The Hall Light Left On for Teague

The light

That first night, about two in the morning, I heard a small sound in the hall. I found him on the floor in his pajamas with his back against the wall and his knees pulled up, staring into the dark.

“I can’t sleep,” he said. “It’s too dark. I don’t know where anything is.”

So I screwed a forty-watt bulb into the fixture over his door, the last one in the pantry, and the whole hall went the color of butter.

“Does it stay on?” he said.

“As long as you live in this house,” I said.

He slept until nine the next morning, the longest he ever slept under my roof, before or since.

That bulb has been changed eleven times. It has not once been off.

It stayed on through Ferris’s funeral, when Teague was twelve. Ferris went out to pull the last tomatoes one September evening and sat down in the garden row, and by the time I found him he was gone.

Teague stood at the graveside in a borrowed jacket, straight as a post, and did not cry there either. That night I found him in the hall again.

“Is it still going to stay on?” he asked.

“I told you it would.”

“Granddaddy’s not here to say it too.”

“Then I will say it for both of us,” I said. “As long as you live in this house.”

He put his head on my shoulder, and that was when he finally cried, and it went on a long time, and I let it.

The years between

He was quiet and careful and funny in a way that sneaked up on you. He checked the door locks every night without being asked, as if the house might need him.

He played left tackle for the Dunmore Springs Hornets. I sat in the same spot on the visitors’ side every game with a cushion and a thermos, and every game he looked up into the stands, found me, and gave me one nod.

Faye came to one game his senior year. She sat three rows behind me and left at halftime. Teague came to me afterward with his helmet under his arm.

“That was her, wasn’t it?”

“That was her.”

“She looked good,” he said. “She looked like she was doing better.”

“She did,” I said. It was true, and it was the kindest thing either of us could say.

At nineteen he sat at my kitchen table and told me he had joined the Mississippi National Guard. They would pay for his diesel mechanics schooling, he said. One weekend a month and two weeks in summer.

“That is not all,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Yes ma’am. I know it.”

I went into the pantry and shut the door and stood among the flour and the jars for ten minutes with my hand over my mouth. When I came out, I fried him an egg sandwich, because I did not know what else to do.

The armory

The unit was called up that winter. A truck company, headed overseas for nine months or a little more.

On a gray February morning I stood in the armory in Tupelo with two hundred other families. Wives held babies. A little boy in a camouflage cap held a sign that said Come Home Daddy in crayon, and I thought, bless him, he does not know yet how long nine months is.

When they called the company to formation, Teague took both my hands in his.

“You’re going to want to stay by the phone, Granny. I want you to eat supper and go to bed and let Mrs. Pettigrew help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

“I know you don’t. Let her anyway.” Then he looked down at my hands, and for a second he was seven years old. “Keep the light on.”

“Well, of course I will. Don’t be silly.”

“And don’t cry on me. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

At home I went straight down the hall to the light. It was already on. I stood under it anyway, with my hand on the wall, until dark.