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.
ELECTRICITY hummed 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.
The embrace ended before I’d had time to process my response to it. We were nearer than we’d been since the day Sheriff Eddings had come for me. We’d joked over dinner about the knock at the door — a pirate come to steal our treasure. We were planning a sword fight. I’d tousled his hair on my way out, promising to be back before bedtime.
“I got news of your release. Moa told me you were here.”
“Oh?”
He looked toward the trees. “I wanted to visit you while you were away,” he said eventually.
“Why didn’t you?”
This was my question — the only one I cared about — and the conversation was his to make or abandon. I watched his teeth bite at the inside of his cheek, a habit I’d seen in him as a child—gnawing away at himself when he was thinking, eating himself into an idea. He’d bitten his nails then, too, and I saw that his nails were still rough, the skin around them torn and red.
“Mother convinced me you were to blame. For everything — Wilson and our back payments and the years we struggled after what happened. The death of that man.” Gerald raised his hulking shoulders up to his ears. “I guess I just got tired of fighting her. But then I got that call from Moa, telling me that you were here, and I–I had to come.” He brought a thumb to his mouth, but there was nothing to chew or clip.
I couldn’t tell whether it was a good thing to see him, or whether it was awful. He had been my boy for those good years, and I had known what fatherhood could be, but then he’d disappeared. I had disappeared. I didn’t know I would stop being his father that day Sheriff Eddings came. Gerald didn’t either. And now he was telling me he might have been my son these nine long years, had his mother let him.
I tried to figure out how to start that process — parenting. I could invite him inside, offer him a glass of water to stave off the heat, maybe a jar of peaches to quench his chewing and distract his hands. The words were ready in my mouth, clear in my mind. Come in, I would say. Come inside out of the heat. Let’s sit down and talk awhile. We have a lot to catch up on. I would put my arm around his shoulder, though he’d grown taller than me, making the gesture awkward, but no less heartening. Come inside, Son. I’ve missed you.