Read The Year the Lights Came On for Free Online Page A

knew the incomprehensible truth. She knew.
    Thomas had been hitchhiking and a man in a pickup truck offered a lift and there was a crash and Thomas was flung from the cab of the truck and his head struck viciously and he rolled into a ditch and died hours later in a small country hospital, with my oldest sister, Emma, sitting alone beside his bed.
    When they tell of Thomas’ death, my sisters remember the painful irony: only a few weeks earlier, one of Thomas’ dearest friends had been killed in an automobile wreck and Thomas had vowed he would never again drive.
    He kept his vow.
    He did not drive.
    He hitchhiked.
    On the day he was killed, Thomas was hitchhiking to another assignment with the REA.
    I have watched their faces when my sisters talked of Thomas. The faces of women have a quaint way of expanding when they are in memory. (It is a butterfly of the eyes, spreading wide, powdery, transparent wings.) My sisters’ faces have always betrayed them, betrayed their longing for another time in another place.
    Thomas would have understood our joy.
    He would have known what we knew, what we thought of, whispered about: the Highway 17 Gang had the Georgia Power Company, and it made everything about them different from us. Their houses had indoor bathrooms. Their mothers had electric washing machines for washing clothes, and electric irons for pressing creases in trousers. Their food came steaming from electric stoves—with four eyes and top-and-bottom coil oven. Electric refrigerators kept their milk from spoiling and made ice that snapped out of trays in tea-size cubes. Electric water pumps sucked water out of the ground and sent it spurting through iron arteries, ready at the touch.
    Our Side had draw-bucket wells and iceboxes in smokehouses and wood-burning stoves and big iron wash pots and outdoor toilets.
    Because of electricity, our habits were not the habits of the Highway 17 Gang. The way we bathed, cooked, dressed, looked—even the way we voided ourselves—was different.
    At least, with our knowledge of the REA, we had solved one mystery: we knew why all the Boy Scout and Emery Methodist Church parties were held at one of the houses on Highway 17. We could not expect one of them to use the facility of our outdoor toilets, but it was a carnival experience for one of us to flush a commode and watch the swirling water vanish somewhere below the ground.
    Thomas would have understood our joy.
    Thomas would have celebrated our giddiness.

5
    WE WERE DRUNK with our knowledge of the REA. The Select Seven. Smirking, preening, laughing demonically.
    The Highway 17 Gang thought we were batty.
    We didn’t care.
    We knew about the REA—knew, fully, the impact of not having electricity—and that was our advantage. We were not arrogant; we were smug, and in that smugness, we discovered a kind of new joy. To our delight, we realized an additional benefit in our behavior: it confused the Highway 17 Gang. They could not understand our suddenly patronizing attitude, and we extended our dramatics to repulsive extremes.
    One day, Freeman even opened the lunchroom door for Dupree, bowing graciously as Dupree passed, so amazed by Freeman’s unexpected kindness that he tripped over the top step.
    *
    Wesley warned us often about secrecy. He knew we would be regarded as idiots if—in the loose tongue of anger—we began babbling about electricity. To be dynamic, the telling would require a dynamic moment, and we had vowed on the Big Gully Oath to permit Wesley that decision.
    “I mean it, now,” Wesley said. “We waited all our lives for this, and there’s no need to throw it away just because somebody gets mad.”
    Freeman assured him none of us would violate our oath, or the consequences would be terrible.
    “That goes for you, too, Colin. I don’t care if you are Wesley’s brother,” Freeman emphasized.
    “A team of wild mules couldn’t drag nothin’ out of me,” I promised Freeman. “Shoot, there’s nothin’ that