Roscoe couldn’t remember the last time Marie had pointed out a waxwing. He couldn’t remember the last time anything had been tender between them.
“Where is Wilson working?” he asked.
“North field. He’s mending rails on the far fence line. He could use your help.” She was looking at her book again, her features cast in their resident fatigue, and Roscoe left her without saying good-bye. They were long past greetings and farewells.
The paint on the rungs of the porch steps was chipped and flaking, and Roscoe kicked bits free as he walked down. The steps had been white once, as the house had been white, but everything was gray now, the exposed boards and the remaining paint dulled by age. Roscoe glanced back at his wife, sitting under the roof of the porch, and he saw the sadness in her surroundings, the great failing of her father’s house and land. Creepers had taken over the chimneys and lattice of the porch. The brick underneath crumbled in places, the mortar giving way to the vines. This was no longer the home of Marie’s childhood, and Roscoe could understand — right here, for just this moment — his wife’s disappointment. She had come here to save the place, to return it to the glory it had known under her father’s care, but there had been no improvements since their arrival. They weren’t even holding steady. Their yields and income continued to decline, the house to deteriorate, the land to fail them.
At one time in their lives Roscoe would have told her these thoughts, a time when his compassion would have helped.
He left Marie in her crumbling house and took a trail through a thicket of woods, veering right at its fork. Left led to a cottage where Wilson lived with his family. Right led to the cornfield, ending at the furrows.
Roscoe made so much noise that Wilson had his eyes on him before he’d fully cleared the crops.
“What brings you out here, Ross?”
Roscoe leaned his weight against the new rail Wilson had just hung. “I’m thinking about a project. Could use your help.”
Wilson laughed the way he did over cards the nights Roscoe could convince him to play or over the fishing lines they strung out into the pond, begging for catfish or bass or bluegill. His was a light laugh, a whistle of breath through his nose.
“Can’t imagine this project’s got much to do with the farm.” Wilson hammered a nail into a thick branch, recently cut, leaking sap.
“I figured out how to save the place.” Roscoe believed it. And not just the place, but his life with Marie. The thought raised a yearning in his gut. He could fix things. He could make them right again.
“The place don’t need saving, Ross.”
These were Marie’s words, and she spread them like the words of God. She had everyone, temporary hands included, thinking the place needed nothing more than its people. She was wrong. Her father had been wrong, too.
“I want to run lines in. Here along the edge of the field. It’s the perfect spot. I can tap that pole right past the corner.”
Wilson finished up with a second nail and jiggled the new timber, testing its strength. The wood didn’t budge. “Those lines are bound for the city, Ross. What makes you think they’d run a line in here?”
“I wouldn’t ask them.”
Wilson laughed again and moved down a fence post. The next top rail was rotted through, broken in its middle. “You talking about stealing?”
Now, Roscoe laughed. “There’s already so much current lost in line transmission — what we would take is nothing in comparison. A drop of water from a lake, Wilson. Nothing missed.”
Wilson pried at the nails anchoring the rotted wood. “How are you going to tap those lines without killing yourself?”
“We’d knock out the power first, and anyway, I’ve been doing this kind of thing a long time.”
Wilson looked at him. “Even if you could make it work, what’s electricity going to do for the farm?”
Roscoe pounded his hands down on the solid rail in front of him, so good was the idea. “I’ve figured out how to convert a fuel-powered thresher to run off electricity. Think of it — all the shucking and picking we’d be rid of. We could get more fields of peanuts in. And then have the machine do the bulk of the labor. I know it’d make this place profitable, Wilson. I know it.”
Wilson looked off into the neighboring property, its grasses grown tall while its resident cows worked the other side of the land. He had to be imagining the thresher. Roscoe willed it into his friend’s mind, the giant machine squatting in the shop, churning out ears all plucked from their stalks, ready for market. See it, Wilson.
Wilson shook his head. “The farm don’t need electricity, Ross. It needs more hands.”
“Goddamn it, Wilson. That’s Marie’s pitch, and even I know we can’t afford more hands. Growing up here doesn’t make her an expert. You know that. Hell, you were here when she was a schoolgirl up in her father’s library reading all day, and then gone to the university the first chance she got. She’s a goddamned teacher, not a farmer.”
“It’s her land, Ross.”
“It’s mine, too.”
Wilson shook his head again. “You gonna pull boss ranks on me, now?”
Roscoe kicked at the bunched grass near a fence post. He wasn’t Wilson’s boss. Marie wasn’t either. Wilson had lived on this property since he was a boy, and he’d helped Marie’s father tend it all through her childhood. He was the boss of the place, if anyone was, Roscoe coming to him for permission, a subordinate with a revolutionary idea. Just give me a chance, boss! Let me try.
“I’m not your goddamned boss. I’m an electrician, and if I’m going to stay here, I have to do something that’s mine.” Roscoe leaned his elbows on the rail. “I know how little I’ve done around here this past year. This is what I can do.”
Wilson kept working.
“I got word from my old foreman at the powerhouse. Says there’s a spot for me. Open door. If I don’t do this, I think I’ll have to go.”
“You wouldn’t leave Marie and Gerald.”
“I would.” Saying it, Roscoe fully understood its truth. If this didn’t work — the transformers, the lines, the thresher — he would go back to that village at the Lock 12 dam on the banks of the Coosa River where he’d first met Marie. He’d move back into the single-employee apartment house and walk down the clay road to the dam each morning, all those wires and conduits awaiting him, all those new lines to run. He would leave his wife and son to get back to the drive and purpose of that work. He would.
Wilson set his pry bar into the gap between pole and crossbeam to wrench the broken rail loose. Roscoe watched, half hoping Wilson would refuse his proposal. He could walk back to the house and pack a small bag, kiss his son on the top of his head and Marie once more on her dry lips, and then start south. He would walk the whole way and never grow tired.
“What’s my part?” Wilson asked.
“I’d need your help raising the poles and getting the lines strung.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
Roscoe saw himself walking through fields like this neighboring one, down lanes chalky with red dust, past farms worse off than Marie’s.
“Is Marie gonna know about this?”
Roscoe saw himself turning around, walking back up those porch steps, gathering Marie into his arms. “She will know we have power.”
“But she won’t know how we’re gettin’ it.”
“It will come from the power company, as far as she knows, and that will be enough.”