by Josh Weil
THE ESSENTIAL
CONSTITUENT OF
MODERN LIVING
STANDARDS
We woke to a world opened up in holes, a dawn still stained with spots of night. Stoking the stove, we stood, went to the window, blew out the lamp to better see: out there, beneath the barely brightening sky, the snow-smooth pasture somehow gone guttate while we’d slept. Letting out the dog, we lingered in the doorway, the cold cutting through our nightshirts, down our gowns, gazed at what we gradually made out to be a line of fresh-dug pits. Big and black as tractor tires, startling as exit wounds ringed by bursts of dirt. Outside the milking parlor, amid the lowing, we squinted past the path they made through nearer fields, discerned a distant movement: men on the far-off slope, shovel blades flashing first light, pickaxes swinging in glinting arcs. We called for our husbands then, went to our wives, stood side by side in the slam and slam of steel bars driving down. In the corners of our mouths the egg yolk had gone clammy. On the stove, the bacon began to burn.
Did we feel it even then? The spark in our frayed ends? The places where our casings had been chewed through? The air—alive like the second before a flash of lightning—touching our wires where they had been stripped bare?
Watt, socket, flashover, volt: for most of our lives the words had seemed as far from us as the city from our farms. But ever since Penn Power and Light had graced the surrounding counties with places on their grid we’d watched their electric glow creep closer to the horizons of our fields, each evening towns to all points blooming bright as moonflowers, each year—’37, ’38, ’39—hoping that our time was coming near.
For three decades we had dreamed of it. Trying to follow a last fly ball falling palely through a dying dusk. Lying beside first sweethearts in a deep barn dark. How we yearned to see his face when he made that sound, to glimpse the sweat slick on her belly. At dances we fled the heat and smoke, quit the lamp-lit grange hall before our legs were ready, our hearts still thumping for another set, wishing for wires that would let us whirl and whirl. In a handsaw’s slow rasp we heard a blade buzz through in seconds. In whispered rumors of the hobo who’d slit the throat of so-and-so we saw bulbs brightening our barnyards all night. But even when we left in our mule carts, rode off to war, we lived barely a month beneath the hum of filaments before we shipped for dark-ditched France. And back again, driving our own cars, our headlights showed the unlit roads, our still-dark homes. Still giving birth by firelight. Still fumbling to light the lamp to tell what the hell the baby was bawling about. Sitting in the rocker, we made our kids get up to crank the radio, told them someday wires would arrive, bring all the music we could take, effortless entertainment, a pump in the well, an indoor privy, electric milkers to spare our hands from ever wringing out another heifer’s teat.
Yet for all our hope, there passed another decade of depression, came another war, our children grown old enough to cross the Atlantic in our stead, and still each evening we sank into a century the cities had long left behind. Still PP&L refused to help us into the decade the rest of our country had begun. 1940. And not a single power line. Profits, they said. People per square mile. Amperes and installation costs and, We’re sorry, we can’t.
But we could. That was what Bell told us. You can. Yourselves. Though he, himself, what did we know of him? That he had showed up in the grange one night? There in the dark rectangle of that open door? Said union, said come from Harrisburg, Philadelphia before. And, we sensed, from somewhere even stranger, further back: that trace of Slavic on his tongue, that hint in his eye of unimagined hardships seen. He was a Jew. A Red. A man of must be thirty without a family, a wife. And yet we listened to him. Watched his spindly frame unfold from the creaking folding chair, so rod armed and slack trousered he fooled you into thinking he was tall. He introduced himself—Abe Bell—said he was there to help if we would let him.
By the bonfire after, passing the bottle around, he spoke of loans and power plants with a heat that seemed to stoke the blaze. That week he showed up at barn doors, chicken coops, helped peel potatoes, stook the corn, talked to us of the Steamburg Association, the Rural Electrification Administration, made us feel like kids again listening to tales: how the REA had fought to pave the way for us, for this, for now, the law passed a mere two years ago so we, county by county, could come together, vote to form our own cooperative, control our own electricity, hold a little power in our hands. Crouched by our woodstoves, bony fingers outstretched, shoulders crowded as if squeezed by a clamp, his booming voice made it all seem something proud, our struggle with PP&L a bold new front in an old war on our own shores.
In churches, barns, grange halls, we gathered, bickered, shouted down the company hacks sent to dissuade us, lifted up our hands, counted, began. The Tri-County Co-operative’s own electric generation: by the winter of ’41 we’d gotten all but the final go-ahead for the federal funds, contracted for construction of the plant, routed our lines, could feel in our fingers the hardwood handles of the shovels we’d use to dig the holes for our first poles. Until that January dawn we woke to find PP&L putting in their own.
Spite line, Bell told us, the dog flinching at the anger in his voice, Bell’s head shaking away our offer of a chair, no time to stay a second longer than it took to make things clear: That law the government had passed, pushed through by Roosevelt and the REA? Turned out we could cooperatize, could get the grant, only if we weren’t already served by someone else. Those diggers out in our fresh-snowed fields: they’d come to undercut us, snatch away the claim we’d staked to our own light. In our milking parlors, Bell paced the concrete floors that we washed down, explained how the poles PP&L were putting in were solely meant to hold us back, a thing he called cream skimming, the bastards running a single line along a road, or through a couple farms, serving just enough of the easiest to reach to claim PP&L had brought a county electricity, while in reality they’d left the rest of it—the rest of us—still in the dark. Except, he said that morning, going farm to farm, we won’t let them.
He owned no auto, no animal to ride, but we lent him our mule, our workhorse, watched our school-bound children step aside into the snowbanks as he hoof churned by. Heaving the bucket up the well, we caught his silhouette come shaking into that circle of reflected sky, felt the urgent fury in his eyes. And who didn’t pause, mid–pitchfork lift, at the sight of Abe Bell peddling like hell atop a bike? His clothes mud flecked, his fists red, his face raw, his bushy hair matted beneath his dark knit hat. He swept it off, steam rising from his head.
Listen, he said, spoke of a such-and-such preemption clause, the power company legally constrained: we had six months to get our lines up first. Listen, he said, and it was as if his words gave voice to what we’d so long felt. True, he was a different kind—that beakish nose, those accordion-moaned tunes that floated from his rented room—but in the last few months he had become a part of who we had become together. We farmers. We kinfolk and friends. We men who had known each other since we were boys, who had shared bulls, helped slaughter hogs, celebrated births, set legs, lent a hand, a blessing, a buck. We came in trucks, packed three to a cab, on carts, legs dangling off the back, rode in alone from far-off farms to the big stone barn below Berks Hill where, that evening, we all converged.
Two dozen of us. Maybe more. Slamming truck doors, shaking hands, saying little amid the scraping clangor of all the shovels dragged across the boards. It was sunset. The red light caught the steel spade heads, sparked where stones had sharpened clean the blades. We held them, squinting, while Abe Bell spoke. Then—mad scatter of refracted flashing—raised them to our shoulders, swung them across our necks, and, amid the din of half a hundred boots shoving through snow, followed him into the field.
Through the sun’s last slant the workers watched us come. They were all across the pasture, gathered in teams around each hole. Behind them, the holes already dug dotted the snow; ahead, the unmarred surface spread up the hill towards a chink of sky cut from the windbr
eak. There, others stood silhouetted against the fulvous clouds, axes gone still. All down the hillside shovels hung at the end of a toss, black bars of rock breakers stuck motionless in earth, the heavy heads of pickaxes eased to a rest in front of frozen boots.
To them, the spray of snow kicked up by us must have seemed a breaker rolling up the hill. If we could catch their troubled faces as we closed, they must have seen the fire in our own, known how hard this thing could go: the nearest workers—their patched coats and ragged trousers and unkempt beards catching our deepest fears of what could come from being kept in backward blackness while the world sped past—stepped away, drew up their tools, seemed prepared to leave us to the work we would have begun if, from up near the broken windbreak, a different figure hadn’t come striding down.
He wore a quilted coat, its collar up, a wool cap’s flaps over his ears and while he walked he lit a smoke, hands cupped before his mustache, eyes focused on the flame all the way until he nearly smacked into the wall of us. He dropped his hands, looked up. Gentlemen? he said. What is it I can do for you?
But he was talking to Abe Bell. If we could spark, he had discovered which of us would flip the switch. Bell stepped out of our ranks. He’d laid his shovel across his shoulders, wrists hooked over handle, arms hanging loose, but as they talked, their words blown to us on the cold wind—court ordered, and eminent domain and in violation of the law—we saw Bell’s fingers slip to grip the handle, turn to fists. And gripping our own a little harder, pushing a little closer behind, we wondered what might make someone like Bell come on his own out among the likes of us. What had he left? What had he run from?
When he swung—the sudden slash of blade through air—we jerked as one. The mustached man lurched back as if foreseeing the spade connecting with his head. But Bell checked its swing, leveled it instead at the man’s chest. Go on, he said, and, with its tip, pressed just enough to dent the padding between the man’s coat buttons. Go on get back to work. He drew his shovel away again. While we get on with ours.
That night the moon rose gibbous, waxing, a scant few days from full, and in its light we danced an eerie choreography, us and them. All the snow’s surface strung with lamp-lit circles, each one illuminating a crew of three or four digging a hole. Beyond the light, we watched. Until the moment when they would pick up their lamps, shoulder their tools, move on. And we would step up, unshoulder ours, fill the hole back in. While ahead they trudged past another cluster of us doing the same, another and another, until at last they reached the last hole dug and set to work digging one more. We followed, gathered again, waited outside their lantern’s reach for our next turn to undo another hour of their work. You would have thought we’d come to blows, angry exchanges, but we settled instead into a sort of understanding, stayed out of each other’s way, spoke low among ourselves as if to keep a separation of sound as well, hung back when they hit a rock, gave them space while they took turns slamming down the spud bar’s iron wedge. And when, each hour on the hour, word came along the digger line—take five!—we accompanied their thermos-pouring sounds with ours from what our wives had packed us, each finding a spot to sit, a split rail, a pasture rock, until the diggers shook out their coffee grounds, stood, went back to work unearthing what we would come along behind them to replace. A strange sight. The lamp-lit them, the moonlit us, our ceaseless weaving around each other in that long line all through that wide white pasture.
Sometimes, we would glimpse our instigator. He flickered in and out of lantern light—Bell’s breath a cloud, his teeth a glint—taking our shovels for a spell or speaking to the diggers as we stood our silent watch. He was the only one who broke the pact, braved the broad backs and swinging picks, tried to make them see our side, broke a little of the border we kept between us so that as the night wore on they stayed a little after they were done, long enough to loose a couple words on us as, stepping up to work, we sent back a little laughter, a little later offered them a slice of ham, maybe at the next hole a swig of whiskey, a sympathetic grunt at the grind of shovel hitting rock. Even, sometimes, when one of their spud bars would finally break through, a cheer.
Maybe it was that. Maybe the way we sat close enough on the next break to see them hold their warm tin cups against their tired eyes. Maybe it was how they stretched out the silent minutes, their necks craned back, their throats smokestacks of breath. They spoke of cities, of someone left back home, the way the moon was so much brighter here. The stars. They seemed never to have seen such a sky of them. We tilted our own heads back, tried to imagine what it would be like to not see it every night. And maybe the foreman, observing all his men, looked up too, lost himself for a moment in the firmament. The distant bells of town began to clang. We all stood silent through all twelve knells. Maybe it was the sight of a far-off lantern slowly separating from the flickers in the sky, splitting in two, becoming headlights. A neighbor’s cart, a truck from the next county. All night they trickled in, and maybe it was simply that—too many of us, too few of them. Sometime in the early hours the company trucks rumbled to life, rolled down the line collecting their laborers, and left.
At daybreak, when they came back, they found us waiting: a wall of farmers built across the entrance to the field. We stood wrapped in our coats, holding our shovels. Though those of us newly arrived, not knowing how far the company might go, had brought our timber axes, two-handed saws arced high over a shoulder, even, jutting here and there among the tools, a rifle barrel white with frost.
Watching the trucks emerge out of the distant gray, it came clear: the ones who had brought saws and axes had been right. On the flatbeds, poles were piled, strapped down in hulking stacks: the company would redig the holes, keep us at bay in whatever way they had to until they had planted and set the poles. Ahead of the flatbeds, more trucks hauled workmen huddled beneath canvas flaps, last night’s camaraderie stripped from their faces by the knowledge of what they’d been sent back to do. Standing within the headlights’ burn, the shuddering of so many engines, the sheer tonnage of all those poles, made the more than a hundred of us seem suddenly small. And in that moment we knew the rifle bearers had been right too: each truck cab held the heat-blurred shape of someone in the passenger seat holding a gun.
The closest passenger window slid down. A huff of heat fumed out. All along the line of trucks the side windows did the same, a silent cannonade of steam blown around the long black barrels that jutted from each cab. Just as, from each of us, there rose our own wisp of warmth, amidst the breath of all our beasts—mules and horses and dogs come down—mixed with the exhaust plumes of the entire caravan. For a moment the air above us all seemed the only thing that moved.
And then Abe Bell shouldered through. He held an ax, its handle gripped hard in his bony fist, the double-bladed head swinging like a clock weight at his side. A few feet from the front of the first truck, he stopped. The sun was still buried behind the eastward ridge and in the shadowed road last vestiges of night remained, and standing in it, lit by the headlights, he seemed almost to glow, as if he alone among us had been plugged in, his switch already flicked. But what could he do but stand there and burn? What was there to say he hadn’t already said all night? Instead, he simply stepped to the driver’s side, swung the ax. A low soft thud. At first we weren’t even sure we’d heard it beneath the engine’s mutter. Though somewhere above it, was that the high-pitched hiss of leaking air? The second ax blow boomed so loud it snapped our stares to the shotgun barrel, then back to Bell stumbling away from the truck’s slumped front. For a second, watching him stagger, we thought he had been shot, then saw him regain his footing, hitch his grip, and start for the tire at the rear. From us, at that: a roar. Another, louder, as he swung the ax. And when that tire blew the sound that burst from us might have been what knocked him back. And split his face with a grin so wide we could feel it in our own teeth. Around the other side he went, the workers in the truck bed pushing at the canvas flaps to better see, all of us shifting to c
atch a glimpse of ax head swinging back, jacket flung out, that bush of hair blown wild with each exploding blast.
By the time he reached the final tire, on the front passenger side, our cheering had grown so loud we couldn’t tell what the man with the shotgun might have said. But we could see Bell hear it. He stood with the ax gone still in his hands, his eyes on the tire, his whole self attuned to the barrel aimed at his head. Later, some of us would claim the man said: assault or self-defense. Others insisted on: I guess you’ve gotten close enough. Whatever it was, we countered it with our own calls. And when Bell lifted the ax again, squared himself to swing it at the sidewall, our urging swelled until he must have felt plunged into a sea of sound. It must have filled his ears, drowned the voice that surely spoke inside him: Don’t.
All our breath from all our shouting. All the lung heat of all the laborers erupting all at once. The sudden nostril steam of all the startled horses’ snorts, puffs released from the sprung jaws of all the dogs. The thicker gust poured from each truck’s exhaust. From above it would have seemed an aberrant cloud descended from the sky, dropped down upon the place where we had gathered, a strange mist making itself out of the clear cold air. Within it, the separate strand of smoke blown upwards from the fired gun would have barely been discernable. Until the fog shifted, thinned, broke apart to show a momentary picture—the shadow of a figure twisted on his back: Abe Bell burst open, his lifeblood bright as sunrise on the frozen road—before closing shut back over us again.
So goes our memory. In the years after, we would come to disagree on what we’d seen. Whether the blast had killed him on the spot or he’d expired elsewhere, whether some of us had wrenched the door open, dragged the shooter out, or, to a man, each shrunk back in shock. Whatever happened that morning we all agree on this: that the whole convoy of company trucks shifted into reverse, backed away, wound down the road; the way the commissioner of utilities came to our defense at the hearings that came after; how, after eight days of argument were over, we had won. That spring the director of the REA himself stood among all our families come from all three counties, and, in the seconds before he sent power coursing through the lines we’d built, spoke: Because you live on farms and denied the essential and modern living standards. He bemoaned our inability till then to pump water, refrigerate fruit, brood our chicks, save our children’s eyes. When you banded together, he said, your efforts were opposed by …