Mailbag: Three Lanterns, No Oil

reader's porch. she says it was on the rail when she got home. she says it was on.

Three letters in one week, three different landings, same story: a lantern, found lit, that does not take oil.

"It was on the levee by the pump. I brought it home because it was a good lantern. It is still lit. I have not filled it. My husband says to put it back and I say put it back where, it was on a levee."

"Found it in the pirogue Sunday morning. Pirogue was tied up all night, nobody went down there. It is on my porch rail now because I am not bringing it in the house."

"My daughter found one in the cane. I told her to leave it. She left it. It followed her home, is how she says it, and I am writing to you because I do not know who else you write to about that."

The Chronicle has one too, which you know if you read the classifieds (and you should, I have told you). The St. Ambroise office has it and would like it gone. That makes four lanterns, and the advice column over there, bless her, has already given the only sensible instruction anybody has given this month: do not bring a lantern. They will think it is one of theirs, and they miss it.

I will say what I always say. Most strange things are a heron, a neighbor, or the light doing what light does on water. A lantern is not light on water. A lantern is a made thing, and somebody made these, and somebody is leaving them, and the number of people in this basin who want a lantern back is, as of this week, at least four.

Do not fill them. Do not carry them anywhere you want to come back from. If you have one, write me which landing. Not the number on your mailbox. The landing.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau