Inside the barn, the old ranch phone started to ring, and Wades face went white, because Hank was calling about the letter from the union, the one dated 2014, the one Wade had hidden in his filing cabinet for eleven years.
For years Wade ran that ranch and called me soft like my dad, and my mother went inside instead of standing beside me. This time the truth came through my dads own union, because Hank recognized my last name.
When my father died on a pole in the ice storm of 2014, his union local paid a death benefit meant for his family, for me, and the letter announcing it came to the house that year, but Wade intercepted it and hid it in his barn filing cabinet, and for eleven years he collected and spent money that belonged to my fathers son.
The letter from the IBEW was in my bag, the one I finally found in Wades cabinet after Hank told me to look. Hank climbed with my father for twenty years, and when he saw my name at the apprenticeship orientation, he asked the question nobody else had thought to ask, about a policy through the local, and it led me straight to what Wade had buried.
Wade threw my dads climbing gaffs into the freezing stock tank and told me to climb out of that, sure I would never make it as a lineman. He did not know Hank was already calling the ranch line, and that the death benefit he stole was about to come to light.
My mother came onto the porch asking what was going on. I told her to ask Wade about the letter from the union from 2014. Wades face said the rest.
I did not stay. I fished my dads gaffs out of the tank, dried them, and at seven the next morning I climbed forty feet up a wooden pole in twenty-eight degrees with a crew watching, on my dads gaffs, and I made it to the top, and I passed.
I am a lineman apprentice now, in my fathers trade, in his local, and the men there treat me like family because I am. The stolen benefit is with the union and a lawyer, and Wade is answering for eleven years of it on paper, where soft like your old man means nothing.
My mother left the ranch that month and came to stay with me. She told me she was sorry she always went inside. She is out here now, on the porch of my place, in the daylight.
The union takes care of its own, Hank told me. It took care of me, eleven years late, because a man who climbed with my father asked one question. And Wade did not say another word before the ranch phone finished ringing, because my dad, and my dads union, protected me in the end.