The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell

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Christmas Eve service at Grace Community has started at seven o’clock for as long as I’ve been alive in this town. In a normal year we get maybe a hundred and twenty people, which fills about two thirds of the pews, with the back third left open for the families who come in late with sleepy children.

I got to the church at four thirty that afternoon, same as every year, to light the entry lanterns and run the heat up early so the sanctuary would be warm by the time the doors opened. Pastor Means was already there, going over his sermon in the small office, and he looked up when I came in and something in his face told me he already knew something I didn’t.

“You’re going to want to get here a little before seven,” was all he said.

I did not think much of it. I went about my work. I checked the bell rope one more time, because a man does not get careless about the one job he has left just because it’s the last time he’s doing it. I set out the extra folding chairs we keep in the basement, the ones we only need at Easter and Christmas, out of habit, the way I always have, never imagining I’d need every single one of them and then some.

By six fifteen cars were parked the length of both sides of Main Street, past the hardware store, past the bank, all the way down to the feed store on the corner, which has not happened at that church in my memory, not for a funeral, not for a wedding, not for anything.

By six forty the parking lot was full and people were parking in the grass beside the cemetery and walking across in the cold.

By six fifty I stood just inside the sanctuary doors handing out the last of the folding chairs, and I watched families I had known for forty years walk in alongside families I barely recognized, people who’d moved away from Loring and come back for the holiday and heard the story from a cousin or an aunt, people who hadn’t darkened that door in years, all of them filing in and filling the pews and then the aisles along the walls and then the back of the sanctuary standing three deep, and still they kept coming.

Wilma Dunkel found me by the coat rack. She had on her good church dress and a look on her face like a woman who has just watched a plan work exactly as well as she’d hoped and is trying not to look too pleased about it.

“I told them to come see for themselves,” she said. “I didn’t tell a soul to say a word to the board. I just told them to come and sit in the pews their grandparents built and feel it for themselves, one more time, before the board decided what this place is worth.”