The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell
The box still had a produce sticker on the side. Bananas, 44 cents a pound. Somebody at the grocery in Loring had broken it down flat and built it back up for Grant Soderberg to carry into the fellowship hall, and he set it on the folding table in front of me like he was setting down something hot.
“The company starts the first of January,” he said.
I looked at the box. Then I looked at him.
“Forty five years,” I said.
“I know, Odell.”
“Not fifty. Forty five. I keep track.”
He had the decency to not argue the number. Grant Soderberg was thirty six years old, sold crop insurance out of an office on the highway, and had been board chair at Grace Community Church for eleven months. He had a spreadsheet open on a laptop at the end of the table, and I could see, upside down, a column of numbers that I was fairly sure added up to me.
“It’s not about the work,” he said. “Everybody knows the work you do is good work.”
“Then what’s it about.”
“Precision Facility Services bid nine hundred a month for the sanctuary, the hall, and the office wing. Full service, insured, bonded. They can start right after the new year.”
“And what do I cost.”
He didn’t want to say it in front of Pastor Means, who was standing by the coffee pot pretending to read the bulletin board, but I’d asked him straight so he answered straight. That was one thing about Grant. He didn’t dodge once you cornered him.
“Seven hundred a month, plus the cottage. The board figures the cottage is worth another nine, we could rent it or sell the lot. All told you run us about sixteen hundred a month in money and in what we’re giving up. The company is nine hundred flat. That’s about eight thousand four hundred dollars a year, Odell. We’ve got a roof that needs forty thousand dollars of work by spring and a furnace in the fellowship hall that’s older than Grant here.”
Three days before Christmas. That was the part nobody wrote on a spreadsheet. Three days before Christmas, in the building where I had scraped gum off the undersides of the pews since before some of these board members were born, a man I’d known for less than a year handed me a banana box and told me the math had spoken.
I want to tell you I said something wise. I didn’t. I didn’t say much of anything. I have never in my life been a man who raises his voice, and forty five years of unclogging that church’s pipes, patching its roof in the rain, and carrying its dead out the side door on cold mornings had not changed that about me, and it wasn’t going to change that afternoon either.
What I said was, “Can I ask you one thing.”
“Of course.”
“Christmas Eve. Can I ring the bell one more time.”