The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

The paper plate was taped to the front edge of the folding table with blue painter’s tape, and somebody had written on it in black marker: Lanterns, five dollars each.

I had been awake for nineteen hours. I was driving home from a night shift on the medical floor at the hospital in Galion, where I am a unit clerk, the one at the desk who answers the call lights and keeps the charts straight.

I took the long way home past my brother’s house on the north side of town because I always did. Dad had been living there since August, and on the mornings after a shift I liked to drive by and see his bedroom curtain open.

This Saturday the curtain was open. And there was a yard sale at the curb.

I almost kept going. Yard sales in Crawford County in September are like dandelions in May. Then I saw the row of red and silver on the table, and my foot came off the gas by itself.

Twenty-one railroad lanterns stood in a line on that table, shoulder to shoulder, the way Dad had always kept them on the long shelf in his garage. Red globes and clear globes, tall wire bails, the old tin gone soft and gray.

I pulled up behind a minivan and got out in my scrubs.

My sister-in-law, Tamra, was sitting in a folding lawn chair beside the table with a cup of coffee and a coffee can for the money. She is Phil’s wife, forty-seven, a good cook, a hard worker, and a woman who does not like surprises in her own house.

“Morning, Joelle,” she said. “You look beat.”

“Those are Dad’s,” I said.

She looked at the lanterns like she was seeing them for the first time. “They were in my garage,” she said. “Along with his recliner, his tools, two filing cabinets and a deep freeze. Something had to go.”

“Does he know?”

“He doesn’t need to watch me sell junk, Joelle. It would only upset him.”

I stood there in the cold morning with my car keys in my hand. A woman in a sweatshirt was turning one of the red-globed lanterns over, looking at the bottom like it might have a price sticker from a store.

My dad, Herb Kemp, worked twenty-one years as a brakeman and then a conductor out of Galion. He hired on in 1968, the same spring the New York Central became the Penn Central, and he stayed through Conrail until they cut the Galion crew board in 1988.

The year he started, an old conductor named Mr. Hughes gave him a kerosene lantern and told him a railroader always carries his own light. Dad liked that so much that he bought or traded for one more lantern every year he worked. One for every year. Never two.

When the crew board closed he took his buyout and went to work at the road grader plant on the edge of town, and he never added another one. He said the trains were the trains, and the plant was just a job.

So there were twenty-one. I knew every one of them by sight. I had grown up dusting them.

“Tamra,” I said, “please don’t sell any more of those.”