Chapter 8
The freight truck ground up my driveway two weeks to the day after I'd placed the order. I heard it before I saw it, the diesel engine laboring against the grade in the early afternoon.
By the time it crested the rise, Abner was already walking out of the treeline from the direction of his place, right on time.
The driver climbed down and looked at the cabin, then at Abner with his long gray beard and flannel shirt, then at me.
"Thomas Harmon?"
"That's me."
He handed me a clipboard thick with packing slips.
"Lot of hardware. You boys building a power station?"
"Something like that."
Abner was already at the back of the truck, waiting. The driver rolled up the door and I saw it all stacked there: the panels in their heavy cardboard sleeves, the two battery cases, boxes of hardware and conduit and wire. More than I'd imagined when I clicked the order buttons.
"Let's get it off the truck," Abner said. "Then we inventory."
We worked for an hour just unloading. The panels were awkward more than heavy, each one a four-foot by six-foot sail that wanted to catch any breath of wind. The batteries were the opposite problem. Compact but dense, each one requiring both of us to lower it safely from the truck bed.
The driver watched us work for about ten minutes, then climbed back into his cab and pulled out his phone. I didn't blame him. We weren't moving fast. I gave him my Wi-Fi password so he could entertain himself.
When the truck was finally empty, Abner shook the driver's hand and the truck rumbled back down my drive. Then we turned to the pile of boxes and crates scattered across my yard.
"Now we see what we have," Abner said. "And what we're missing."
He pulled a folded paper from his shirt pocket, the packing list I'd printed and given him the week before. I started to grab the nearest box, but he stopped me with a raised hand.
"Not yet. We stage first."
He surveyed the pile with narrowed eyes, then pointed to a flat area near where the equipment shed would go.
"Panels there. Batteries there." He indicated spots in sequence around the yard. "Mounting hardware. Electrical. Conduit and wire. Charge controller and inverter last, they go straight into the shed once it's built."
"Wouldn't it be faster to just open everything and check it off?"
"Faster now. Slower later." He started walking toward the first stack of boxes. "Every hour spent organizing saves three hours hunting for what you need when you need it."
I thought of the years I'd spent in the insurance office, the way files accumulated on my desk in drifts, the frantic searches for documents I knew I'd seen somewhere. I picked up the other end of the first panel crate and followed his lead.
By late afternoon we had everything sorted into Abner's grid pattern and every item checked against the manifest. Nothing missing, nothing damaged. The yard looked like a military supply depot, everything in its place, organized by the order we'd need it.
"This is a productive start." Abner stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the result. "Tomorrow we start the ground mount."
I was already tired and we hadn't built anything yet.
"I'll have coffee ready."
He nodded once and walked back into the trees.
Claire's Subaru came up the driveway around three the next afternoon.
Abner and I were driving posts for the panel mounting frame, me on the post driver, him holding each post plumb while I swung.
The rhythm had taken us most of the morning to find.
Now we moved together without speaking, post after post sinking into the ground at precise intervals Abner had marked with string and stakes.
Claire climbed out holding a large glass jar beaded with condensation. The tea inside was dark amber, with a few mint leaves floating at the top.
"Thought you might be thirsty."
Abner set down the post driver and accepted the jar first, drinking deep before passing it to me. The tea was cold and sweet with just enough bite from the mint. I hadn't realized how dry my throat was until I tasted it.
Claire walked a slow circle around the worksite, taking in the staged materials, the posts already in the ground, the scope of what we were building. When she came back to where I stood, she was quiet for a moment.
"This is serious," she said.
"Abner doesn't do things halfway."
"I wasn't talking about Abner." She looked me over with an appraising eye. "You're really staying."
"I'm really staying. Just like I said I would. No more running."
"I believe you, Thomas Harmon."
The moment stretched between us, warm and relaxed.
"I'll bring more tea tomorrow," she said.
She touched my arm once, briefly, and walked back to her truck.
Abner watched her drive away, then picked up the post driver again.
"Good woman," he said. "Post."
He held the next one plumb and we went back to work.
The days blurred together after that. The mounting frame went up first, angled steel rails that would hold the panels at thirty-eight degrees to catch the winter sun. Then the trenching, three runs of conduit buried eighteen inches deep connecting the array to where the equipment shed would stand.
I worked the trenching spade. I was bad at it, my shoulders burning after the first hour.
"You're thinking too much," Abner told me. "Stop thinking. Feel where the ground is soft."
I followed his advice. By the end of the day my trenches were tolerably done. My shoulders still burned, but I was used to the feeling now. The burn of muscles remembering how to do work.
The shed went up next. I'd bought a pre-cut kit from Forks. Eight by eight, tall enough to stand in, with a raised platform along one wall for the battery enclosure.
We insulated the battery enclosure with rigid foam sealed tight against moisture and cold. Abner installed the twelve-volt heating pad himself, wiring it to a thermostat that would kick on if the temperature dropped below forty degrees.
"Lithium doesn't like cold," he said. "It kills the cells. These batteries cost what they cost because they will last twenty years, but only if you take care of them."
The wiring came next. Abner worked slowly here, double-checking every connection, every terminal crimp, every ground.
He let me do some of it under his supervision, guiding my hands through the process of stripping wire to the right length, crimping terminals, tightening connections to the right torque.
Not too loose, which would cause resistance and heat.
Not too tight, which would crack the terminal.
"Electricity wants to kill you," he said once, when I reached for a live wire without thinking. His hand was on my wrist before I touched it, his grip firm but not painful. "Respect it."
I noticed things about him as we worked. The way he never wasted motion. The way he checked his work twice before moving on. The way he answered questions with just enough information and no more, trusting me to ask again if I needed clarification.
It was the same way Scout moved through the world.
The same precision, the same economy. The same instinct to check twice, to measure before cutting, to respect the things that could hurt you.
She was who she was because she'd learned from him, absorbed his standards through twenty-one years of watching and working beside him.
As we wired the charge controller, I voiced the hope that had been building inside me.
"The propane generator was killing me. The noise, the cost. And after the propane company blacklisted me, having to get it delivered from Forks with a huge markup." I tightened a terminal connection. "This is going to change everything."
Abner was quiet for a moment, checking a wiring diagram.
"A man who depends on another man's system," he said finally, "lives at that man's pleasure. County wants to cut your power, they cut it. Propane company wants to refuse your business, they refuse it. Every connection to their grid is a leash."
He looked up at the solar panels arrayed in the sunlight, drinking in the free energy that Harlan Foster couldn't touch.
"Cut the leash, you cut their leverage."
I thought about the letter from the county. The denied propane deliveries. All of it traced back to Harlan and his connections, his ability to reach into systems I depended on and turn them against me.
"This isn't just about electricity," I said. "All of this."
"Nothing is ever just about electricity." Abner went back to the wiring diagram. "Or just about water, or just about land. It's about who controls what you need to live. The answer should be you."
We made great progress, but it wasn't all smooth sailing. We were trenching when I first noticed Abner's breathing. He'd stopped to rest, leaning on his shovel, and I could hear the whistle in his chest from ten feet away. A wet, labored sound that didn't match the work we'd been doing.
He caught me looking and straightened up, going back to the trench without comment.
I said nothing.
It happened again in the middle of erecting the shed.
Abner set down his hammer and walked to the edge of the treeline, his back to me.
I heard the coughing from where I stood.
Deep, wracking coughs that bent him double.
When he came back his face was composed, but there was a grayness under his weathered skin that hadn't been there before.
I handed him the mason jar of Claire's tea. He drank without meeting my eyes.
I said nothing.
The next day, wiring the inverter, he had to stop twice to catch his breath. The second time I saw him grip the edge of the workbench, knuckles white, waiting for something to pass. His chest rose and fell in shallow hitches.
I kept working on my section of the wiring. Giving him the privacy of not being watched.
When his breathing steadied, he picked up his wire strippers and went back to work as if nothing had happened.