Luke was a good-looking man, eyes the color of Charlene’s deep brown mixed with his father’s blue. Green eyes, long eyelashes, curly brown hair. Tall and muscular. A hunk. And he carried his handsomeness with the same indifference that Charlene carries her beauty. With no attention to it. He was an ironworker. A job with enough risk to maintain excitement and sufficient income to maintain the outdoor toys he loved. Motorcycles. Snowmobiles. Horses. Jet Skis. He turned twenty-seven the year he died, and he’d fallen in love with a slightly older woman, Jenny, with two little kids. They had rented an apartment together and were looking for a house and planning their wedding.

Luke was at work on a windy day in May—summer hadn’t completely arrived, so remnants of winter coarsened the wind. He was building a new office building, walking on the scaffold, the rebar rods stretched to the sixth level. The rods rooted the cement, the drywall, the bricks, and the wood securely to the ground, providing the stable sheath for the structure. He had pride in his job, setting the rods. I wonder what he was thinking. I never asked Charlene this, not wanting to introduce a new anxiety or obsession. But this is one of mine: I imagine those last seconds before everything changed. Was he thinking about making love to Jenny? Was he thinking about waterskiing this summer? Was he slightly hung over from the beers he had had with his crew the night before? Or maybe it wasn’t anything that I could imagine. Maybe he was thinking about setting the rod, carrying the rod across the scaffolding and welding it to its base. Maybe a glob of mayonnaise dropped from someone’s sandwich. Maybe a sudden gust of wind swayed the scaffolding just as he took a step. Maybe someone called to him, “Hey, Luke, wanna grab some brew tonight?” Or “Did you catch that Tigers game?”

But he slipped.

He fell.

He was halted in his course by the tip of a rod honed by a furnace to the sharpness of a spear. The naked rod was two stories down.

It pierced his lower back, split his guts, missed his heart, penetrated his lungs, and exited his shoulder. Stopped his descent, so he hung there, above the ground, the rod piercing him. He hung there, completely conscious. To me, when I think of it, I think of him, dear Luke with his curly hair and obscenely long eyelashes. (“No boy deserves those lashes,” I used to tease him.) I imagine him as Jesus, hanging impaled. Fixed by the metal rod and its fabrication instead of metal nails. A crucifixion by modern construction instead of Roman cruelty.