Although his farm will one day be sold and divided up into housing lots, it is not yet part of a suburb. It is still a farm. And in the middle of July it is country cold. Skinner feels that cold more keenly now than he ever did as a younger man, as he stands on the back veranda of the farmhouse and contemplates the paddocks that have remained unchanged, more or less, all his life, and that have been in the family now for three generations, but which, nonetheless, will inevitably pass from him into local history. Instead of talking about Skinner’s farm and pointing to it, they will point to where it once was.
Skinner is the last of the family line. The last living branch of an old, dead tree. There is no one to pass the farm on to, and he has for a long time now felt the strength and energy that it takes to run a farm gradually draining from him. The strength that was once there in abundance, and which he took for granted, has gone. He has known this for some time now, just as he knows that the productive years of his life, if not completely gone, are coming to an end. And quickly. All the things that he brought to the community (milk, butter and cheddar cheese), and which the community needed and looked to him to provide, no matter what the weather, will soon be provided by someone else, somewhere else. Not here, where it always came from. Not from these paddocks across which his cows still roam.
He saw this in the eyes of the young newspaper man this morning. The young man had turned as he left, solely to look back upon him, Skinner, as he stood at his gate, watching the only bit of conversation he would be likely to have that day leave with the energy and purpose that he immediately recognised as the energy and the purpose of the young. And he knew precisely what the young man saw as he left, what caused him to turn around. He saw, this young man … what is the phrase? … ‘yesterday’s man’. Standing at the gate of change. But the young man didn’t see it with smugness or without care. He saw it with what Skinner registered at the time was respect. And that is why Skinner had nodded. It was a thank you. I don’t require much, the nod said. Just a thank you, and not a grand one either. Just an acknowledgment that the productive years, the best years, the years that had strength and energy have been noted. The productive years of someone’s life deserve at least that. For with the acknowledgment comes the respect that he saw in the young man’s eyes, and with the respect, the satisfaction that, in the end, it all mattered.
While Skinner is rolling this round in his mind, the way his father would have rolled the makings of a cigarette in his palm (Skinner never having acquired the taste for tobacco nor taken up the habit), he scans the paddocks and sees the light from Miss Carroll’s tent glowing in the dark. He can’t be sure when that light first arrived. He only remembers that one night it was there.
Before it came, the paddocks, from this vantage point at the back veranda, were country dark at night, just as they are now country cold. The only light came from the moon and stars, and that was a frosty, silver light that could be weak or strong, depending on the fullness of the moon and the brightness of the stars. Then one night Miss Carroll’s light was there. And although they are only nine miles from the city, and although the baker, grocer and butcher are within easy walking distance, and although there are a few scattered houses around the farm, the effect of the light appearing was extraordinary. And its light wasn’t frosty or silver but yellow. Golden, he now corrects himself. And it didn’t shine — it glowed. Someone was out there.
For most of his life, since the death of his parents, who worked themselves into an early grave, and the loss of his brother in the Great War, Skinner had thought of himself as alone. Never mind that there were people around to whom he could talk and visitors from time to time. They were not part of his life, nor were they part of the family he had known before it was blown apart by the sad and violent years of another age. No, since then his life had become, in his mind, a solitary one. And this was the effect of Miss Carroll’s light. That first time he became aware of it, it felt like company. And with the possibility of company came a sense of comfort and with that thought his life didn’t seem so solitary. One light in the dark can do that.
This is why Skinner is standing on the back veranda of his house. And although he is feeling the winter cold more than he ever did as a young man, he is also feeling the glow of comfort and registering the sensation that this life need not be solitary because there is now someone out there. This is what brings him here every night, this feeling of connection, of having made first contact with a world beyond his own, of having discovered a way of being in the world that wasn’t there before Miss Carroll’s light appeared. And when he thinks of it like this, part of him suspects that he might have spent too many years living alone and that those solitary years in which he, Skinner, likely as not, spoke only to Skinner about the things that mattered have done this to him. Made him imagine things, and just a bit too dramatically. Perhaps.
And so the light in Miss Carroll’s old canvas tent brings him back every night. As it has for months now. Brings him back here to the back veranda, where he stands, an inexplicable connection between him and the light in Miss Carroll’s tent bringing comfort, unfailingly, at the end of each day.
But if he goes too close to the light in the tent, if he responds to it as if it were an announcement, even an invitation (as a solitary light in the dark night is), and is not invited in, will the light lose its power to comfort because it will have lost its potential? And will this time that he has come to look forward to at the end of each day be lost to him?
It is then that the light dims. With this thought still in his mind, and which he has mulled over now for some time without resolution, he steps back into the house, no longer able to ignore the cold because the energy and the strength that resisted the weather and gave him his productive years are now gone and will not be back.