The Last Bell

The bell looked further away than it was, smudged and patient atop the green. Since the first winter of the war, the bell had sounded every morning, one toll for each name carved on the wall. People drifted toward it with the same sleepy determination as always. Their boots whispering through wet grass, hoods pulled up as the mist folded its way along the ridge and settled into the village like a thin shawl. The bell’s rope, dark with years of handling, hung straight.

Elias stood behind the elm and watched them gather. His breath came out in pale threads. His palms were damp. He kept them at his sides where they could cause no trouble.

The names were carved into the stone wall below the bell. Someone had wiped last night’s drizzle from the granite so each letter shone like a small wound. The wall had once been low. Over the past two years it had grown, stone by stone. Someone had planted rosemary along the base, and the smell, when the wind stirred the stems, was sharp enough to taste.

Old Tomas lit the stub of a beeswax candle and cupped it while it steadied. He nodded to the priest who lifted his chin and began the intonation that the children could say in their sleep. He was not old, but the ritual had given him an old man’s eyes.

“For the names we keep,” he said. “For the lives we carry forward. May the bell guide them and keep their memory from sinking.”

They all murmured the lines, the way they always did, each person a small note in a chord. Elias did not speak. He watched his mother mouth the words. He had learned to read by watching her. He had learned to lie too. She did not turn to him. Her jaw worked in a rhythm that matched the bell that had not yet rung.

A boy of nine, small for his age, was brought forward to pull the first toll. He stood straighter as if stepping into his own height. The rope was heavy. When he yanked it down, the bell spoke once, a deep and careful note that seemed to warm the damp air. Silence gathered itself again. Old Tomas read the first name. Another villager stepped forward. Another toll. Another name. Each sound went up and out over the fields, toward the river, toward the unpicked blackberries along the old fence, towards the dark patch of forest that never gave up its chill.

A woman who wore her hair in a long gray braid brushed past Elias and gave him a quick look, a look like a hand searching for something to grip. He looked away. The bell tolled again. It tolled for lives he had known and lives he had not. It tolled for boys who had once thrown stones at a tin pail in his yard and for men whose palms had smelled of cedar shavings.

When it was his turn to step forward. He stayed still.

The priest’s voice did not falter. “Elias.”

A hush. Even the birds seemed to tuck their questions away. His mother shifted her weight but did not reach for him. Elias felt his own name hang in front of him like a thread that he could follow if he wanted.

He breathed once. Twice. The rope was an arm’s length away. It had torn the skin of his palms when he was five, when he had insisted on pulling it without help. He had cried and his father had been past hearing, and his mother lit a candle for him. This is how you learn you have skin, she had said.

Elias did not move. Would not move. He put his hands behind his back because the left one had begun to tremble.

The priest cleared his throat. “Elias,” he said again and the second time the name held.

“No,” Elias said.

The word felt smaller than it was.

A woman on the edge of the crowd let out a shocked breath of air that a hand tried to smother. The boy of nine looked at Elias with his mouth soft in surprise. Old Tomas’s candle bent and guttered, then steadied.

Elias’s mother turned her head just enough for him to see the field of freckles along her cheekbone. “Please,” she said, not loudly, not for everyone. Her eyes did not ask. They never did. She was simply opening a space where yes could fit.

Elias shook his head. He felt the mist bead on his lashes. The bell waited. Rope waited. Names waited.

The priest’s voice, careful. “This is not about you, my son.”

Elias found that a little funny, bleakly, in the quiet of his own skull. He swallowed. His tongue tasted of rosemary and iron. The faces blurred and sharpened. His stomach tugged as if he had swallowed a stone.

“It is,” he said. “That’s the trouble.” And he turned, and walked away.

The crowd’s whisper followed him, a sound like leaves in the wind. He did not walk fast. The elm had a scar on its trunk from a winter storm. He put his hand on it as he passed and felt the roughness. The bell tolled after him, not by his hand. The name read was not his to honour. The sound reached him anyway, went through him anyway, found the places that were not healed and pressed a thumb to them.

He kept walking until the green became lane and the lane became the path along the hedgerow where the blackberries glowed with small damp stars. At the edge of the fields he stopped and bent over with his hands on his knees. His breath came harsh. He wanted to spit the taste out of his mouth and could not.

“I do not know how to fix this,” he said and the wind did not answer.

Later, at the market, people would be kinder than they felt. They would say hello the way people say hello to a man who has walked through fire and now walks among their straw thatched roofs. They would ask his mother about carrots and the haying and the weather.

At noon Anna came to his door with a cloth-wrapped loaf from her aunt. She did not knock the way others knocked. She knocked the ways she always had, as if the doors were not much use between them.

He let her in. The kitchen was dim and he had not pulled the curtains. The bread smelled of fennel. He did not remember the last time he had eaten.

“Your mother is at Marta’s,” Anna said. “She is not angry.”

“She is ashamed,” he said.

“She is both,” Anna set the loaf on the table and stared at him. “You could have warned her you meant to do that.”

“I meant to do nothing,” he said, and that was true. He had woken intending to keep the peace. He had shaved with care. Had put on the sweater that belonged to his father. He had rehearsed standing in line, stepping forward, putting his hand out, closing it on the rope. He had rehearsed doing what was asked. He had pictured his brother’s name in his mind and said it through his teeth like a prayer. He had meant every bit of it. Then the rope had been a snake whose bite he feared and the bell had been a void.

Anna’s gaze softened. She sat. She did not take off her shawl. She did not fuss with the loaf. Her hands were empty, resting on the table like birds not yet sure if they would stay.

“You do not owe me an explanation,” she said.

“I do,” he said, and then it came out, clumsy. He told her of the bell in his head. Of the sound that had followed him when he crawled under trucks, when the mud came up to his throat. He told her that when men died they did not go silent. He told her that sometimes, when the mortar strobes lit the fog, he had seen faces in it and that every face had a sound. He told her of Markus, about his brother’s hair slicked wet to his forehead and the way his breath had left him. He told her about the way the air had rung.

“The ritual keeps them,” he said. “That is what I know. Or what I believe.”

Anna listened. She did not say the bell was for the living. She did not say it gave shape to grief and made it carryable. She did not say that the priest’s lines were only a frame for the water to freeze around so that it may be a window instead of a flood. She only watched with attention that did not press. She had been engaged to a man named Pieter who had a laugh that made people look up. Pieter’s name was on the wall.

“Maybe it keeps them,” she said. “Maybe it keeps us.”

Elias looked at the bread and then away. “I do not know how to fix this,” he said again.

“Perhaps it is not yours to fix,” she said.

That night the wind rose. Apples and iron clung to it as it whistled through the eaves. Elias lay on his narrow bed and stared at the beam above. The tree it had been bent toward a light that was not here. That was what war had done to him too. He had grown toward a light that was not there.

He slept. When he did, he dreamed, which he had learned to fear and learned to crave. In the dream he stood in the green at dawn. Fog curled and the bell waited. Markus stood beside him with his hair in his eyes.

“It is not a prison,” Markus said without moving his mouth. “I am not a bird in a cage. It is a door. It swings.”

Elias reached out for him and his hand caught nothing.

“We ring so you remember the door,” Markus said, with the same quick impatience he had used when Elias had been slow to spot the fish flashing in the shallows. “Do not make everything about you.”

Elias flinched. “That is unfair.”

“So is the world,” Markus said, and smiled in a way that hurt.

Elias woke with a hard gasp. His throat burned. He sat up, swinging his feet to the floor and waited for the trembling to settle. The small clock on the dresser ticked a human heartbeat and then did not. He could not tell if it had his.

He lit the candle stub. Its flame leaned and then found itself. He put on his coat. He did not lace up his boots before trudging into the night. The clean cold before frost greeted him. The stars looked alive. The bell was only a blacker shape against the black. He climbed the green and stood before it. The rope was a braid of old hands.

He took it.

He could have walked away again. He could have done as Anna suggested and let the village hold its own grief in its own way. He could have smashed the bell and taken the consequences and pretended that the destruction was freedom. He could have gone to the woods and learned to be a man who speaks only to trees.

He did not.

He closed his fingers. He felt the burn where old scars met rope. The smell that rose up was sweat and smoke. He did not pray. He thought of his mother’s jaw and Anna’s steady hands and Pieter’s laugh like wings. He thought of Markus with wet hair. He thought, if a door swings, it swings both ways.

He pulled.

The bell’s voice was not loud. It did not shatter the air. It went through him like water that had remembered being ice. It rang once. It filled his teeth. It made his eyes sting. Then the world went quiet, as if waiting to see what he would be now that he had made a sound.

He pulled again.

On the third toll he heard his brother.

Markus’s voice threaded the tone the way a reed threads a river. It was there, clear, as if Elias had turned and found him right behind his shoulder. As if they had been boys and woken too early and were trying not to wake their parents. It was not a scream like in a nightmare. It was worse. It was a call that had no throat.

Elias sagged. The rope slid through his hands. He caught it again as if dropping it would drop Markus.

“Stop,” he whispered. “Stop, I am here.”

The bell settled itself into another note and another. Markus’s voice braided each one. The words were not words. They were the shape of recognition and guilt and the way a body remembers its own weight. Elias choked and pressed his forehead to the rope.

He heard footsteps and did not look up. He did not want to see the priest or Old Tomas or the boy of nine. He did not want to see his mother’s face in the wrong place.

It was Anna. He knew by the way she breathed, as if she was about to speak and then did not.

“Elias,” she said softly.

He could not answer. He kept his forehead to the rope and pulled again because not pulling was worse, because if a door swings then it must swing until it does not. The bell gave one long tone that felt like stepping into cold and Markus’s voice in it flared and thinned and flared again.

“What do you hear?” Anna asked.

“My brother,” he said. “He is in it.”

Anna was quiet long enough that the tone nearly faded. He pulled again, a smaller pull, almost an apology. The bell answered anyway. The air lifted and settled.

“I hear Pieter,” Anna said at last. “But only because I want to.”

Elias lifted his head and stared at her face, pale and clear. She looked back with a steadiness that neither believed nor disbelieved.

“What if we are strong,” he said. “What if we are the ones keeping them here.”

“What if letting go keeps them too,” Anna said. “What if everything keeps them and nothing does. What if the bell is only a way to share the weight.”

Elias closed his eyes. He saw the day they had laid Markus’s boots on the wall because there was nothing better to lay. He saw his mother’s hand not shaking.

“Say his name,” Anna said and it was both a suggestion and a mercy.

Elias tried. The first syllable stuck. He coughed. He felt something in his chest loosen like a knot. He said it then. He said it once and the way it came out made the air feel different. He said it again because the first time had not been enough. He said it until he could not tell if he was speaking or only moving his mouth.

Behind them, lamps came on in windows. Curtains did not quite move. The village did not gather yet. The dawn thought about itself. The mist lifted by an inch and then settled again. Elias let the rope go at last. His hand stung. The bell hung still, patient.

Anna did not touch him. She looked at his hands. “Come morning,” she said, “you can do as you like. You can stand aside again. You can ring. You can go to the woods and talk to the trees. I will bake bread and try to forgive us both.”

The morning came whether he wanted it or not. The ridge took the sun and handed it down in a thin strip. People came up the green with their scarves and their sleep and their small hard griefs. The priest set his book on the wall. Old Tomas lit a new candle. The boy of nine stood straight and did not look around for his mother.

Elias was already there. He had not gone home. He had found a bench in the shadow of the Elm and sat with his coat around him and watched the sky bruise and then pale. Anna had gone and returned with two cups of tea.

The priest began. The villagers answered. A woman whose husband had left the winter before last led her daughter forward to pull the first toll. The bell said hello to the morning. A flock rose from the field and swung once wide and settled again as if deciding to stay.

When the rope was offered to Elias, he reached for it. He did not do so bravely. He did it because now that he had heard it there was nothing else to do. He could not carry the weight alone, because refusing would not end the sound. He did it because his mother’s jaw had loosened, just barely, and because Anna stood in the crowd with her hands empty at her sides.

He closed his fingers and pulled.

The note rose. It found him. Found everyone. It found the edges of the village and the far hedgerow and the river’s shoulders and the dark path of woods that always felt like November. It found the names on the wall and brushed each one like a hand brushing hair back from a brow.

He heard Markus.

He whispered without meaning to, “I don’t know how to fix this.”

The bell did not answer. The village did not answer. The sky did not. Anna did not. His mother did not.

Someone read the next name. The rope waited. He did what the living do. He stayed. He pulled. He listened. He did not mend the world. He let it ring.