Free Newfoundland Stories by Eldon Drodge

corner of the house to empty my bladder before I went to bed, like I always do, when I happened to glance up in the potato garden – and there was this light.
    â€œIt was the strangest thing,” he continued. “It wasn’t very big or very bright and it never moved around or flickered. I must have watched it for an hour or more and then it disappeared, just like that. I was watching it so long that Alice came out to see if anything was wrong with me, and she saw it too.”
    That was all. Jake and Ruth talked a little bit about it later, but neither of them really gave it much thought until Uncle Simon came back the next morning to repeat the same story – the light had been there again.
    â€œTell you what, Simon,” Jake told him. “If you see it again tonight, let me know, and I’ll come and have a look at it too.”
    Sure enough, that night, an hour or so after nightfall, Uncle Simon tapped on their door and poked his head in to tell them that the light was there again.
    â€œNed,” Jake told his son, “stay here with your mother. I won’t be gone long.”
    Ned protested, “I’m coming too.”
    Surprisingly, for once, Ruth came down on Ned’s side. “I’m sure it will be all right, Jake. There’s nothing to harm him.”
    Ned smiled to himself. Obviously, she wanted to go herself. His father wasn’t pleased to be challenged, but after he and Ned’s mother argued for a few minutes, they agreed that they would all go over to see what this light was all about.
    And there it was, just as Uncle Simon said. It was hard to say for sure how close it was or how far away. It could have been just a few feet or it could have been all the way up to the top of the garden, perhaps even farther – there was just no way of telling. Ned and his parents watched it until it disappeared, just like Uncle Simon said it had the night before. They waited a little while longer to see if it would reappear. When it didn’t, they all went home. When he was upstairs in bed later that night, Ned could still hear his mother and father talking about it down in the kitchen. He felt oddly disconcerted.
    The light was there again the next night and the night after that. By that time Aunt Alice was convinced that it was a token.
    â€œIt’s Harold, I’m sure of it,” she insisted. “There’s something wrong and he’s trying to let us know.”
    Harold was their only son. Uncle Simon and Aunt Alice had three other children, all daughters, but they were all married and had by then moved out on their own. Harold and a boy named Tom Peddle from across the harbour, along with two other young men from the other side of the bay, had all left together several months earlier to go to St. John’s to sign up for the war. Aunt Alice and Uncle Simon hadn’t heard anything about Harold for a long while until one day they received a letter from him letting them know that he was over in France. The envelope also contained money from his soldier’s pay. Aunt Alice never spent it. She just put it away in her bureau to give back to him when he came home again after the war.
    Night after night for a full week the light reappeared for an hour or so, and then disappeared, just like clockwork. The two families looked for it every night. After a while they began to wish that it would just go away. It was starting to play on their nerves. Sometimes Ned got the cold shivers and felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck when he saw it, and instinctively stayed as close as possible to his parents’ sides. When he went to bed afterwards, he sometimes asked his father to stay with him until he went to sleep.
    By that time Aunt Alice had herself worked into a state of anxiety. She was sure Harold was dead, that that was what the light was trying to tell them. She cried and moaned for hours on end and nothing Ned’s mother and father, Uncle