Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Wethersfield ·
Why They Never Close the Lanterns
A Wethersfield lantern door is left swinging in the worst of weathers, because a light that is shut stops looking and closes the books too soon.
- status: folklore
They say there is a rule in Wethersfield older than the cobbles, and the rule is short: a lantern's door is never shut. Not in the equinox gales, not when the sleet comes sideways off the estuary, not when a wick drowns and the glass goes black — the little hinged door stays open, or the light stays cold. Every lamp from the harbour steps up to the chapelyard carries one of those doors, and the lamplighters go their rounds in weather that would keep a sailor ashore, and they go round with a box of wooden wedges in the barrow, because a door will creep shut on its own in a wind, and a creeping door is the one thing this town will not stand for.
And the reason is not moths, whatever the jokers at the fish market say. The reason is bookkeeping. A lantern stands still and looks, and while its door stands open, the account it keeps stands open with it: the street, the gate, the seabank, whoever passes under — nothing carried to the finished side, nothing written off. Shut the door, and the light stops looking. And a light that stops looking has, in the manner of ledgers everywhere, seen enough. What it has seen enough of gets carried over as settled, all in one stroke, and no name is ever signed to the stroke.
We had our lesson of that in my grandfather's time. Tom Pask kept the fish-gate light the year the herring failed, and one sleet night he latched the little door to keep the wick from drowning, meaning no more than a kindness to a wick. Come morning, the lamp was bright and dry, and everything in Wethersfield went on naming Ede Pellow, the netmender who had passed under that lamp in the hour of the shutting — and then, all in the same week, all the papers stopped. The harbour roll. The ferry book, which never misses. The rent book, the milk book, the parish book. One line to a page, tidy as you like, the way a clerk finishes a thing. His bench is still out on the gate with his needles crossed in it, and no grave ever came of it, and that is the fright of the thing if you want it put straight: you cannot mourn by the book what the book will not keep.
So the custom, since then, is iron. The doors swing. The wedges go in. The fish-gate light has its door wired back open to this day, and the latch rusted clean from want of use, and when a stranger tells us we are wasting oil, we thank him kindly for his economy and send him along to look at the bench.
A word, too, for the careful. If ever you find a lantern door shut in Wethersfield, you do not open it yourself after dark. You fetch the lamplighter and you stand back while he unhooks it, and you let him read the glass before he lights it, on the chance that something got carried over while it was shut and is owed its hour back.
The lads on the lamp rounds tell it still, where the ladders dry by the oil house, and they keep it to the letter: door open, wedge in pocket, wick drowned or not. The telling came down to me from a lamplighter's daughter on my mother's side, and I keep it as I got it. And the question they leave swinging with every open door is the one this town has never had the reading of: when a shut light settles a thing before its time — who makes the stroke, and what is it, all this while, that gets settled toward?