The boy froze with his hand six inches from the wire.
Brett looked down from the bucket. "Gus, it's dead. I opened it myself. It's tagged."
"I believe you," Gus said. "Test it anyway."
"I'm about to ground it."
"Then test it first. Humor an old man."
Brett looked at him for a long moment. Then he took the voltage tester off his belt. He lowered the bucket, held the tester's long hot stick up to the line, and the tester lit up and started screaming.
Josh stepped back so fast he sat down in the snow.
For a while, the only sound was the wind going through the bare trees. The transformer down the road kept humming.
"That's not possible," Brett said quietly. "I opened it."
"You opened it from the substation," Gus said. "Something's feeding it from the other end."
Every lineman learns about backfeed in his first year. Most never see it.
When the power goes out, some folks hook a portable generator straight into their house. If they do it the wrong way, without a proper transfer switch, the power doesn't just run the house. It runs backward, out through the meter and into the transformer on the pole.
A transformer works both ways. It takes the high voltage on the line and steps it down to household power.
Feed household power into it backward, and it steps it up. A little generator in somebody's garage can put thousands of volts on a line that every rule says is dead.
"Four houses on that transformer," Gus said. "Past the bend. The Kepler place, the Sizemores, the Yoders' rental, and Harlan Bales."
Brett stared at him. "How do you know that?"
"Because I built that tap," Gus said. "Summer of 1979. Set those poles with my own hands."
They found it at the third house.
Harlan Bales was eighty-one, a regular at the Liars' Table, a widower with a bad heart and an oxygen machine of his own. His grandson Cody had driven up from Athens when the power went out. Cody was twenty-two, and he loved his grandfather, and he'd brought a generator.
There was no transfer switch. Cody had made a cord with a plug on each end and run it from the generator straight into the dryer outlet in the laundry room, so the whole house would have power for his grandpa's oxygen.
The generator was roaring in the garage. Harlan's oxygen machine was humming in the front room.
"I watched a video," Cody said, white-faced, when Brett explained it to him. "It said that's how you do it."
"That video nearly killed a nineteen-year-old kid half a mile from here," Brett said. He said it without raising his voice, which Gus thought was to his credit.
Cody looked like he was going to be sick.
Gus put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "You were trying to keep your grandpa breathing," he said. "That's the right reason. It's just the wrong cord."
He shut off the generator himself and pulled the cord out of the dryer outlet, and Harlan's oxygen machine went quiet. Then he walked back out to his truck, got the little spare oxygen tank Terry had sent along from Maple Grove, and carried it in to Harlan's chair.
"This'll hold you a few hours," he said. "We'll have you back on the line by dark."
Harlan looked up at him. "You knew I was on this line."
"I know who's on every line out here," Gus said.
With the backfeed stopped, Brett tested the line again. It was dead now, truly dead. They grounded it on both sides of the work before anybody touched it, the way the rules say, the way Gus had done it ten thousand times.
They finished at 7:40 that night, in the dark, under the truck lights, with the temperature at nine degrees.
Brett called the dispatcher. Then he went back to the substation and closed the switch.
Gus was parked on the hill above Maple Grove, with his engine running and his coffee gone cold. He saw the parking lot lights come on first. Then the hallway lights, then the lobby.
Then, one by one, the windows of the residents' rooms.
Brett found him there twenty minutes later. He parked his truck beside Gus's and climbed into the passenger seat without asking.
For a while they sat and watched the windows.
"I'd have touched it," Brett said finally. "If it was me on the ground. I'd have been tired and cold and I'd have trusted my own tag."
"Most of us would have," Gus said. "That's why the rule is test before you touch. Every time. Even when you know."
"You didn't test it. You heard it."
"I've been listening to that line since 1979," Gus said. "It's an old line. It talks to you, if you pay attention."
Brett looked at him in the dark.
"The co-op's got a training day in March," he said. "For the apprentices. I'd like you to come teach it."
Gus thought about that.
"I'll come," he said. "If Josh sits in the front row."
Down the hill, the last dark window at Maple Grove lit up, the corner room on the second floor. Gus knew without asking that it was Clara Abernathy's, and that she'd be sitting up in bed with a library book, finally able to see the page.