“I am sitting at the curb, Carol,” Gary answered, and through the little attic window I watched the white work truck, with the engine running and the exhaust curling up into the January air. “I was driving past on my way to the yard and I saw your light on. A woman of your age should not be climbing around in an attic in this cold. Let me come up and help you with whatever you need.” I looked at Mia. She was holding the climbing bag open against her stomach, her eyes enormous. I pressed a finger to my lips. “That is kind, Gary,” I said carefully. “The door is open. Come in.”
I had to think very fast, and I did it the way Ron taught me, long ago, on the night of a flood, by breaking a large problem into the smallest possible pieces. The front door was unlocked. I wanted it so. I did not want him standing on the porch, shouting, drawing attention. I wanted him in my kitchen. And in my kitchen there was a telephone, an old green wall model that Ron refused to give up, which Gary had never noticed was wired to ring in the garage of my neighbor, a retired deputy of the sheriff named Walter Pruitt.
Mia and I came down the attic stairs quietly, with the bag held between us. I slid the cut strap and the notebook into the pocket of my cardigan. I put the new strap, with its receipt, into the pocket of the coat of Mia. Then I went into the kitchen and put on the kettle, as if nothing in the world was wrong, and I took down the good cups. I took three cups. My hands were perfectly steady, and I will never understand why. Perhaps it was only that Ron was in the room with me. I heard the screen door open. I heard boots on the porch.
A strap cut halfway can only hold a lineman until the truth is willing to catch him.
Gary stepped into the kitchen with snow on his shoulders and a smile on his face. He held out his arms. “Carol, you look like you have seen a ghost.” I poured him a cup of tea. I did not speak. He took the cup and sat at the table in the chair of Ron, as he had done at a hundred Sunday dinners, and he looked from me to Mia, then at the bag on the counter. His smile slid away, quietly. “You found it,” he said. It was not a question. “Ron always did hide things where only a wife would look.”
I stood by the stove with my back against the warm metal. “Why, Gary?” I asked. He looked into his tea. “Copper,” he said. “For six years, a few of us on the crew had been taking down old wire from decommissioned lines and selling it for scrap. It started small. A hundred dollars here, two hundred there. Then it was a business. Ron found out at Christmas and wrote a report for the foreman. I begged him to tear it up. He would not.” His shoulders sank. “He told me that I had one week to come clean. Then it was Monday, and he was going up the pole.”
“You cut his strap,” I said. “I only nicked it,” Gary answered, in the thin voice of a man who has repeated one sentence to himself in the dark for four years. “I only wanted to scare him. I did not think he would fall. I thought he would feel it give, and come down, and understand how serious I was.” He lifted his eyes to mine, and I will never forget how old he looked. “He did not come down, Carol. He went all the way down. And I stood there at the bottom of that pole, and he looked at me as he fell.”
I will tell you what I did. I did not scream. I did not throw the tea. I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, slowly, and put my hands flat on the table. I said, very quietly, “Gary, there is a man in the kitchen of my neighbor who has been listening to every word you said.” He turned his head to the green phone on the wall. I saw the horror reach his face, and I saw, much more slowly, the relief. “The line has been open since you came in the door,” I told him.
Walter Pruitt came in through the back door, a thin old man in a quilted coat, with his service revolver held low at his side. Behind him were two deputies of the sheriff and the chief of the power company security division. Gary did not stand. He did not argue. He asked only whether he could finish his tea, and Walter said yes, and so he did, in absolute silence, with seven people watching him. When the cup was empty, he placed it carefully on its saucer, rose, and held out his wrists.
Eleven men on the crew were charged. Gary pleaded guilty to second degree murder and received thirty years. The power company paid my family four million dollars, and I used a portion of it to establish a scholarship fund for apprentice linemen, in the name of Ron. Mia was the first recipient. She graduated that summer from the lineman program in Cedar Rapids, in a yellow hard hat, and she stood on the stage and looked out and found me in the third row. She touched the lining of the hat, and I knew precisely what she meant.
Every January, on the anniversary of the ice storm, I carry a thermos of coffee out to the pole outside Dubuque and set it at the base, where he fell. Mia comes with me. She climbs the pole now, with her own harness and her own new strap, and she checks them twice, and when she reaches the top she waves down at me. I wave back with my mitten. The wind is cold on that hill. But the sky is clean and the lines are humming, and I know that Ron is somewhere up there, steady as ever, holding the other end.
