I’m nervous to enter the pen with the pushing throng of dogs, but I ease myself through the sagging gate anyway.
“Hell of a thing,” Jones continues. He’s staring at me when I look up. “Hell of a thing.”
“Yeah.” It is some sort of hell, this thing we’ve seen with its dogs and sirens, its cotton and striped men, its blasts and shots and blood.
“That’s not what this job’s about. Ain’t never seen that before. Never seen Taylor shoot a man.”
“Nope,” the other dog boy, Jackson, says. “First for me, too, and I been out on these dogs since Taylor started the goddamn pack.”
I set my dog loose among the thicket of bodies—snouts and tails pushing their way into other snouts and tails. They’re not interested in me, all of the remaining dogs crowding round the one I brought back as though asking about her day. What was the chase like? I hear them asking with their eyes. You get it?
Taylor is away with Jennings, the other guards back at their posts. The three of us convicts are alone here with these dogs, and the itch to run takes me full by the shoulders, shaking me to standing tall and alert.
“There aren’t any guards around,” I venture.
Jones laughs. “You thinking about running? That your ticket?”
“Luck to you,” Jackson says, joining in the laughter.
“What?” I ask them.
“This is the best there is,” Jones says. “You get put out here on these dogs, and you’re looking at trustee ranks, early parole, time outside the damn wall. But you run when you’re out here? A broken trustee’s the bottom of this ladder. You don’t climb anywhere, and you sure as hell don’t get paroled.”
“That’s right,” Jackson says.
I know what Marie would counsel in this situation: “Patience, Roscoe. Do the work. Let the reward come later.”
But I just saw a man shot, I would tell her. I am an electrician. I should not be here.
“Best thing for you to do is head over to the gate,” Jones says. “Get yourself back inside that wall and wait to hear from Taylor.” He gives me a leveled, honest stare. “These dogs are good. And your scent will be damn easy to track, starting at the pens as you are.”
The image of these dogs after me melts the itch away—me as the runner and these men as the chasers tied to dogs. I can hear the men shouting and the beasts’ whining behind me, their quick feet and their snuffling breaths. They suck in every speck of my scent, tiny bits of dust that fire a need in their brains. Follow, those bits say. Find.
I don’t want to be chased.
So I leave the pens, Jones and Jackson there with the dogs. I head back to the guard at the outer gate who shoved his gun into my back earlier, and I look away from the smirk on his face.
Beau unlocks the interior door and shoves me through with the barrel of his gun. “Get on back to the dairy. Don’t belong out here anyway.”
“I’m going, sir.” I’m glad of the gate and the door swinging shut behind me. I prefer the mulled quiet of the dairy barn to what I’ve seen and done today. I imagine Marie laughing at the irony of this—my wanting of a barn.
JENNINGS leaves the hospital the next morning.
“Wasn’t so bad,” he tells us in the yard. “They got all the shot out.” The triumph in his voice doesn’t match the blood in his eyes, or the shuffle in his walk, the way his hand goes to his side again and again, pressing. The next day, his back’s bowed, a crease that never rights itself, and then he starts sweating, his face gone gray and dusky.
He seeks me out in the yard, wanting to hear the whole thing told again. “What’s it like seeing someone shot down like that, Ross? Which way did I fall? I can’t see it. It’s all too quick for me.”
“I don’t know. You fell forward.”
“What’d old Taylor do?”
“He walked over.”
“Bastard counted his steps along the way, didn’t he?”
I nod.
“Nineteen,” Jennings says. Everyone knows the number, now, shooting through the fields and the cells like some secret we’d been trying to figure out for years—far enough away to miss and scatter that shot all over the field, but close enough to blow a man’s side open should it land just right. Nineteen. We whisper the word like a curse.
Jennings is sweating too much, beads on his lips and forehead.
“You all right?” I ask.
“I’m feeling a little hot, tell you the truth. Think I’ve got myself a fever.” He pushes at his side again and tries to straighten his back. It catches at an angle, keeping him bent, then he drops down to his knees.
One of the guards comes over. “What’s this?”
Jennings doesn’t speak.
“I think he needs to go to the hospital,” I say.
“He that idiot got himself shot?”
“Yes, sir.”
The guard laughs. “Hey, Buckshot. Come on. Let’s get you to the infirmary.” Jennings doesn’t move, and the guard finally drags him to standing by one of his arms. “The hell you expect?”
The chapel is just past the hospital, and I know they’ll be calling on Chaplain to come discuss Jennings’s soul while he sits in his sickbed. Jennings is in on a liquor violation. He can’t have more than a year or two left. But he’s a damaged man walking next to that guard, not the same man to get me cigarettes, not even the man running through the fields just a few days ago. We change so quickly in here.
TAYLOR pulls me from the barn the next day, ordering me back through the east gate.
“Jesus Christ,” Beau says.
He pushes me through, and the guard on the other side walks me to the pens, his gun pointed at the ground.
“You hear about Jennings?” Taylor asks as soon as I’m level with him. In the same breath, he says “Go on” to the guard.
“I was with him when he went back to the infirmary.”
“Died this morning,” Taylor says. “Blood poisoning. Goddamned doctor didn’t get all the shot out. X-rays showed a ball lodged there in the boy’s kidney. Wasn’t anything to be done then.”
I have seen a man shot and killed from nineteen steps away.
“No sense in a death like that, Martin.” I cannot tell whether Taylor’s truly mournful for the loss of life or whether Jennings is just another lost prisoner to him, a man taking his release early. “No sense.” Taylor shakes his head.
I can hear Marie’s voice in the rustle of the dog bodies: You know all about senseless deaths, don’t you, dear?
Taylor and Marie are both wrong to rely on sense as a measurement, though. Making sense is about logic, and logic follows instructions, like electricity culled from water and transported along lines. If you point power somewhere—no matter the kind—it’ll follow its course until it hits something. Perfect sense.
“How are you feeling about this work, Martin?” Taylor turns his face from the dogs to look at me. “Think it suits you?”
“Due respect, sir, but I don’t know that it does.”
Taylor almost smiles. “You’re wrong, Martin, but it was a hell of an introduction, I’ll give you that. You stick on the barn for a while yet.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Ain’t for you, Martin. Can’t have a boy out here who’s not ready for it. You best be next time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, go on.”
I glance once more at that pack of dogs, all red and black and needy, so different from the dairy cows in the barn.
“Go on,” Taylor says.
I could run right now, take to the cotton like Jennings, crawl my way through its branches until I get to the woods. I do this again and again. I run. I escape. I return to my wife and son.
I don’t know if they’re still there.
CHAPTER 3
Roscoe used galvanized sto
rage cylinders from the shop for the transformers’ bodies, but he had to go into Rockford for the copper wire. The local mercantile was called Bean’s, and Marie’s family had been frequenting it since Edgar Bean opened its doors, a charge account still on file, though there wasn’t money to cover the things charged.
Roscoe took the mules and wagon in. He left Wilson back, not wanting him to take part in this particular dishonesty.
When he walked in the door, Bean hollered, “Roscoe Martin! What brings you here?”
“I finally have some electrical work.”
“You and your fancy electricity.”
Bean was like Marie’s father in his love of flames over bulbs. They’d both sworn that the country would never let itself get fully electrified, and if the country failed them, well, hell—they’d stay strong at least. “You’ll never see a wired lamp in this store,” Bean had told Roscoe once. “Fire needs to be out in the open, someplace we can keep an eye on it. Don’t belong inside wires.” Marie’s father had conceded slightly since his son-in-law was in the trade. “Never my library, though. If you light up the house someday, that’s one thing. But you stay out of my library. I want to know what’s near my books.”
“It’s trapped,” Roscoe tried to explain, both to Bean and to Marie’s father. “All that power is stored inside wires, which are stored inside rubber coatings. There’s no threat to you. In fact, it’s safer than flame. If you break a lamp bulb, the light just goes out. If you break a wicked lamp, you’re likely to see your whole house go up.”
“No, no, son,” the men would reply, and Roscoe would keep at them until Marie laid a hand on his arm, or one of them forced the conversation in a new direction.
Roscoe couldn’t understand their hesitancy and mistrust. He had only experienced fascination, intrigue, desire to know more. That first time he’d seen electrical streetlamps, in Birmingham, he’d thought he was seeing magic—something from the fairy tales he’d once told his sister. Those glowing bulbs belonged with princes who could be changed into toads and then back again with a kiss. They belonged with talking animals and flight for flightless creatures, rather than his father’s world of coal and tunnels and prosperity at the expense of others’ bent backs and widowed families. Then he’d found Faraday, and science had supplanted the magic—long descriptions of experiments that took Roscoe months and sometimes years to understand—and all while still working for his father in the mines, a candle’s flame lighting the pages of the books he read every chance he could, trusted and esteemed narratives to which he could return. Electricity had freed him from his father’s life.
He’d told as much to his father-in-law, and the man had listened, genuine care in his pale eyes.
“We find our own salvations, Son,” he’d said. “You have your electricity, and I have my farm, and we both have my lovely daughter and a wagonload of books. We’ve more in common than not. You keep to your lines, and I’ll keep to my land, and we’ll meet over the supper table to talk about what we’ve been reading.”
Marie’s father had been a good man. Bean was a good man, too. Lying to him about this project felt like lying to Marie’s father, and Roscoe disliked it. He’d make them both proud, though, distill their fears, prove the strength of his trade. A lie was worth that.
“I’ll need quite a bit of copper wire,” he told Bean. “The work’s about midway between our place and the dam, and they’ve asked me to get the supplies up on this end. It’s a first, for sure. They’ve always provided everything in the past, but it seems there’s wire heading in every direction but this one. What’s your spool count right now?”
Bean looked at a clipboard on the wall behind him. He flipped a few pages. “Looks like I got about ten rolls in the barn.”
“I’ll need all of them. My foreman will be coming through with the check soon as he can, and we’ll guarantee it with our account.”
“That’s a lot of product, Roscoe.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bean rubbed at the peppered beard on his chin, holding his rheumy eyes low on Roscoe’s face as if the answer were stored there, some sign to be trusted in Roscoe’s lips or jaw.
“You don’t make good on this, and I’ll be forced to take the debt back any way I can. I could go after the land.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s your father-in-law’s land, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bean nodded, once, and then scribbled on a slip of paper. “Head on round back and give this to the boys. They’ll help you get it all in the wagon.”
“Thanks, Bean.”
“Whatever this is, it makes me nervous, Roscoe.”
“It’s fine. You wait.”
ROSCOE had Wilson weld the iron cores for the transformers, thick, ringlike creations about a foot wide and tall, squared at their corners.
“Whatever you say,” Wilson said, given the instructions.
“Here.” Roscoe flipped pages in the bound register he now kept. He found his drawing of the transformers, a plan deducted from Faraday as much as from his own work with Alabama Power. “I’ll wrap copper round the cores.” He tapped at the page. “Iron is permeable to magnetic force, so it’ll move the current from one side—the receiving side—over to the sparser secondary coil on the other side of the ring. What’s not shot off through those secondary wires will return to the primary, and we’ll be left with a twist of wires housing about half the original voltage. We’ll feed those wires into the next ring, making the turns of the secondary coils even less, and then again, and after the voltage passes through three, we’ll be down to a current close to safe. I’m going to leave it higher for the transmission from the road to the shop. If we stepped it down all the way up front, we’d lose too much over the distance and risk a weak current. I’ll put one more transformer close in to step it down to two-twenty.”
“You’re talking another language, my friend.”
“I’m not,” Roscoe insisted, just as he had with Marie’s father once, and Bean. “It’s like—a windup toy. Think of those windup toys the kids have. It’s like one of those as it winds down. Imagine that the strength of your hand stays the same, but the mechanism inside slows down. You’re just changing the size of the spring.”
Wilson cocked his head. “Why’s it so important to you that I understand?”
“Don’t you want to?”
Wilson smiled, the same slow, easy smile he brought to most things. “There’s a lot I seek out, Ross. You’ve seen me on those trails—the likes of the crops on this land, all their stages of growth, all the things I might do to make them stronger and bigger. There’s workings of music I’m right taken by. Even Moa’s cooking calls my attention at times, all those leavenings and flavors. But this here”—Wilson tapped at the drawing—“this isn’t my concern. Agreeing to help you was me agreeing to help this farm, not agreeing to be your student.”
Roscoe clapped him on the back, glad of his honesty. “I hear you, but I won’t stop the lessons.”
“You want to holler at a deaf man, that’s your concern.”
They both laughed at that, and Roscoe found himself grateful for the camaraderie. He’d not worked with anyone since Marie had taken them away from the village, and he missed collaborative discipline and drive. He’d liked Wilson from the day they met—both for the man he was in person and for all the stories Marie had told—but only in this work had Roscoe felt friendship, loyalty, shared lives. He could see their families growing thick and comfortable, Roscoe and Wilson running the land and the wires, the wives and children happy, big meals and steady comfort. Maybe he and Wilson could even start their own electrical business installing transformers for the other farms, a marriage of their separate work.
He left Wilson to his welding and walked the line route again.
WITH the cores done, Roscoe started winding wire. Wilson checked in on him per
iodically, and Roscoe tried, again, to explain, holding up one of the iron rings. “See? The voltage will be doing laps.”
Wilson shook his head. “When do we start raising poles? I’m readying to get some actual work done.”
“Soon.”
But the transformers took longer than that. A solid month had passed before Roscoe was confident enough to test them.
Together, Roscoe and Wilson raised their first pole, just nine yards from the original line. Then they hauled out wheelbarrows full of tools, those three transformers unrecognizable in their galvanized frames, all of the rods and coils hidden deep inside, along with levers to stop and start the current. The levers were in the off position, where they’d stay until Roscoe connected the first transformer to the live line, and then it to the other two.
Wilson helped Roscoe mount the transformers on the new pole, evenly distributed with the lowest one ten feet above the ground. Roscoe attached the first stretch of line that would lead to the house and the shop.
“You seem comfortable with this work,” Roscoe noted.
“Only ’cause we’re not hooked up to anything yet. You plug those wires into that live line and just see how fast I run out of here.”
“You won’t run.” Roscoe knew it was for show, this disinterest. He’d seen the information seeping into Wilson’s thoughts. He’d even found him winding wires around a core one day. “Just trying to keep this moving along,” Wilson had said.
Roscoe had shown him a finished core, noting the differences in the sides, then left Wilson to finish the one he was working on.
IT was too dangerous to risk linking up to a ten-thousand-volt current, so Roscoe and Wilson set about temporarily halting the power on the main transmission line. Roscoe had already selected the pine they’d fell a couple miles toward the dam, just down from a crossroads where it’d be easy to locate—he didn’t want linemen stomping around the fields searching for the outage. The past several weeks had seen heavy rains, and the water helped with the story Roscoe had built—just an old tree loosened by weather, ready to topple.
They left their supplies with the transformers and rode horses to the tree. “Even when it’s down, we won’t have that long of a window,” Roscoe said. “They’ll get this line running as quick as they can.”
Work Like Any Other Page 3