Chapter 30 — The Lantern in the Window
A year is not a long time in a valley, and it is not a short one either. It is fences mended and fences argued about; a calf crop; a school term; a grave visited in July with flowers that Nashona pretended not to have sent. It is a man calling in the spring, properly, with his hat in his hands — and finding, by summer, that the hat is generally on the hook by the door and nobody remarks on it, and by autumn that his chair at the table is simply his chair, and that a child has opinions about where he should sit at her birthday and expects them honored.
In the spring he had come properly, with his hat in his hands, and been fed, and been set to mending a gate hinge as a test of character he pretended not to recognize. In May, at the schoolhouse dance, he had danced exactly one dance, with the concentration of a man defusing something, and Lucy had pronounced it "not the worst," with the fairness of a hanging judge. In July he had gone with them to the burying ground with flowers, and stood far enough off to be respectful and near enough to be counted, and Nashona had looked at the distance and shortened it by one deliberate step, which the whole valley might have missed and Levi had not. In the autumn he had helped Kaya bring the herd down off the high pasture, and she had paid him in beef and argument, and he had gone home poorer in neither.
On Christmas Eve, 1884, Levi Hartman loaded his wagon with firewood, as was now his habit, and drove it across the creek in the blue afternoon, because the Little place burned more wood than one woman and a hired girl could reasonably be expected to split, and because some errands a man keeps for himself on principle.
The snow was not deep that year. The creek ran open and black under a skin of shore ice, talking to itself. He unloaded the wood at the side of the house under the eave where Sam had always stacked it — the order of the rows was Levi's now, tight and true — and he was setting the last armload when he looked up at the window.
The lantern was lit in it.
He knew that lantern. He had seen it there through the whole of last winter, and most of this one: a small lamp in a tin frame, set in the front window at dusk, because Lucy Little believed her father might be somewhere in the dark between the worlds and need a light to find the house by. Kaya had never argued her out of it, and Levi had never once, in a year of crossings, supposed it was any of his business.
He stood in the yard with his arms full of wood and understood, all at once and completely, that tonight it was his business. Because Lucy was eight years old now and had stopped talking about the lantern in the summer — children put things down the way they put down dresses that no longer fit, gently and without ceremony. And because the hand that had lit it tonight had lit it after he was already expected; after his wagon was already heard at the ford. He looked at the warm square of light for a long moment, and if any man riding past on the valley road had seen Levi Hartman standing in a widow's yard holding firewood with tears standing in his eyes, he would have had the decency — this being Cedar Valley, and this being the year that it was — to ride on and say nothing forever.
Kaya opened the door before he knocked.
"You'll catch your death," she said, "standing admiring my window like it owes you money."
"It does owe me money," Levi said gravely. "A year's worth of looking at it. I'm collecting."
Inside, the house was what it had been kept to be: warm at the center, lamplight on pine boards, the tree Nashona had supervised with a general's disdain for everyone's ornament placement, Lucy in her good dress vibrating at the frequency of Christmas itself, the wooden horse standing on the shelf beside Sam's watch, wound that morning and ticking — the past kept in its place, which was not a shrine and not a grave, but a shelf, where a family keeps what it loves.
Supper was at six. His chair was the one that didn't wobble; it had never occurred to anyone to replace it, since it was his. Lucy said the grace Sam had taught her, with an addition of her own devising for the company present, which Nashona permitted after review. And when the meal was done and the child had been allowed exactly one more song than the agreed number, Kaya rose and took the lantern from the window — for it had done its work; everyone it was lit for was home — and set it on the table among the dishes, where it burned the rest of the evening like the smallest and steadiest of guests.
Before the dishes, Lucy produced her gift, kept under her chair all through the meal with a conspirator's patience: a mitten, knitted under her grandmother's exacting tutelage, in a red so cheerful it could be seen from the road. The thumb was longer than the fingers and canted at an angle no thumb had ever achieved. "It is for the hand that drives," she informed him. "The other one is in your pocket anyway. Grandmother counted." Levi drew it on with ceremony, admired the thumb, declared it the first mitten ever made with room to point in, and wore it to clear the table.
Outside, the snow began again, fine and straight down, erasing the wagon tracks at the ford, covering the valley in clean white silence. Inside, the light held.
The End