Four Flashlights in the Back Pasture

Steve

At nine o’clock a flashlight beam came bobbing down past the machine shed, and it was Steve, with both girls bundled up behind him in their new boots.

Avery was carrying a bag of marshmallows from my mother’s pantry. Lily was holding Steve’s hand and nearly running.

“Uncle Steve!” Grady said, and stood up, and showed them the tent before anybody could say hello.

Lily went straight inside it and lay on Grady’s sleeping bag and said, “It’s so warm in here,” which is what everybody says, every time, about a tent.

Steve stood by the fire with his hands in his pockets and looked around at all of it.

The tent, the guy lines, the stacked oak, the coals. “You did all this?” he said to me.

Avery and Lily roasted marshmallows until the bag was empty. Grady showed them how to hold the stick above the coals instead of in the flame, and Lily got hers perfect on the fourth try.

Then Grady showed them the Morse code. He flashed their names at them, slowly, one letter at a time, and they made him do it again and again.

At one point Avery came and sat down next to me on the log. She is twelve, that age when kids start to notice everything.

She stared at the fire for a while and then said, very quietly, “This is the best Christmas Eve I can remember.”

I didn’t say anything. I put my arm around her shoulders. Steve heard her. I saw him look up at the house, and then at Grady’s flashlights hanging and blinking around the tent, and then at the ground.

He didn’t say anything either. But I saw his face, and I knew he had done the same math I had, about four years too late, standing in his father’s pasture with his daughter telling him the truth.

At ten Jill flashed the porch light, which in our family means come in. Steve gathered the girls. Lily cried a little and asked if she could come back in the morning, and I said of course.

Avery hugged Grady, which she had not done since she was about seven.

Halfway back to the house, Steve turned and called toward the porch, where my dad stood at the rail in his barn coat.

“Dad,” Steve called. “You coming down? There’s room by the fire.”

My dad didn’t answer. He stood there another second, and then he turned around and went back in the house, and the storm door banged behind him.

Good Night

After the girls left, Grady went in the tent to read. I could see his shadow on the orange wall, propped on one elbow with the reading flashlight, turning pages.

Every so often he’d stick his head out the door and flash me something, and I would flash back nonsense, and he’d groan.

I sat by the fire and let it burn down to a good bed of coals. I thought about my dad on the porch.

I thought about him teaching me to build a fire right here, on his knees, with his big chapped hands, saying, “Small to big, Amy. Small to big. Don’t rush it.”

I wasn’t angry anymore, sitting out there. I had been angry for three years, and somewhere around the hot dogs the anger had gone out of me like air out of a tire.

It is hard to stay mad in the snow beside your own son when he is that happy.

At eleven thirty, Grady crawled out of the tent and stood up by the fire with the signal flashlight.

He faced the house, across the pasture, where the lights were still on in the kitchen and in my parents’ bedroom.

He started flashing, very slowly. I could see his lips moving with each letter. Long, long, short. Long, long, long. Long, long, long.

Long, short, short. A pause. Long, short. Short, short. Long, long, short. Short, short, short, short. Long.

“What’s that one?” I asked him.

“Good night,” he said. “So they know we’re fine out here. So Grandma doesn’t worry.”

He flashed it three times, the whole message, slowly, the way the book said to for beginners. Then he stood there, watching the house, the flashlight hanging at his side, waiting.

Nobody flashed back. Of course nobody did. Nobody in that house knew Morse code. The kitchen light went off. Then the bedroom light.

Then it was just the Christmas tree in the front window and the yard light by the shed.

Grady sat down on the log beside me and didn’t say anything about it. He just leaned against me in his green coat, and I put my arm around him, and we watched the coals.

That boy has never once complained to me about his grandparents. Not once in four years.