The old man who climbed out of the car with Florida plates walked straight down the boardwalk to my shack, slowly, with a cane in one hand and a paper bag in the other, and stopped under the empty hook where the bell of my husband had hung. He was about eighty five, a tall, bent figure in a faded guayabera shirt, with white eyebrows and a face tanned and creased like old leather. He looked up at the hook, then at the bell on my counter, then at me. “Ma am,” he said, “I am sorry to bother you. I wonder if I might ring it.”
I did not answer right away. Everyone on the boardwalk had gone silent. The deputy stood in the doorway, the insurance man in the corner, my grandson on the bait cooler with his hands between his knees. I looked at the roll of paper I had pulled from the clapper of the bell, the letter in the handwriting of Jimmy, and the old newspaper clipping, brown at the edges. Then I looked at the old man, and I felt something shift, a quiet click, like a lock turning. “Sir,” I said, “I think you had better tell me your name first.”
“Raymond Teague,” he said. “My father was Captain Harold Teague. He owned the bait shop that stood on this spot until it burned, in October of 1986. He was inside. He was sixty one years old.” He set the paper bag on the counter. “I was in the Navy then, stationed in Norfolk. I came home for the funeral and found only ashes. I stayed three days, and then I left, and I did not come back for thirty nine years. I could not bear to look at this boardwalk.” I put my hand on the counter to steady myself. The bell sat between us.
“The bell was my father,” he went on. “It came off the first boat he ever owned, a little shrimper called the Sea Dove. He hung it over the door of his shop, and any man who caught something big could ring it, and every ring meant a free cup of coffee. It disappeared in the fire. We thought it melted.” His voice shook. “I read in a magazine last month that a woman named Varnado had a bait shop on the boardwalk, with a ship bell over the door, and a hand painted sign that said since 1987. I drove straight through. Twenty hours, from Tampa.”
What is lost to the fire is seldom lost entirely. Somewhere a quiet man pulls it from the ashes and keeps it safe until it is time to ring.
I unrolled the letter and read it aloud, in front of everyone, in the hot afternoon with the gulls crying outside. It was in the careful, looping hand of my husband. To whoever finds this, it began. I am Jimmy Varnado. On the night of the fire of October 1986, I was a deckhand on the Miss Wanda, and I saw the flames from the water. I was the first one there. I could not reach Captain Teague in time. I pulled the ship bell out of the wreckage the next morning, black with soot, and I could not bear to see it thrown into the dump.
Jimmy had cleaned it, the letter said, for a whole year, with vinegar and steel wool and prayer. He had asked the widow of Captain Teague for permission to rebuild a bait shop on the same ground, and she had said yes, on one condition, that the bell hang over the door and that no man ever be turned away from it. Mrs. Teague had passed on in 1991, but Jimmy had kept her promise for thirty four years. He had hung the bell in 1987 and left a letter inside it, in case any Teague ever returned. If one did, Jimmy wrote, tell him the coffee is on the house.
Raymond Teague sat down on my bait cooler. He covered his face with his big, spotted hands, and his shoulders shook. I poured him a cup of coffee from the pot that has been running since 1987, and set it in front of him. He drank it slowly. When he looked up, his eyes were red, and he smiled, a sweet, crooked smile, the first I had seen on him. “Ma am,” he said, “I believe that is the best coffee I have ever tasted.” I told him it was the same pot his father would have recognized.
Austin, meanwhile, had been sitting very still. When the old man finished, my grandson stood up and said, in a voice I had not heard in years, “Grandma, I have to tell you what I did.” He told it all. Blake, the man in the linen shirt, had promised him a share of the tiki bar. He had asked Austin to sign my name to an insurance policy, just a formality, and Austin had done it, because he was twenty four and stupid and wanted so badly to be somebody. When Blake planned the fire, Austin did not know. When he found out, he ran.
The deputy told me the rest. Blake Hollister had been arrested at a gas station in Mobile that morning, with two cans of gasoline in the trunk and a bag of cash. He had done it in two other towns. In the bell, taped to the clapper, had been an envelope containing the receipt for the insurance policy, which Austin had hidden there that very night, after he saw the gas cans in the truck of Blake. He had taken it to the sheriff at dawn, trembling. It was the bravest thing he had ever done.
I put my arms around my grandson. I told him I forgave him. He cried against my shoulder for a long time, like a little boy. Then he rose from the cooler, took the bell in both hands, and carried it outside, and Austin brought a stepladder. Together, the old man and the young one hung it back on the hook above the door, and tightened the screws, and stepped away. The sun hit the brass. It shone like gold.
“Go on,” I said to Raymond. “It is yours to ring first.” He took hold of the old rope. He closed his eyes. He pulled once, hard, and the sound rolled out over the water, deep and clear, and a dozen fishermen along the rail turned and cheered. Then Raymond let go, and wiped his face, and said in a whisper, “Dad, I came home.”
He stayed in Gulf Shores through the summer, in a little rented room above the hardware store. Every morning he came to the shack at five to help me open, with his cane and a thermos. Austin works the register now. He wears an apron that says Varnado Bait, Since 1987, Still Here, and underneath, in smaller letters, Teague Bait, Since 1950. The charter captains say they have never seen the boardwalk so busy. And every time somebody catches something big, the bell rings out across the water, and a free cup of coffee goes to the man who rang it.