The Hollow Bell: Bell And Bone

The brass bell sat on Silas Croft's kitchen table, catching the gray light from the window. He had wrapped it in a flour sack towel the night before, but the cloth had slipped during the night, and now the corroded metal gleamed dull against scarred pine. Rain tapped the tin roof in an uneven rhythm, and the wood stove popped once, sending a curl of ash into the air.

Silas did not move for a long time.

He had not slept well. The bell had been a weight in his hands when he carried it from the church, heavier than brass had any right to be, and he had felt the ghost of something in his fingers ever since, a tremor that would not settle. His coffee grew cold in the mug. Outside, the hollow was waking: a dog barking somewhere down the ridge, the distant grind of a truck on the gravel road, a child calling to another across the creek.

He stood, finally. The chair scraped against the floor, and he steadied himself on the table's edge, bones popping in his knees. He crossed to the shelf above the sink where he kept his few valuables: a tin of snuff, a watch that no longer kept time, a leather billfold with a photograph he did not show anyone. Behind these, folded into a square of oilcloth, was the brass bell's twin, smaller, dented at the crown. He did not touch it now. He only looked, then turned away.

The bell on the table needed answers. And there was only one person in the county who might give them.

---

Hadley Vance's classroom at the community college smelled of chalk and old paper and the faint, sharp undertone of floor polish. The building had been a textile mill once, before the mill closed and the town decided it needed somewhere to educate its young people beyond high school. The brick walls held the chill of autumn even when the radiators clanged their best. A row of fluorescent tubes hummed overhead, and beneath that sound, the scratch of Hadley's fountain pen on a ledger was the loudest thing in the room.

She did not look up when Silas knocked.

"Come in," she said, though her tone suggested she had been expecting no one and was annoyed to be proven wrong.

Silas eased the door open with his shoulder. He had walked the four miles from his place to the college, the bell wrapped again in its flour sack, cradled against his chest. The climb up the courthouse hill had winded him, and sweat cooled on his temples despite the chill. He stood in the doorway a moment, hat in hand.

"Professor Vance."

"Silas." Now she looked up. Her eyes were the color of river stone, pale and unblinking. She set the pen down precisely in the gutter of the ledger, aligned it parallel to the binding. "You don't often come up here."

"No, ma'am."

She regarded him the way one regards a misplaced object, something that had been put somewhere inconvenient and now required sorting. Hadley Vance was seventy-three years old. Her hair, once the deep copper of the Vance family line, had silvered to the color of pewter, and she wore it pinned in a low roll at the nape of her neck. Her dress was dark wool, high-collared, and her hands, when she folded them on the desk, showed the ridged veins of age beneath skin that had always been fair. She had taught history at the college for thirty-one years. Before that, she had taught history at the high school. Before that, she had been a girl in this town who understood, very early, that history was a thing to be curated, protected, and, when necessary, buried.

"What is it you need, Silas?"

He stepped forward and set the bundle on her desk. The flour sack made a soft, heavy sound against the wood. Hadley did not reach for it immediately. She watched him.

"I found this," he said. "In the belfry. Behind the yew bell's mounting."

A pause. The fluorescent tubes buzzed. Somewhere down the corridor, a door opened and closed, and footsteps passed, muffled.

"The yew bell," Hadley repeated, as though tasting the words. "That bell has hung in that tower since before my grandmother was born. Since before the church was even the church. It was the original bell, Silas. It was hung in 1871."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You are telling me someone hid something behind it."

"I'm telling you I found this where no one should have been able to put it. The mounting is sealed. Hasn't been disturbed in living memory. But this was tucked behind the bracket, in the hollow of the brick."

Hadley's mouth thinned. She unfolded her hands and drew the bundle toward her, pulling the flour sack away with two precise motions. The brass caught the fluorescent light and threw it back in a dull, uneven sheen.

She went still.

For a long moment she did not speak. She turned the bell slowly in her hands, her fingers reading the surface the way a blind woman reads a face. The crown was dented in a long, shallow depression, as though struck by something heavy. The patina was deep and uneven, layered like the sediment of a creek bed: blackish green in the hollows, brown where air had reached, and, where the corrosion had flaked away at the rim, the pale gold of original metal.

"Does it have markings?" Silas asked.

"Look for yourself," Hadley said, and pushed it back across the desk.

Silas took it up. The weight of it was familiar now, the tremor in his hands quieting as his fingers found the raised lettering around the shoulder. He tilted it toward the light.

H M S CORIOLAN

1891

He read it twice, though he knew the words before he spoke them.

"I know that name," he said quietly.

"You should," Hadley replied. Her tone had not warmed, but something in it had sharpened, a blade drawn from a sheath. "Sit down, Silas."

He sat. The chair was small, meant for students, and his knees rose awkwardly above the desk's edge. Hadley rose and went to a tall wooden cabinet against the far wall, one she had brought from the old Vance house, where it had held ledgers and Bibles and the private correspondence of three generations. She unlocked it with a key she wore on a chain beneath her collar and withdrew a slim volume bound in faded green cloth.

The History of the Briar Valley Steamship Company, 1872 to 1904. By Elihu T. Vance.

She set it on the desk between them and opened it to a page near the middle. Her finger found a paragraph and tapped it once.

"Read," she said.

Silas read. The print was old style, the sort that used a long s and ornamented capitals. The paragraph described a vessel, the HMS Coriolan, a steel-hulled steamer of four hundred and twelve tons, built in Glasgow and brought around the Horn to serve the inland trade. She had run the river routes for six years, hauling cotton and tobacco south, hauling machinery and immigrants north. In the autumn of 1891, she had attempted the passage through the Narro's during a storm, a fool's errand by any reckoning. She had struck the rock shelf known as the Devil's Elbow, listed badly, and gone down in the stretch of water that the locals simply called the Bend.

"Loss of the vessel was total," Silas read aloud. "Crew of twenty-three, none recovered. The wreck lies in approximately nine fathoms of water at the foot of the Bend and is considered a hazard to navigation. Salvage attempts in 1892 and 1895 were unsuccessful due to depth and current. The ship's bell was recovered shortly after the sinking by a local fisherman and presented to the company. It was hung in the company's offices in the city and remained there until the company dissolved in 1904."

He stopped reading. The room was very quiet.

"The bell was recovered," he said.

"That is what the record says."

"And taken to the city."

"That is also what the record says."

Silas turned the bell again in his hands. The letters were clear, the date unmistakable. He looked at Hadley.

"Then how did it end up behind the yew bell's mounting in the belfry of a church that wasn't built until four years after this ship sank?"

Hadley did not answer immediately. She folded her hands again, the gesture of a woman who has already decided what she will and will not say. The fluorescent tubes hummed. The radiator clanged once and fell silent.

"That," she said at last, "is a question for someone other than me."

"Who, then?"

She looked at him. The pale eyes did not waver.

"The river," she said. "The river remembers what we bury. And it has a long memory, Silas Croft."

She reached across and drew the bell from his hands with a motion that was not unkind but was unmistakably final. She wrapped it again in the flour sack and set it to one side, away from him, as though marking a boundary.

"I will keep this for now," she said. "It is a historical artifact. It belongs with the college, with the county historical society. It does not belong in a church belfry, and it certainly does not belong in your kitchen."

"Now, Hadley, I don't think that's right. It was found on church property. It belongs to the church."

"The church," Hadley repeated, and the word carried a weight that had nothing to do with religion. "The church is a building, Silas. Bricks and mortar and a mortgage held by the Vance family trust, as it happens. The contents of that building are another matter."

Silas felt the heat rise in his face. He had known Hadley Vance since he was a boy. He had rung the bells under her grandmother's direction. He had known her husband, Whitmore Vance, before the heart attack took him at fifty-eight. He had thought, over the years, that he understood her: the coldness, the precision, the way she held the world at the length of her arms.

Now he saw something else. Not anger, exactly. Fear.

"You're keeping it," he said. It was not a question.

"I am preserving it. There is a difference." She stood, smoothing the front of her dress. "You may go, Silas. I have a class at eleven."

He rose slowly. His knees protested, and the chair scraped again. He did not reach for the bell.

"Hadley," he said, from the doorway. "Whatever this is, it didn't come up the river by itself. Someone put it where I found it. Someone knew the belfry."

"Someone," Hadley agreed. Her face was unreadable. "Someone always knows."

He walked home in the rain. The bell was not with him. The weight of it had been transferred to something else, a heavier thing, settled in his chest like a stone in a creek bed.

He did not look back.

The rain had not relented by morning. It pressed against the windows of Silas Croft's small house like a thousand insistent fingers, and he lay in his bed listening to it, his old bones aching with the particular misery of weather that would not commit to storm or shower. It simply hung there, gray and heavy, turning the world to watercolor.

He rose at six. He dressed in his good trousers and the blue shirt his sister had sent him two Christmases ago, the one he had never worn because it seemed too fine for a man who rang bells and mowed the churchyard grass. He put it on now because he had a feeling the day would ask something of him, and he meant to answer it dressed.

The bell was not at his house. He had not expected it to be. But the absence of it sat in his kitchen like a fourth chair at a table set for two, and he found himself glancing toward the door as he poured his coffee, as though the bronze might somehow have found its way home in the night.

He drank his coffee standing. He did not eat.

The walk to the church took twenty minutes in fair weather. In the rain, with the creek path turned to a ribbon of mud and the low places pooling into shallow ponds, it took thirty-five. His boots sank at every step. The smell of wet earth rose around him, and beneath it, the older smell of stone and leaf rot that he had come to associate with the place.

He let himself in through the side door. The lock had been changed sometime in the previous year, but Silas knew the old ways; a hairpin and a firm hand, and the mechanism yielded to him as it had yielded to four generations of sextons before him. The door groaned on its hinges. Inside, the air was cooler, touched with dust and the faint sweetness of old hymnals.

He did not go to the belfry first. He went to the vestry, where the records were kept.

Hadley Vance had been keeper of the church records since her marriage to Whitmore in 1957. Before her, it had been her mother, and before that, her grandmother, whose copperplate hand filled the earliest volumes with a precision that bordered on devotion. The Vestry Book of the Church of the Holy Cross, 1872 to present, sat on its shelf in a place of honor, and Silas had been given to understand, over the years, that its presence on that shelf was a kind of covenant. The Vance women did not lose things. The Vance women remembered.

He pulled the volume down. It was heavier than he remembered, or his arms were weaker; either way, he set it on the reading stand with the care a man gives to a sleeping child. He opened it to the index.

The pages were cream and dense, ruled in faded blue. The entries were alphabetical by subject, and he ran his finger down the column until he found what he was looking for: Bell, the. Three references, all in the same decade.

He turned to the first entry, dated April of 1903. The hand was the grandmother's, and she wrote with the slightly labored precision of a woman who had not been taught penmanship as a girl and had taught herself in middle age. The entry concerned the casting of a bell by a foundry in Lynchburg, the subscription list that had paid for it, the names of the donors. He read it through, though he knew most of it by heart. He had read this entry before, on a winter afternoon when Whitmore Vance was alive and Hadley had still permitted him access to the records without the slow, appraising look she had since perfected.

The second entry, from the summer of 1908, concerned the hanging of the bell in the new belfry. A crew of six men, two of them named in the entry as Masons of the local lodge. He paused here. His finger rested on the words. He had read this entry before, too, but the significance of it had not struck him then. Now it struck him with the force of a struck bell, a clear and singular tone.

He turned to the third entry, dated November of 1912. This one was in a different hand, the slanted cursive of a man named Ezra Combs, who had served as secretary of the lodge. The entry recorded the donation of a ceremonial emblem to the church, to be placed within the bell as a token of the lodge's continued fellowship with the congregation. The emblem was described, in Ezra Combs' careful script, as a representation of the square and compasses within a circle, surmounted by a stylized flame.

Silas read the entry twice. He read it a third time.

He set the volume down. He sat in the reading chair, which was Hadley's chair when she held her meetings, and which smelled faintly of her perfume and of the lavender she kept in the vestry drawer. He thought.

The Elkinsville Masonic Lodge, Number Two Hundred and Twelve, had been a fixture of the town since the 1880s. Its members had built the first bridge across the Elk River, and they had laid the cornerstone of the church in 1891. The lodge had continued to meet in the second floor of the hardware store on Main Street until the late 1940s, when membership had begun to decline. By 1963, the lodge had surrendered its charter to the Grand Lodge in Richmond, and the building had been sold to a man from Roanoke who had turned it into a feed store. The lodge's records had been distributed among the remaining members, or so Silas had been told. He did not know where the records had gone. He suspected Hadley knew.

He rose from the chair. He went to the belfry stairs.

The rain had found its way in through a missing shingle, and a thin stream of water traced a path down the eastern wall, pooling in a small dish-shaped depression in the floor that Silas had worn smooth with decades of his feet. He stepped over it. He climbed.

The belfry was as he had left it two days ago. The rope still hung in its coil. The floorboards still bore the dark smear where the bell had lain. He crossed to the place where he had found it and knelt, though his knees protested in three different places. He pressed his palm to the wood.

He had thought, when he first lifted the bell, that the interior was smooth. He had been wrong. The inside of a bell, he knew, was rarely finished with the care given to the outside; the clapper's work would mar any fine detail, and the founder's attention was for the sound, not the sight. But this bell had been finished with care. He understood that now.

He had brought a flashlight, though the morning was not so dark that he needed one. He clicked it on and angled the beam into the bell's interior, where it stood on its crown in the corner he had placed it. The light caught the metal and threw it back at him, and for a moment he saw nothing but the dazzle. He adjusted the angle. He saw.

Etched into the bronze, in lines so fine they might have been drawn with a needle, was a symbol. A circle. Within the circle, a square set on its edge. Within the square, two crossed lines forming a compass. Above the circle, rising from the upper edge of it, a stylized flame.

He knew the symbol. He had seen its like on the apron of a Mason, at a funeral he had attended as a boy, when his grandfather had worn the regalia of his lodge and walked in the procession with the slow gravity of a man who believed in the things he carried.

The lodge had been disbanded in the 1960s. The emblem had been placed inside the bell in 1912. The bell had been buried, or hidden, sometime between then and now, and the emblem had traveled with it, sealed within the bronze, untouched by the world for more than a century.

He lowered the flashlight. He sat back on his heels. The rain on the roof was louder now, or his hearing had become more sensitive to small sounds, or the quiet of the belfry had deepened to a kind of holding breath.

He thought of the bell as a thing that had been made to be heard. He thought of the lodge as a thing that had been made to be seen, and to be known, and to pass its emblems from hand to hand in solemn ceremony. He thought of the emblem hidden within the bell, a secret inside a voice, and he felt the wrongness of it settle into his stomach like a cold stone.

A thing meant to be seen should not be sealed inside a thing meant to be heard. A thing meant to be carried in procession should not be buried beneath the floor of a belfry. Someone had taken a symbol of fellowship and made it a secret, and the making of that secret had been a kind of violence, he thought, though he could not have said whose violence it had been, or against whom it had been directed.

He rose. His knees made a sound like a small branch breaking. He turned off the flashlight and stood in the dim belfry, looking at the bell, and the bell looked back at him with its one dark mouth.

He went down the stairs. He went through the vestry, where the record book still lay open on the reading stand, and he closed it with care, and he put it back on its shelf. He went out into the rain. He locked the side door behind him with the same hairpin, and he walked home the way he had come, with the mud pulling at his boots and the smell of wet earth in his nose.

He did not go to Hadley. Not yet. He went home, and he sat at his kitchen table, and he put his hands flat on the wood, and he thought.

The Vance family trust held the mortgage on the church. The Vance family had held the records since the church was built. The Vance family had been members of the lodge, or at least adjacent to it, in the years when the lodge was strong. Hadley's grandfather had been a Mason. He remembered seeing the apron at the old man's funeral, folded on the coffin lid, the same symbol he had just seen etched into bronze.

He did not know what Hadley was preserving. He did not know what the bell had been buried to hide, or to keep. He knew only that the emblem was there, and that it had been there for more than a hundred years, and that the woman who held the records had taken the bell from him with a speed and a certainty that did not belong to a woman who was merely preserving a curiosity.

He thought of Edgar Pruitt, who had died at seventeen, and of the boy who had found the bell, and of the girl who had come back to town with a notebook and questions. He thought of the woman in the blue dress who had stood in his kitchen and told him the bell belonged to the church.

He thought of the emblem, sealed inside the bell, waiting.

He got up from the table. He went to the window. The rain had thinned to a drizzle, and through it he could see the town laid out below him, the church at its center, the river at its edge, the mountains standing behind it all like witnesses to something that had not yet been spoken.

He picked up the telephone. He dialed the number of the newspaper office on Main Street, where the girl with the notebook had said she could be reached most mornings. He let it ring four times. He was about to hang up when he heard the click of the receiver, and a voice, bright and quick, said, "Calloway."

He told her what he had found. He told her about the record book, and the entry from 1912, and the emblem inside the bell. He did not tell her everything. He told her enough.

"Come to the church," he said, when he had finished. "Come now, before she moves it somewhere I cannot find."

He hung up. He put on his coat. He went out into the rain.

The walk to the church was shorter this time, or he walked it faster, or the rain had washed the path clean and his boots found firmer ground. He let himself in the side door. He climbed to the belfry. He stood over the bell, and he waited.

He did not have to wait long. He heard the side door open and close below him, and then the quick footsteps on the vestry floor, and then on the stairs. Wren Calloway came up into the belfry with her hair plastered to her face and her notebook already in her hand, and she looked at him, and he looked at her, and neither of them spoke for a long moment.

Then he knelt beside the bell, and he clicked on the flashlight, and he angled the beam into the interior, and he showed her the symbol.

She made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound a person makes when they have been looking for something and have found it, and the finding is not a relief but a deepening of the trouble they were already in.

She knelt beside him. She took the flashlight from his hand, though he had not offered it, and she turned it this way and that, studying the lines of the emblem as though she were reading a text written in a language she had only begun to learn.

"The lodge," she said, after a while. "The one that closed in the sixties."

"The same," Silas said.

"And the bell was buried with the emblem inside it. On church property."

"Yes."

She looked up at him. Her eyes were very bright, and very steady, and there was something in them that he had not seen in the eyes of a young person in a long time. It was the look of a person who has understood that the thing they have come upon is larger than they are, and who has decided, in that understanding, to go forward anyway.

"Someone did not want this found," she said.

"Someone," Silas agreed.

She set the flashlight down. She took out her notebook. She began to write.

The rain on the roof was louder now, and the belfry was very small, and the bell stood between them like a third presence in the room, keeping its secret still, but no longer entirely its own.

Below them, in the vestry, a door opened and closed. Footsteps crossed the floor. A voice, cold and measured, called up the stair.

"Silas," Hadley Vance said. "I know you are up there. Bring the girl down."

Wren looked at him. Silas looked at the bell. The emblem caught the light from the stairwell, and for a moment it seemed to flicker, as though the flame above the circle had been lit by some hand not their own.

He rose. He offered her his hand. She took it, and they rose together, and they went down the stairs to meet whatever was coming.

They descended into a silence that felt less like quiet and more like the held breath before a confession. The vestry smelled of cedar and old hymnals, the air cool and close after the open cold of the belfry. Wren's notebook was closed against her hip, her thumb holding the place, and Silas walked with the careful deliberation of a man who has stood in this room a thousand times and knows every board that will creak.

Hadley Vance stood at the center of the floor. She did not sit. Her hands were folded at her waist, and her face held the composed severity of a woman accustomed to receiving information rather than requesting it. She wore a dark wool coat despite the warmth of the room, and her silver hair was pinned so tightly that it seemed to pull at the corners of her mouth.

"Mrs. Vance," Wren said. Her voice was respectful but unbowed, and she kept her chin level.

"Miss Calloway." Hadley's gaze moved from Wren to Silas and remained there, as though Wren were a footnote. "I had understood you were visiting the church for the purposes of writing a feature on the town. I had not understood you would be climbing into the belfry at this hour, or indeed at any hour, without supervision."

"I asked Silas to show me the bell," Wren said. "He was kind enough to oblige."

Hadley's mouth compressed by a degree. "Kindness," she said, "is not the same as permission. And the belfry is not a place for visitors. It is a place for the bell, and the emblem, and the prayers of the people who built this church. It is not a place for curiosity."

Silas shifted his weight. "She asked a fair question, Hadley. And it is my place to answer fair questions about the bell."

"Your place," Hadley repeated, and the words carried a chill that had nothing to do with the rain. "Your place is to tend the bell and to keep the record. Your place is not to interpret. That has always been understood."

"It has," Silas said quietly. "And I have kept that understanding for a long while."

The air between them tightened, a held string. Wren felt the history in it, the sediment of decades, and she kept very still, the way one keeps still in the presence of something older than oneself.

"You have found something," Hadley said to Silas. It was not a question. "I can see it in your face. You have always been a poor dissembler, Silas, for all your silence."

"I have found what was there to be found," he said. "No more. No less."

"And you will tell me what it is."

"I will tell you what it is," he said, "because it ought to be told. But I will tell her too. And the record will be made whole."

Hadley's eyes narrowed. "You speak as though the record has been broken."

"It has," he said. "A long time ago. Before my time, and your husband's, and his father's. The record was broken, and the pieces were buried, and the bell was buried with them. And now the bell has been found, and the pieces must be gathered."

Wren opened her notebook. She did not write yet. She waited.

Hadley drew a slow breath. "Very well," she said. "Tell us what you have found, Silas Croft. And may God help us all to bear it."

Silas looked at the floor for a moment. Then he raised his head, and he began to speak, and his voice was the voice he used when he read the old entries aloud, steady and grave, the voice of a man delivering testimony he had carried alone for too long.

"The emblem," he said, "was placed inside the bell at the time of the casting. The lodge placed it there, as a seal, as a sign that the bell was bound to the covenant of the brotherhood and to the work of the town. When the lodge was closed in the years after the war, the emblem was meant to remain where it was, hidden, undisturbed. But in 1903, the original chapel on this site burned. The records of the lodge were kept in the chapel. Most of them were lost. The emblem, inside the bell, survived only because the bell was buried in the earth beneath the foundation, as a precaution, as a kind of trust. The new chapel was built over the old foundation. The bell was not raised. It was left in the dark, where it has been for a hundred and twenty years, until the rains of this autumn opened the ground at the base of the tower and made the way down."

He paused. The rain outside had softened to a steady murmur, and the vestry felt very still.

"And the lodge," Hadley said, in a voice that was almost a whisper. "The records. What became of them?"

"Some were destroyed in the fire," Silas said. "Some were taken by the brothers who survived. And some," he said, and he looked at her, "were given into the keeping of your husband's family, Hadley. The Vances. They were the founders of this town, and they were the keepers of the covenant. The records were entrusted to them when the lodge closed, and they have been in the Vance house ever since, in the chest in the attic, beneath the floorboards, in the room no one enters."

Hadley's face did not change. But her hands, folded at her waist, tightened against each other, the knuckles whitening.

"You speak of things," she said, "that are not your concern."

"I speak of things," Silas said, "that are the concern of every person in this town. The covenant was not a private matter. It was a public trust. And the trust has been kept private for too long."

Wren wrote, quickly, in a small, slanted hand. The pen scratched against the paper, and the sound was very loud in the quiet of the vestry.

Hadley turned to her. "You will not publish this."

"I will publish what is true," Wren said. Her voice was steady, and her eyes did not leave Hadley's face. "I came here to write about the bell. I have found something larger than the bell. I will write about that, too."

"You will ruin what has been preserved."

"I will reveal what has been concealed," Wren said. "There is a difference."

Hadley stared at her for a long moment. Then she turned back to Silas, and something shifted in her face, something like exhaustion, or like the relief of a burden too long carried.

"The chest," she said. "You know where it is."

"I know where it was," Silas said. "I do not know if it is still there. I have not been in your attic in forty years."

"You were never in my attic," Hadley said. "You have never set foot in my house."

"Not above the parlor," he agreed.

She drew another breath. Then she smoothed the front of her coat, and she lifted her chin, and when she spoke again her voice was the voice of a woman who has made a decision and will not be moved from it.

"Then we will go to my house," she said. "Tonight. The three of us. And we will see what has been kept, and what has been lost, and we will decide together what must be done."

Wren closed her notebook. Silas bowed his head, the briefest motion, a kind of assent. And the three of them moved toward the door, into the rain, into the dark, toward the Vance house at the top of the hill, where the attic waited, and the chest, and the rest of the story.