Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

Bean clapped me on the back. “Just have to check, son. Can’t have you heading back out so soon after you’ve arrived. You boys’ll have to help me with the rolls.”

I saw Bean on the stand again, telling the jury that I’d made good on my debt to him. I saw those detailed bills he’d sent me, subtracting my payments, and then the final note, which read, Paid in Full. Thank you for your business .

We loaded everything into the pickup bed, and Wilson told Bean to add it to the account.

“Is that Marie’s account?” I asked in the truck on the way home.

“It’s the land’s account. When you’re ready for light fixtures, you’ll use the same one.”

Wilson helped me carry the wiring back to the cottage. “Need anything else?” he asked when we were done.

“No.”

“Holler when you do.”

It was strange to be hollering for Wilson when I needed material things, shovels and wires and fixtures. Before, he’d provided the labor — welding those cores, digging and filling holes, harvesting and planting. I thought again of his replacing rails on that fence, both his arms pulling the rotted pieces loose. He hadn’t needed it, but he’d asked for my help that day I sought his support for the lines. He would always need assistance with that work now, and I wondered whether it was my responsibility to give it, to stand in for Wilson’s lost arm, my presence there one of necessity. It seemed clean, like Bean’s columns of payments applied to debts, something near balance.

Itook time weaving the copper together — eight strands of it twisting over and past themselves. The wires already had a thin layer of insulation, which worked with their twisted positions to force a more equal current through the total cross section of the strand.

I finished the weaving in a week and slid the bundled wires into their coats. As much as I hated to enlist him in the same endeavor, I called upon Wilson to help me set the lines in their porcelain insulators. He held the coiled length while I strung it, three lines on the poles to distribute the current in case of surges or lightning before they came together at the service conduit I’d cobbled together on an eave of the cottage. The lines went in the steel pipe from below, up and through a U-joint curve, before they came out inside. On their own, wires can withstand water just fine, but stick them in a contained space with a puddle, and there’s promised damage. Water is a beast in captivity, father to rust and mold and rot. Give it a bit of air, though, some sun, and it goes on its way quiet enough.

“Another couple yards,” I shouted to Wilson. We were on the last line of the last pole, those twisted copper wires hidden away under their black coat, the thick cord settling into the shining brown of its insulator as if lying down to bed. All of the pieces were so beautiful together — snug and purposeful and poised — and I let myself feel the inherent magic I’d always felt for the work. The power I’d soon feed into those wires had its home in water, far back at the start of the transmission lines I’d run from the dammed-up Coosa. We made this fierce, blazing force out of something wet and fluid. We changed it completely, but it still behaved the same.

“That’s all I have,” Wilson said.

We walked together to the company’s transformer perched high overhead. Wilson held the base of the ladder as I climbed. “Don’t even have to knock down a tree this time,” he said. Alabama Power had taken care of that, the current severed until it was asked to work.

I attached my wires and flipped the lever on.

The moment lacked the thrill of our first, but still I wished Marie were there to see it, to see me legally running electricity onto her land, improving it as I said I would.

ELECTRICITYhummed through the cottage, wires in white coating running their way across walls and ceilings through small, white insulators I’d ordered from Bean. I knew people were starting to hide the wiring inside walls, but I will always prefer it exposed.

The new lights were bright, and I found myself lighting the oil lamps instead. The cottage looked better in the lamplight, like the upstairs library, I suppose.

The door hung straight on its hinges, a new frame running round it. Scraping the word Fix off had set me to scraping the entire thing, and I’d taken the wood down a few grains before polishing it with linseed oil. It had become a handsome entrance.

I’d replaced the broken panes in the windows, too.

Three weeks had passed since Jenny mailed the letter, and we hadn’t received a response. She didn’t linger when she brought my meals.

Summer struck out hot and humid, but the cottage stayed cool in its shade. The oaks had been dropping their leaves on the roof so long, it’d become a mess of mulch up there. A leak near the stovepipe had grown, warping the ceiling planks, dripping loud into the pot I kept stationed underneath it. The summer thunderstorms set it streaming, so I climbed to the roof to begin replacing it. The shingles had rotted to the consistency of leaves, everything sloughing loose against the flat edge of the shovel. I pounded a few spikes into the slope to help station myself, and I scraped all the junk toward one corner of the house, pushing it over the eaves, where it littered the ground in great brown clumps. When I got to the planking underneath, it was like exposing treasure, the flat, smooth boards so stark against the pulpy roofing. The cottage had been built well.

My hands no longer blistered against the handle of the shovel.

I raked leaves and shingles out wide in the meadow, a single layer so the sun would parch them. If the sky could give me two days without rain, they’d be dry enough to scrape back into a pile and set aflame. Wilson had given me a roll of tar paper, and I’d intended to get it up that same day, but the wood needed drying time, too. I asked the sky to stay clear.

“Who’re you talking to?” I imagined my father asking. “You a praying man, now?”

My young Marie said, “You shouldn’t be here, love. You should be waiting on Yellow Mama.”

Ed might say, “Fastening that farmer’s coat tight, aren’t you, brother?”

“Come out,” I whispered to the timber, my eyes on the low holly and the middling dogwoods, the heavy oaks and tall pines, the nubby grasses. Birds were in the branches making their noise, wind scratching through. The day’s work ran in sweat down my arms, dampening the wood of the rake handle. Its teeth were rusted a dark red-brown. “Ed?” I questioned. “Pa?”

Maggie lifted her head from the shade where she rested and let out a low growl. Footsteps followed the sound, and a figure I didn’t recognize appeared from the bushes and trees. He was tall and heavy, comfortably thick about his middle. His cheeks were pudgy and his chin gave a small sag, his face childish in a sad way, like a boy on the verge of crying.

Maggie stood and barked, and the man’s face twisted into a fear I recognized. Gerald — my son. What life had given him the time and food and lack of work to become so large about the middle and face? I remembered him as an active boy, alongside his reading. Sword fights and tree climbing and races through the stalks and furrows.

“It’s all right,” I said to Maggie. “Down.”

She gruffed once more and flopped back down, too hot to put up a fuss.

“Gerald?”

“Hey, Pa.”

Was he eighteen? Nineteen? I didn’t know. Either way, I’d been younger than him when I met his mother.

He put his thick arms around my back, squeezing my body against his own, crushing between us the rake still clutched in my hands. “Pa.”

“Gerald?” The question was a muffled whisper I doubt he heard.