Four Flashlights in the Back Pasture

Until Two

After that, the night got easy. My dad asked Grady about the tent, and Grady showed him every part of it, the vestibule and the snow stakes and the guy lines, and my dad got down on his knees in the snow to look at how I’d buried the stakes. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s how you do it.”

He told Grady about the winter of 1972, when he was twelve and his own father let him and his cousin sleep in the haymow on New Year’s Eve in sleeping bags made of feed sacks and old quilts.

It got down to twenty below. They lasted until about three and then ran for the house.

“You’re tougher than we were,” he told Grady. “We had quilts and pride.”

He asked Grady to teach him the code. Grady took it very seriously. He drew the letters in the snow with a stick, dots and dashes, and made my dad say them back.

My dad, who has never in his life been good at school, sat there and learned G and O and D, and N and I and H and T.

“Long, long, short,” my dad would say, squinting at the snow, and Grady would say, “No, Grandpa, that’s G, you want O,” and my dad would say, “Well, that’s what I said,” and Grady would laugh so hard he had to lie down.

I fed the fire and watched my father and my son on a log in the back pasture, heads bent over a row of marks in the snow, at one in the morning on Christmas Day.

At some point I went in the tent and listened through the orange nylon.

I heard my dad say, “Your mom used to sit right there, when she was little. Right by this same fire.” I heard Grady say, “Really?” I heard the fire pop.

I must have dozed, because the next thing I knew it was two o’clock, and my dad was standing up and stamping his feet and saying it was time an old man went to bed.

Grady crawled in beside me and got into his bag with the hot water bottle, and I zipped him in.

My dad leaned down at the tent door. “You two all right out here?”

“We’re fine, Dad,” I said. “We’ve got gear.”

“I can see that,” he said. He stayed there another second, bent over in the dark.

Then he said, “Good night, Grady,” and Grady said, “Good night, Grandpa,” and my dad straightened up and walked away across the pasture.