Work Like Any Other

by Virginia Reeves

  “A minute!” I shouted. “Wait outside just a minute, Jenny.” I went back to retrieve my clothes, the same filthy ones from the day’s labors, stiffened a little from lying on the floor. I felt damned by the warmth in my stomach.

  It’s nothing, I whispered. I’d been naked and ready to bathe and then a young woman had come to my door. Of course I was shaky. Quiet, now.

  I remained barefoot, my hair damp.

  “I’ve disturbed you,” Jenny said when I opened the door. “You were settling in for the night. My apologies, Mr. Roscoe. I have dinner and the writing supplies you requested.”

  Jenny had been so small before I left, Moa and Wilson’s youngest, a child who played with Gerald at times. I had so few clear memories of her alone—chasing the chickens and then, outside this same cottage, festooning a tree with ribbons. Now, she was my only visitor with a history that didn’t indict me directly.

  “I’d rather eat than settle in. I’ll light some lamps.”

  Jenny closed the door as best she could behind her.

  “You have a pencil?”

  She handed me a yellow stick worked halfway down, likely stolen from her daddy’s workshop. I dulled the point quickly etching Fix into the wood of the door.

  “Now you’ll always think it’s broken.” Jenny set food on the table, enough for two, even three. “Figure you could use a little extra.” She dumped meat into Maggie’s pie tin, tugging one of Maggie’s ears as the dog set to eating.

  I could remember the feel of Jenny’s arms around me.

  I started swallowing down Moa’s beans—not so good as Marie’s, but good all the same—and I called for the paper Jenny had brought.

  “We’ll write to the deputy warden, Taylor. He’s the one who gave me the dog.”

  “Papa thinks ill of you getting a dog on your release.”

  “I worked those dogs for years,” I told this girl who has no business hearing, who had no guilt to own, no part in Kilby or Flat Top.

  Jenny set her hands flat on the table. “I’m sure you know what to say in the letter, Mr. Roscoe. Charles Emit Grice. That’s his full name. Papa gave him Mr. Emit’s name in the middle there. You probably already knew.”

  “No.”

  “It was so hard to lose Mr. Emit, but Mama always says every hardship has its blessed side, and she knew it was the truth because you and Ms. Marie came then, with little Gerald. She tells such stories from those days. Corn reaching to the tops of the pecans and the peanuts growing three and four to the pod. Everyone growing bellies, and the farm growing taller and wider every season—”

  “That isn’t true. The farm struggled until we got electricity.”

  We sat quiet for a moment, Jenny’s lips shining in the weak light of my lamps.

  “Charles Emit Grice,” I finally said. It was only Jenny and me there in her parents’ old cottage, this girl and me and my prison dog.

  Dear Deputy Warden Taylor, I wrote. I was polite and direct, stating our request simply. I said please. I was asking for a favor, and I treated it as such. Just before I signed my name, I wrote, Thank you for sending Maggie with me. I signed Roscoe T Martin, and only upon seeing my own name in print did I realize I’d written a letter to an illiterate man.

  I couldn’t tell Jenny. I couldn’t tell her I had failed in this endeavor before we’d even handed the letter to the postmaster.

  I’d memorized the prison’s address from all the letters I once sent, and it was strange to switch the numbers and roads, to send from here to there. The letter I wrote with Jenny was the first ­Kilby’d seen from that house.

  “I’ll take it to the PO in the morning,” Jenny said. “Papa is going into town.”

  I had a hard time giving the envelope away, a sad-sick murmur in my gut. It might go unanswered, an old, gnawing fear.

  “It’ll be a little while before we hear back, don’t you think?” She seemed as scared as I was. “You said you’d wait until we hear. Even if it’s weeks, right? Months even?”

  “Yes, Jenny. I’ll wait.” With the poles in, it was good to have another excuse. Though I’d thought about Jenny’s idea of this being my home, I was still convinced that I couldn’t stay.

  “Thank you, Mr. Roscoe.”

  I anticipated her walking round the table to embrace me in gratitude, but instead, she moved toward the door. Over her head I read, Fix. The light outside was still enough to catch her figure through the windows, that letter bright white in the dusky air.

  I feared I’d forget pieces when I started working on the lines. The power flowing in came in alternating currents at a higher voltage, and the company’s new transformer on the main line from the road stepped down that voltage for domestic consumption, bringing it to another that lined up with my new poles.

  Wilson took me to town for supplies, straight to Bean’s Hardware. Electric lamps hung from the ceiling.

  “Wilson.” Bean paused on my face before slowly drawing out my name. “Roscoe T Martin. I’ll be damned.”

  “Bean.”

  “Welcome back.” He came round the counter to shake my hand. “Was a real shame how everything happened.”

  “I see you relented.” I nodded toward the ceiling lights, their solid glow.

  “Hah!” Bean laughed. “You remember how dead set I was against all that electrical nonsense of yours. Well, when they brought power to the block, suppose I just couldn’t hold out any longer.”

  “How’s it treating you?”

  “Still makes me nervous as hell, but I’ll admit to the ease it brings. What is it I can do for you gentlemen?”

  “Insulated copper wire,” I told him, “five hundred yards’ worth, and fifty of sheathing.”

  Bean looked to Wilson.

  “It’s all aboveground now, Bean. Honest work. Ross here is electrifying the cottage, doing some fine improvements to the property.”

  Bean clapped me on the back. “Just have to check, son. Can’t have you heading back out so soon after you’ve arrived. You boys’ll have to help me with the rolls.”

  I saw Bean on the stand again, telling the jury that I’d made good on my debt to him. I saw those detailed bills he’d sent me, subtracting my payments, and then the final note, which read, Paid in Full. Thank you for your business.

  We loaded everything into the pickup bed, and Wilson told Bean to add it to the account.

  “Is that Marie’s account?” I asked in the truck on the way home.

  “It’s the land’s account. When you’re ready for light fixtures, you’ll use the same one.”

  Wilson helped me carry the wiring back to the cottage. “Need anything else?” he asked when we were done.

  “No.”

  “Holler when you do.”

  It was strange to be hollering for Wilson when I needed material things, shovels and wires and fixtures. Before, he’d provided the labor—welding those cores, digging and filling holes, harvesting and planting. I thought again of his replacing rails on that fence, both his arms pulling the rotted pieces loose. He hadn’t needed it, but he’d asked for my help that day I sought his support for the lines. He would always need assistance with that work now, and I wondered whether it was my responsibility to give it, to stand in for Wilson’s lost arm, my presence there one of necessity. It seemed clean, like Bean’s columns of payments applied to debts, something near balance.

  I took time weaving the copper together—eight strands of it twisting over and past themselves. The wires already had a thin layer of insulation, which worked with their twisted positions to force a more equal current through the total cross section of the strand.

  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 str
ung 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.

  And I had. I did. I do still. I miss the nine-year-old version, the ten-year-old, and the eleven-year-old, too, and I wanted that child to translate into the stranger
in front of me, with his meaty face and messy hands. I wanted to know how to be his father.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Pa.”

  For a moment I could see us together—on a walk out to the lines, in the shop watching the thresher, pushing out to the south woods in the fall, rifles on our shoulders, venison steaks on our minds. I had taught him to shoot.

  “I should’ve gone against her earlier.”

  I let the rake fall to the ground and reached for him with my good arm. He was so tall and so thick. He hadn’t even begun the route to manhood when I left, hadn’t grown any hairs or inches, and I found myself imagining every one of those moments I’d missed—the first beard and mustache, the first shave, the drop in voice, the thickening of the legs, the hair growing in dark and thatched, covering his body. He would always be a man, now, and I had missed him become one.

  I did ask him inside, but he declined quickly. “I can’t stay. I didn’t even know I was coming today—I just got in the car. I have to be back for a shift in the library.”

  “I worked in the library at Kilby.”

  “Mom told me. She never showed me your letters, but she gave me updates sometimes.”

  “So she read them.”

  For a moment again neither of us spoke.

  “Could I come again? Maybe this Saturday?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  We shook hands—right hands, and he looked at the reduced height of my arm. “Is that from the fight you had with another inmate? I remember getting word about that.”

  Wilson had told me the same.

  “It’s a different injury. Later, from a guard, not an inmate, but it’s fine.” I held on to his hand. “Did your mother visit me when I was injured that first time? Did she come to the hospital?”

  Gerald looked caught, a trapped thing. “We’ll talk about it next time I see you, all right?”

  So Marie had come. Those flimsy visions in the hospital had been grounded in at least some truth. She’d said something, and we’d been together long enough for her to put something in my hand before Nurse Hannah chased her away. Crows in flight, pecking and shouting.