The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

We turned over the others. Every one had a year. 1968 on the oldest, a heavy one with a red globe that had a chip on the rim. 1988 on the last, a tall clear globe, the cleanest of them all.

I had dusted those lanterns a hundred times as a girl and never once looked underneath them.

“He dated them,” Toby said. “Like a calendar.”

“Like a calendar,” I said, and I had to go inside for a minute and run the faucet so he would not hear me.

On Wednesday I bought new wicks and a gallon of clear lamp oil at the hardware store downtown. The man behind the counter looked at the cut of wick I wanted and said, “Railroad lanterns?”

“My dad’s,” I said.

“My granddad worked the Big Four,” he said. “They had a lantern hanging in the kitchen till the day he died.” He threw in a little brass wick trimmer and would not let me pay for it.

Galion is that kind of town. Everybody’s grandfather worked for some railroad. The old Big Four depot still sits by the tracks with its tall roof, painted and fixed up, and on summer nights people sit on the benches out front and wait to hear a train.

That evening Toby and I trimmed the new wicks straight across, the way Dad always said, so the flame would burn even and not smoke. We filled each fount halfway and lit one on the back step to test it.

The flame came up small and steady inside the red globe. Toby held his hand near it and pulled it back.

“It’s warm,” he said, surprised.

“It’s real fire, bud.”

We sat there and watched it until the downstairs neighbor called up to ask if something was burning, and I told her it was only my father’s lantern, and she came out to look at it and stayed twenty minutes.

I went to see Dad on Thursday after work. Not inside. He was sitting on Phil’s front porch in the afternoon sun with a blanket over his knees and the radio on low to the Indians game, which he still calls the Indians and always will.

The folding table was gone from the curb. The garage door was open, and the garage was clean, swept, with Tamra’s car parked inside it for the first time since August.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“There’s my girl.” He tried to get up and I put a hand on his shoulder and sat down on the step beside his chair instead.

We talked about the game, and about the leaves turning on the maples along the street, and about Toby’s math grade, which was a B.

Then he looked over at the garage and was quiet for a while.

“Tamra had a sale,” he said.

“I saw.”

“She needed the room. She’s been parking out in the weather since I came.” He folded his hands on the blanket. “It’s her house, Joelle. She’s been good to me. She makes my eggs the way I like.”

“Did she ask you first?”

He did not answer that. He looked at his hands. His left wrist was still a little crooked from the break.

“They were just lanterns,” he said. “I’m eighty years old next week. I don’t need to own twenty-one lanterns.”

He said it the way a man says a thing he has been practicing.