Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

Bean looked at a clipboard on the wall behind him. He flipped a few pages. “Looks like I got about ten rolls in the barn.”

“I’ll need all of them. My foreman will be coming through with the check soon as he can, and we’ll guarantee it with our account.”

“That’s a lot of product, Roscoe.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bean rubbed at the peppered beard on his chin, holding his rheumy eyes low on Roscoe’s face as if the answer were stored there, some sign to be trusted in Roscoe’s lips or jaw.

“You don’t make good on this, and I’ll be forced to take the debt back any way I can. I could go after the land.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s your father-in-law’s land, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bean nodded, once, and then scribbled on a slip of paper. “Head on round back and give this to the boys. They’ll help you get it all in the wagon.”

“Thanks, Bean.”

“Whatever this is, it makes me nervous, Roscoe.”

“It’s fine. You wait.”

ROSCOEhad Wilson weld the iron cores for the transformers, thick, ringlike creations about a foot wide and tall, squared at their corners.

“Whatever you say,” Wilson said, given the instructions.

“Here.” Roscoe flipped pages in the bound register he now kept. He found his drawing of the transformers, a plan deducted from Faraday as much as from his own work with Alabama Power. “I’ll wrap copper round the cores.” He tapped at the page. “Iron is permeable to magnetic force, so it’ll move the current from one side — the receiving side — over to the sparser secondary coil on the other side of the ring. What’s not shot off through those secondary wires will return to the primary, and we’ll be left with a twist of wires housing about half the original voltage. We’ll feed those wires into the next ring, making the turns of the secondary coils even less, and then again, and after the voltage passes through three, we’ll be down to a current close to safe. I’m going to leave it higher for the transmission from the road to the shop. If we stepped it down all the way up front, we’d lose too much over the distance and risk a weak current. I’ll put one more transformer close in to step it down to two-twenty.”

“You’re talking another language, my friend.”

“I’m not,” Roscoe insisted, just as he had with Marie’s father once, and Bean. “It’s like — a windup toy. Think of those windup toys the kids have. It’s like one of those as it winds down. Imagine that the strength of your hand stays the same, but the mechanism inside slows down. You’re just changing the size of the spring.”

Wilson cocked his head. “Why’s it so important to you that I understand?”

“Don’t you want to?”

Wilson smiled, the same slow, easy smile he brought to most things. “There’s a lot I seek out, Ross. You’ve seen me on those trails — the likes of the crops on this land, all their stages of growth, all the things I might do to make them stronger and bigger. There’s workings of music I’m right taken by. Even Moa’s cooking calls my attention at times, all those leavenings and flavors. But this here”—Wilson tapped at the drawing—“this isn’t my concern. Agreeing to help you was me agreeing to help this farm, not agreeing to be your student.”

Roscoe clapped him on the back, glad of his honesty. “I hear you, but I won’t stop the lessons.”

“You want to holler at a deaf man, that’s your concern.”

They both laughed at that, and Roscoe found himself grateful for the camaraderie. He’d not worked with anyone since Marie had taken them away from the village, and he missed collaborative discipline and drive. He’d liked Wilson from the day they met — both for the man he was in person and for all the stories Marie had told — but only in this work had Roscoe felt friendship, loyalty, shared lives. He could see their families growing thick and comfortable, Roscoe and Wilson running the land and the wires, the wives and children happy, big meals and steady comfort. Maybe he and Wilson could even start their own electrical business installing transformers for the other farms, a marriage of their separate work.

He left Wilson to his welding and walked the line route again.

WITHthe cores done, Roscoe started winding wire. Wilson checked in on him periodically, and Roscoe tried, again, to explain, holding up one of the iron rings. “See? The voltage will be doing laps.”

Wilson shook his head. “When do we start raising poles? I’m readying to get some actual work done.”

“Soon.”

But the transformers took longer than that. A solid month had passed before Roscoe was confident enough to test them.

Together, Roscoe and Wilson raised their first pole, just nine yards from the original line. Then they hauled out wheelbarrows full of tools, those three transformers unrecognizable in their galvanized frames, all of the rods and coils hidden deep inside, along with levers to stop and start the current. The levers were in the off position, where they’d stay until Roscoe connected the first transformer to the live line, and then it to the other two.

Wilson helped Roscoe mount the transformers on the new pole, evenly distributed with the lowest one ten feet above the ground. Roscoe attached the first stretch of line that would lead to the house and the shop.

“You seem comfortable with this work,” Roscoe noted.

“Only ’cause we’re not hooked up to anything yet. You plug those wires into that live line and just see how fast I run out of here.”

“You won’t run.” Roscoe knew it was for show, this disinterest. He’d seen the information seeping into Wilson’s thoughts. He’d even found him winding wires around a core one day. “Just trying to keep this moving along,” Wilson had said.

Roscoe had shown him a finished core, noting the differences in the sides, then left Wilson to finish the one he was working on.

ITwas too dangerous to risk linking up to a ten-thousand-volt current, so Roscoe and Wilson set about temporarily halting the power on the main transmission line. Roscoe had already selected the pine they’d fell a couple miles toward the dam, just down from a crossroads where it’d be easy to locate — he didn’t want linemen stomping around the fields searching for the outage. The past several weeks had seen heavy rains, and the water helped with the story Roscoe had built — just an old tree loosened by weather, ready to topple.

They left their supplies with the transformers and rode horses to the tree. “Even when it’s down, we won’t have that long of a window,” Roscoe said. “They’ll get this line running as quick as they can.”

“So we’ll ride like hell once the tree falls.”

“That’s right.”

Wilson had spent a few days there already, and the tree swayed under the axes they took to its roots and the ground. They hitched their horses to long chains looped round the trunk and whipped them forward. The pine came easily, crashing against the lines, sparks and snapping branches spooking the horses into high-kneed gallops.

Roscoe and Wilson unhooked and wound the chains, swung into their saddles, drove their ankles into their horses’ flanks. They raced along the trail slashed wide for the power line, and Roscoe found himself whooping like a boy, Wilson there with him, an adventure on their hands.

Back on their land, they tethered their horses to the fence and positioned the ladder against the pole that belonged to Alabama Power. Roscoe grabbed a wooden stick and climbed to line height. “If we failed, there will be sparks,” he shouted to Wilson. “Best stand clear.” A binder was on the line, coupling wires together. He needed to make the lines touch — different currents on different wires. If they touched quietly, the lines were cold. If not, Roscoe could be thrown from the ladder by the shock. He hesitated, knowing the power he might touch.