because the cabinet over the stove was not hiding his fear of the dark. It was keeping a light for the men who died in it.
Inside that little padlocked cabinet, up where you needed a chair to reach it, was a candle, half burned, in a brass holder. Around it, laid out careful, were dog tags. Six sets. And propped behind them, a photograph of seven young men in jungle fatigues, and a folded paper in my grandfathers hand.
Six of the seven in that photo did not come home. My grandfather was the one who did.
The note told it, as much as he could ever bring himself to tell.
We got hit at night and I was the only one who walked out of the dark. I have never been able to leave them there. So every night I keep a light on, and once a week I light the candle for them, so no man I served with ever has to lie in the dark again wondering if anybody remembers. The light is not for me. It is for them.
Forty-five years that kitchen light burned all night, every night, and we all figured it was an old mans nerves, a soldier who came back afraid of the dark and never got over it. We had it exactly backward. My grandfather was not afraid of the dark. He was standing guard against it, for six men he could not save, keeping a light burning so they would never be left alone in the black the way they were the night they died.
Every VFW dinner, every quiet spell where he got up and went to the porch, we thought was a haunted man running from something. He was not running. He was tending a vigil forty-five years long, and he did it in secret, up over his own stove, because grief that big does not want an audience.
I sat down right there on the kitchen floor and I cried for a man I thought I understood and never did.
I did not put the candle back in the cabinet. I took the six sets of dog tags and the photograph to the VFW where my grandfather ate his quiet dinners for forty years, and I told them the whole of it, and there is a case on the wall now with those six names and my grandfathers, and a small light that the post keeps burning day and night, always, so it never goes dark.
The men in Vietnam who did not come home have a light on them now, in the light, where everyone can see. My grandfather kept it alone in the dark of his kitchen for forty-five years. The least the rest of us can do is keep it lit for him too, so that quiet man who stood guard so long finally gets to stand down.