The Lanterns on Dad’s Back Fence

The engine was three units long, and the engineer was a dark shape in the cab window with the panel lights behind him. I saw his head turn. I saw him see the line of lanterns, and the old man in the cap with the light going up and down.

And he gave us two long blasts on the horn. Long and longer. They rolled out over the yard and the house and the whole east side of Galion.

Dad told me later that two longs is in the rulebook, but it means release brakes and go, and no engineer on earth was obliged to blow it for an old man with a lantern. “That one isn’t orders,” he said. “That one’s just hello.”

The freight went by for a long time, boxcars and tank cars and hoppers, the wheels clicking over the joint by the crossing, and every one of those twenty-one small flames held steady through the wind of it.

Dad stood at the fence with his lantern lowered and watched every car go by until the last one went past and the sound went down the line and out of town.

When he turned around, his face was wet, and so was everyone else’s, including Toby’s, who would want me to say that it was the smoke.

We stayed out there until full dark. Toby brought camp chairs from my trunk, and Phil got Dad settled in one by the fence with the blanket from his porch, and Tamra sat down in the grass next to him in her good coat.

I had brought a sheet cake from the grocery store with “Happy 80th Herb” on it in blue icing and one candle, and we ate it off paper plates in the light of the lanterns. Toby had two pieces. Dad had one and asked for a corner of another.

After a while Tamra got up and came over to where I was standing by the 1971 post. She did not look at me at first. She looked at the lantern.

“The woman across the street came over Sunday,” she said. “She told me she’d watched you carry them out two at a time. She said she’d lived on that street for thirty years and never seen a meaner morning.” She took a breath. “She’s right.”

I did not say anything. I let her say it.

“I want you to know I wasn’t trying to hurt him,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about him at all. That’s the truth, and it’s worse. I was thinking about me. About his recliner in my front room and his deep freeze running in my garage and my car out in the rain since August.”

She pressed her lips together. “Nobody asked me, Joelle. Phil came home one night and said your dad was coming Saturday. Nobody asked me if I could do it.”

“I know,” I said. “Phil told me. I didn’t ask you either. I didn’t even think to. I’m sorry for that.”

She nodded, quick, like she did not trust herself to say anything to that.

“I’ll give you back the hundred and five,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Keep it. It’s the best hundred and five dollars I ever spent.”

She almost smiled. Then she looked at the cloudy red globe on the post between us.