The Bell I Almost Took Down

The Wrench

On the afternoon of Saturday the seventh of November I stood at the cedar corner post on the line fence between my hay meadow and the Stroud north pasture with a crescent wrench on the second nut of the bell bracket, and I had made up my mind that it was the last time I would be out there.

I should say who I am. I am Loyal Zeller. I am seventy-four years old, I drove a motor grader on the Sipple County gravel roads for twenty-seven years, and I have lived on the same eighty acres outside Norland, Indiana, since 1978. You heard from Winifred Stroud, and she told it plainly and kindly. She said I looked like a man who had stopped letting himself expect something. That is exactly right, and it is also the most generous way anyone could have put it. I had a wrench in my hand. I was not tightening a bracket.

The bell had gone up on that post on the eleventh of February, two years and nine months before. It is a cast-iron farm dinner bell, thirty-one pounds, cast in 1948, and it hung from the porch roof of my mother Ottilie’s farmhouse until the day she died. I had rung it a thousand times. Not for her, not for supper. I had rung it every afternoon at four thirty, three strokes, for a woman who sat at her kitchen sink and did not come.

On Friday the sixth I had rung the thousandth. I counted. I keep my own tally, in pencil, on the inside of the pump house door, and when I made the thousandth mark I stood there looking at it for some time. Then I went back to the shed and found the crescent wrench and put it in the truck. A man can only be turned down by a pasture so many times. A thousand is a fair try. I had told myself that all week.

The bolts were rusted. I had the wrench on the second nut, and I was leaning my whole weight on it, and I had my back to the Stroud house, when I heard grass crunching behind me. Stiff grass, brown November grass, being walked through by somebody who was not used to walking through it.

I turned around, and Winifred Stroud was standing six feet away in a canvas chore coat and rubber boots, white hair pinned up, out of breath, with a look on her face I have seen on a woman at a bus station.

I said the first thing that came into my head, and it was a lie. I said the bracket had worked loose.

She looked at the wrench. She looked at me. She is a bookkeeper by nature, and she added it up in about two seconds, and she did not call me a liar, which is a kindness I will carry to my grave. She said, “Then you can tighten it after. Ring it.”

I put the wrench in my back pocket and I rang it. And I will tell you that after a thousand times I had never once rung that bell with someone standing a yard from me, and it is a much bigger sound close up than it is from across a pasture. She laughed. I do not think she knew she was going to. It was a short, startled laugh, the sound a person makes at a clap of thunder when they find out they are not afraid.

That is what you have already heard. Here is what you have not.