Read The Year the Lights Came On for Free Online

on in somebody else’s head?” Wesley responded.
    “I don’t know—I thought…”
    “What is it you don’t understand?”
    “Well, I never heard Daddy talking about the REA, but I’ve heard of it before. I know I have. I can’t remember why.”
    For a moment, Wesley did not answer. Then he said, “It took me some time to figure that out. Maybe we not old enough to remember much about it, but the REA used to be talked about around home. Thomas was working as a lineman for the REA when he was killed.”
    The apparition of Thomas rushed into an eerie, distorted vision—a baby’s vision. I was high in the air, dizzy, flying, falling, falling, falling into Thomas’ face.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “Yeah,” replied Wesley. “That was a long time ago.”
    *
    Thomas would have understood our joy. He would have celebrated our giddiness.
    Thomas would have told us marvelous stories about electricity. He would have made it real for us—real with places and dates and names and wildly funny happenings.
    Thomas. My older sisters loved to talk of him.
    He had a smile and a laugh and eyes with This Morning’s Sun burning blue. He knew how to say hello and make the exuberance of that hello surround you and follow you everywhere you traveled that day. He had a dancer’s step and there was a dancer’s tune playing forever in some mysterious, secret place in his mind. He was a man-child, or a child-man, and he had a way of making that magical confusion seem distinctly his, and his alone. He was restless and a wanderer, quick for joy and quick for pain.
    Thomas was First Son, the family’s Other Man, and he had a fierce temper against threat to his brothers and sisters. Once, when some unknowing fool of a Saturday drunk made a too-teasing suggestion to one of my sisters, Thomas jerked the fellow up by his shirt, hoisted him overhead, and tossed him against a kerosene drum in a service station. He was only fourteen, but Olympian in strength and courage. Even my father knew that. There was a time when my father decided to be humorous and he hid in the old Civil War cemetery with a cotton sheet draped over his head, and waited to leap out when his children passed. Everyone ran. Everyone except Thomas. Thomas scooped up a rock and hurled it at my father, hitting him in the shoulder.
    But Thomas had always been an apparition to me. A blur.
    There was a face that I thought was his. It was the same face in the photo album my mother kept safe in a cedar chest. The face was below me, looking up. Somehow, in slow motion, I have always been falling into his face, feeling the powerful jolt of fingers sinking into my armpits and the swishing sensation of being dropped and pitched, soundless and weightless, into the air. And there was another baby’s vision: lying peacefully still and reaching for a face—the same face that memory tells me is Thomas and the same face that is in the photo album—and not being able to touch it until he bends in obedience to my reach, and my fingers slide over the ticklish softness of his eyebrows. There was never any sound to any of this. I do not remember the laughing and whistling and singing my sisters tell of. I know they have not lied to me; I simply did not hear it. (The smile of that photo-album face was too explosive not to be noisy and wonderfully musical.)
    *
    J. P. Wynn drove down from Royston with the message of Thomas’ death. J. P. Wynn was a distant cousin and he operated a small grocery, where we had an account that was more an understanding than a legal contract. He did not always charge for jawbreakers. My sisters agree that Mother recognized Cousin J. P. Wynn’s car as it topped the hill near the old Civil War cemetery, recognized its age and color and keep.
    Mother said, very suddenly, “Oh, no. Thomas is dead.” That premonition fascinated me. Mother knew. She knew. It was raining that day. Perhaps something in the rain drove its sound waves into her mind in that moment, and Mother