of them that year.

The line superintendent inspects every apprentice’s gear himself on the first day. He is a hard man about gear, and he should be.

At ten past eight, the crew foreman who took Arlo’s place stopped by the dispatch window on his way out to a job.

He leaned in and set his coffee on the ledge.

“Thought you’d want to know,” he said. “Superintendent went over every piece of your boy’s gear. Turned your old hooks over in his hands a while. Said they were the best kept climbers he’d seen in a year.”

“And?” I said.

“And he was the first one up the pole,” he said. “Didn’t wait to be asked. Topped it, set his strap, came down clean. The other three stood there with their mouths open.”

He picked up his coffee and went out. I sat there at the console with the outage board blinking, and a woman called in a tree on the line out by the Montauk road, and I took her address and sent a truck, and the whole time I was smiling like a fool.