Sam stood in the freezing dark with the useless mallet in his hand and felt sixteen years of fixing things quietly fall away from him.
Then his phone buzzed in his coat pocket.
It was Tyler Kessler. Sam almost did not answer. When he did, he heard wind and the sound of a car door, and then Tyler's voice, out of breath.
"Pastor Sam. Don't hit it again."
"Tyler, where are you?"
"In the parking lot. I've got Mr. Combs."
Tyler had driven out to Maple Grove at eleven to pick up his grandmother's friend for the service, as he had promised. When he got there, Arliss Combs was already dressed in his good coat and hat, sitting in his wheelchair by the door of his room with the old blacksmith's hammer across his knees.
"He wouldn't leave it," Tyler said on the phone. "He said, take me to the bell. He said you'd be using the wrong hammer."
By the time Sam got down the ladder, Tyler and two of the Yoder grandsons had carried Arliss's wheelchair up the front steps of the church and into the vestibule at the bottom of the tower stairs. The old man sat there with snow on his hat and the hammer in his lap.
The whole congregation had turned around in their pews to look.
Arliss held the hammer out to Sam.
"Rope broke at three in the morning," he said. His voice was thin, but it carried. "In 1937. The water was coming up Creek Road, and the rope snapped right off the wheel. My daddy was down at the creek with the men. I was nine. So I climbed up the tower with this."
He tapped the head of the hammer, with its faded wrapping of feed sack.
"Granddaddy's shoeing hammer. You don't swing the bell. You hit it. But you don't hit it in the middle, where it's thick and dead. You hit it down low, right on the lip, a hand's width up from the bottom edge. That's where the bell wants to sing." He put the hammer in Sam's hands. "And you wrap the head so you don't crack her. A bare hammer'll crack a bell."
Sam looked down at the hammer. It was heavier than it looked.
"I rang her an hour with this," Arliss said. "Three strokes and a rest. Three strokes and a rest. So the people on Creek Road would know it wasn't the wind."
Sam climbed the tower again.
The clock below had finished chiming midnight two minutes ago. He did not care. He found the lip of the bell with his gloved fingers, felt for a hand's width above the edge where the bronze thickened into a ring, and drew back the little hammer with its feed-sack wrapping.
He struck.
The sound filled the tower so completely he felt it in his chest and his teeth. It rolled out through the louvers into the snow, deep and round and clear, the same note his congregation had heard every Christmas Eve of their lives.
Down below, he heard somebody gasp.
He struck again. And again.
Then he stopped and waited, the way Arliss had said. He counted the rest in his head. Three strokes and a rest.
He struck twelve times in all, in four sets of three, while the snow came down on Pine Hollow and the bell sang out over Main Street and Elm and Creek Road and the dark fields beyond.
When he came down the ladder, the vestibule was crowded. Dot Kessler was standing beside Arliss's wheelchair with her hand on the old man's shoulder and tears running down her face, not bothering to wipe them.
Arliss was looking up at the tower. His eyes were wet too.
"Three and a rest," he said quietly. "That's right. That's how she sounds."
Sam knelt down beside the wheelchair and held out the hammer.
Arliss shook his head.
"You keep it here now," he said. "I kept it eighty-nine years in case she ever needed it again. I'm ninety-eight, Pastor. I'd like to know where it is."
Sam could not answer for a moment. He just nodded.
Dot held out a handkerchief. Arliss waved it away and used his sleeve.
"You know what I thought about up in that tower in 1937?" he said. "With the water coming up Creek Road in the dark?"
Sam shook his head.
"I thought, if I stop, somebody won't wake up." Arliss looked at the hammer in Sam's hands. "So I didn't stop. My arms gave out at the end of the hour, and my daddy came up the ladder and took over. But I didn't stop."
They sang Silent Night at twelve-twenty, an hour after they should have, with every candle in the church lit and Arliss Combs in his wheelchair at the end of the front pew, singing the words in a voice like dry leaves.
Afterward, Floyd Eckert came up and shook Sam's hand.
"Better than a record," Floyd said.
"Yes, Floyd," Sam said. "It was."
The crew from Cincinnati replaced the oak yoke in February. When they had the new one in, they asked Sam if he wanted to test it with the rope.
He said yes. Then he climbed the tower one more time and hung the old blacksmith's hammer on a nail beside the bell, high on the beam where the next pastor would find it, with a tag tied to the handle in his own handwriting.
For emergencies. Strike low, on the lip. Three and a rest. And before you do anything else, go ask the oldest person in town.
