The Lineman Who Held the Hymnal

The ice storm came through Calder Mills on a Saturday night and left every branch on Locust Street wearing glass. By morning the power was back on at Howard Pruitt’s end of the road, though he could hear chainsaws somewhere down toward the river.

He made coffee in the old percolator because that was what Dot had used for forty-one years. When he opened the cabinet for his mug, there was the index card she had taped to the inside of the door, her handwriting slanting uphill the way it always did.

“For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.” Isaiah 41:13.

She had put it up the winter of her first surgery. Howard had stopped seeing it years ago, the way you stop seeing a light switch. Five weeks after the funeral, he saw it every single morning.

It had also been five Sundays since he had set foot in Willow Ford Church. People had been kind, and that was part of the trouble. His freezer was full of other women’s chicken and noodles, and he did not think he could stand one more pat on the arm.

But the coffee tasted like nothing, and the house was too quiet to drink it in. So he put on his brown suit and the tie with the little anchors that Dot said made him look like a ferry captain, and he drove the eleven blocks with the defroster roaring.

He came in after the prelude and slid into the third pew from the back on the window side, next to the radiator that knocked. Their pew. The empty half of it looked about a mile long.

Up front, the hymn numbers sat on the wooden board in white. Howard could not read that board past the fifth row and never could. Dot used to whisper the numbers to him and have the page open before the organist finished the introduction.

She ran her finger under the words, too, because he lost his place between verses. He used to pretend that annoyed him.

Pastor Glenn Ostrander announced the opening hymn, and everyone stood. Howard stood with them and opened the hymnal somewhere near the middle. Responsive readings. He turned pages, and they stuck together in the cold.

Then the organ began, and he knew the tune before he found the number. “Abide with Me.” Dot’s favorite.

His hands would not work right. The book shook. The congregation was already singing, and his throat had closed up like a fist, and he thought seriously about sitting down and staying there.

That was when a man slipped in from the aisle.

He had come in late, and he brought the cold in with him. He smelled of diesel and wet wool. He wore an orange canvas jacket with reflective stripes, and there was a pressed ring in his hair where a hard hat had been. He might have been thirty-five. His beard still had a little frost melting out of it.

He did not say a word. He opened his own hymnal to the right page, held it out low between them where Howard could see, and set one thick, scraped finger under the first line.

“Fast falls the eventide.”

The man sang loud and a little flat. His finger moved along with the words, steady as a level. When the verse ended, right where Howard always lost it, the finger was already waiting at the start of the next one.

Howard sang. His voice cracked in the second verse and went out entirely for half a line in the third. The man never looked over at him. He just kept the finger moving, and somehow that was the kindest part of all.

Four verses. Amen. The stranger closed the book, gave Howard a short nod, and sat. Howard sat too and pressed his handkerchief hard against his eyes, as if he had something in them.

During the announcements the man’s phone buzzed in his jacket. He looked at it, then leaned close.

“Sorry, sir,” he whispered. “They’re calling us back out. Got a line down on the county road.”

He gripped Howard’s shoulder once and was gone before the offering plate came around.

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After the service Howard asked everyone he could. Nobody knew the man.

“Probably one of the out-of-state crews,” Pastor Ostrander said, shaking his hand at the door. “The power company brought trucks in overnight. They’ve got them lined up three deep behind the feed store.”

Somebody said the crews were from Tennessee. Somebody else said Ohio.

That afternoon Howard drove out the county road slowly, the tires hissing on the salt. A mile past the grain elevator he found them. Four trucks sat on the shoulder with their booms raised against a white sky, and two men worked in the buckets, small as birds up there.

He could not tell which one was his man. He did not stop. You don’t bother a fellow working a live line. He pulled over a good way back and sat with the engine running and the heater ticking, and he watched them until the wires were up and the trucks moved on.

At home he warmed a bowl of somebody’s chicken and noodles and actually ate it. Then he stood at the counter a long while with the cabinet door open, looking at the card.

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The next Sunday Howard got to church twenty minutes early. Bev Kittredge was at the organ sorting her music, and he asked her for the hymn numbers. She wrote them on the back of an envelope without asking why.

He sat down in his pew and tore a bulletin into narrow strips, the way Dot always had. He marked the three hymns in his own book. Then he reached over to the rack, took out a second hymnal, and marked that one too.

He laid it on the empty half of the pew with the little white strips sticking out of the top.

Bev passed him on her way to the coffee urn and raised an eyebrow. “Expecting company, Howard?”

“Never know who’s coming in off the road,” he said.

Then he settled in beside the knocking radiator, opened his own book to the first hymn, and kept his thumb on the place.