The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell

Cole Ritter is eleven years old. His daddy left when he was six and does not come around, and for whatever reason, the boy took to me the summer he was eight, following me around the churchyard while I mowed, asking me what every tool was for, wanting to know if he could pull the bell rope on Christmas Eve when he got bigger. I taught him how to check the oil in the mower and how to true up a door that’s dragging on its hinge, small useless things that a boy without a father in the house seems to need to know are his to know, and twice a month he still rides his bike over after school just to sit on the church steps and talk to me about nothing in particular while I work.

“Tell him I’m fine,” I said. “Tell him I’ll see him Sunday.”

“He wants to talk to you himself.”

She put him on. I could hear him trying not to sound like he’d been crying, and failing.

“Mr. Brumley, Mr. Soderberg’s gonna let you ring the bell though, right? My mom said you asked.”

“That’s right. Christmas Eve. Same as always.”

“Okay.” A pause. Then, in a smaller voice, “Who’s gonna fix the mower, if you’re not there.”

That question did more to me than the box had. I told him I didn’t know, which was the truth, and I told him it was late and he should get some sleep, and I hung up and sat in my dark kitchen for a long while.

*

What happened over the next two days I did not orchestrate, and I want to say that plainly, because I know how these things can look from the outside, like a man quietly working angles while pretending to be humble. I did not call a single person. I did not post a single thing anywhere, I don’t even have one of those accounts. What happened was Wilma Dunkel, and after Wilma, half the women’s circle, and after the women’s circle, most of a congregation of two hundred and ten souls who have watched their children baptized, their parents buried, and their marriages blessed in a building I had kept warm and dry and clean for them longer than some of them had been alive.

Wilma called the board. All five of them. She is seventy nine years old and has chaired the altar guild since Nixon was president, and she does not raise her voice either, but she does not need to.

“You have exactly as much right to fire that man as you do to sell the communion silver,” she told Grant Soderberg, by his own later account, “and about as much sense.”

Grant told her the budget was the budget. Wilma told him the budget had been the budget in 1987 when the roof needed redoing and somehow the church had found the money then too, and maybe the board ought to try harder before it started cutting the men who held the place up with their own two hands.

She did not ask people to boycott the church or write letters or make a scene. She is too old and too wise for scenes. What she did, and what I only found out about after the fact, was call every family in that congregation who owed Odell Brumley something, which turned out to be most of them, and remind them, gently, what Christmas Eve had always meant at Grace Community, and ask them to come.