I pulled the tacks and reached inside. When I saw what my grandfather had kept hidden in the chair he sat in every night, I had to call my father, because every one of them had my father’s name on the back.
Photographs. A flat cigar box of them, wedged up into the frame where the webbing meets the rail, and the fabric worn shiny above it from sixty years of a man’s hand going in and coming back out.
They are all the same picture. That is the part that took me a while.
Every one is the view out that window. The front walk, the mailbox, the two ruts of the driveway, the road past it, and the corner of the porch with the light on. Taken from a chair. Taken at night, most of them, so the flash bounces off the glass and you get a white smear in the middle of your own reflection. Some of them you can barely tell what you are looking at.
On the back of each one, in pencil, a date and a number.
The first says August 9, 1968. Night 1. Light on.
My father left home on August 8, 1968. He was seventeen. There was a fight about the draft board and about a girl and about a truck, and my grandfather said something that he apparently could not take back, and my dad went out the door and did not come back for six years. I have known that story my whole life. Everybody in the family knows that story. What nobody knew was the counting.
Night 40. Night 300. Night 811, and somebody had written under it, colder tonight. Night 1,500. Night 2,000, and by then the handwriting has stopped being careful.
There are also four electric bills in that box, from 1969, 1971, 1972 and 1973, with the porch circuit figured out in the margin in his machinist’s pencil. He had worked out to the penny what it cost to leave that light burning every night of the year and he had written the number down like a man checking whether he could afford to keep doing it.
The last photograph is different. It is daylight. There is a truck in the driveway that my father owned in 1974 and complained about for thirty years afterward.
Night 2,190. He came up the walk. I did not run out. I let him knock. God forgive me, I made that boy knock, and then I turned the light off for the first time in six years.
My father is seventy-four. He drove over that same evening because I would not tell him on the phone what it was, only that he needed to come.
He stood in my kitchen and went through them one at a time, and he did not say anything for a long time, and then he said, “He never turned it off?” And I said no, sir. Not one night.
My dad remembers coming home and finding his father sitting in that chair reading the paper like nothing had happened. That is the story he has told at every family table for fifty years. The old man barely looked up. That is how he tells it.
He is not telling it that way anymore.
The chair is in his living room now, by his window, and I did not have to ask him. He put the tacks back in himself.