The Lamp I Left in the Window

The plow

I knew Dorsey Pohl the way you know the man who plows your road. A big man, heavy through the shoulders, with a gray mustache and a seed cap pulled down over his ears, who lifted two fingers off the wheel when he passed.

I had never once seen him get out of the truck at my house.

He got out of it now. He came up the walk with his cap in his hand, and I opened the door, and he stood on the porch with the cold coming off him in a cloud and said, “Morning, Mrs. Haverkamp. Are they here?”

“Who?”

“The Rasmussens. Husband, wife, kid, baby. They in there?”

“They are.”

He let out a long breath that went up in the cold like smoke. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He said a few quiet words into his radio and wiped his boots on my mat for a long time.

“Megan’s mother called the sheriff at eleven last night,” he said. “Said they’d left Scotia and never got home. Kayla Brandt was on dispatch. She asked where they were last seen, and the mother said the Loup bridge, and Kayla said…” He looked at the cap. “Kayla said, ‘Then they’ve gone to Dot’s.'”

“She said that?”

“Word for word. Told the mother to go to bed. And then she got up and made a mark on the door, before anybody knew a thing. Said she’d rub it out if she was wrong.”

I had not the least idea what he meant. I asked him in. He sat at my kitchen table across from Tyler and Megan, who had come down the stairs in their stocking feet with the baby, and I poured him a cup of coffee he said he didn’t have time for. Eli woke up and came in rubbing his eyes, and the man and the boy looked at each other and said nothing, which suited them both.

Dorsey put his big hands around the cup.

“Mrs. Haverkamp,” he said, “do you know what they call your place on the radio?”

“I do not.”

“The light. Not Haverkamp’s. Not Lone Tree Road. Just ‘the light.’ Every dispatcher at the sheriff’s office has said it for thirty-five years. Somebody’s stranded north of Spalding, they can’t say where they are, there’s no signal, and Lorna Beck, when she ran the desk, would say, ‘Are you on a gravel road? Do you see a farmhouse with a lamp in the window? If you can see the light, walk to it. If you can’t, stay with your car and we’re coming.'”

I did not say anything. I could not have.

“They’ve been telling people to walk to your light since before I got on the road crew,” he said.

“I didn’t know that.”

“I know you didn’t.” He took out his phone and slid it across the table to me. “Lorna retired in 2014. She’s eighty now, she lives in town. She kept a tally. In pencil, on the inside of the supply cabinet door in the dispatch room, under the radio. Every time somebody called in stranded and the dispatcher sent them to the light, she made a mark. Every dispatcher since has kept it up.”

On the screen was a photograph of a gray metal door.

It was covered in small pencil marks. Bundles of five, hundreds of them, in rows, in several different hands, some dark and some faded nearly to nothing, running down the whole inside of the door and across the frame. Here and there, a set of initials. In one corner, a tiny drawing of a lamp.

“They painted that cabinet last spring,” Dorsey said. “Kayla counted before they did. She counted twice.” He swallowed. “Two hundred and fourteen.”

I looked at the marks for a long time. I put my finger on the glass and went along one row, and then I put my hand over my mouth.

“Two hundred and fourteen,” he said. “And that’s just the ones who got through to the radio. That’s only the ones who had a signal, or somebody who called for them. It doesn’t count the ones who never called.”