NC EOG Practice Test 10

The Night the Lights Came

¹All summer of 1939, the men from the electric cooperative had been planting poles along the dirt road like a row of tall, bare trees. Lottie Barrow counted them from the porch every evening. There were forty-one poles between the Barrow farm and the crossroads store, and a black wire strung between them that hummed when the wind blew.

²"Two more weeks," her father said in August, after the cooperative man came to wire the house. Now a single glass bulb hung from the ceiling in the kitchen, and another hung in the front room, with a little button switch by each door. Lottie pressed the kitchen switch at least ten times a day, even though nothing happened yet. Click on. Click off. It felt like holding a promise in her fingertip.

³Granny Ida did not press the switch. Granny Ida did not even look at it.

⁴Every night she still filled the kerosene lamp, trimmed its wick with her little scissors, and polished the glass chimney with a scrap of newspaper until it shone. Then she carried it to her rocking chair and read the paper in the soft yellow circle it made.

⁵"Won't need that much longer," Lottie's father said one evening, nodding at the lamp.

⁶"We'll see," said Granny Ida, and she turned a page.

⁷Lottie did not understand her. Kerosene smelled. The lamp smoked if you turned the wick too high, and you had to carry it from room to room like a baby. The electric light, the cooperative man had said, would be as bright as many lamps put together. Lottie could read in any corner of the house. She could finish her chores after dark. She could see the bottom of the flour barrel without sticking her whole head inside.

⁸"Why doesn't Granny want the lights?" she asked her mother while they snapped beans.

⁹Her mother was quiet for a moment. "That lamp was a wedding present," she said. "Granny's mother gave it to her the year she married your grandpa. She read to your daddy by that lamp when he was small. She read to me by it the winter I was so sick and couldn't sleep. Some things are hard to put away, even when something new comes along."

¹⁰On the second Saturday in September, the power came on.

¹¹It happened at dusk. Lottie was standing by the kitchen door with her finger on the switch, the way she had stood every evening for two weeks, and when she pressed it this time, the bulb blazed. White light poured over everything: the oilcloth on the table, the dented coffee pot, the cracks in the floorboards that Lottie had never noticed before. Her father whooped. Her little brother, Clyde, ran from room to room clicking switches until her mother caught him by the collar.

¹²Lottie ran to the front room. Granny Ida was sitting in her rocker beneath the new bulb, which was blazing too. The kerosene lamp sat unlit on the table beside her.

¹³"Isn't it wonderful?" Lottie said.

¹⁴Granny Ida squinted up at the bulb. "It's bright," she said. "I'll give it that. Bright as a noonday sun on a tin roof." She did not sound as if she meant it as a compliment.

¹⁵That night, after everyone had gone to bed, Lottie crept downstairs for a drink of water. A small yellow glow was coming from the front room. Granny Ida had switched off the electric light. She sat in her rocker with the kerosene lamp lit beside her and the newspaper in her lap, and her eyes were closed.

¹⁶Lottie almost tiptoed away. Then she went and sat on the floor by the rocker and leaned her head against Granny's knee.

¹⁷"Read me something?" she whispered.

¹⁸Granny Ida opened her eyes. She didn't say anything about the lights, and Lottie didn't either. Granny just picked up the paper and began to read aloud, slowly, in the yellow circle of the lamp, while the bright new bulb hung dark and quiet above them.