The steel star on Mill Hill had burned over Iron Bend, Pennsylvania, every December since 1952, and on a Thursday in November the borough council voted five to two to leave it dark.
Eddie Mrozek read about it in the Thursday paper at his kitchen table, with his coffee going cold and his reading glasses on the end of his nose. Then he read it again.
The star was sixty feet across, built by mill workers in 1952 out of steel the mill had rolled itself. Four hundred light bulbs ran along its points. It stood on the hill above the river where the blast furnaces used to be, and on clear nights in December you could see it from the river bridge, three miles off.
The wiring had failed last winter. The council had gotten one quote to fix it. Forty-one thousand dollars, for new LED lights and new cable from the street. The borough did not have it.
Eddie set the paper down. He was eighty-one. In January, he was moving into the assisted living place across the river, because his knees and his heart had both put in for retirement, and his daughter had found him a room with a window that faced the hill.
It had not occurred to him until that moment that the star might be dark when he got there.
Eddie had been an electrician at the mill for thirty-one years, until it closed in 1986. In 1979, the foreman had sent him up the hill to rewire the star. He had spent six weeks up there that fall with two helpers, running new cable through the steel tubes and splicing every circuit by hand.
He still remembered all of it. Four circuits, one for each pair of points. A big knife switch in a steel box at the base. A junction box under the east leg where the feeder came up from the old mill substation.
And a second feeder.
He sat up straighter in his chair.
In 1979, the main line had kept tripping in wet weather. So Eddie had run a backup feeder from the old pump house at the bottom of the hill, and wired a transfer switch into the box at the base. He had told his foreman about it. The foreman had kept it to himself, because the foreman kept everything to himself.
If that line was still in the ground, the star did not need forty-one thousand dollars. It needed somebody who knew where to look.
Eddie called the borough office Friday morning and asked to speak to the council president. Her name was Dana Kostelnik, and she was forty-four, and she had been a little girl in his parish when he was an usher.
She listened politely.
"Mr. Mrozek, I appreciate it," she said. "I really do. But the engineer from Pittsburgh looked at it in March. He said the whole system is shot. And honestly, the borough's insurance won't let a retired volunteer go up on that structure."
"I don't need to go up on it," Eddie said. "I need to go down. Into the box at the bottom."
"I'm sorry," Dana said. "We just can't take the risk."
He sat by the phone for a long time after that. Then he picked it up again and dialed a number he had not called in eleven years.
It rang four times. A man answered, sounding busy. "Tom Mrozek."
"Tommy," Eddie said. "It's your dad."
There was a long silence on the line. Eddie had expected it. He and his son had not spoken since his wife's funeral, when Tom said Eddie had never once come to a single thing that mattered, and Eddie said some things back that he had regretted every day since.
Tom was fifty-two now. He was an electrical engineer with a firm in Pittsburgh. Eddie knew that from his daughter, who talked to both of them and had given up trying to make them talk to each other.
"Dad," Tom said finally. "Is something wrong? Are you sick?"
"No. I need your help with the star."
Tom came out on Saturday. He drove up in a gray SUV and stood in the kitchen doorway in a good jacket, looking at the old man as if he was not sure what to do with his hands.
"You look older," Tom said.
"I am older," Eddie said. "Sit down. I drew you a map."
He had drawn it the night before on the back of a feed store calendar, from memory. The star. The four circuits. The box at the base. The old pump house at the bottom of the hill. A dotted line between them.
Tom studied it for a long time.
"You ran a second feeder," he said slowly. "In 1979. Without telling anybody."
"I told my foreman."
"Same thing, from what you used to say about him." Tom almost smiled. Then he stopped himself. "The council will never let us touch it."
"The council will let a licensed engineer from Pittsburgh look at it," Eddie said. "For free."
Word got around Iron Bend the way it always had, from the bakery to the church to the bar by the bridge. By the next Saturday, there were twenty people on Mill Hill.
There were retired mill hands with tool belts they had not worn in forty years. There was the high school shop teacher and six of his students. There was a borough lineman named Ricky Sabol who said he was not technically on duty and did not want his name in the paper. And there was Dana Kostelnik, standing to one side with her arms folded, who had agreed to it all only because Tom Mrozek had a license and a lot of patience on the phone.
Eddie sat in a lawn chair at the bottom of the hill with a thermos and a blanket and his map, giving directions like a man running a crew again.
They found the old pump house under thirty years of sumac. They found the second feeder still in its conduit, solid copper, wrapped in old cloth tape. Tom tested it twice and shook his head in amazement. It was good.
By dusk, they had cleaned out the box at the base, replaced the burned fuses, and rerouted the star to the old line. Ricky Sabol stood with his hand on the transfer switch.
The crowd on the hill had grown to sixty. Somebody's grandmother had brought a pot of coffee and a tray of nut roll.
"Mr. Mrozek," Ricky called down. "You want to say when?"
Eddie lifted his hand.
Ricky threw the switch.
For half a second, nothing happened. Then there was a loud pop from the junction box under the east leg, and a puff of gray smoke, and every work light on Mill Hill went black at once, leaving sixty people standing in the dark under a dead star.