In the dark, Eddie heard sixty people stop breathing.
He heard Dana Kostelnik say, very quietly, "Okay. That's it. All of you, back down the hill."
He heard his son say, "Dad?"
And he smelled it. Sharp and sour, like burned paper and old pennies. Eddie had smelled that smell a thousand times in thirty-one years at the mill. It was not cable. It was not copper.
It was Bakelite. An old fuse block, cooked.
"Don't touch anything," Eddie called out. "Tommy, come here."
Tom came down the hill with a flashlight. Eddie took it from him and pointed it at the map in his lap.
"Under the east leg," he said. "There's a junction box. I spliced the main feeder there in 1979, and when I ran the second line, I put a little fuse block in that box so the two lines couldn't backfeed each other. It's old Bakelite. Brown. About the size of a deck of cards."
"Okay."
"That fuse block cooked. Probably cracked years ago and let water in. When Ricky switched over, it shorted and threw the breaker on the work lights too. The star's fine. The line's fine. It's one little block."
Tom stared at him. "You can tell all that from the smell?"
"I can tell it because I put it there," Eddie said. "And I'd forgotten about it until just now. That's on me, Tommy. Not you."
They did it in the dark, by flashlight.
Tom and Ricky opened the east junction box. The brown fuse block inside was cracked straight across and black on one side. Tom held it up in the light so Eddie could see it from the bottom of the hill.
"That's it," Eddie said.
One of the shop students had a spare block in a coffee can of parts his grandfather had kept from the mill. It was not the same model. But it was close, and Tom was a better electrician than his father had ever told him.
"You'll have to bridge it," Eddie called up. "Short jumper. Same gauge."
"I know, Dad."
"I'm just saying."
"I know." And then, after a moment, with something new in his voice. "Hold the light still, would you?"
Eddie held the light still.
While Tom worked, he talked without looking down.
"I used to watch you go up this hill," he said. "When I was eight. You'd come home at night with your hands black and your coat smelling like the mill, and Mom would say, your father lit the star today. I thought you'd built the whole thing yourself."
"I didn't build it. I just kept it lit."
"Same thing, when you're eight." Tom tightened a screw. "I was proud of you, Dad. I don't think I ever told you that either."
Eddie could not answer that. He kept the light steady, which was the one thing he could do, and he did it as well as he had ever done anything.
It took forty minutes. The crowd waited in the cold. Not one of them went home. The grandmother with the coffee went around a second time. Dana Kostelnik stood next to Eddie's lawn chair, and halfway through, she unfolded her arms and put one hand on his shoulder.
At seven-fifteen, Tom climbed down from the east leg and came to stand beside his father.
"It's ready," he said. "You want to do it?"
Eddie looked up at him. "I can't climb up to that switch, son."
"I know." Tom held out his phone. On the screen was a call to Ricky Sabol, already connected. "Tell him when."
Eddie took the phone. His hand was not steady.
"Ricky," he said. "Go ahead."
The star came on one point at a time.
The east pair first, then the north, then the west, then the south, four hundred bulbs warming up from orange to white across the dark hill. Sixty people cheered. A car down on the river bridge honked, and then another, and then a whole line of them, all the way across the river. Somebody started singing Silent Night, and the hill took it up, sixty voices thin and off-key in the cold.
Eddie did not cheer. He sat in his lawn chair and looked up at it. His eyes were wet, and he let them be. Beside him, Dana Kostelnik was crying openly and did not seem to mind who saw.
Tom sat down on the cold ground next to him. They did not say anything for a long time.
"I should have come to more of your games," Eddie said finally. "When you were a kid. I was always working the turn."
"I know why you worked," Tom said. "I understand it now. I've got two of my own." He was quiet a moment. "I should have called you."
"You called today."
"You called," Tom said. "I just answered."
In January, Eddie moved into his room across the river. His daughter hung his old union jacket on the back of the door. Tom drove out every other Sunday with the grandkids and a box of nut roll from the bakery.
The borough council voted unanimously in February to keep the star on the old feeder until the borough could afford to replace it right. They named the switch at the base the Mrozek Switch and put a small brass plate on it.
Every night in December after that, Eddie sat in the chair by his window with the lamp off. Across the black river, on Mill Hill, four hundred bulbs he had spliced by hand burned through the night.
