Darrell Huckstep read my name at the bottom of the page, and then he read it again, and the trophy in his other hand slipped, and he caught it clumsily against his chest. Behind him, on the porch, the bluegrass band stood with their instruments hanging from their necks like fish on a line. “Thirteen million, one hundred thousand dollars,” he said, to nobody. “Dewey. You sold Plunkett Line Construction. In June.” I said that was right. All ninety linemen had kept their jobs. “And you came to my house,” he said hoarsely, “and stirred my chili.”
“Four kettles,” I said. “Six hours. It was a good chili.” Chad had come down off the porch steps and stood on the grass, a lean, earnest man of thirty eight with the shoulders of a lineman and a way of holding his hands at his sides that I recognized, because I taught him to do it, on his first day at the top of a pole. “Dewey, I can explain,” he said. “I do not want you to explain,” I said. “I want you to tell me where the digger derrick is, and the bucket truck and the pole trailer, and why Bubba heard that I okayed it.”
Jessica, my daughter, stood up from the end of a picnic bench. She was thirty six, long boned and quiet, with the steady eyes of her mother, and she did not run to her husband. She walked slowly through the crowd until she stood in front of him, so close that her shadow fell across his boots. “Chad,” she said. “What did you tell my father?” He swallowed. “That I was selling them. To start something of our own.” “Our own,” she repeated, with dry precision. “Chad, we have a daughter. I have a job at the hospital. I never said I wanted a line company. Did I ever say it?” He shook his head. “Then whose idea was it?”
A kettle of chili and a wooden spoon sat on a bluff above the river and gave one lineman the cook off night to bring his son in law back to the pole.
Chad looked past her. He looked at the porch, at the man with the trophy, and every head in the yard followed his eyes. Darrell had not moved. He is a stout, silver haired man of sixty two who has owned two car washes and a lake house and a seat on three boards, and I watched his shoulders drop one inch, and then another. “Darrell,” he said, in a voice I had never heard from him, “I only meant to help the boy.” “You meant to help him to my trucks,” I said. “Two hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, and a bucket truck, and a trailer. For a company with your name on it.”
Peggy came up the steps from the yard, small and square in a green cardigan, and I saw that she had been crying for some time. “Darrell,” she said, “I am your sister. I have known you since you were in diapers.” Her voice was steady. “You have called my husband the pole climber at every Thanksgiving for thirty four years. I told myself that you were teasing. It was never teasing. It was always, in some small part, a knife.”
Darrell stood as if shot. Peggy went on, in the same low voice. “He climbed that pole in 1978 for a co op, with spikes on his boots. He went up it in an ice storm, with his hands bleeding, to restore the light to a hospital. I was there. I watched him come down. And in all those years I never once heard you say, Dewey, I am proud of you.” She drew a breath that shook. “So I will say it. Dewey Plunkett, I am proud of you. And I am so sorry that I sat quietly and let you be laughed at.” She turned to the crowd. “All of you. That is the truth.”
I did not speak. I could not. I stood on the grass with the cornbread pan in my hands and the Mississippi going dark behind me, and my wife had said it out loud. Forty years of marriage, and she had saved the whole thing up for a bluff over a river. The band, with an instinct that I will love them for, began very softly to play an old hymn, Will the Circle Be Unbroken, the banjo picking its way through the melody like a man crossing ice. I felt something loosen in my chest that I had carried since 1990. I set the pan on the bench.
Chad was weeping silently. I put my hand on the back of his neck. “Son,” I said, “Bubba will meet you at the yard at six tomorrow. Bring the truck. Bring the bucket truck. Bring the trailer. You will drive them in with your own two hands.” He nodded, scrubbing his face. “And on Monday you will report to the new owners, as a lineman, on a crew, in the cold.” He looked at me, aghast. “You will start at the bottom,” I said. “Where I started. And one day you will earn the right to run a crew. It might take you ten years. I will be here.” Jessica laid her head against his arm.
Darrell found me at the end of the night, by my truck, in the dark. He had put the trophy in the bed of his own pickup, unawarded. He was holding his hat in front of him in both hands, a man with a big lake house and a car wash and nothing in his pockets. “Dewey, I will pay you back,” he said. “For the chili. For the thirty four Thanksgivings.” I said he could start by bringing a kettle to my house in October. He blinked. “A kettle of chili?” “Yes,” I said. “And you will stir it. For six hours. And I will hand you twenty five dollars.”
He came. It was a cold, bright October, with leaves coming down on the lake, and Darrell stirred for six hours in an apron that read Kiss the Cook, and complained in a loud voice about his shoulder. Peggy brought the cornbread. At the end of the day I held out a twenty and a five. He looked at them for a long time with a stern, wet face, and then he folded them, carefully, into his shirt pocket, behind the pen. “I will keep these,” he said. And he did. Last I saw, they were framed over his desk, in the office of the car wash, under a sign that says, Be Kind To Linemen.