The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

Twenty-one small flames in a row along the fence, red and silver, beside the track. They did not flicker. They just burned, steady and warm, the way Dad always said a good lantern should.

Toby came around the house with the cake box and stood next to me, his free hand in his jacket pocket.

“Mom,” he said. “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Phil’s truck came up the street at seven-thirty-five. I heard it before I saw it, that low diesel he is so proud of. It turned into the drive alongside the house and stopped.

Phil got out first and came around to the passenger side to help Dad, but Dad already had the door open. He got down slow, one hand on the door and one on Phil’s arm. He had on his good flannel jacket and his conductor’s cap from the Conrail years, the one with the brim worn shiny.

He looked at the house first. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he looked past it, down the yard, at the fence.

He stopped walking.

I was standing halfway down the yard with Toby. I could not see Dad’s face very well in the dusk, but I saw his hand come up off Phil’s arm and go flat against his chest.

“Joelle,” he said.

That was all. Just my name.

Phil looked at the lanterns, then at me, then back at the lanterns. He came across the grass with Dad on his arm, slow, the way you walk a man who has been in a hospital.

“Where did these come from?” he asked, low, so only I could hear.

“Your curb,” I said. “Five dollars apiece.”

He closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them, they were wet. “You bought them all.”

“Every one.”

Then the passenger door of the truck opened again, and Tamra got out.

I had not known she was coming. Phil told me later he had not known either, until she got her coat and climbed in at the last minute. She said she was not going to sit home on her father-in-law’s eightieth birthday like a stranger.

She came across the grass toward us, and she had her hand up over her nose and mouth.

“Phil, that smoke,” she said. “It’s going to be in my hair and my coat all night. Is that kerosene?”

“Lamp oil,” Toby said, helpfully.

She stopped. She looked at the fence. I watched it reach her, down the line of posts, one light at a time.

“Are those…” she said, and did not finish.

Nobody answered her.

Far off to the west, past the crossing, a freight blew for town. Two longs, a short and a long, the crossing whistle, carried a long way on the cool air.

Dad let go of Phil’s arm. He walked, on his own, down the yard to the fence. He walked to the far end, to the last post, nearest the crossing, where the 1988 lantern hung with its tall clear globe. He lifted it off the post by its bail.

Tamra had followed him without seeming to decide to. She stopped at his elbow.

“Herb,” she said. “What is all this?”

He held the lantern up so the light fell on her face, and he looked at her a long moment, and then he said, very gently, “This one is 1988. This is my last year.”