The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell
“Wilma, there isn’t room for all these people.”
“There’s room,” she said. “Make room.”
We brought in chairs from the basement, and then from the church office, and then, when those ran out, I unlocked the utility shed and we hauled out the old wooden pews we’d retired to storage after a remodel twenty years back and never gotten around to hauling to the dump, and men I hadn’t seen in years rolled up their sleeves in their good coats and carried those pews in and set them in the side aisles, and by seven o’clock every pew and every folding chair in that sanctuary was filled, the fullest I had seen it in forty five years, people standing in the doorways, standing on the front steps in the cold with the doors propped open so they could hear.
I found Cole Ritter near the front, in his good shirt, his mother beside him, and he grabbed my sleeve as I went past.
“Mr. Brumley, is it still you ringing the bell?”
“It’s still me, Cole.”
“Good,” he said, like that settled something important in him, and maybe it did.
Pastor Means stood at the pulpit and looked out over that crowd for a long moment before he even opened his Bible, and I watched his face change from confusion to something closer to awe, and when he finally spoke his voice cracked a little before he got it steady.
“I don’t believe,” he said, “this sanctuary has held this many people since the day it was built.”
Somebody in the back called out, “We’re here for the bell, Pastor,” and a ripple of soft laughter went through the whole room, and he smiled and nodded like he understood exactly what that meant.
*
The service itself I will not try to describe to you in full, because some things a man keeps for himself, but I will tell you the hymns that night sounded like something I had not heard in years, every voice in that packed room pressing against the old windows I had reglazed myself one piece at a time over the better part of a decade.
Grant Soderberg was there. I saw him come in late, in his good coat, and I watched him stand against the back wall because there was nowhere left to sit, and I watched his face while he looked out over that packed room, and I will tell you it was not the face of an angry man or a defensive man. It was the face of a man doing arithmetic that had nothing to do with a spreadsheet.
At five minutes to eight, the time we have always rung the bell at Grace Community, right before the final candle lighting, Pastor Means caught my eye from the pulpit and gave me the smallest nod, and I made my way back through that crowd of neighbors, shaking hands I hadn’t shaken in years, toward the little door at the base of the tower.