The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

He did not wait for an answer. He turned and walked back along the fence, slow, and Tamra walked with him, and somewhere along the way, I could not tell you exactly where, she took his arm.

He stopped at every post.

“Eighty-seven,” he said. “That’s the winter the Mansfield local froze up at the switch and we were out there with a torch till three in the morning.”

“Eighty-five. That’s Joelle. She was born in May, on a Tuesday. I came straight off a run and still had the cinders on me, and the nurse made me wash my hands twice.”

“Eighty-one. Your husband broke his arm jumping off the garage roof with an umbrella, Tamra. Did he ever tell you that one?”

Tamra laughed. It came out of her surprised, like a cough. “No,” she said. “He never did.”

“Seventy-six. That’s Phil. Same year we became Conrail. I told the trainmaster I’d had a son and he gave me the afternoon off, and that was the only afternoon Conrail ever gave me.”

Phil stood behind them in the grass with his hands in his jacket pockets. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

They kept going, Dad naming the years, Tamra holding his arm. I stayed back with Toby. It was not mine to walk.

At the post marked 1971 Dad stopped longer than at any of the others. The lantern there had a red globe, a little cloudy at the top no matter how hard Toby and I had scrubbed it.

“Seventy-one,” Dad said. “That’s the year I married their mother. We bought this house in September. I carried this lantern home from the yard office and hung it on the back porch so she could find her way to the clothesline after dark.”

He reached out and touched the globe with the back of one finger, the way you would touch a sleeping child.

“She never needed it,” he said. “She knew every step of this yard. She just liked that it was there.”

Tamra did not say anything. She was holding his arm with both hands now.

The freight came out of the west a minute later, its headlight swinging around the gentle bend past the crossing, the horn going again for the next road. The ground under us began to hum, the way it does near a track, up through your shoes and into your knees.

Dad was standing by the 1968 post, at the house end of the line. He still had the 1988 lantern in his hand, the clear one, the last one. He let go of Tamra’s arm, very kindly, and patted her hand, and stepped up close to the fence.

As the engine came up even with the lantern nearest the crossing, Dad lifted his light.

He raised it high, over his head, and brought it straight down to his knee. Up, and down. Up, and down. Slow and even, the way he had done it ten thousand times on the ground beside a train, telling an engineer all was well and it was time to go.

The highball. I had not seen him do it since I was a little girl standing on this same grass in my pajamas.