City Lights

My father, rather a quiet man, told a story only the one time, if even then—he had so little need, it seemed, of being understood. Intervals of years, his silences! Late in his life he recalled for us that when he was sixteen, his papa entrusted to him a wagonload of hogs, which he was to deliver to the train depot, a half-day’s ride from home, over a hilly dirt road. Lightly he held the reins, light his heart, the old horses, as ever, willing. In town at noon he heard the station- master say the train had been delayed, would not arrive until that evening. The boy could only wait. At home they’d wait for him and worry and would place the kerosene lamp in the window. Thus the day had turned to dusk before he turned about the empty wagon, took his weary horses through the cloud of fireflies that was the little town. In all his years he’d never seen those lights—he thought of this, he said, until he and his milk-white horses came down the last moonlit hill to home, drawn as from a distance toward a single flame.