The following Sunday, I returned to church, hoping to quietly take my usual seat, but there was a man standing in the vestibule with a clipboard and a hard hat, and the pastor was standing beside him with his face the color of the plaster.
The insurance adjuster had come about the tower.
Here is what the young man learned the hard way, and I want to say plainly that I did not wish it on him. That bell is a 1911 Meneely, twelve hundred pounds, hung on a wooden headstock in a frame that was old when I was young. You do not pull the rope. You set the bell rocking with three short pulls, you feel for the stroke, and then you ride it. Pull it wrong and you slam a ton of bronze against a hundred-year-old frame, and the frame does not complain the first time. It complains the fourth time.
The young man had rung it twice on his practice Saturday and had not come back, and I did not know why until the pastor told me. He said he thought he had broken something. He heard a crack come down out of that tower and he went home and would not answer his phone, and he was nineteen years old and terrified he had wrecked a church.
He had not wrecked anything. The crack he heard was a joist that had been letting go slowly since about 1994.
I know that because I wrote it down. There is a composition book in the tower on a nail by the ladder, and it has been there since Mr. Ehrhardt taught me in 1983. Every ringing gets a line. Date, occasion, weather, and anything the tower said back. Thirty years of little notes about that joist. Damp week, timber sounding hollow at the north bearing. Greased the gudgeons. Frost, rang short.
Mr. Ehrhardt started that book in 1951 and the first page is his, and inside the cover he wrote a line I have looked at every Sunday morning of my adult life.
Whoever is holding this rope next: the bell is not yours and it was never mine. We are only the ones who keep it honest for the next fellow. Write down what you hear.
The adjuster read that book on a folding chair in the fellowship hall for an hour and a half. He told the pastor it was the best maintenance record he had seen on a historic structure in this county, and that it was the reason the claim would be paid instead of denied for neglect.
The tower was repaired in the fall. It cost eleven thousand dollars and the congregation covered the deductible in three weeks.
The pastor came to my house before that. He sat in my kitchen and he apologized, and he did it badly, the way young men do when they have never had to before, and I told him that a man who says he is sorry in your kitchen instead of in a hallway is doing it right.
The bell rings at ten. The young fellow rings it now, most Sundays, and I stand at the bottom of the ladder with my coffee and tell him when he is fighting it.
He writes the line in the book himself. That was the only thing I asked for.