The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell

Grant blinked like I’d asked him something in another language.

“The bell,” he said.

“The rope in the tower. I’ve pulled it every Christmas Eve since 1981. I’m not asking to keep my job. I heard you. I’m asking for one more Christmas Eve on that rope, and then I’ll clear out the cottage by New Year’s like you want.”

He looked relieved, honestly, like I’d handed him the easy way out of a hard conversation.

“Of course you can ring the bell, Odell. Nobody’s taking Christmas Eve away from you.”

Pastor Means set the bulletin down then and came over, and I could see in his face that he hated this as much as I did and had lost the argument before it ever got to me. He put a hand on my shoulder.

“We’ll talk after the holidays,” he said. “There has to be something we can do.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Pastor. The man’s got a spreadsheet. I’ve got a bell. Let’s leave it there.”

I picked up the box, which was empty, which was the strangest thing of all, an empty box handed to a man so he could go fill it with his own life, and I carried it out to the cottage behind the fellowship hall where I had lived rent free for forty one years, ever since my wife Vivian and I got married in that sanctuary and Pastor Vance, who had Grant’s job before there was a board at all, just a pastor and his own good sense, told us the cottage was ours as long as I kept the furnace running and the floors swept.

Vivian had been gone six years. The cottage still had her dish towels folded in the drawer the way she folded them, which is to say wrong, which is to say the way I liked, because it was the way she did it.

I set the box on the kitchen table and sat down across from it and I will admit that for about ten minutes I let myself feel exactly as old as I am.

*

I started at that church in September of 1981. I was twenty five years old, I’d just come back from two years working construction in Sioux City because Loring, Iowa, population eleven hundred, did not have enough work to keep a young man fed, and Pastor Vance caught me outside the hardware store and asked if I knew anything about boilers.

“A little,” I said, which meant nothing, which he found out inside of a week.

“Learn,” he said. “I’ll pay you to learn.”

I learned. I learned the boiler, and then the roof, and then the plumbing that ran under that building like a nest of old snakes, pipe fitted to pipe by three generations of men who were long dead and had left no drawings. I learned which floor joists in the fellowship hall would hold a church supper for two hundred and which ones you kept the folding tables off of. I learned to drive the old church van to Sioux City for parts and back in a single afternoon, snow or no snow, because Iowa weather does not care what day of the funeral or the wedding falls on.