The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell
“Not to fight,” she told people. “Just to come. Just to be there and see for yourselves what you’d be losing.”
I did not know any of this was happening. I spent those two days doing what I have always done three days before Christmas: cleaning. I waxed the floor in the fellowship hall. I checked every strand of lights on the sanctuary windows and replaced the two bulbs that had gone dark. I climbed the tower, forty five steps up a ladder that has gotten steeper every year of my life, and I oiled the bell yoke and checked the rope for fray, because a frayed rope on Christmas Eve is a thing I was not going to have on my conscience, job or no job.
Grant Soderberg came by the cottage on the twenty third, the day before Christmas Eve, and I want to tell you honestly that I thought he had come to tell me the board had changed its mind about the date, moved it up, decided I shouldn’t even get my one last night.
Instead he stood on my porch looking like a man whose own plans had gotten away from him.
“My phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” he said.
“I didn’t call anybody, Grant.”
“I believe you. That’s almost worse.” He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “Mrs. Dunkel told me my grandmother’s funeral reception was in that fellowship hall. I didn’t even know that. She said you fixed the furnace yourself, at midnight, in a snowstorm, so the mourners wouldn’t sit there in their coats.”
“I remember that funeral. Your grandmother made the best rhubarb pie this town ever saw. 1994, I believe. The furnace blower motor had seized.”
He stood there a minute not saying anything.
“The company really is cheaper,” he finally said, like he needed somebody to tell him he hadn’t imagined that part.
“I don’t doubt it is.”
“I wasn’t trying to be cruel. I was trying to be responsible with the church’s money. That’s the job they gave me.”
“I know it, Grant. I’m not angry at you. I’ve buried better men than you for less reason than a cheaper cleaning bid. But you handed a man a box three days before Christmas after forty five years, and you did it with a spreadsheet instead of a conversation, and now you’re standing on my porch wondering why your phone won’t stop ringing. Those two things are connected.”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He thanked me, in a stiff way, for not making things worse than they already were, and he walked back to his truck and sat in it in my driveway for a solid two minutes before he drove off, and I went back inside and finished polishing the brass on the sanctuary doors, because that was still my job until the first of January, and I was not going to leave it half done on account of my feelings.