The Lineman

Letcher County, Kentucky, 1937

Roy drove up the hollow on the Monday before the last week of October. They had told him at the office in Whitesburg that the road would end and that the last house on the line belonged to a widow who had a room waiting.

The hollow narrowed as he climbed. The creek ran alongside the road for the first mile and then crossed under it on a low concrete culvert and went up the far side and was lost in the laurel. The leaves were down along the road and the ones still on the trees were the color of rust and old brass. He passed two houses, then a third, and then the road climbed and the houses ended and there was only the road, the creek, and the trees on either side, and he pulled up to a faded, red-painted gate.

He cut the engine and sat a moment.

He got out with his canvas bag and his climbing irons slung over one shoulder. He set the duffel down and pushed against the gate with his knee.

The house was white-painted and less than a minute’s walk on the other side. A porch ran the width of it. There was a black walnut in the side yard and a barn behind the house, and beyond the barn the hollow closed tightly around. A garden patch ran along the south side of the house with the cornstalks broken over and the bean poles still standing. A wire chicken run sat against the back of the barn. A hand pump stood between the house and the barn with a wooden trough beneath it and a tin cup hanging from a nail on the post.

A woman waited on the porch in a straight-backed chair. She had a small rifle across her lap. She watched him come up the walk.

“Ma’am,” he said. “Roy Pendleton. From the REA. They sent word.”

“They sent word.”

“I’ve got the dispatch here if you want to see.”

“I don’t need it. Come up out of the yard.”

He came up the steps and set the duffel on the porch boards and the climbing irons beside it. The irons rang off the boards and she wrinkled her nose at the sound.

“Pardon,” he said.

“Those can stay outside.”

“I can leave them in the truck.”

“Out here’s fine.”

The woman’s hair was gray and pinned up and her hands on the rifle were the hands of a woman who had worked every day of her life. It was a Winchester .22, the short model, the stock darkened at the wrist.

“Supper’s at six,” she said. “We eat in the kitchen. There’s a room at the back of the house. The bed’s made.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’ll wash at the pump. There’s a privy out past the walnut.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The toilet in the house is for me.”

“I don’t mind an outhouse.”

She did not say her name and he did not ask it. He took the duffel into the house.

The back room was small and clean. The bed was made with a quilt in a pattern he did not know. There was a washstand and a chair and a window that looked out on the barn. A man’s razor sat on the washstand in a tin cup, and a strop hung from a nail beside it. He set the duffel on the floor at the foot of the bed and he washed his hands at the pump outside and came in to supper at six.

She had made beans and cornbread and a dish of greens and a piece of fatback the size of his thumb for flavor. She took three plates down from the shelf and stood a moment and put one back. She set a plate for him and a plate for herself and waited for him to sit first.

They ate without speaking.

When he was finished, he said, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and he took his plate to the sink.

“Leave it,” she said, and that was all before she stood and busied herself cleaning up.

He went out to the porch and stood at the top step.

She came out a few minutes later with the rifle and sat in the straight-backed chair. There was a second chair on the porch, a rocker, and he took it because it was the chair that was there.

The light was going in the hollow. A whippoorwill started up somewhere past the barn.

She had a coffee can on the rail with holes punched in the sides and she struck a match and lit a handful of green grass inside the can and the grass went to smoke and the smoke came up thin and gray and went along the rail toward the end of the porch.

“Henry kept the bugs down this way,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

They sat and he was careful to keep the motion of his chair small.

She began to hum. Her toe tapped against the porch boards.

A rat moved along the base of the barn in the near-dark and she lifted the rifle from her lap without hurry and fired once. The impact knocked the rat against the barn.

It did not move again.

“They come over from the grain depot,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I keep the house and barn clean.”

“Yes, ma’am. I can see that.”

After a while he said he would turn in and she said good night and he went into the house and lay down in his clothes on top of the quilt and listened to the rhythm of her feet until he fell asleep.

He woke before first light.

He carried his boots to the front step and gathered his irons.

The truck was where he’d left it, parked beneath a large walnut. The branches spread off from the road and leaned across a flat stretch of open ground.

Under the walnut was a grave.

It was fresh. The mound of dirt was dark and the clods on it had not busted and it was still bare of grass or weed. A board stood at the head with a name burned into it and a date less than a month past. The walnut leaves had come down around the mound in a yellow circle, and a few of the husks lay split open in the grass.

He stood for a moment.

Then he got into the truck and started it and drove down the hollow to meet the crew.

He worked with the crew all day along the lower end of the hollow, setting poles in holes the augers had cut the week before. The holes were four feet deep. The poles were loblolly pine out of North Carolina, creosoted, heavy at the butt, and he and two other men walked each pole up and set it and tamped the dirt back around it with the butts of their shovels while a fourth man held the pole plumb. The foreman was a man named Harlan out of Pikeville. The two men on the shovels were brothers from somewhere down by Cumberland and they did not say much and what they said was mostly to each other. The boy who held the poles plumb was maybe nineteen and ran the chain and fetched water from the creek in a galvanized bucket when the men called for it.

The work was what he was used to.

He had done it in France in the rain with shells coming in and he had done it outside of Hazard in ninety-three-degree heat in July and he was doing it now in Letcher County in October with the light coming down yellow through the oaks and the crew not saying much and the dirt going back into the holes easier than he’d seen.

They ran a straight line and the late sun caught the creosote and the wood looked black against the brown of the woods behind.

They set nine poles the first day.

He came back up the hollow at dusk with the tar on his hands from the pole butts and the dirt on his pants to the knee.

She had supper on the table at six.

He washed at the pump and came in and ate. She had made a stew with potatoes and a bit of meat and he cleaned two bowls.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and he went out to the porch.

She came out later with the rifle and the smudge can and the matches.

The match flared and the smoke came up between them.

He said, “Are you eager to get the line in?”

She did not answer for a while.

Then she said, “My husband. He signed the papers in July.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“They told him it would be October.”

“We’re on time, at least.”

“I didn’t have an opinion about it.”

“No, ma’am.”

She raised the rifle and fired. He did not see what it was and she did not say whether she had hit it.

The whippoorwill started.

“You married, Mr. Pendleton?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Never?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Why not.”

He thought about the question.

“I went to France in seventeen and I came back in nineteen and the woman I had been going to marry had married somebody else. After that I did not get around to it.”

“That’s a long time not to get around to something.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She turned her head. “There’s time still.”

He watched the smoke come off the can and go along the rail. The smoke smelled the way green grass smells when it burns, which is a smell he had not smelled since he was a boy in Tennessee and his mother had kept a smudge can on the porch of a house on the edge of a tobacco field. He had forgotten about it until tonight.

“I knew a man in France,” he said. “Fellow from Pennsylvania named Kohler. He taught me a splice I still use. He talked about a girl in Altoona the whole time we worked together. Said he needed to hurry home.”

“Some are like that.”

“He might have married her.”

“You lose track of him?”

“I lost track of him.”

“In the war.”

“After.”

The green grass burned down and she added more from a basket by her chair and fed it in until the smoke covered halfway up her arm.

A small shape flitted along the shadow of the barn. She raised the rifle again and fired.

“Forty-one years,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Forty-one years I’ve been lighting a lamp in that front room.”

She cut her eyes at him, but kept her head turned past the barn.

“That’s a long time to do a thing. And then decide to stop.”

“I’ve not done a thing that long.”

“You been in the electric business a while?”

“That’s the truth.”

“I didn’t have an opinion about our arrangement either,” she said. “But Henry signed the papers.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome to stay till the job’s done.”

She did not say anything more that night and he did not either and after a while the full dark came and he went in.

They were both out before light the next morning. The lamp was burning in the kitchen and her shape moved past the window as he washed at the pump. The water was cold enough to take his breath. By the time he had pulled his shirt back on she had come out the back door with a tin pail and crossed the yard to the chicken run and let herself in. The chickens came to her without hurry. She scattered the feed from the pail and talked to herself in a low voice.

He nodded to her from across the yard.

She latched the gate and went into the house.

He went past the barn on his way to the truck. The double doors stood open. Inside were the shapes of a horse stall long unused and a workbench against the far wall with hand tools laid out the way a man laid out tools who meant to use them again. The smell of the barn was hay and old leather and the cold dust of October.

Wednesday was splicing day on the lower run.

He worked up on the poles with the climbing irons biting into the creosote and the belt around the pole and his hands doing the splice the way his hands had done before, stripping the copper with the knife and twisting the strands and wrapping them and taping the wrap. The tape came off the roll sticky and hot in the sun and stuck to his fingers.

From the top of the pole the lower hollow opened below him. The creek ran bright in the late light. Smoke rose from a chimney down where the road came in from the main. Her house was not visible from here. The hollow turned twice between her gate and the run he was working and the ridge cut off the rest.

He leaned back against the harness and let his arms hang loose. The scar on the back of his left hand was white against the tar. It came to him April of eighteen on a line between two command posts at the edge of a wood whose name he no longer remembered. A line under load had parted in his hand and the bare copper had taken a strip of skin off from the knuckle to the wrist. He had wrapped the hand in a piece of shirt and finished the splice and gone back to the post and a medic had cleaned it with something that burned and wrapped it properly and by morning it had stopped bleeding.

She saw it Wednesday night on the porch when he lifted his coffee cup.

He said, “A line parted on me in France. The copper took the skin off.”

“Looks like it.”

“It wasn’t much.”

“No.”

“A man I was with wrapped it for me.”

“The Kohler fella?”

“No, ma’am. A different man. I don’t remember his name.”

“You remember Kohler’s.”

“I worked with Kohler longer.”

The basket was by her foot and her hand went to it without looking.

“My husband cut his hand on a saw in nineteen and ten,” she said. “Took the top joint off his little finger on the left. He was splitting rail for the pasture fence. I was in the kitchen and I heard him call and I came out and he was holding the finger in his other hand like he was going to put it back on.”

“Did he?”

“No. I wrapped the hand and we went to Whitesburg. The doctor there sewed it up. Henry carried the finger back home in his pocket and then he buried it beneath the walnut when we got back.”

“Under the walnut.”

“Said the walnut could have it if it wanted it.”

She said this without smiling and he did not smile either.

She was quiet then, and after a while she came back and fed the smudge can again. The whippoorwill started and the smoke went out along the rail the way smoke goes when there is no wind.

Thursday they wired four houses along the middle of the hollow. The first was a four-room house with a tin roof and a woman waiting on the porch with two children hiding behind her skirts. The second was a two-room cabin with a stovepipe coming out the side wall. The third was a frame house with a sagging porch and a man who shook the lineman’s hand and called him sir. The fourth sat back from the road at the end of a long walk through a yard of packed dirt where chickens scratched in the late light.

He drove the staples into the clapboards of each one and ran the drop wires and mounted the meter boxes and at every house there was someone on the porch to watch.

He came back to her house that night with the tar fresh on his hands and a blister on the heel of his right palm from the staple hammer and a tiredness in his shoulders he had not felt since summer.

She had supper ready and he ate it and went out to the porch.

She finished up and joined him with the rifle and the can.

“Some days are harder than others.”

He wiped his hair back.

“They are.”

The kerosene lamp was on the porch rail between them, unlit. She had brought it out. It sat between them in the dusk with the chimney clean and the wick trimmed.

The smudge can burned on the other end of the rail.

“Tomorrow’s your day up here,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. In the morning.”

“What time?”

“Around nine.”

“All right.”

He looked at the lamp on the rail.

“I saw electric light the first time in a hospital tent outside a place called Souilly,” he said. “It was October of eighteen. There was a bulb on a wire strung between two poles over a row of cots. The wind came through the flap and the bulb swung and the shadows on the canvas went back and forth.”

She did not say anything.

“It was a good way to light a tent.”

She fired at a rat along the barn and the rat ran and she fired twice more and it went still.

“Three shots,” she said.

“You hit it.”

“Getting old.”

The smoke went along the rail and out past the end of the porch and into the dark.

“Mr. Pendleton.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“My husband was a man who wanted things done.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He wanted the line in. He signed the papers in July and he was in the hospital in Hazard by the end of August and he was in the ground by the first week of October.”

“I was told he’d passed.”

“He told me on the last day at the hospital that I should be sure and let them put the wire on the house when the crew got to us.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He said that was the one thing he wanted me to be sure to do.”

She was looking out past the barn.

“I met that man when he was still a boy.”

The green grass burned, the smoke died down and this time she watched it fade.

“It was the last thing he said. I raised a family with that man, kept his house, and sat with him through good times and bad.”

She stood up with the rifle in one hand and the unlit lamp in the other.

“And that was the last thing he said.”

She said good night, Mr. Pendleton, and went into the house.

He sat on the porch a while longer. The whippoorwill had stopped. The hollow was dark up to the ridge and the ridge was dark against the sky.

He went to bed.

Friday morning he climbed the last pole.

It stood at the corner of the yard between the walnut and the barn. The crew had set it Tuesday but he had asked to be the one to bring the wire to the house and the foreman had said suit yourself.

He set the irons and went up.

The climbing irons bit into the creosote the way they had bitten into pole upon pole before this one and the belt caught him at the waist when he leaned back and his hands went to the cross-arm and pulled him up the last foot and he hooked the belt over the arm and stood in the irons with his weight on the belt and his hands free.

The cross-arm was loblolly, new, smelling still of the mill.

From the top of the pole the hollow opened out below him. The line of poles he had helped set ran down the slope and around the first turn and was lost in the trees. The roofs of the houses along the middle of the hollow showed where the wire had come in the day before. The crew was somewhere down past the second turn working the run that came up from the main.

He got to work. The insulators were glass, pale green, the color of bottle glass held up to the sun, and they screwed onto the wooden pins on the cross-arm and the wire went into the grooves at the top of the insulators and was tied off with a short length of tie wire wrapped the way his hands had wrapped it in France and in Whitesburg and everywhere in between.

He brought the service drop down from the cross-arm to the wall of the house.

He worked himself off the pole.

He carried the end of the drop to the wall and climbed the wooden ladder he had set against the clapboards and drove the staples into the wall with the staple hammer and ran the drop along the eave to the point above the front-room window where the meter box would go. He mounted the meter box. He drilled through the clapboards into the front room with the brace and bit and he fed the wire through and he came down the ladder and went inside.

She was in the kitchen.

“I need to run the wire along the front-room wall,” he said. “About six feet. Then up to where the fixture will go.”

“All right.”

“It will not take long.”

“All right.”

He went into the front room.

The front room had a horsehair sofa and two chairs and a small table by the far wall and on the table was a kerosene lamp with a chimney that had been cleaned that morning. The wick was trimmed. The lamp had not been lit.

He set the ladder down and went to the far wall.

He ran the wire along the top of the baseboard and up the corner of the room and across the ceiling to the center where the fixture would hang. He stapled the wire every eight inches. The staples went into the plaster with a soft sound that was not the sound they made going into a clapboard. He screwed in the ceiling rose and wired the drop cord and screwed the bulb into the socket at the end of the cord.

The bulb was a sixty-watt General Electric, frosted, and the glass was cool in his hand.

He wired the switch into the wall beside the front-room door.

He went back outside and climbed the pole one more time and made the final tie at the cross-arm and came down.

He went around to the side of the house and opened the meter box and made the connections at the meter.

He washed his hands at the pump. The tar would not come off and he knew it would not come off and he washed them anyway. He came in and she had a plate for him at the kitchen table — cornbread and a piece of ham and a bowl of beans — and he ate it standing because he was going to go back out on the line for the rest of the afternoon and come back at supper.

“The bulb will work when you pull the chain on the fixture,” he said. “I’ll show you tonight.”

“I know how to pull a chain, Mr. Pendleton.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He went back down the hollow.

He came back at six.

She had supper ready. He ate it and she ate it and neither of them said much and when he was finished he carried his plate to the sink and she said leave it and he left it.

The light was going in the hollow.

She picked up the kerosene lamp from the kitchen table where she had carried it that morning from the front room. She carried it into the front room and set it on the small table by the far wall in the place it had been on the table for forty-one years.

He stood in the doorway of the front room with his hands at his sides.

She went to the switch beside the door.

“You have to pull the chain the first time,” he said.

She looked at him.

“The chain on the fixture,” he said.

“You said the switch.”

“The switch and the chain. The chain has to be pulled the first time.”

She crossed the room to the fixture in the center of the ceiling. The cord hung down from the rose with a brass chain at the end of it and a small brass pull on the chain.

She reached up and took the pull between her thumb and forefinger.

She pulled.

Then the light was on her face and on the backs of her hands where they had come up from her side.

She did not step back. The kerosene lamp sat on the table. The shadows had gone from the corners of the room. She looked at her own hands in the light.

Then she walked to the table.

She picked up the kerosene lamp by the handle and she lifted the chimney off and set it on the table and she took a match from the box on the table and struck it and lit the wick and put the chimney back.

The kerosene lamp caught and burned on the table beside the bulb.

She stood by the table and did not move.

He stood in the doorway and did not move.

The smell of the lamp was in the room after a moment, the smell of kerosene burning in a room where a kerosene lamp had burned every night for forty-one years, and the bulb was burning above it, and the two lights were on her hands where her hands rested on the edge of the table, and on her face, and on the quilt folded across the arm of the sofa, and on the wall behind the table where the wire ran along the top of the baseboard.

“Good night, Mr. Pendleton,” she said.

“Good night, ma’am.”

He went out to the porch.

He sat in the rocker in the dark. The smudge can was not burning tonight. She had not lit it.

The whippoorwill started up past the barn.

A rat came out of the grass along the base of the barn and moved toward the window light. Another came behind it.

The door opened and she came out with the rifle.

She raised it and fired. The rat ran. She fired again. It ran into the dark.

A third came low through the grass toward the light.

“I expect you’ll be out early tomorrow,” she said.

She looked at the rifle in her hands. She lowered it and set it against the rail and went into the house.

Through the front-room window the two lights burned on.