I set my pry bar down real slow, because the beam of my flashlight had gone into that sealed compartment under the bell and found, not a skeleton or a treasure chest, but a copper cylinder, green with age and about as long as my arm, lying on a bed of dry sawdust. Beside it was a flat tin box, a bundle of rolled papers, and a small leather pouch with a drawstring. Everything was perfectly dry. Whoever had built that room had known how to keep out the weather, and had wanted whatever lay inside it to last.
I called down the ladder to the pastor, a tall young man named Reverend Aldo Marsh, who had been standing at the bottom with the head of the building committee, a retired postmaster named Mrs. June Cutter. They climbed up one rung at a time, slowly, because the tower stairs were steep. When they came through the trapdoor and saw what was in the floor, Mrs. Cutter put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, my,” she said. “They told us the building fund was stolen. Everyone in this congregation has believed it for fifty years.”
I did not know the story, so I asked, and the two of them told it between breaths. In 1971 the church had raised money for a new roof, nearly nine thousand dollars, mostly in small gifts from mill workers and farm wives. The treasurer, a quiet man named Orville Pate, had kept the cash in the church, and on the night before the bank deposit, it had disappeared. Orville had left town within a month, under a cloud, and the congregation had spent half a century wondering whether to forgive him.
The leather pouch held a letter, folded in thirds, and Mrs. Cutter opened it with a steady hand. It was dated the week of the disappearance. “To the Trustees of Grace Church,” it began. “I am writing this in the tower, because I cannot sleep. A man came to see me on Sunday night and told me that if the money was in the building, he would take it, and that he knew how to take it. I do not know how he knew. I have hidden the funds where no one will think to look, under the bell, and I mean to tell you tomorrow. But I am afraid.”
Honesty is sometimes mistaken for guilt for a long time, until a patient hand opens the door the truth has been waiting behind.
The letter went on for another page, in a hand growing more hurried. Orville had gone to the sheriff the next morning to report that a man had threatened him, and the sheriff, a friend of the man in question, had laughed. Orville had hidden the cash in the tower, intending to give it to the trustees at the next meeting. But the man had come back, and had told him that if the money were found, harm would come to his family. So Orville had sealed the compartment himself and left town in the dark, hoping the congregation would someday look up.
Mrs. Cutter finished reading and sat down on a beam. The reverend stood with his head bowed. I realized I was holding my cap against my chest, and I put it back on. We opened the tin box. It held cash, bundled in rubber bands and stacked in neat rows, every bill still crisp. Under it lay the deposit slips for the funds, written out in advance in the careful hand of the treasurer, along with a ledger that accounted for every dollar to the penny. Eight thousand eight hundred and forty dollars. Not one cent was missing.
The copper cylinder was a time capsule, laid down in 1923 by the first congregation, with a Bible, a roll of photographs, a program from the dedication of the church, and a list of every family that had given to the building. The reverend read it out loud in the tower, in the half light, and the names rang off the stone. The old bell hung above us like a patient animal. Mrs. Cutter said, “My grandparents are on that list.” She put her fingertip on the paper. “Right there. Cutter, Jacob and Ida.”
We carried everything down in the order we had found it. The reverend called the bishop, and the bishop called the diocese attorney, and within the week the whole matter had been placed in the proper hands. The money was held by the church as the funds it had always been. There was no one to prosecute. The man who had threatened Orville had died in 1998, and Orville himself had passed in a nursing home in Florida eleven years before that, his name never cleared. The congregation voted unanimously to clear it now, with a plaque.
Orville had a daughter, it turned out, living in Columbus. The reverend wrote to her. She came to the church on a bright Sunday in the fall, a woman in her sixties with the jaw of her father, and sat in the front pew while the reverend read the letter to the whole congregation. When he finished, no one spoke. Then an old farmer in the back row stood up and said, in a voice thick with feeling, “We were wrong about your daddy, ma am, and we have been wrong for fifty years.” She cried. A hundred people crossed the aisle to embrace her.
The restoration took the rest of the winter. We replaced the rotted louvers with new cedar, rebuilt the bell frame with oak, and rehung the old bell on bearings that I greased myself. The funds from the tower paid for all of it, so that the roof he had meant to buy, he bought at last. I put the final pin into the frame on the twenty third of December, climbed down the stairs with aching knees, and told the pastor that the bell was ready, whenever the congregation wished to ring it.
They rang it on Christmas Eve, at midnight, for the first time in fifty years. I stood in the churchyard in the snow with two hundred people, and I heard that deep bronze voice roll out across the roofs of Parkersburg and down toward the river. The daughter of Orville stood beside me with her hand in mine, though we had met only that week. She whispered, “He would have been so glad.” I said I thought he knew. And somewhere above us, in the dark, the great bell swung once more, and said it for him.