…”Kessler.”
Marcus stopped laughing. He put his whiskey down.
“Ruth Kessler was your grandmother,” Grandma said, in the same quiet voice she uses to tell you to wipe your feet. “In January 2003, she was on dialysis three times a week at the clinic in Harlan. The ice storm took out every line in the county. The clinic’s generator failed on the second day. Without power, the machines stop. Hal climbed that pole at six in the morning and didn’t come down for thirty hours. He ran a line from the substation by hand. The clinic had power again by noon the next day. Your grandmother finished her treatment.”
Marcus looked at my grandfather’s right hand. The three fingers on it don’t bend all the way. They haven’t since 2003.
“The clinic put that plaque up in 2004,” Grandma said. “They held this dinner here because the VFW bought the clinic building when it closed. Hal didn’t want to have it here. I did. I wanted somebody to finally read it.”
Marcus got up. He walked out into the hallway. Everyone at the tables could see him through the doorway, standing in front of the brass plaque on the wall, reading it. He stood there for a long time.
When he came back, his face was red. He walked up to my grandfather and said, “My mom told me a lineman saved Grandma’s life. She told me every Christmas. I never asked his name.”
“She sent a fruitcake every year until 2010,” Grandpa said. “It was terrible. I ate every one.”
Marcus laughed. Then he put his hand over his eyes.
That’s when I dropped my dinner roll. I didn’t even notice I was holding it.
Marcus called his mother from the parking lot that night. She drove four hours the next morning to have breakfast with my grandparents. She brought a fruitcake. Grandpa ate the whole slice and said it was still terrible. She laughed so hard she had to sit down.
At the end of the night, Marcus asked if he could say something. He stood up with a glass of ginger ale instead of whiskey. “To Hal,” he said. “Forty-one years of climbing poles. A bucket truck can’t do what you did. Nothing can.” Then he sat down.
Nobody called anybody “chief” for the rest of the night.
