The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

The fence was the same fence I grew up with: old cedar posts every eight feet with two split rails between them, weathered gray. Dad had set those posts himself the summer I was born. There were twenty-four of them along the back line. I had counted them on Wednesday.

Friday was clear and cool, the maples already dropping leaves all over the yard, the kind of late September evening where you can smell somebody burning leaves three blocks away. Toby and I got there at six-thirty with a stepladder from the apartment storage, a box of kitchen matches, a hand towel, and all twenty-one lanterns packed in laundry baskets on the back seat.

We had already filled them at home. I did not want to be pouring lamp oil in the grass in the dark.

On the Wednesday before, I had come out alone and pushed a black iron shepherd’s hook into the ground beside every post, the curved kind people hang flower baskets from, so each lantern would hang just over the top of its post, facing the track.

Toby wanted to hang them in order, oldest to newest, from the gate at the house end to the post nearest the crossing. So we did. 1968 on the first post, 1988 on the twenty-first.

“Hang them still,” I told him. “Bail all the way down on the hook, and make sure it can’t swing.”

“Why?”

“Because Grandpa taught me that a red light swinging back and forth by a track means stop. A train crew sees that, they stop. I don’t want some engineer throwing on his brakes because of a birthday party.”

Toby thought about that. “What does a white light mean?”

“Depends how you wave it. Grandpa can tell you better than me.”

We worked our way down the fence. Toby held the ladder and handed them up, and I set each one on its hook and pressed the bail down tight. The red ones went on in the low sun and glowed even before we lit them.

When they were all hung, I went back down the line with the matches. You lift the globe, light the wick, lower the globe, turn the wick down until the flame stops smoking. Twenty-one times. My hands smelled like lamp oil, and I didn’t mind it at all.

I missed one. The 1985 lantern, the year I was born, a red globe with a dent in the frame, had a short wick that would not take. I took it down, trimmed it again with the hardware man’s little brass trimmer, filled it, and carried it back up the yard by myself. Toby had gone out front to the car for the cake.

That is the one I was lifting back onto its post when the sky started going from blue to dusk behind the house. I had on my maroon cardigan over a white T-shirt and my good jeans, and my hair was pushed behind my ears, and I remember thinking I should have brought gloves.

I hung it on its hook and pressed the bail down and stepped back.