Four days before Christmas, Pastor Sam Greer climbed the Grace Methodist bell tower with a flashlight and found the oak yoke split down the middle, and with it, eighty-nine years of Christmas Eve midnights.
The bell had not fallen. Thank God for that. It hung crooked in its frame, held up by the iron straps and one stubborn bolt, with a crack running through the old timber above it like a lightning bolt. When Sam put his hand on the rope and pulled gently, the whole frame groaned.
He let go of the rope.
"Well, Lord," he said out loud, to the cold dark tower. "That's a problem."
Sam was fifty-eight. He had been pastor of Grace Methodist for sixteen years and a Marine for twelve before that, and he had learned in both jobs that most problems could be fixed quietly before anybody had to worry about them. He had fixed a leaking roof the Saturday before Easter. He had fixed a feud between two sisters over a casserole dish the week of a funeral.
He did not know how to fix a bell.
Every Christmas Eve since 1937, the Grace Methodist bell had rung at midnight. Twelve strokes, slow, so the whole town could hear it from Main Street to Creek Road. It had rung through the war and through the glass works closing and through the winter June Whitaker died. It was the one thing about Christmas in Pine Hollow that had never once changed.
He called a bell company in Cincinnati that afternoon. A kind woman told him they could send a crew to replace the yoke in February.
"We can't swing it before then?"
"Pastor, if that yoke is cracked, I wouldn't let anybody pull that rope. You could bring the whole bell down through the floor."
Word got around, the way it does in a town of twenty-four hundred people with one diner.
By the next morning, Dot Kessler had heard about it from Tyler, who had heard about it from the church secretary. By noon, the Liars' Table had three different theories about how to fix it. Floyd Eckert, home from the hospital in Marietta and back in his Saturday tie, said they should just play a recording of a bell over a loudspeaker.
"Floyd," Dot said, "I'd rather hear nothing."
Tyler had already found a speaker system online. "It'd sound pretty good, Grandma. Honestly. You could barely tell."
"I could tell," Dot said.
Sam sat in the corner booth with his coffee and let them argue. Then he paid his bill and drove out to Maple Grove to see the only living person in Pine Hollow who had ever rung that bell in an emergency.
Arliss Combs was ninety-eight. He sat in a wheelchair by the window of his room at Maple Grove, with a blanket over his knees and the Calder County Ledger folded on his lap, though he could not read it anymore without the big magnifier.
Every child in Pine Hollow learned the story in third grade. In January of 1937, Hollow Creek came over its banks in the middle of the night. The water rose up Creek Road faster than anybody had ever seen. The Grace Methodist bell rang for six hours to wake the families on the low ground, and nine-year-old Arliss Combs, the sexton's boy, rang it for one of those hours by himself. All thirty-one houses on Creek Road got out.
Sam had heard the story a hundred times. He had never heard Arliss tell it.
He sat down next to the old man and told him about the yoke.
Arliss listened with his eyes half closed. When Sam finished, he did not say anything for a long time.
On the windowsill beside him sat an old hammer. Sam had noticed it before, on other visits. It was a small blacksmith's hammer with a worn hickory handle, the head wrapped in a faded scrap of feed sack tied with baling twine. The nurses dusted around it. Sam had always assumed it was a keepsake from the old man's working days.
"They're going to tell you to play a record," Arliss said finally.
"They already have."
The old man's mouth twitched. "Don't."
Sam came back the next afternoon and the one after that. Each time, Arliss asked a few more questions about the tower. How the frame was leaning. Where the crack ran. Whether the clapper still hung free.
"It hangs free," Sam said. "But I can't swing the bell. The yoke won't take it."
"Don't need to swing it," Arliss said. And then he went to sleep in his chair, and Sam drove home not knowing what he meant.
On Christmas Eve, the church was full by eleven. Every pew, every folding chair, people standing three deep in the back. Snow was falling softly outside. The candles were lit.
Sam had decided to try it himself. He had borrowed a rubber mallet from Walt Brenner's workshop, the big kind for setting floor tile. The plan was simple. He would climb the tower at five to midnight, leave the bell hanging still in its broken yoke, and strike it twelve times from the side. No swinging, no rope, no weight on the cracked timber.
At eleven-fifty-five, he climbed the ladder into the tower with a flashlight between his teeth and the mallet in his belt.
The cold up there was bitter. He could see his breath. He could see the town below through the louvers, the stoplight blinking yellow at Main and Elm, the snow coming down on Dot's dark windows.
The church clock below him began to chime midnight.
Sam drew back the mallet and swung it hard into the side of the bell.
It made a sound like somebody dropping a sack of potatoes on a kitchen floor.
Thud.
He hit it again, harder. Thud.
Down below, through the floor, he heard the congregation go quiet, waiting. Then, in the hush, a small voice near the back of the church asked, loud enough to carry all the way up the tower, "Mama, is that the bell?"