The Lamp I Left in the Window

Before light

I put them to bed. Eli stayed on the davenport under a quilt from the cedar chest, and Tyler took the floor beside him. Megan took Josie upstairs to Wayne’s old room, and the baby slept in a laundry basket beside the bed, lined with one of Verner’s flannel shirts. I had kept that shirt in the cedar chest for six years without knowing what for.

I sat in my chair. The Aladdin lamp hissed in the window.

I will tell you plainly what I thought, because I promised myself I would be honest in this account.

I thought: they were going to be fine. If I had never put a lamp in my window, Tyler and Megan would still have gotten out of that car. They would have sat in it and run the heater and waited for the plow. The county knew the road was closed. Somebody would have come eventually.

I thought: Wayne is right. One knock in nine years. Eleven in forty. A house at the end of nothing.

And then I thought about the way Tyler had stood at my gate for three minutes. And Megan on the ridge with the baby in her arms saying, A little yellow square. And Alma, and the stamp-sized yellow that Verner had followed home through a field he could not see.

I did not reach any large conclusion. I sat there and watched the snow run past the glass in front of the flame, and I thought about how little it takes, really, for a person to know that somebody in the world is awake.

The power came back at twenty to six with a clunk that made the whole house jump. The furnace roared. The clock on the stove started blinking twelve. I turned down the Aladdin lamp, and the milk-glass lamp beside it had come on again, because I had left the key turned.

At a quarter past seven it was gray out. The wind had dropped. The snow lay down. And a county plow came grinding up Lone Tree Road with its amber light turning, throwing a long white wave off the blade, and it slowed at my gate, and it turned in.