THE LITTLE HISTORY OF A BELL, by Molly McNett

Oas

This story begins long ago, in a place called Bavaria, which is in a country called Germany, as you may know. But you must imagine a time so long ago that there were no such names for this place; it was simply a beautiful place, an uninhabited place, a table in the clouds surrounded by high mountains. The sky was deep blue there, the sun bright; a clear stream ran over rocks and down the mountainside. From time to time, travelers following a goat- path up the mountain found that this table in the clouds provided a nice spot to rest before continuing their journey. They slept under a beech tree canopy, on a bed of moss and spring flowers – for the table in the clouds was not so high that a beech forest could not grow – or they sat on the banks of the stream, in the shade of tall pines, on a fragrant pink carpet of needles. Surely many admired the place before it happened that one particular group stayed on with the donkeys they’d been riding. They cut trees and built shelter. A few left and came back up the goat-path on ox carts, with wives and children and fine sturdy horses in tow, with – we might imagine – three cattle and six pigs, and a burlap sack with cereal seed. The land above this little table in the clouds was rocky, but below it was rich and fertile. Stones from the mountainside were used for retaining walls, so that even the steep land could be farmed where the water ran close by and the soil was dark and good. Time went by; children were born; the oxen and donkeys and cattle multiplied. As the people gave thanks to God, they prayed for a priest, to intercede on their behalf.

From the mountainside a quarry was fashioned, and from the quarry came the stone for solid structures. The hands that had cut the trees and carved the quarry now built a courtyard and a church. A bishop from the valley below the mountain appointed a parish priest, who came up the winding path carrying wine for the host. Shortly after the priest arrived, one of the oxen died, and one of its horns was fashioned into a chalice. At that time in the church there was neither belfry nor bell.

Generations were born in this beautiful place, and generations were buried below it where the soil was not rocky but where they had not yet begun to farm, and their graves were marked with mountain stone. Travelers sometimes came from other places, up the mountain, or across and over the other side, and some stayed on in the village. Perhaps it was from one of these that the village learned that their Catholic faith was no longer the only one – that others were called Protestants. (The travelers may have warned of war between those Protestants and Catholics like themselves, and the people may have feared that this war would spread even all the way up the mountain to their little village.)

And perhaps just about at this time another traveler suggested that the church was missing something – that it was not yet high enough into the clouds. Or perhaps it was the priest, who had gotten it from his bishop, for times had changed, and it was necessary for a church to have a spire, a belfry, and a bell.

Up the curves of the mountain path, by donkey and cart they came: men hauling copper and tin. A foundry was constructed with the stone from the mountainside. It was rumored that the bellfounder, Herr Böcklemann, had perfect pitch and was good with numbers. (And while the people of the village did not care much about numbers, or understand why they were important for a bell, the importance of numbers was already changing the ideas and minds of people outside the village, something we will hear more about later in our story.) Herr Böcklemann’s men built a smelting furnace and dug a molding pit, where sand and stone were fashioned into a bell shape – the core – and a wax layer pressed around it. In this wax were fashioned the words Laudo Deum Verum, I praise the true God, along with other first- person declarations: I diffuse the lightning, I waken lazy heads on the Sabbath, I calm the tempests. I dispel demons. I soften the hard of heart.

A layer of hard earth – the cope – was molded on top of this wax layer. When it had dried, the wax was heated and poured out. Copper and tin were smelted in the furnace – along with one hapless vole and a gold coin thrown in by a villager for good fortune – and this thick mixture, which would become the true bell itself, was poured, hissing and steaming, through a runner and down into the space where the wax had been. After the true bell was cool, ropes were attached and threaded through pulleys at the base of the belfry.

Imagine now, if you will, the whole village – including children and three tame goats and a sow, five sheep and one good herding dog, the oxen and mules and the fine work horses and Herr Böcklemann and all of his men – pulling and pulling, until finally the bell was hoisted up and into its home.

Now the women sewed a wide white baptism gown, gathered at the neck, just as babies wear even today; and the water and salt and oils were blessed, and they washed the bell in salt water; and carefully and tenderly dressed it: Sanctificetur et consecretur, Domine, signum istud. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti . . . At noon the cloth was unwound from the bell’s clapper, and the first sound of the Angelus was heard, as the first cry of a baby born, calling out to the high, white mountain peaks, announcing itself.

Herr Böcklemann ran to the belfry to test for himself. Listen, he cried, when you strike at her sound bow and again at her shoulder, a perfect octave! He would not go back to Munich, said the bellfounder. He would stay here, near the best bell he had ever created. (But some also said Herr Böcklemann, who was good with numbers, had created many such bells, and it was the beauty of the place that made this one extraordinary.) So the bellfounder’s men wound their way down the mountain without him, with their empty carts, and Herr Böcklemann stayed. It was said that he forgot his trade altogether, and became the humble ringer of the bell itself. Through the years, Herr Böcklemann loved the bell tenderly, but no more tenderly than those people who called themselves the village, and who paused each morning, noon, and evening to recite the Angelus.

I diffuse the lightning. I dispel demons! I soften the hard of heart . . . great claims were spelled out upon that bell, so that it became the center of the village itself, more important than even their priest, though they might not have admitted it. For over the years, great storms came, but lightning never struck a house, and never the church itself.

When Herr Böcklemann died at 91 years of age, the bell rang of its own accord, in mourning.

Zwoa

Herr Böcklemann’s son rang the bell and lived long and died, and his son, Herr Böcklemann, replaced him. The village grew, gaining all of the things and people and tasks a village might have – a mason and a joiner, a carter, a miller and baker – and farmers all around, especially on the southern slope below the spring, where the full sun shone, and the soil was not rocky. Barley and hops were grown for beer. A tavern was built across from the church, a school beside the tavern. Children were born and baptized, and went to catechism. And through it all, the Angelus rang out at six and twelve and six every day, and every farmer stopped his plow and every milkmaid bowed her head and crossed herself with sticky hands.

In one sense it was a ritual – the words in praise of the virgin came to them without thought. Yet how many of us recite prayers, and our minds are unquiet? The bell itself – its pure, beautiful sound – seemed to possess a kind of magic. There was not one of them who did not stop even his thoughts, and feel something penetrating his heart, and binding him to the others. Even babies and children too small to recite the Angelus became quiet, and gazed dreamily into the distance.

Let’s say it is almost six o’clock and two men have an argument, the kind that happens when one man’s sheep have wandered into another’s crop of black wheat, and one accuses the other of not keeping track of the sheep, or tending his fence. Cursing, the other bends down for his cudgel – but just then the bell rings. They stand – they cross themselves, and say their simple words, and when it is finished, it’s as if they’ve come out of a dream. Their anger has vanished, and remembering it, they smile at each other bashfully.

Let’s say a woman is six months pregnant and in the night she has a pain. She worries, the pain grows, and she doesn’t sleep until morning. Then suddenly the light comes up, the bell rings, she stands, and crosses herself, and recites the Angelus. When the echo of the bell recedes she is no longer in pain. This is not to say that no one in the village is sick, that no one dies. But when the bell rings, a veil is lifted, and things become what they are, no more. So pain does not turn to fear, or sadness to despair.

Over the years, the little village was sometimes reminded that it was part of something larger. The words for these larger things – duchy, kingdom, empire – made their way up the mountain, but they weren’t put to use. Still, because of one of the words, the goat-path became a road; and because they had the use of the road, ten percent of the villagers’ crops went to the nobleman to whom the land had been bequeathed. Because of this, at times a few men were called upon to fight, and a smaller few went away, never to return. Others did return, having seen something of the wide world. One brought a shiny shirt, sewn by worms. Another had seen vast glaciers of sand. One had risen up into the sky in an airy globe. And we might imagine that the words for such things also came in to the village with the men who returned.

Then one day, a villager claimed that at the bottom of the mountain was a train. One could take this train anywhere in the world. How did this man know? He was an old man, a farmer who had never left the village. It was as if the word had come up the mountain in disembodied fashion. But the villagers believed it, for if the wind was right they could hear this train ascending the north slope of the mountain; and it happened that soon after, one sunny day, a snarl was heard in the distance, and grew louder, and a motorcar (which they knew of somehow, but had never seen) came passing by on the mountain road. This was shortly after the harvest. All the people stopped – as they had one hour earlier for the noon Angelus – and stood up from their gleaning and stared, shading their foreheads with their hands.

On that same sunny day – as if the motorcar had delivered it – they learned the word Kaiserreich, which at first seemed of no more importance than the other words they knew – duchy, or kingdom, or empire.

Later that year another motorcar came buzzing up the mountain road. (It was a sparkling spring day, and the sun cut through the mountain clouds, turning a lone beech tree outside the sacristy window a translucent green.) This time the motorcar stopped. Seven officials in grey uniforms and forage caps descended, and two of these inspected the village horses. One inspector was thin with a large Adam’s apple and a high voice. Another was fat with a booming baritone. These two announced the decisions, one squeaky (“Fine”), one low (“Lame”). Three mares with their nursing colts were exempted from judgment. Two geldings were spared for each man to plow his field. The rest of the fine horses were led down the mountain by the officials, while the inspectors – fat and thin – snarled off in the motorcar.

The villagers went to their priest, Young Father Gottmund, with his blond curls and broad shoulders. He was only thirty, and barely grew hair on his rosy, dimpled face. “Why did the Protestants take our horses?” they asked.

Father Gottmund had noticed that the thin inspector was not a Protestant – he’d worn a lapel pin with the Franciscan Tau Cross – but perhaps that hadn’t made any difference in their favor. He cleared his throat nervously. During his short stay in the village, the streams had been full and the crops bountiful. He’d never had bad news to deliver.

“A war will come by summer’s end,” he began, “I have it from the bishop . . . ehh . . . that we must protect the Kaiserreich . . .” and he paused. The word felt strange in his mouth.

“Eh, the bishop writes, and he has this from the Kaiser, I believe, that the war will be over before the leaves fall.”

At this news, the people seemed relieved. But Young Father Gottmund, though he had relayed the bishop’s message honestly, still had a feeling that he had deceived them.

The next morning before the early Angelus, Young Father Gottmund climbed to the belfry to pray. There he stood, looking down over the village shrouded in fog and morning quiet, the captain of a ship who senses a storm coming. But what true captain is a stranger to stormy waters? His soft hands trembled at the helm. He began to pray and his mind was drawn away; he recited the Gloria, but lost his place even in the familiar words, and finally found himself speaking out loud, as if hearing his own confession:

“How should I govern them in times of – ”

“How should ‘I’ you ask . . . but your concern must be for them.”

“They belong to the old world. I don’t know how to speak to them.”

“Did St. Paul not tell us God’s strength is perfected in the Priest’s weakness?”

“I must say something!”

“Wait. Be filled by the Holy Spirit.”

These were not mere words for Young Father Gottmund. From time to time the Lord entered him as certainly as He entered the Blessed Sacrament; a warm golden light rose up through his limbs and torso; words he had never thought of came up and out of his mouth effortlessly. This gift was what had called him to the priesthood. He knew well St. Augustine’s warning that pride changed angels into devils, and humility made them as angels. But Young Father Gottmund could not always help himself; he was proud of his gift, and oddly insecure at once.

Now as he stood at the belfry, the village came to life under its blanket of fog, with the metallic clink of horses being hitched, the strong, low voices of the men calling out, as they began the hauling and cutting and milling – the work of the day. Soon the bellringer appeared in the churchyard, walking out from under the white blanket of fog; this was the priest’s cue to descend the ladder. The bell rang, the village stopped and together all recited the Angelus, and their minds were quiet.

Spring gave way to summer, and one hot day in late morning, the air filled again with the buzzing they could now recognize as a motorcar. The same officials, fat and thin, entered the church vestibule. The men were in their fields and did not leave them, but the women gathered there around the notice board, and after the paper was nailed in place by the thin official with the large Adam’s apple they stood in silence, reading. Some murmured the names of their husbands, or sons, or grandsons. Frau Koppen, squinting, suggested that – for the sake of some whose eyes were poor – Father Gottmund recite the list aloud.

Father Gottmund read one name, and the next, and the wives and mothers were silent, staring. Then he came to “Franz Böcklemann.”

“How could it be?”

“He won’t go . . . he’ll refuse!” (Franz Böcklemann himself, having come from his field to ring the Angelus, was at that moment approaching the church, but he did not hear the protest, because he was growing deaf, as all bellringers do.)

“What will we do? Who will ring the bell now?” So the recitation of the list was halted by their laments and protestations.

It seemed to Father Gottmund this position would be easy to replace. Franz Böcklemann had two red- haired, freckle- faced young twins who loved to fish in the stream; who climbed over the rocks in their bare feet, who skipped stones over the smooth water of the spring – who were tall and strong enough to ring the bell. Even Father Gottmund, who already climbed to the bell tower for his morning prayers, could easily perform this simple task, but he knew they would be insulted at the suggestion.

Frau Zimmer stepped forward, a big- shouldered woman with blond braids coiled at the top of her head in stubby horns. She was Franz Böcklemann’s sister.

“Our father will do it,” she said. “Again.”

Their father was Old Herr Böcklemann, the former bellringer. His son Franz had taken over two years earlier, when Old Herr Böcklemann had taken to his bed.

“What about his weak heart, Frau Zimmer?” asked Gerda Jungmann, the miller’s wife, and Frau Böcklemann, whose Christian name was Margareta, nodded.

“We must let him try.” Frau Zimmer’s voice was low, and smooth as her skin. Hearing the voice, the little crowd calmed, and Young Father Gottmund (after noting that Frau Zimmer had an authority over them that he did not possess, and after deciding that this was a rather jealous and sinful thought, and pushing it away) continued to read aloud (for the sake of Frau Koppen) the list of those conscripted. The list left out the old men who could not work the fields any longer. It left out Little Christian, who stood only as high as a donkey’s haunch. It left out Left- hand Thom, whose right side had been crushed in a threshing accident. It left out broad- shouldered Father Gottmund, of course, who stood before them after he’d read the last name, feeling conspicuously healthy and feckless.

Then Franz Böcklemann entered the church vestibule. His wife Margareta called out to him, but he passed by, oblivious, climbing nimbly up the ladder to the belfry platform. Then the bell rang. Together all bowed, all recited the Angelus, and time stopped. They were the village again. When it was finished, they calmly disbanded and went back to their work.

The village had a month of waiting before the conscripted were to leave. One by one the women came to Father Gottmund, and he prayed with them, but Frau Zimmer had not yet come. One day she sat in her pew after Mass with her head bent, her hands over the horns of blond braids. Father Gottmund knelt beside her.

“I’ve sinned, Father,” she whispered. “I’ve prayed for my husband to stay.”

“But my child – ” The word child stuck in his throat. She is no younger than I, he thought, and in another life we might be married, and I would be the one to go away – “that is not a sin.”

She turned to him, and her face, usually so broad and smooth, was contorted in pain. “I have asked the bell to keep him home,” she whispered.

The catch in Father Gottmund’s throat felt like hunger. “The bell is not God, Frau Zimmer,” he said curtly. “Nor His intercessor.”

Father Gottmund heard his own harsh voice with remorse. For among all the good people of the village, no one sought God as earnestly as Frau Zimmer. Father Gottmund closed his eyes, but all that came was an image of the crusty dark bread that waited for him on his table in the rectory, of the roll of butter in its strange tray carved with the head of a ptarmigan. He saw himself devouring the bread and butter savagely, climbing to the belfry, slashing the ropes, and sending the bell crashing.

Frau Zimmer sniffed.

Then suddenly Father Gottmund’s anger melted. His fingers felt dense and his philtrum buzzed and his body became warm and light.

“Think of your husband, Frau Zimmer,” he said. “Surely it is worse for him, though he does not speak it.”

But if it was worse for young Herr Zimmer, her husband – Herr Zimmer who was quiet, who had rather narrow shoulders, and a rather weak chin – he did not tell Father Gottmund. In fact, most of the men did not seem particularly troubled in the last month before leaving, and Father Gottmund heard more whistling than confessions, and sensed a growing excitement. Most of these men had never been out of the village, or down the mountain. Most had never taken a train. They were going to see something – the wide world. If they’d been asked why they went so willingly, they might have mentioned their beautiful table in the clouds – or their farms, their women and children, and their Angelus bell.

It was late in August, the birds just starting to call in the near- darkness, when the men kissed their wives at their doors and gathered at the church for the priest to recite a blessing. When it was done, Father Gottmund watched from the belfry as they headed down the old goatpath, the fog enveloping them as if they were walking off into a balmy dream. A cuckoo called his farewell from the tops of the pines. The men whistled back to it, and their mood seemed soft and fine.

Then Father Gottmund prayed to guide his little parish, unworthy as he was. He prayed sincerely, but his mind strayed, and circled back again, as the quiet hour passed. Finally he heard the familiar metallic clink of horses being hitched, the voices calling out – but this time the voices were all of the same high pitch, the women calling out to the young boys, the young boys to the women – as they began the milling and hauling and plowing and cutting, the work of the day.

Suddenly, a figure appeared out of the fog – an old man, leaning on a cane. He wore tattered bedcovers, pinned shut at the throat to form a hood, and he hobbled along the cobblestones of the churchyard, his cane jutting out in front of him.

The priest climbed down from the belfry and hurried to the churchyard. “God’s peace,” he greeted Old Herr Böcklemann, having forgotten that the bellringer was completely deaf.

Old Herr Böcklemann merely looked up at the priest from his stooped position, taking the posture of a shepherd’s hook, his eyebrows leaping up his forehead like white caterpillars. He took two shuffles and gasped, and then another two shuffles – at this rate he would not reach the belfry by the six o’clock Angelus, thought Father Gottmund, and how could he possibly climb a ladder?

But with Father Gottmund following behind in a slow agony, the bellringer finally arrived at the base of the belfry, dropped his cane unceremoniously, and put one hand on the ladder, then one foot on the lowest rung.

He pulled himself up. He gasped. He paused. Father Gottmund stood behind the old man and steadied the ladder.

Up and up the old fellow mounted, until he came to his knees on the platform with a thud. He maneuvered himself to the rope, grasped it, and as he pulled himself up, the bell sounded nicely. One! Two! Three! Old Herr Böcklemann pulled: Three strokes, thrice repeated, followed by nine in succession. From his shepherd’s hook posture, the old man watched the rings spin through their pulleys as the bell tipped up. Then just as it swung down again into his path, he leaned back, holding to the rope, his weight in his heels as if a stubborn animal were pulling away from him. Below, Father Gottmund mumbled anxiously – not quite able to shut his eyes – Angelus Domininuntiavit Maria, thinking as he mumbled that he must tell Frau Zimmer, “It is not a good idea . . . “

He was interrupted with a Clunk!

The old man, fallen! But he had fallen only to his knees, and shuffled backward until he reached the edge of the platform – he was not hurt, it seemed. He dropped one thin blue leg down, feeling for the top rung of the ladder with his ragged slipper. Father Gottmund held the ladder fast, wondering if he could catch the old man if he fell from such a height.

But the bellringer descended steadily, and when the second ragged slipper touched the floor, Father Gottmund offered the fallen cane. Herr Böcklemann snatched it, and leaned upon it, breathing noisily, like an open gate creaking in the wind.

Now was the time for Father Gottmund to forbid the bellringer to risk his life climbing high to the platform, for Father Gottmund to show his authority, as Frau Zimmer had shown hers. He breathed deeply until a feeling came, a light behind his closed eyes.

“Herr Böcklemann,” Father Gottmund found himself saying – although Old Herr Böcklemann, of course, did not hear it – “with God’s help, anything is possible . . . “

So the old bellringer came each day at six and twelve and six again, to ring the Angelus bell. He shuffled, he teetered, he groaned, but as the time drew near Father Gottmund could see him approaching anew. And when the time came for Mass, so also the bellringer came, though he had not been well enough to do so since Father Gottmund had arrived in the parish. He wore lederhosen with a family crest on the drop flap, and a felt cap with a green feather in it.

Old Herr Böcklemann! the congregation exclaimed when he entered the church, as if the name itself were an invocation. Old Herr Böcklemann knelt, and crossed himself. Then he picked up his missal upside down – because he came from a very old world, in which there were still a few in the land who could not read – and the good people looked away politely.

As the weeks went by, the bellringer’s step grew steadier, his breath less strained. His skin – which had been a dead man’s skin, waxy and yellow – began to pinken. “It’s the bell . . . ” the villagers whispered . . . And they grew excited and even giddy.

If you have ever been sitting on a train as it waits in the station, and another train on the next track begins to move, you may have noticed that you felt as if your own train were travelling backward, although it was standing still! You may have found it a strange, unsettling feeling. This is how it had been in the village. Each new word that had wound its way up the mountain road, each snarl of a motorcar, made the people feel that the world moved on without them. And they were not wrong. All throughout our story – from the time of the empire and the train and the motorcar especially – things outside the village had been changing, moving forward. You may have learned about some of these changes in school. The numbers that Herr Böcklemann had used to fashion the bell had made possible many discoveries. And the discoveries made changes in the way people thought. The village didn’t really understand these changes, just as they didn’t use the new words. Still, when one of them heard that it was the sun that actually held still while the earth moved around it, it gave them that same strange, unsettled feeling.

This is why they found such comfort in the bell, and its magical effect on the old bellringer, for if one week an old man is lying on his deathbed – a man so old he was never taught to read! – and the next he is climbing a ladder, time might not impose itself everywhere equally; and the village might forever be free to stand as still as that train waiting in the station.

But to Father Gottmund, who climbed to the belfry and looked out upon the village – hearing under the fog the morning sounds of the wheels creaking and the metal clinking and the voices calling all of the same high pitch – their devotion to the bell seemed a dangerous blend of fairy- tale and wish. And as he searched his mind for a warning psalm to commence his next homily, he was interrupted by something underneath the high- pitched voices. A new sound had joined them – cracking voices, jumping from low to high, as if trying to find their spots. These were the voices of the boys in the new catechism class, which included the red- haired sons of Franz Böcklemann.

Father Gottmund, as he looked down at the hitching, the pulling, and the carrying, the work of the day, crossed his arms in satisfaction. He said aloud – in practice for his homily, perhaps, because they could not hear him – “Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment . . . as a vesture shalt thou change them!”

But though their children grew and their men were gone, they were still the village. Day after day the bell rang, and daily the prayers continued, and weekly the Mass was held and the host offered. A letter from young Franz Böcklemann to his wife Margareta and his two red- haired sons assured them that he was safe – because he was deaf, he’d been assigned to bury the dead. This worried the village – the fact that there were dead to be buried. But as they worried, the Angelus came, and when the bell rang the worry fell away. Instead they recited. They trusted. They worked.

The women worked very hard in those days. They had all of their daily chores of washing and darning, milking, churning and skimming; and all of the men’s work on top of that, delegating what they could to the young ones, and sometimes to the very old among them, and when the harvest came they barely had time to sleep. Frau Zimmer’s daughters, for example, were nine and seven and four – together they cooked, milked, gathered wood. They tended the fire and swept the floor. Her two nephews – Franz Böckle mann’s redhaired twins, who used to fish in the stream, who used to climb over the rocks in their bare feet, who used to skip stones over the smooth water of the spring – helped with the harvest. But first they did their mother’s work, and their mother’s chores, and learned their catechism. They gave Frau Zimmer only what little time remained.

When the smooth voice of Frau Zimmer came through the confession grate, it sounded heavy and tired.

“Father, there is not a moment to stop. I am worn out in my bones, and there is always more to do.”

“Make your work a devotion to God,” said Father Gottmund, looking down into his own soft hands.

“To fill our hearts with God, so that demons do not enter,” said Frau Zimmer.

“Indeed . . . “

“These words you spoke at the last Mass, Father.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“But one needs time, Father, to fill one’s heart with God. When the sun is setting, in that hour when I was quiet in former times, instead I must do all of the things I have not done in the day. And I am in danger. There is too much to do. I cannot fill it.”

Father Gottmund closed his eyes. He waited until he felt the breath warm in his chest. “I would have you think, Frau Zimmer, of Christ in Gethsemane,” he said (feeling his fingers and toes, dense with warmth and light, pulsing), “of his struggle there to empty himself of the fear, the imagination, the knowledge even of what was to happen to him. What a struggle for him to pray at that time; to say, Not my will but your will be done; as He did, Frau Zimmer, make your suffering your way, gently turn back to God again and again, though your eyes may close in sleep.” Frau Zimmer sighed heavily, but Father Gottmund did not notice. His own words – God’s words, he felt, passing through him – had moved him to tears.

At the harvest’s end, the officials with their grey uniforms and their forage caps came up the mountain with a crew of men and empty wagons. Father Gottmund stood beside the women and boys as the officials weighed the wheat and oats, the rye and barley, while the fat one took notes in a grey ledger, and measured out ten percent for the women to live on.

“It’s a generous allowance,” squeaked the skinny one with the large Adam’s apple. “That’s the same as anyone else gets, maybe a little more.”

“Oh, it’s more; it’s certainly more!” said the fat one in his booming voice. “They’re certainly very hungry in the cities these days. No butter or honey to be had anywhere, certainly. And meat but once a month.”

The women, whose supply of butter and honey had been taken by the same officials, watched in dismay as their cereal crop wound its way down the mountain.

They turned to Father Gottmund. “The work we did and the Protestants took all of it!”

“An allowance!” said Frau Jorgen. “It insults us!”

Father Gottmund was ashamed. Could he not have forbidden the officials to take so much? Now there was nothing but to try to help them by words alone.

“Your fathers, and grandfathers, of course, gave ten percent of crops to their landlords?” he asked.

“Ten percent is not what they took but what we are allowed to keep!” Frau Hoffman scowled.

“Yes, yes,” he stammered, blushing. “I understand.”

“Oh, Father,” whispered Frau Zimmer. “It makes me feel as if I should not work so hard.”

Father Gottmund closed his eyes and the women looked on curiously. They watched his broad chest rise and fall beneath the soutane. They studied his knitted brows.

“The bishop tells us,” he said finally, “that those in the cities are starving. And those are your fellow men.”

“The Belgians too are my fellow men,” said Gerda Jungmann. A few heads nodded. “And even the French!” Nobody nodded at this, except Father Gottmund, who said, let us pray, and they bowed their heads as he prayed for all of these poor souls, for the conscripted men of the village especially; for their safety, and even more – though he did not say it aloud – for their souls. For if they were killed they might see the kingdom of Heaven, but what if they themselves did

the killing? What was the Kaiserreich to any of them, compared to the Kingdom of God?

Father Gottmund wrote the bishop: the women are overworked, tired, and sleep during Mass. After so much work they see their harvest taken almost entirely by the officials. Can something be done?

The bishop replied that Belgian prisoners would be sent to help with the next harvest – he had this from the cardinal, who had it from the Kaiser.

Drei

Now our story moves more quickly. There are more official visits; more empty wagons arrive to be filled; more things wind down the mountain. Their wool mattresses, which they must replace with lumpy oat- husk ones. Tallow candles. Along with the fine horses, some old, and some lame. Some cheese, some milk, and finally, half of the cows. Rumors wind their way up the mountain: the cows are not even taken for their milk, but to slaughter. At the same time, the officials tell the village that they are forbidden to kill their own animals; for this, they must have permission. A ticket, to slaughter one’s own hog! But numbers are kept and inventories taken and some are willing and some are afraid, and they comply.

Another paper is posted. What does it say? asks Frau Koppen, pressed up near the notice board, squinting. Father Gottmund answers, Casualties. (Which means? The dead, but also the wounded or missing.) Father Gottmund, a lump in his throat, reads the names aloud: Herr Gunter is dead. Herr Miller is dead. Quiet Herr Zimmer, with his narrow shoulders and weak chin, is “missing.” Herr Böcklemann’s name is not on the list.

Yet another notice is posted, by those officials in grey with the forage caps, the fat Lutheran with the large mustache nailing it on the board as his friend (with the lapel pin of the Tau Cross) looks on blinking and stroking his Adam’s apple: more are conscripted. Little Christian, who stands as high as a donkey’s haunch. Klaus, whose left leg is shorter than his right. Left-hand Thom.

What does it mean, Frau Zimmer whispers through the confessional grate, for a man to be missing?

It means we can hope.
But in all likelihood he is dead.
Father Gottmund thinks so, yes. But he will not say so.
Frau Zimmer, cleave to God. Let us pray.

Fiare

Every morning, before the ringing of the Angelus, Father Gottmund climbs to the belfry to pray, to look down on the little village, and out into the clouds. Every morning he hears the women and boys calling in the same high pitch, accompanied by the cracking voices trying to find their pitch; and then one day some low voices again join the high ones and the jumping ones – the voices of Belgian prisoners who have come to help with the harvest.

These Belgians come to Mass with the villagers they are assigned to help, and they sit in the pews with the women and children – like actors, thinks Father Gottmund, men who play the part of husbands. In the front pew are Frau Zimmer, her girls, and the handsome Schomur, who, when they’d asked his name, thought they’d asked his occupation, which was unemployed – chomêur. (His native language was Walloon. He spoke French to them because it was the foreign tongue he knew, and he thought the villagers, being foreign, would understand it.)

What should it mean, wonders Father Gottmund – looking out at the pews of women sitting with strangers – for a man to be missing?

There is a healthiness to Frau Zimmer, a blush. And that should not be. (I am in danger, she’d told him.) A new blue ribbon is threaded through her braided horns. When things are so scarce (shoes, and stockings, and soap; mattresses, milk and tallow candles) how would a blue ribbon have wound its way up the mountain?

In confession, Frau Zimmer is vague. One must move forward. You said this, Father. Just as time passes, you said. According to God’s plan.

Oh! That was not – Frau Zimmer! To move forward in such a way, you risk your soul. Do you understand?

If she has understood, Father Gottmund won’t know. Because Frau Zimmer no longer comes to confession.

Fimfe

Time passes. In the morning, from the belfry, in his private hour before the Angelus, Father Gottmund prays. Through the mist, he hears their= voices calling out, one to the other; women calling to boys and both these to the men again, the Belgians. Then one morning the cracking voices are gone. When the curtain of fog lifts, the players have suddenly changed; those who were boys in the catechism class – including the red- haired sons of Franz Böcklemann – are now deep- voiced – tall, broad- shouldered young men. If the war goes on through the summer, they are next on the list of the conscripted.

More often the village has need of the bell, for they have bad dreams. Up the mountain winds the news that the war (which Father Gottmund said would be over by the time the leaves fell several autumns ago) has “no end in sight.”

The deaf old bellringer learns from watching. In Mass he sees the knit brows, the hands, though resting, curled in fists. He walks beside the stream, where standing water pools in rainy season. The frogs are thick there – their vibration stops as he passes. They are afraid, he thinks, as we all are. A giant moves alongside us. We can feel his shadow.

In a storm, Herr Böcklemann struggles his way up the muddy path to the belfry. By candlelight, he mounts the ladder, ringing the bell as the thunder cracks the sky open and the lightning flashes. When the storm moves off he stumbles home and falls into bed with wet clothes. Suddenly another clap of thunder rips the roof off Herr Böcklemann’s house. The rain pours in, flooding it, his oat- husk mattress has become a boat, his larder floats alongside it with flotsam of felt hats, lederhosen with the family crest on the drop flap, ragged slippers, butter dishes with the heads of a stork, a bittern, an egret – and he sits up with a start. Oh. He’s had a nightmare. A slice of light comes through his curtain – the birds have started calling. Already time to go back to the belfry.

Old Herr Böcklemann rings the six o’clock Angelus. And all of the village – having also sat up with a start, their hearts still beating hard from their nightmares – hears the Angelus bell. Then they are able to begin the work of the day. To eat, and give thanks for their bread. For they must give thanks – in the cities there are lines for blocks to get a few rotting potatoes. Everyone is thin. Shoes, soap, woolen stockings, are impossible to come by.

It is only a matter of time before these starving city people wonder about the places the food is coming from. In spite of the officials, it’s said that farmers, such as those living up the mountain, hold back food for themselves (and why wouldn’t they?) such as butter, cream, a suckling pig not yet marked on the inventory.

One day an old horse comes up the goat- path- turned- mountainroad. In the cart behind sits a woman with stringy hair, wearing a torn dress and no shoes. She is so thin she looks like the dead. She stops outside the church, where Father Gottmund gives her bread with some of his butter, from the dish with the head carved in the shape of a ptarmigan.

But the thin woman does not leave; instead she hovers outside of the church until the Mass begins; they hear the old horse slowly clopping off. Strange woman, they say, would she not want to stay for Mass, having come all this way? After the service they find their eggs have been stolen from the nests; butter and cheese from the larder; Gerda Jungman spies the thin woman cutting her wheat with Frau Koppen’s scythe.

“Thief!” Gerda Jungmann cries out.

The village chases the thin woman. She runs, climbs into her cart and drives her thin horse as fast as it will go on the mountain road. Then suddenly the horse falls, and as much as the old woman whips him, he makes only one feeble rocking attempt to rise and sinks back down in exhaustion. The village descends upon the woman, grabbing their eggs, which break, their cheese, their salt pork, their coarse worsted which represents the three shorn sheep. And when they have recovered these things they fall on the woman and beat her.

Father Gottmund, hearing the racket, runs from the sacristy, lifting his soutane out of the mud, yelling, Stop!

The village screams, claws at the thin woman, and Father Gottmund is one man, unused to fighting, to restraining anyone physically. There’s a punch to his gut; a pair of hands close around his neck (broad, soft, smooth hands); the thumbs (also broad and soft) presshis windpipe.

Suddenly the bell rings. The hands release.

They stand, and smooth their garments. They turn on cue, and recite the Angelus, while Father Gottmund doubles over, gasping.

The village stares at the thin woman, ashamed, aghast. Willingly they give her bread and cheese, what they have left, a bed to sleep in. Frau Koppen gives her an old gelding. Frau Zimmer calls the redhaired sons of Herr Böcklemann to repair the cart. And after two days they send the thin woman off, her cart loaded with cereals.

But the villagers have become wary. A word for the hungry city people comes along up the mountain, too, hamsterers – and more of them come, stealing wheat from the field; more creep into the henhouses and take the eggs (Gerda Jungman, chasing one away, saw him break the egg and slurp it raw); more steal into the barn to milk the cows (Frau Koppen saw one milking right into his mouth).

When they complain to Father Gottmund he closes his eyes for the Lord to enter, to help him speak. “Your fellow men,” he says. “So hungry. Do you not bleed for them?”

“They scare us, Father Gottmund.”

They scare Father Gottmund too. The very need of the hamsterers seems contagious, and he’s felt it spreading among the villagers. After the Angelus their eyes are clear and calm. But at other times there is something sidelong in the way they look at him, something shifty. (Frau Koppen was seen on the side of the mountain road, waving her husband’s spare boots at a passing horse and cart.)

When the inspectors next arrive in the village they’re greeted by a phalanx – women, children, Belgians – holding dung forks. Don’t come any closer, say the villagers, don’t you dare take any more.

Just then the bell rings, they put their weapons down, and back away. Please, comrade, begs the thin official – with the lapel pin of the Tau Cross – to the fat one, let’s overlook this little scene. And the fat Prussian sighs. Certainly, he says, times are wearying. Times are hard on us all, certainly. For this time the officials have not come for inspection or crops or butter, only to post another notification.

Dead: Herr Zimmer. Herr Jungman. Herr Koppen. Little Christian.

Missing: Left- hand Thom.

I confess, I felt relief at Herr Zimmer’s death.

Nothing else?

Also guilt.

Because?

What is the worth of my gift – my words, if they could not help her? Again, it is only about you, I see. “My words. My gift. My failure.”

But no one in the village has more yearning for the Kingdom of

Heaven than Frau Zimmer!

Are you forgetting something?

(Father Gottmund is silent, waiting for his own answer.)

Forgiveness.

The bell rings. Father Gottmund feels strangely empty. He is not special; he can see that now. He is one of many, one of the village. With them, he recites the Angelus. His mind is quiet.

Dead: Left-hand Thom.

Terrible images wind their way up the mountain road – of air turned a bright poison green. From a hole in the earth, a severed hand sticks out as if waving, a lone booted foot. Skeletons of the fine village horses hang entire in the harness.

Dead: The red- haired sons of Herr Franz Böcklemann – who had once loved to fish, to skip stones in the stream. Missing: their father the bellringer, Herr Franz Böcklemann.

Then the villagers grew slow and heavy, their eyes dull. In the morning, Father Gottmund climbed to the belfry. When his hour of prayer ended he strained his ears. The clinking came, the fog lifted, but the voices were no more; the horses were hitched in silence, the simple calls reduced to gestures.

What was their Angelus to them now? It could not change what had happened. But when the bell rang, the village heard it, as a swimmer can vaguely hear a voice in water. They rose to the surface. At six and twelve and six they stopped and crossed themselves and said the familiar words, and these words – as if by a miracle – they were able to say. They worked. They slept. Still, they lived.

Sechse

One bright morning came when the two officials, one fat and one thin, came to discuss a “serious matter.” Father Gottmund nervously invited them to sit across from him in the sacristy. A fresh breeze rustled the beech tree outside the open window and played with a stack of official notices on the table in front of them, which were weighted down by the old ox- horn chalice.

Finally the fat one spoke. Ammunition, he said, was certainly running low, and metal was needed, certainly, from every possible source. Including church bells. Father Gottmund drew himself up.

“Not our bell,” he said. “Surely not.”

“Oh yes,” said the thin one, in a sing- song, his Adam’s apple bobbing, “all of the church bells, from all of the churches, all across the fatherland.”

“Certainly,” said the fat one.

Father Gottmund buried his head in his hands as the officials looked on, shrugging. A sensitive priest, they thought; perhaps he was crying.

In fact, Father Gottmund was trying to remember his jealousy of the bell. For hadn’t he thought the village backward in their views?

The people had prayed to the bell; they seemed to worship it. He would have willingly sent it down the mountain, in former times. But something had changed. He breathed there with his head in his hands, waiting for words to come, but his gift had abandoned him. He could not feel the light and warmth in his body. Instead he pictured their bell being melted, being poured down a trough, hissing and steaming. He saw that sacred metal (that very word came to him – sacred) being forged into bullets. And he felt the rage and loss and fear of the village – as if these emotions were his own. His throat was tight and his heart beat hard in his chest.

“It is understandable,” he said slowly, looking into his hands, “that such metals are needed. But the bell is the center of the village – of our village – and when the center is plucked out from any thing, it collapses upon itself. I am sure that we can forego many things – food, for example, and comforts. You might take more of our crops. But please do not take our bell.”

“But Father –” said the thin one, in a hurt voice – “it is an order.”

“Certainly,” said the fat one. “It will be done.”

“Please,” said Father Gottmund, addressing the thin one with the lapel pin of the Tau Cross, “let me discuss this with the bishop, to see if there is some way . . .”

“Father,” said the fat one, “we have this order from the Kaiser – the highest bishop in the land!”

Father Gottmund stiffened. “My highest bishop is in Rome.”

“Father, we don’t mean to insult you,” the thin one pleaded. “But we may not overlook noncompliance. We should be killed for it!” The fat one nodded. “And if you refuse, Father, so will you.” Father Gottmund looked down into his soft, useless, trembling hands. Words would not come; he knew that now. And words had done nothing; he had done nothing. He’d stood by. Do something, he thought. For once, don’t simply rely on words!

He rolled his eyes up at the officials with his head still hanging, like an angry bull. “No.”

The fat one chuckled. “That is noble of you Father, but if we should arrest you – and certainly, for even the slightest resistance, we will arrest you – we will nevertheless take the bell. Have you not heard? This is happening all over the fatherland. You are not alone in the sacrifice. And the churches who also have brass organ pipes must give those as well. The opulent have the farthest to fall, certainly. For you lucky ones, it is only a simple bell. Even your chalice there seems to be a peasant’s model – fashioned of bone, is it?” he asked, smiling unctuously. “We’ll have no need of that, ha ha! So you are fortunate there too! Remember that the Kaiserreich – ”

“Don’t talk to me of the Kaiserreich!” said Father Gottmund, leaping to his feet. “What has the Kaiser done for my village? Taken all of its men, its horses, its sheep, its wool, its hard- won crops, all!” His heart was beating wildly now, and it felt as large as the heart of the bravest soldier, and the words, do something, rang in his head as he looked about him for something heavy and hard – the chalice.

It was, at this moment, a breath away from the noon Angelus.

Old Herr Böcklemann, having inched up his ladder, his hands ready on the rope, could see down through the open screen into the sacristy. His sharp eyes – which had served as eyes and ears for many years – lit on the beech tree outside the window. Its leaves did not twist, as in a wind, but trembled horizontally, as if the ground itself were shaking. He dropped the rope and shuffled to the edge of the platform, until he could see the young Father standing menacingly over the officials, red- faced and wild- haired, like a Viking. What terrible news had they brought, to enrage him so?

Herr Böcklemann, listening with his squinting eyes, inched even closer to the edge of the platform, and as he saw Father Gottmund shove the fat one – who fell to his knees before the priest, his forehead an open target – he placed his left foot, and then, unwittingly, the entire weight of his old body, into the air.

Father Gottmund was insensible to the thud made by the bellringer’s old body as it struck the ladder and then the floor, insensible to consequences.

“No!” he yelled, lunging at the fat one, and bringing the heavy chalice down upon his forehead.

The fat one fell. He lay on the floor of the sacristy, his head bleeding and his body still, as the thin one picked up the fallen chalice, shaking, turning to Father Gottmund.

“Look what you’ve done, Father!” The thin one, raising the chalice, rushed at Father Gottmund, who fell to his knees beside the fat one’s body, his own forehead an open target.

Then a strange thing happened, a thing that had only happened once before. The old bell rang of its own accord. The thin official dropped the chalice and turned to Father Gottmund. Father Gottmund turned to the thin official, and they wept.

Sieme

Hear now the sound of the last rites, read in the low smooth voice of a woman, and then, when her tears prevent her, a man, in Bavarian with a strange mingled accent of French and Walloon.

Picture a funeral procession, following a cart as it winds its way out of a churchyard. The cart goes slowly, giving off a fragrance, for it is covered with flowers and incense.

The people are no longer silent. Now they come lamenting, howling.

Some rush forward to say a last goodbye, to throw their arms around the Angelus bell – dressed in its white robe and garlanded in flowers there upon the cart – and hold it fast, their tears running.

As the cart wound down the goat- path turned mountain road, the villagers stood and watched it go, as they had watched their horses go, and their men and the sons of their men; as they’d watched their cereal, their cheese and butter, their mattresses stuffed with wool; as they had watched, finally, their young priest with his hands bound behind him. The cart descended and they stood; the sun went down before them sweetly pink, and they stood. They stood for a long time, for who among them would be the first to go? Darkness descended. Venus showed herself. A cool moon, with a scarf of gauzy cloud, lit the way home. Quietly home and quietly to bed, and when the light came quietly, they went to the fields.

At six, at noon, at six, silence. Silence from the mountaintops winds down, and spreads across the land and loses its particular nature; it joins the silence of those fallen in fields, or buried in the earth; the silence of all of the dead, across all lands of any name.

The bell softens, slumps. Black liquid runs down a trough, hissing and steaming.

Old Herr Böcklemann lies in bed. His left arm and left leg are wound in bandages of rags. The villagers gather at his side, remembering what they’ve been told of him. In his youth the old bellringer had played pranks, and later whittled strange birds to make the heads of butter dishes, and held his missal upside down in Mass, and sang most beautifully and then, when his hearing left, most terribly, and loved to tease, and sometimes misused a new word that had wound its way up the mountain – these traits had been his. But their stories have no relation to the body here. It does not see. It does not whittle, or read or pretend to read – there is only the body and gasping breaths, which come farther and farther apart.

Frau Zimmer stood at the edge of the barley field on the south-facing slope, where the sun was so bright she could only make out that the crop had grown somehow to cover the mountainside and was sprinkled with poppies and cornflowers, and while it resembled a field it was above the field; while it resembled the earth, above the earth. Standing at its far edge was a man with rather narrow shoulders, a rather weak chin. She found herself beside him quite suddenly. He was dead, she remembered that now. But she did not want to embarrass him by saying so.

He turned to her, his eyes glowing.

“Here you are.”

Achte

Now we are nearing the end of our tale. But there is something important we must add. All along for the whole length of our little history – but even more quickly during the time of the empire and the train and the motorcar – scientists had been discovering things that changed people’s ideas of the world. We have mentioned the earth and the planets travelling around the sun, an idea as old as Copernicus, and later, Galileo with his telescope. And though that may seem an ordinary idea to you, imagine if you had grown up believing that Joshua asked God not to let dusk fall until the enemy was destroyed, “And the sun stood still and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Now let us consider something else you’ve learned in school: that animals, when certain things in the world change around them, must adapt to their environment, and the ones that are best at changing in this way will be most likely to survive. What if the theory were applied to a human being – a blacksmith, to take one example? Let us imagine that he lives in a village a little farther down the mountain, a village that has moved forward in time. If people in this place begin to take trains and drive motorcars, and the farmers to use tractors, then of course the number of horses will dwindle, and in order to survive, our blacksmith must pack up his possessions and move down the mountain road to Munich, for example, to work in the motorcar factory. If it can be observed that our blacksmith is indeed subject to the same rule as the most ordinary animal, it could make some question his God- given place in the universe. Just as the earth travelling around the sun may bring up similar doubts.

And this takes us back to the young bellringer, Franz Böcklemann, who, though he was “missing,” did in fact return to the village after all, to the great comfort of his wife, Margareta. Poor Franz Böcklemann had lost not only his two red- haired sons, but his venerated position of bellringer – he had returned to a village that must have seemed a shadow of itself, without even a priest to conduct the Mass. So the people in gentle tones assured Franz Böcklemann that the bishop had promised that the new priest was on his way, and that a new bell would surely follow when the war was done.

Franz Böcklemann replied that the bell only enabled the people’s tendency to superstition, and that a new priest was not necessary, because God was in fact fashioned by man in his own image, and not the other way around.

Then they knew that he must have sustained a war wound to the head.

They could find no other explanation. Though they had passed through such darkness, they could not question that thing that pulsed within them still. Even after their bell had gone, each day at six and twelve and six again, they found themselves standing at attention, their eyes wide and their ears open. What is faith but a kind of listening – a wonder, and a waiting? They had nurtured it in their very souls, where we might imagine it remained, even when the houses cut from the fine wood stood empty, and the fields grew up with weeds.

So in time every man goeth to his long home; every bell, every church, every village too. But we retain a portion of them in memory, in dream, and in story.

And even today, if you were to take an airplane across the ocean, a train and a bus, you might venture up this mountain to the beautiful table in the clouds, where the foundation of an old church might show you that once, long ago, there was a village. Here they farmed, here they worshipped. Here there was a bell.

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Molly McNett is the author of the story collection One Dog Happy (University of Iowa Press, 2008). Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.