“Gerald,” I said, and I stood up from the organ bench, and the bolts clattered in my lap and fell onto the dusty boards. “I came to find the old hymn of Paul. For Nathan.” “Did you,” he said. He had stopped smiling. The key ring in his hand was heavy and old, the iron one that opened the tower door, and his thumb moved over the keys, one by one, as a man moves over beads. “I think you found something else, Carolyn.” Behind him, the loft door swung shut with a soft click, and I realized that he had pushed it with his heel. The only way out now was past him, or up the narrow stair to the bell tower.
I did not scream. Thirty years of choir had taught me to keep my face still. “You took the bolts out,” I said. “Paul saw the collection books. He was going to tell Father Mike on Sunday.” Gerald stood quite still in the colored light of the window, and I watched him decide not to lie. “He was going to ruin me, Carolyn,” he said. “Twenty six years I gave this parish. Twenty six years I sat on the council and nobody ever said thank you. I took what I was owed. A few hundred a week. Then more. I never imagined he would climb that stair on a Saturday.”
“You loosened the railing,” I said. “So that he would fall.” “So that he would be hurt,” said Gerald, hoarsely. “Only hurt, so that he would not make his speech. A broken leg. Maybe a few weeks in the hospital.” He rubbed his face with his hand. “I never thought he would hit the stone.” “You came to the funeral,” I said. “You carried the casket. You married me.” And Gerald, big gentle Gerald with his casseroles and his silver hair, began to weep. “I loved you,” he whispered. “That part was real. God help me, that was the only real part.”
A hidden note in an old hymnal, four rusted bolts, and a locked loft door showed a widow what her husband had known.
Below us, in the nave, a door banged. I heard footsteps on the old oak floor, and a voice I knew, young and out of breath. “Mom! Mom, are you up there?” Nathan. I had told him to wait in the car, and of course he had not. Behind him came a slower step and the swish of a cassock, and I heard Father Mike say, in his calm Kentucky baritone, “Gerald? I would like a word with you.” Gerald looked at me with the strangest expression, not anger, but a sort of tired relief, as if a weight he had carried for years had finally been lifted off his back.
He opened the loft door himself. Nathan stood at the top of the stairs, flushed, with his phone in his hand, and on the step below him were Father Mike and a tall deputy from the Nelson County Sheriff Department. “I called them,” Nathan said. “When you did not text back. I played them the voicemail from Dad.” Gerald held out his wrists to the deputy. He did not resist. He did not say a word. He only looked at the carved ceiling of the choir loft, where the angels were painted in faded blue, and I heard him murmur, to no one, a line of the Nunc Dimittis.
The next months were a blur of statements and depositions. The ledger Paul had hidden showed that Gerald had skimmed eighty one thousand dollars from the collection plate over twelve years. A mechanic confirmed that the bolts from the organ bench had been unscrewed by hand. Gerald pleaded guilty to manslaughter and theft in October, and a judge in Bardstown sentenced him to eleven years. I attended the hearing in a black dress. When the judge asked whether the widow wished to say anything, I stood and said four words. “He was my friend.”
The marriage was annulled by the diocese the following spring, in a quiet office, by a priest who kept apologizing. I took off the ring on the steps of the chancery and put it in an envelope for the court. I stood there under a gray sky, an old woman in a good coat, and I discovered that I was not ashamed. I had been deceived by the best deceiver I had ever known. That is not a sin. It is only what happens when you let love go in the front door without asking it for a name.
The parish rebuilt the bell tower stair that summer, with new oak railings and bolts of galvanized steel. At the dedication, Father Mike asked if the choir might sing a piece that Paul had written for the Feast of Saint Michael. Nathan stood at the front, taller than I had ever seen him, in the black robe of his father, and raised his hands. There were forty voices in the nave that day. Every pew was full. When they reached the final verse, the bells began to ring above us, all six, in the sweet changing pattern that Paul had taught the ringers, and I put my face in my hands.
I went up the stair afterward, alone, in the cool of the evening, and stood at the top of the tower where Paul had stood. The wind moved the ropes. The town lay below me, with its steeples and its white fences and its bourbon warehouses, and the green hills of Kentucky ran off to the south. I touched the new railing. It was solid. I said, out loud, to the empty air, “I found them, Paul. I found the bolts.” And the largest of the bells hummed faintly in the wind, like a held note.
On Sunday mornings now I sit in the third pew on the left, where Paul and I sat for thirty years, and my son directs the choir. I still keep the hymnal on my kitchen table. The spine is mended with a bit of thread and the pages are marked, and on the flyleaf, in the hand of Paul, is a line I had not seen. Carol, sing the alto line. The rest will follow. I sing it every Sunday. And the rest, it turns out, does follow.