Hanks boy was quiet for a long time after I said the night in 79. Then he said, “Mrs. Petrakis, my father told me that story every year until he died. I always wondered if it was true. I guess the lantern kept it after all.”
“What story?” I asked. “Gus never told me what happened in 79. Only to call you.”
“In the winter of 1979 there was a derailment outside the yard,” he said. “A tanker car came off the rails in the dark. Your husband and my father saw it from the porch, and the two of them ran out and flagged the 10:15 freight down with a lantern before it hit the wreck. They saved the whole train, and every soul on it.”
I sat down on the back step. Forty-five years of that horn blowing twice, and I never knew why.
“The company wanted to keep it quiet,” he went on. “So the union worked out an agreement. In exchange, the railroad released its easement on your house and deeded the land to Gus, free and clear, forever. The paper in that lantern is signed by the company and stamped by the union. The easement the railroad man told you about was given up forty-five years ago.”
I unscrewed the bottom of Guss old lantern and smoothed the paper out on my knee, and there were the signatures.
Nobody beats the railroad. But the railroad had already lost this one, the night my husband picked up a lantern.
Hanks boy, who was a lawyer now, brought the agreement to the company himself. The men in the office read their own predecessors signatures and went very quiet. There was no easement. There never had been, not since 1979.
The railroad expanded its yard the other direction. Nobody came for my house again.
And every night at 10:15, the freight still comes by, and the horn still blows twice, for a brakeman who waved from this porch for forty years, and who made sure I would never have to leave it.