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.
“Ross,” Wilson called from below. “This is what you do.”
Roscoe nodded. Camaraderie, companionship, a joint destination. This was what he did. These were his elements, his knowledge, his home.
He felt everything pause — the breeze, the birds, the trains on their tracks and the fish in their ponds. Even the great turbines back at Lock 12 stopped spinning, the water holding back its movement, the powerhouse winding down. The lines had gone cold.
“Clear?” Wilson said.
“Clear.”
Now, Roscoe would work.
He strapped his tool belt round his waist. He looped the connecting line over his shoulder and climbed back up the ladder. Carefully, he removed the rubber coating from the binder, exposing the wires underneath. It was simply a matter of more weaving, more winding. The individual strands of copper from his new line were ready. He’d been doing this for a month, and then for years before that.
When his line was attached, he cut a new opening in the binder coating and replaced it over the coupled lines.
It was done.
“How long will it take them to clear that tree?” Wilson asked.
“Could be within the hour, and certainly no later than evening. We’ll come back and test then.”
Roscoe wasn’t patient, but he didn’t mind the long stretch of that afternoon, the prospect of power meeting him at the day’s end. He was content to unsaddle the horses, brush them down, pump water into their trough. He found Gerald round the back of the house collecting ants, putting them in a jar with dirt to study their habits, and Roscoe knelt next to the boy to help pluck the small bodies from the hole they exited. Gerald was smart to choose small, black ants that didn’t sting. He didn’t tell his father to leave, and Roscoe took encouragement in that.
AT dusk, Wilson and Roscoe met at the fork in the trail and walked back to the transformers. Roscoe had made a small electric motor, a simple circle of coiled copper, bound together with rubber and mounted on small iron rods over a magnet. The current would probably be too strong for it, but if it was flowing, they would see a reaction.
Roscoe connected the last wires — smaller bundles — to the line from the last transformer. These, he connected to the iron rods of the motor.
“Time to flip the levers,” he told Wilson.
They repositioned the ladder against their own pole, and Roscoe climbed to the transformers, lifting all three levers into their on positions. Then he was jumping to the ground to the sound of Wilson’s shouts. The coil circle was a blur of hot, fiery proof. They stared at it like men bewitched by beauty or magic until the small wooden base of the motor caught fire, and then with more shouts from Wilson, Roscoe knocked the connecting wires away. They stamped out the small flames and shook hands over the trifling of smoke.
BUILDING the thresher’s electric motor had moments of difficulty, but nothing compared to the initial acquisition of wire and tapping the line. Roscoe worked steadily, dividing his time between the thresher and the poles. He continued bundling wire to string along the ceramic insulators he’d brought from the village — boxes of them that were slightly flawed and given to him for nothing. Marie had insisted they stay behind when they moved to the farm, but he’d insisted they come, and it was one of the few standoffs in their years of marriage that he’d actually won. The boxes of insulators had followed them to the land, and here they were — being put to use.
Roscoe ran lines along the fence where he’d first told Wilson about the idea. They raised tall poles through the woods, one right at the fork toward Wilson and Moa’s quarters—“We’ll get you two power soon enough,” Roscoe promised — and they kept the lines high all the way to the final pole between the barn and the house. The farmhouse still had to be wired, but Gerald was the only one itching for that particular luxury.
Marie stood by, showing an interest she hadn’t shown since their courting times, back in the village. She visited Roscoe in the shop and walked with him out to the lines. “Tell me again how the transformers work.”
He would take her to his drawings, saying, “As you remember, it all starts with dual attractions,” explaining, again, how some bodies are graced with extraordinary attraction lurking below their surfaces. “You have to awaken the attraction, though, create it. You remember the Faraday experiment with the wax and the flannel?”
“No. Show me again.”
He was sure she did remember, but he had no qualms demonstrating the base of electricity for her yet another time. “We’ve been seeing electricity forever,” he said, taking a round stick of wax from a shelf, “in the shocks we feel when we’ve become charged.” He rubbed the wax against his flannel shirt and held it close to Marie’s head, his wife laughing as the thin threads of her hair rose to meet it.
“When you run the wax through your hand, the attraction will go away,” Marie said, drawing a smile from her husband.
“You were paying attention to your lessons, weren’t you?”
He could see her back in the village, young and eager and inquisitive, sitting across from him in the dining hall while he talked on and on. She’d once told him it was a poetry of sorts — his lectures on electricity.
“We can introduce attractions and remove them,” he continued. “And Faraday took it further by showing how we can transfer the force, how we can harness and move it to other places.”
“Through copper.”
“And other materials. But copper is one of our best conductors, yes. That’s why I’ve used it in these cores.” Here, he’d take her to the guts of the transformers, showing her Wilson’s ironwork and his own windings of wire.
WHEN Marie wasn’t with Roscoe, she was educating Gerald, teaching him his geography and history, reading and writing, arithmetic, science. The two of them could be found in the front yard, studying more ants, or off in the fields taking notes on the crops. Marie felt like a teacher again — all this time with this one student — and Roscoe watched their son grow with his education, changing from the resentful boy he’d been into a young man ready to learn. They were all in their right roles — electrician, teacher, son.
Roscoe worried, at times, about Bean coming to call, looking for payment on his copper. Roscoe had sent in one small check, not enough to cover a quarter of one spool, along with a note promising the rest in full soon. Bean had sent a note back with clear numbers, Roscoe’s token payment deducted. Roscoe needed just a few months. That time would see the corn ready for harvest, and a great surge of income not spent on temporary pickers. They’d knock the stalks down with the tractor and send them to the thresher. They’d be the first farm in the county to have corn, and the money would come. Roscoe knew it. He’d pay off Bean, and his family would settle into the comfort of prosperity — lamps blazing in the living room, Gerald reading one of his adventure books, Marie studying up on her birds, Roscoe returning to Faraday’s words like a religious man to his Bible. Maybe, under those new bulbs, Gerald would take an interest, and Roscoe would be given the chance to be a father, explaining a part of the world to his boy.