The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell
They met Christmas morning, after services, same as Grant had said, and I was not in the room for the vote, because it was not my decision to make and I did not want it to look like it was. Pastor Means came out to the cottage himself, around noon, snow just starting to come down outside, and told me the board had voted four to one, Grant among the four, to keep me on, to cancel the contract with Precision Facility Services before it ever started, and to form a small committee, Wilma Dunkel chairing it, whose actual job was simply to make sure nobody on that board ever again made a decision about a person’s forty five years without first asking the person, and the congregation, what that work had actually been worth.
They did find the eight thousand four hundred dollars elsewhere, if you’re wondering, because Carol in you would want to know that part is real and not glossed over. The men’s fellowship took on the gutter and the small roof repairs themselves instead of contracting them out, which saved more than that figure by spring, and a handful of families who had drifted away from giving over the years, moved by what they’d seen that Christmas Eve, started tithing again. The budget balanced. It usually does, when a congregation decides what it actually values.
I kept the cottage. I kept the mower running for Cole to learn on, and that spring I taught him to true up the hinge on the fellowship hall’s back door, the one that still drags every March when the ground heaves, same as it has every March of my whole life there.
Grant Soderberg and I get along fine now. Better than fine. He stops by the cottage some evenings just to talk, the way a man does when he’s trying to make up in small visits for one bad day in December, and I let him, because holding a grudge against a thirty six year old man for one hard spreadsheet would have cost me more than it ever cost him.
Last Christmas Eve, the one just past, the crowd was smaller than that first one. Word like that doesn’t repeat itself twice. But it was still bigger than any Christmas Eve we’d had before the box and the bell, somewhere near two hundred and fifty, enough that we still needed a few of the old pews from storage, and Cole Ritter, twelve years old now and an inch taller, climbed those forty five steps ahead of me without being asked and had his hands on the rope before I even reached the top.
“You ready, Mr. Brumley?”
“Lead the way,” I told him, and together, his hands below mine the same as before, we rang that bell out over Loring, Iowa, twelve times, once for each year and one more for hope, same as we always will for as long as my knees will carry me up that ladder, and not one day longer than that, and not one day sooner either.