The Voice in the Bell

The valley was a green seam stitched between two ridges of pine, and at the bottom of it the river ran all year, brown in spring flood, clear as a knife in autumn. Wicket lay on the eastern bank: a town of stone cellars and timber upper rooms, two churches (the old one, sagging on its Romanesque piers; the new one, still unfinished on its hill), a tannery, a guildhall with a crooked clock, a market square that smelled of cabbage and wet dog eight days out of ten. Beyond the last houses, where the road turned to a track and the track turned to a path, the foundry sat in a hollow of its own, low-roofed, half-buried into the slope, with a chimney that spat black feathers into the sky when the wind came wrong.

He had nodded. He had not, she noticed, touched the relic either.

The year began in the pit.

In late autumn, when the leaves were coming down off the ridges and the river smelled of oak and cold stone, she began the false bell — the maquette, the shape around which everything else would be built. It was a model of clay and wax, life-size, hollow within, the thickness of her closed fist at the soundbow, tapering to a knuckle's width at the crown. She built it up in layers over a wooden armature, a turntable fixed to the floor of the workshop, each layer of wax smoothed with a warm iron and then carved with the inscriptions she had been paid for: the name of the saint; the name of the pastor; the date by the new reckoning; a verse from the psalter in badly-spaced Latin; a row of small running figures — saints, donors, a dog — strung around the shoulder like a procession.

She worked with two boys that year. The elder was Eitan, son of a tanner, sixteen, with a soft mouth and clever hands. The younger was Miro, twelve, the smith's boy, who had come because his father had said he was good with fire and not much else. They fetched and carried and held things and asked, sometimes, questions that Alma answered in monosyllables. She did not teach them the way her father had taught her — with cuffs and riddles — but she did not teach them much either. The craft was something you leaned into, the way you leaned into a current. You did not master it so much as stop fighting it.

The wax figure stood for two weeks in the cool of the workshop. While it stood, she prepared the noyau — the core, the inner mold. This was a thing of brick dust and clay and cow hair, built up by hand over the wax in a thick, rough coat, then scored and pierced with a grid of shallow channels, like the lines on the back of a hand. These channels would be the paths through which the gases, fleeing the molten bronze, would find their way out. If they did not find their way out, the mold would crack, or the bell would be unsound, or worse — the pour would fail and the metal would lie in the pit like a dead thing for months.

She saw, on the third circuit, the flaw.

It was on the shoulder, where the inscription ran. A crack, hairline, the length of her hand. She knelt. She put her face close to the bell. The crack had the look of a vein in a leaf, or a river on a map. She did not touch it.

"Get me a light."

Eitan brought the lamp. She held it close to the crack and looked along the surface. The crack went deep. She knew, without being told, that it went all the way through. She sat back on her heels.

"Get me a chisel. The small one. And a rag."

She ran the edge of the chisel along the crack, gently, listening with her fingertips the way her father had taught her. The chisel rang. The crack did not. A sound bell was a sound bell; a cracked bell was a dull thing, a thing with a silence inside it.

She stood. She looked at the boys. Their faces were the faces of boys who had been waiting to learn that the world was not fair.

"Bank the pit," she said. "And go home."

They went.

She sat on the stool by the cooling pit for a long time. The light went out of the day. The first stars came over the ridge. The bell cooled in its pit, ticking gently as the metal contracted, and the crack, she knew, would grow. By morning it would be longer. By the next morning, longer still. In a week the bell would be a broken bell, fit only for the scrap heap, fit only to be melted down and tried again.

She thought of the relic in the crown. She thought of Father Renier, who had set it there with his own hand, and of what he would say when he came to see the broken bell. She thought of the bishop, who had insisted, and of the bishop's predecessor, who had died in the winter, and of the people in the town who had given their silver for this bell and would now have to give it again, or would have to make do with the old bell in the old church, which had cracked two years before and had been mended with a band of iron, and which rang, when it rang at all, with a voice like a sick cat.

She thought of her father. She had not, she realized, thought of him for weeks. She had been too busy with the work. Now she thought of him, sitting at the table with the cider, his hands around the cup, his face unchanged. She thought of the way he had looked at the pit, sometimes, when the metal was cooling, as if he were listening for something. She had thought, then, that he was listening for flaws. Now she thought he might have been listening for something else.

She got up. She went into the workshop. She sat at the bench and took down the tuning hammers, the three weights, and set them in a row. She looked at them for a long time. Then she put them away and went to bed.

In the morning, she wrote a letter to Father Renier. She told him the bell was cracked. She did not apologize. She did not explain. She said only that she would begin again, and that the cost of the new metal would be borne by her, and that the new bell would be cast in the autumn, when the air was cool and the river was low.

"The relic," he said, finally. "Is it — "

"Untouched," she said. "I haven't opened the crown."

He nodded. He knelt by the pit. He put his hand on the rim of the broken bell, gently, as if it were a sleeping animal.

"My predecessor," he said, "the one who died in the winter. He cast a bell once. Over the western ridge."

"I know."

"He said the bell rang on the day it was hung. He said it rang for an hour without being struck. He said the people came out of their houses and stood in the street and listened. He said, when it stopped, that the bell had a crack in it the length of a man's arm."

"And?"

"They broke it up. They cast it again. The second bell rang as it should. He said the first bell had been wrong in some way he could not name. He said he had tried, for years, to find out what the wrongness was. He died not knowing."

Alma was quiet. The bell ticked in its pit. A crow went over.

"Do you believe him?" she said.

"I don't know," he said. "I wasn't there."

They stood together at the pit for a while. Then he went.

In April, she broke up the bell. This was a thing she had not done before, and it was harder than she had expected. The crack had grown, as she had known it would, and the bell was now divided into two unequal pieces, joined at the rim by a thin strip of metal that bent but did not break when she struck it with the sledge. She had to cut the strip with a chisel. The sound was a low, dull note that seemed to come from the bell rather than from the chisel, and that lasted, in the pit, for several seconds after the cut was made.

She set the two halves in the yard. She did not look at them again for a week.

In May, when the river was running clear and the apple trees in the town were coming into blossom, she took the broken halves and began to recore them. This was something she had read of but had never done. The idea was that the metal of a broken bell, if it had been well-cast to begin with, retained the shape and the voice the founders had given it, even when broken. If you cleaned the broken faces, recored them, and recast over them — using the old metal as part of the new charge — the bell would remember itself, in some way the old books did not pretend to explain. The new bell would be, in part, the old bell; and the old bell, broken though it was, would be, in part, the new bell.

She heard, very faintly, the sound of the river.

She sat back on her heels. She stayed there a long time. Then she went into the workshop and took down the tuning hammers and began, very slowly, to bring the bell into voice.

This was the work she liked best. The tuning was done from the inside, with the bell hanging from a tripod in the workshop, the mouth upward. She would set the lightest hammer against the inside of the soundbow and strike the outside with the heaviest, listening for the places where the note was flat or sharp. Where it was sharp, she would tap the inside, lightly, to thin the metal and lower the note. Where it was flat, she would tap the outside, to stretch the metal and raise it. It was a work of weeks, sometimes of months. You did not force a bell into voice. You coaxed it. You asked it. You listened.

This bell came into voice strangely. She would strike it and it would ring, and the ring would be the ring she had shaped — the deep, bright tone she had aimed for, the tone that would carry up the valley and down the valley and across the river to the far ridge. But under the tone, very faintly, there was another tone, lower, slower, like the memory of a tone, or the echo of a tone heard from a great distance. She would strike it again, and the tone would be there, and the undertone would be there, and she could not tell whether the undertone was in the bell or in her ear or in the air of the workshop.

She did not tell the boys. She did not tell Father Renier. She worked on.

In late August, when the apples were coming in and the river was low and the air was the color of a struck match, she pronounced the bell ready. She wrote to Father Renier that the bell would be hung in September, on the feast of the saint, and that the relic would be set in the crown on the morning of the hanging, with the customary prayers.

"I don't know," she said.

He nodded, as if this were the answer he had expected. He took his hand from the rim and stepped back.

"It is for the bishop to hear," he said, "and for the people. Not for me."

She wanted to say something — that the undertone might be a flaw, that it might be a trick of the air, that it might be in her ear or in his, that the bell, struck a hundred times in a church tower, would sound only as bells sound, which is to say, as bronze and human breath. She did not say it. She had been casting bells for twenty-five years. She had never heard an undertone. She had never, before this bell, recast a bell from its own broken halves. She had never set a relic into a mold before the pour. She did not know what to say.

The hanging was on a Saturday. The townspeople came up from the valley in their best clothes, the women in their dark dresses and white caps, the men in their wool coats, the children running ahead and being called back. The bishop came, in his carriage, with two canons and a secretary. Father Renier was already at the foundry, in his surplice, with the brass theca in his hands.

The bell was lifted from the tripod by eight men and set on a low cart, which Eitan and Miro pulled up the hill to the unfinished church. The procession followed. Alma walked at the back, in her working coat, her hands black with the bronze dust that never quite came out. She did not feel, that morning, that the bell was hers. She felt that she had been its instrument, the way the pit was its instrument, the way the furnace was its instrument, the way the river, in some sense she could not articulate, was its instrument too.

Under the bell's voice, the undertone was there.

It was not, this time, faint. It was as clear as the bell's own voice, and as low, and as slow, and it came not from the bell but from the ground, or from the air, or from somewhere that was neither the ground nor the air. It was the sound the river made when it ran over a bed of stone in spring flood. It was the sound a fire made when it burned down to its last coal. It was the sound her father had made, she thought, when he had stopped, the way a bell stops when the rope is let go — that small, final sound, not heard so much as felt, in the chest, in the bones.

The people in the churchyard did not speak. They stood with their faces upturned and their hands at their sides and they listened. The bishop did not open his eyes. Father Renier stood at Alma's elbow. She could feel him shaking, slightly, the way a bell shakes after it has been struck.

The bell rang for a long time. Then it stopped.

The silence that followed was not the silence that usually follows a bell. It was a heavier silence, a silence with weight, as if the air had been thickened by what had passed through it. The people did not move. The bishop did not open his eyes. The dog, far off, had stopped barking.

Then the bishop opened his eyes. He looked at Alma. He looked at Father Renier. He looked at the people in the churchyard. He opened his mouth, and closed it, and opened it again.

"Well," he said.

The people began, slowly, to stir. Some went home. Some stood in the churchyard and talked in low voices, glancing up at the bell in the tower. Some went into the church to see the bishop, who had gone to sit in a pew at the back and was staring at the unfinished altar with the look of a man who has been asked a question in a language he does not speak.

Alma went up into the tower alone. The bell hung in its yoke, dark and heavy. The rope hung down through the floor. She put her hand on the rim, the way Father Renier had done. She put her ear to the belly of the bell. She listened.

She heard, very faintly, the sound of the river.

She came down. Father Renier was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. He did not ask what she had heard. He walked with her back down the hill to the foundry, and they sat at the bench in the workshop, in the late afternoon light, and drank the small beer Miro had set out for them.

"Do you believe," he said, "that the bell has a voice?"

"I believe," she said, "that the bell has a voice. I do not know whose."

He nodded. He drank. He looked out into the yard, where Eitan and Miro were stacking the last of the broken crucibles into a pile for the next pour.

"My predecessor," he said, "the one who died in the winter. He wrote, in a letter I found, that the bell he had cast over the western ridge — the one that rang without being struck — had been cast from a broken bell. He wrote that the broken bell had been, in some way he could not name, the same bell. He wrote that he thought the voice in the bell had been the voice of the bell itself, and not, as the people believed, the voice of the saint."

Alma was quiet for a long time. The light in the yard was going. The pines on the ridge were black against a yellow sky.

"The bell I cast in the spring," she said, finally, "was broken. The bell I cast in the summer was cast from the broken bell. The relic is in the crown of the bell I cast in the summer."

"Yes," he said.

"And the undertone — "

"Yes."

She looked at her hands. They were wide and short-fingered, with burn scars paled to the color of old wax. They were steady.

"I do not know," she said, "whether the undertone is the voice of the saint, or the voice of the bell, or the voice of the river, or the voice of nothing at all."

He did not answer. He did not need to. She had said what she had to say, and he had heard it, and the bell, hanging in its tower on the hill above the foundry, was silent, and the river ran in the valley below, and the year was turning toward autumn, and there would be other bells, in other years, for other saints, with other relics, and the undertone would be there or it would not be there, and no one, she thought, would ever know for certain.

She poured him another beer. He drank it. The light went out of the day. The first stars came over the ridge. Somewhere up the hill, in the unfinished church, the bishop sat in a pew at the back and stared at the altar and did not know what to say. Somewhere in the town, the people sat in their houses and did not speak of what they had heard, or spoke of it only in low voices, with the doors closed. Somewhere on the river, a fish moved in the dark water, and the water moved over the stones, and the stones did not remember the bell, and the bell did not remember the stones, and the saint, if he was there at all, did not say.

In the morning, Alma went up to the foundry pit. The pit was empty, the metal cold, the dome wheeled back on its rails. She stood at the edge and looked down. She thought of her father, sitting at the table with the cider. She thought of her father's sister, who had married a man from over the western ridge and had left no one to hold the ladle but him. She thought of the founder before her, and the founder before him, and the founder before him, back into a past she did not bother to count. She thought of the bell in the tower, with its crack healed and its voice doubled and its undertone — whatever it was — running under its voice like a river under a road.

She went into the workshop. She took down the tuning hammers and set them in a row on the bench. She looked at them for a long time. Then she put them away, and sat down, and waited for the boys to come.

She had a new bell to think about. There would be more metal to order. There would be letters to write. There would be a core to build, and a cope, and a pour in the spring, when the air was cool and the river was high. There would be tuning, and hanging, and the setting of a relic, and a christening with water and chrism, and the first strike of the bell in the tower, and the sound — whatever sound it was — going up the valley and down the valley and across the river to the far ridge.

She waited for the boys.