The Lamp I Left in the Window

What the lamp is

I should explain that it is not my lamp, or not at first.

We farmed eighty acres of corn and beans and ran a few cows on the rough ground, twelve miles north and west of Spalding, Nebraska, on Lone Tree Road. It is a gravel road that follows the section lines for nine miles between two ridges, and in a bad winter it is the loneliest piece of county there is. There are four houses on it. Ours is the one at the second corner.

The place beside ours belonged to Verl and Alma Tuttle.

Verl drove the cream truck, and later the milk truck, for the creamery in Spalding. In January of 1961, on a night a good deal like the one I am telling you about, his truck slid off Lone Tree Road at the bottom of the east ridge. He was not hurt. He got out. The men who found him in the morning said he had walked in a circle. He was four hundred yards from his own kitchen, and in the dark with the snow running he could not tell where the kitchen was.

They found him at the corner of his own pasture fence, sitting down.

Alma was twenty-nine years old. She did not talk about it, then or for the next twenty-five years. But every night after that, she set a lamp in her front window and let it burn until morning. She never said it was for anybody. The neighbors got used to it the way you get used to a church bell.

In February of 1986, Verner came home from the sale barn in Spalding in a whiteout.

I was thirty-six. Wayne was ten. I had supper in the oven to keep warm by seven, and by nine I had stopped looking at the clock and started looking out the window, which is a worse thing to do.

Verner walked in the back door at ten minutes to midnight. He had no hat. His eyebrows were white. He stood on the mat with his arms hanging and could not unbutton his own coat, and I did it for him, and I could feel him shaking through the canvas.

His pickup was in the ditch a mile and a half east. He had gotten out and tried to walk home, and in the first ten minutes he lost the road. The snow was running along the ground so thick he could not see his own boots. He told me he stopped, finally, because he knew that if he took another step he would not know which way he was facing.

And then, he said, he saw the Tuttle place.

Not the house. He could not see the house. He saw one small yellow square, low and steady, about as big as a postage stamp, off to his left where he would have sworn there was nothing. Alma’s lamp. He had been walking away from home, and he turned around and walked toward that yellow stamp until he came to her fence, and he followed the fence to our corner, and our corner led him to our door.

He sat at my table and drank four cups of coffee and said, “Dot, I’d be sitting against a post right now.”

Alma Tuttle died that October. Her daughter Bonnie came over with a cardboard box the week after the funeral, and in the box, wrapped in a dish towel, was the milk-glass lamp.

“Mother said you’d know what it’s for,” Bonnie said.

I did. I put it in our front window that night. I have not missed a night since.