The Custodian Who Only Asked For The Bell

Cole slipped out of his pew and followed me. His mother let him go without a word.

“Can I come up,” he asked at the bottom of the ladder.

I thought about the forty five steep steps, and his eleven years, and I thought about Vivian, who always said a boy who wants to learn something should be let to learn it, carefully, with somebody watching.

“Stay two steps behind me and hold the rail,” I said.

We climbed up together into the cold, into that little wooden room at the top where the bell has hung since before either of our grandfathers were born, and I showed him, like I’d shown him the mower and the door hinge, how you don’t yank a bell rope, you lean your weight into it and let it swing you, how you listen for the bell to tell you when to pull again instead of fighting its rhythm.

“Can I pull it with you,” he asked. “Just this once.”

I put his small hands below mine on that old rope, worn smooth by forty five Christmas Eves of my grip and however many hundred before mine, and together we leaned back, and the bell swung up into the dark and came down and rang out over Loring, Iowa, the way it had rung for every Christmas Eve of my whole grown life, and I heard, faint and far below us through the old floor, the whole packed room catch its breath at the sound of it, and some of them, I found out later, cried.

We rang it twelve times, the way we always have, once for each year since the last and one more for hope, and when it was done Cole was crying too, and so, I will admit to you plainly, was I.

*

When we came back down, Grant Soderberg was waiting at the bottom of the tower stairs. He had his hands in his coat pockets and his collar was wet where he’d clearly wiped his own eyes more than once.

“Can we talk,” he said. “After, I mean. Not now.”

“We can talk whenever you like.”

The service ended, and the crowd did not rush out the way crowds do after a long service in the cold. They lingered, the way people do when they know they have just been part of something they will tell their grandchildren about, shaking hands, catching up with people they hadn’t seen in years, and more than one person stopped to tell me, quietly, that they remembered me fixing something or carrying something or simply being there on some hard day of their life, a funeral, a flooded basement at the parsonage, a baptism where the heat had gone out and I’d gotten it running again in time.

It was close to ten o’clock, the hall emptied, before the five members of the board, Grant among them, found me in the fellowship hall stacking the borrowed pews back against the wall.