The Year the Lights Came On by Terry Kay Read Free Book Online Page B

talkin’ about?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What’d you think they’re talkin’ about?” I said.
    “How am I supposed to know?” Wesley said irritably. “If he’s the REA man, I guess they’re talking about where the lines are going. I don’t know.”
    Of course, I thought. There would have to be lines and electric light poles and transformers and fuse boxes and meters. I closed my eyes and heard the deep bass of men at work, saw the statue-like lean of their bodies tilting backward as they worked against safety belts high up on black, creosoted pine poles. I saw their hard hats and equipment holsters and spike boots.
    I saw Thomas. Smiling, swinging a rope across his shoulder, jabbing a spike into a pole, and climbing. Thomas. Soundless Thomas.
    I opened my eyes and looked for Wesley. He was sitting against a pine. His eyes were half closed and he was holding a braided pine needle, slowly twirling it in his fingers. Sometimes I confused Wesley and Thomas. They were part of my mood and belonging, yet they seemed removed—Thomas by death and Wesley by ordination. It was bewildering. I was inseparably fused with two people, yet they were somehow removed from my offer—my longing—to know them wholly.
    “I saw that man pointin’ over to where Freeman lives, Wesley,” I said. “You think Freeman and them will get electricity?”
    Wesley opened his eyes and looked in the direction of Freeman’s home across the swamp. “I doubt it,” he answered. “They live too far off the line.”
    Freeman lived with his parents in a shotgun house that was wrapped like gauze in tarpaper. The house had been built for a WPA crew during the thirties. After the crew left, finished with its work of draining Black Pool Swamp, Odell Boyd moved his wife and young son into the house and, in the following years, he had piddled with improvements and failed to improve anything. Odell Boyd worked the sawmills and sometimes made illegal whiskey by moonlight, but there was nothing mean about him. My mother said luck ran backward for him and that we could learn a lot by paying attention to the hard times other people had to live with. She was right. I was always learning something from Freeman—even if it meant I had to be corrected after most of the lessons.
    “It just don’t seem right,” I protested. “Freeman and them ought to get electricity like everybody else.”
    “Yeah,” agreed Wesley. “Maybe they’ll move up to where the Grooms used to live.”
    “I wish they would,” I said.
    *
    We did not question our father about the man, or the REA. We had been taught to honor the adult privilege of silence. Be patient, we were told; be patient and you’ll know soon enough. I think I understood even then that patience was a gift of the Southerner—patience and an instinct for the Right Time. That was what Wesley had said to us: “Be patient, and the time for springing the REA will come; don’t worry, it’ll happen.”
    Days eased into a bubble of other days. We were patient. We waited. But we also lived with the fear that someone from the Highway 17 Gang would begin to smart-mouth about the REA. And that would settle it. Too late. Our play for the Right Time would have been lost. We complained to Wesley, but Wesley pleaded with us to wait, to be patient— more patient. I thought he was probably testing us, teaching us one of the values of life that was natural with him. He was always doing that. Wesley was born to teach.
    *
    But still we waited.
    Our celebration turned to sulking, our joy peaked and paled into fatigue. Our nerves were frayed. But nothing was as bothersome as the new energy of the Highway 17 Gang in tormenting us. It was more than any of us could tolerate and it became difficult for Wesley to control our tempers.
    “Confound it,” Freeman declared one afternoon. “I’m not gonna take much more of all that smart-aleck talk I been gettin’, Wes. I’m not now, and you better know it.”
    “Freeman,