The Lamp I Left in the Window

The fourteenth

By eight o’clock that night the wind had a sound to it, a long, low sound like somebody blowing across the top of a jug. The radio said Highway 11 was closed at the Loup River bridge and the patrol had turned traffic back. I made a cheese sandwich and ate half. I checked the furnace, the flashlight in the drawer, and the Aladdin kerosene lamp on the pantry shelf, which has a mantle and a glass chimney and has sat ready since 1986 in case of a power outage.

Then I sat in the chair across from the lamp with my afghan and a library book about a lighthouse keeper that I was not enjoying, and watched the snow fly past the glass in long white scarves. I dozed. I woke at eleven with the book on the floor and the wind louder.

At a quarter to twelve I got up to put the kettle on, and when I came back, there was a light on the road.

It was low to the ground, a pulsing amber, on and off, a little east of my driveway, maybe a quarter of a mile. Someone’s hazard lights, blinking in the blowing snow, so faint that I might have taken them for something wrong with my eyes.

I stood at the glass with my hand on the sill next to the lamp.

My first thought, and I am not proud of it, was: I do not want to go out in that.

I took Verner’s barn coat off the hook and put it on over my robe. I got the big flashlight. I stood at the door with my hand on the knob and the wind leaning on the wood like a man, and I thought of Verl Tuttle, sitting down at the corner of his fence.

I thought: if I go out in that, in the dark, on this knee, I will be the second one the sheriff has to find.

So I did not go. I turned the porch light on. I went back and stood at the window by the lamp and watched the amber blink, and I prayed in the plainest words I had. I said, Lord, I can’t go out there. Please send somebody to the light.

I do not know why I said it that way. I had never said it that way before. Send somebody to the light.

The hazard lights blinked for another forty minutes. Then they stopped.

I do not know if the battery died or if somebody switched them off. I stood looking at the dark where they had been, with my heart going like a rabbit’s, and I thought: I have been a fool about this. I have been telling myself a story.

At a quarter past one, someone knocked.

It was a very small knock. Three knocks, spaced out, the kind you make when you are afraid of knocking. It was so quiet under the wind that for a second I thought it was the storm door rattling.

I went and opened the door.