The Bell I Almost Took Down

What She Told Me

Winifred came to the post at about seven that evening, the night she finished, to lay a hand on the gate. I had gone out because I could not stay in my kitchen, and we were both there at the same moment, on opposite sides of four feet of open air, with the gate swung back against the wire between us. It was nearly dark. We did not cross.

I said, “Why the gate?”

She said, “Garth said something on Sunday.”

I waited.

She said, “He said, ‘Mom, nobody starts over at seventy-one. You’d be signing up to bury him.'”

It was dark enough by then that I could not see her face. I said, “He is not wrong.”

“No,” she said. “He isn’t.”

“Winnie, I have something to tell you. I am going to tell you Wednesday, at my table, so you have eaten first.”

“Is it the kind of thing I will want to have eaten before?”

“It is.”

She was quiet for the length of a cow chewing. Then she said, “I buried a man for eighteen months, Loyal, a little at a time, and then the rest of it all at once. I know what the arithmetic costs. I did that sum a long time ago. I would not trade one of those eighteen months for a different year. Whatever you have to tell me on Wednesday, I will want to hear it, and I will not want you to be afraid of my hearing it.” She stopped. Then she said, “I’ll hang it tomorrow.” And she walked home in the dark by herself, and I stood at the post with my hand on the cold iron of the bell.

Wednesday

On Wednesday the eleventh I did not go near the fence until a quarter to four. I kept my word and stayed in my meadow, with my hands in my pockets, and I could hear the hinge pin going in from two hundred yards.

At ten past four she drove the second pin and swung it, and the gate went back and forth true. I saw her latch it. I saw her stand with her hand on the bar, getting her wind.

Then a pickup came up the road, and I knew whose it was.

I walked across my meadow. I got to the post at about the same moment he did. His little girl Ainsley was a hundred yards ahead of both of us, with the dog.

Garth told his mother she had cut his father’s fence. She said four feet of it, and the other two thousand six hundred and thirty-six were all his. She said what he had said on Sunday was true, that he had said it gently, and that it was not the same as being right.

I had not planned to say anything. I am not a man who says anything. But I was standing beside the bell.

I said, “You counted right, son. I’m seventy-four and I won’t pretend otherwise. I’d only ask you to let her spend what’s left where she chooses.”

He looked at me, and I will tell you that this was the hardest moment of the whole three days. He is Duane’s boy. He has Duane’s jaw, and I was looking at it across his father’s own fence, with his father’s own gate hung between us. And I thought, if he says a word against her I will not argue, I will go home and take the bell down myself.