The Cowbell at the Last Hill

The hill

I have rung that bell at noon on my father’s porch. I rang it at his funeral, once, for no reason I could explain. I have never rung anything like I rang it on the side of that hill.

The first stroke went out across the grass like a thrown rock, flat and hard and ugly, and it was the best sound I have ever made.

Nathan’s head came up. He did not look around for us. He knew that sound the way he knew his own name. His eyes went to the left side of the slope, and he found us, and I swear on my daddy’s grave something went through that boy like a current.

“Go on, Nathan,” Marlene shouted. She had not raised her voice in my hearing in fifty-one years. “Go on, baby, go on, go on, go.”

I rang the bell until my arm burned. I rang it until the brass hummed in my wrist. I heard myself shouting something with no words in it at all.

He came up that hill like he was being pulled on a rope. I have seen cattle run for feed, and I had never seen a boy do what he did. His stride lengthened. His head came up. His fists opened.

A boy in red was ahead of him by twenty feet. Nathan took him halfway up the slope. Another, in black, was just in front of that one, and Nathan went by him too, so close I could hear the boy’s breath rasping.

“That’s it!” a man beside me yelled. “Look at him go!”

“That’s my grandson!” I shouted back. I had never in my life said anything so loud, or so simple.

Nathan went by us close enough that I could have touched his sleeve. His face was dark red, his mouth open, his eyes on the ridge. For one half second they slid to me, and he did not smile. He nodded. One nod, one boy to one old man.

Then he was past us, small and green against the grass with orange flags on either side, and every bell on that slope was ringing him home.

Marlene was crying without a sound, tears running straight down, her hand on the bell strap next to mine. My own face was cold and wet and I could not tell the difference.

We heard the announcer call his number at the finish. We stood at the foot of the last hill with a dented brass bell between us, and neither of us moved.

“Did you see his face?” Marlene whispered. “He looked like he wasn’t tired at all.”

“He was tired,” I said. “He just didn’t let it matter.”

The call

Marlene went up to find him. She told me to stay where I was and make my phone call.

“I never said I was going to,” I said.

“Ansel Hatfield, I have known you fifty-one years, and you have been making that phone call in your head since four o’clock this morning. Make it.”

She walked off up the hill with her red fleece bright against the grass, a gray-haired woman moving like she was twenty, and I stood alone with my daddy’s bell and a phone I could not look at.

I pulled up my son’s name and stood there with my thumb above it for what felt like a month. Then I pressed it. It rang four times. I thought he would not answer.

“Dad,” Kevin said. His voice was careful, like a man picking his way across ice.

“Kevin. I’m at the state meet.”

“I figured.”

“Nathan ran it.”

Nothing for a moment. I could hear a diesel engine behind him, and wind.

“How’d he do?”

I wanted to tell you I knew what to say. I did not. I said the first true thing that came.

“I don’t know the time yet. I rang the bell at the last hill, and he went by us like a rocket. But Kevin, that’s not why I called. Let me say this. I’ve got a whole speech in my head and I’m going to ruin it, so just let me say it.”

He did not answer, which I took as yes.

“You were right. Last night. I missed your games.”

The wind blew in the phone. A long way off the announcer called another name.

“I told myself it was the farm. It was partly the farm. But there was a night you threw four touchdowns against Dexter, and I was on a combine four miles from that field, and I could see the lights in the dust and hear the crowd, and I did not turn the machine off.”