"Drop that bottle."
"I'm going to."
"And Ancil." She found his eyes. Hers were the same pale gray-green they had been at nineteen across the cafeteria line at Burkett's Ford High School, when she was the girl who stood behind the steam table in a hairnet and gave him an extra roll every day for a month before he got up the nerve to ask why. "Be sweet. Whatever comes."
"I'm always sweet."
"Ha," said Wilma, from the chair.
The truck was a 2006 Silverado, white, with a dent in the tailgate from a fence post and a rack on the back that still had the clips for a pole-climbing belt, though he had not climbed a pole in six years. He drove it down the lane between the hayfield and the woods with the window cracked, because the morning was cool and smelled of cut soybeans and the wood smoke from somebody's stove, and at the bottom of the hill he turned onto the county road and went north toward town. The hills in that part of Gentry County were steep and close and wooded, oak and hickory and maple, and in the second week of October the maples had gone red and orange in patches up the slopes as if somebody had been painting them and got called away. Along the creek bottoms the fields were harvested, combed down to stubble, with round bales in a row along the fence lines like the backs of sleeping animals. He passed the Ninevah Creek bridge with its orange barricade and a plywood sign some local wit had spray-painted NO KIDDING. He passed the Methodist church at Possum Trot with its message board that said FALL HARVEST SUPPER OCT 17 ALL WELCOME and under it GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL. He passed eleven utility poles he had set himself, between 1991 and 2004, and he knew which ones they were without having to think, the way a man knows his own children in a crowd.
He had been a lineman for Gentry Rural Electric Membership Corporation for thirty-four years, the last nine of them as a crew foreman, and in that time he had climbed, by his own rough figuring, something over eleven thousand poles. He had been up in the 2009 ice storm for four days with eighteen hours on and six off, sleeping in the truck with the heater running, and he had brought the lights back on in houses all over the south end of the county, one line at a time, and in every one of them somebody had come out on the porch in a coat and stood there and waved at him, and he had waved back from the bucket. People still told him about it at the IGA and the feed store. You got our lights on Christmas Eve. You remember? He did not always remember. Sometimes he lied and said he did.
The town of Burkett's Ford sat in a bend of the Muscatatuck where the river had once been shallow enough to drive a wagon across, though nobody had been able to do it in a hundred years. It had a limestone courthouse from 1889 in the middle of its square, so white in the sun it hurt to look at, with a Civil War soldier on the south lawn looking toward Kentucky. Around the square there were the things that had always been there and the things that had come since. There was a diner called the Ford Café that had been called the Ford Café since 1952 and had pie in a case by the register. There was a vape shop where the five-and-dime had been, and a storefront office with a hand-lettered sign that said RECOVERY CAFÉ — PEER SUPPORT — WALK-INS WELCOME, and two empty windows with FOR LEASE signs that had been in them so long the sun had bleached them blank. And there was Holcomb Drug, on the northeast corner, with its green awning and its gold-leaf lettering on the plate glass, HOLCOMB DRUG — PRESCRIPTIONS — EST. 1961, and in the corner of the window a laminated sheet that said in red block capitals WE ARE NOT ABLE TO GIVE OUT INFORMATION ABOUT CONTROLLED MEDICATION AVAILABILITY BY PHONE. THANK YOU FOR UNDERSTANDING.
He parked in front of the hardware store, because there was never any parking in front of Holcomb's, and he sat in the truck a minute with the engine off, the way he used to sit at the base of a pole before he buckled on the belt.
He was sixty-four years old. He had never been arrested. He had never been in a fight as a grown man, not even at the union hall in 1998 when the co-op tried to change the call-out pay and a man from the north crew had thrown a folding chair. He had buried a son. He was going to bury a wife. He was going into a drugstore he had been going into since he was six years old, to pick up a bottle of pills for a woman he had been married to for forty-four years, and his hands on the steering wheel were sweating as if he were going to rob it.