The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell

I married Vivian Alders in that sanctuary in 1983. She played the organ for forty two years, right up until the last six months when her hands wouldn’t do it anymore, and I carried her up the aisle in a wheelchair every Sunday so she could sit in the front pew and listen to whoever they’d found to play in her place, and when she died I rang that bell at her funeral myself because I could not stand the thought of another man’s hand on that rope that day.

We raised two children in that cottage. Our son Dale is in Cedar Rapids now, works for the county, and our daughter Patty is in Omaha with three kids of her own. They both wanted me to move closer to them after Vivian passed. I told them the same thing both times.

“I’ve got a church to take care of.”

That used to be true in a way that meant something. Now, three days before Christmas, it was an empty banana box on my kitchen table.

*

Word travels strange in a town of eleven hundred people. I did not tell a soul. I am not a man who complains, and I did not intend to start at seventy years old over a job I had already lost. But Wilma Dunkel saw the Precision Facility Services van parked outside the church office that same afternoon, measuring for a contract that hadn’t even started yet, and Wilma Dunkel has been a member of Grace Community for sixty one years and has never in her life let a strange van sit unexplained.

She walked straight into the office and asked the church secretary, a sweet, nervous young woman named Denise, what in the world that van was doing there, and Denise, who had typed the termination letter that morning and had been feeling sick about it all day, told her everything.

By six o’clock that evening my phone, an old flip phone that mostly just sits on the counter, had fourteen missed calls.

I did not answer the first one. I was still sitting with the box.

I answered the second, because it was Cole Ritter’s mother, and anytime a child’s name comes up on the screen I pick up.

“Mr. Brumley,” she said, “Cole wants to know if it’s true. He’s been crying since supper.”