I. The service

The smell came up first, hymnbook leather and pew varnish and, from outside, the pies cooling on the folding table by the fellowship hall door. Vinegar and brown sugar and pecan. Someone had pressed the tea towels that morning.

Heat was in the wood of the door before I opened it. I came in at the back during the last verse of the hymn, and the sanctuary at Bethel Baptist was full to the wall, forty-eight feet of pine and lath. Someone had left me a corner of pew, because in a Baptist funeral, someone always leaves a corner for the man coming from out of town.

I had driven from the desert that morning, fourteen hours through the dry country and then the wetter country, and the wet flag of August hit the back of my neck when I stepped out of the car. It had not let go.

The casket was closed. He had asked for that in a note my mother read to me on the phone last week. He had asked for two other things. Galatians six nine, and let Silas ring the bell, if he will. I agreed to both before I thought about what either of them meant. I have not yet thought about why I agreed.

I sat in the corner and looked at the line of my father’s shoulders in the front pew. He had taken his coat off and folded it and put it under him to sit on, which was not what you did at his father’s funeral in any decade I had been alive in, but the heat was the heat, and my father had spent fifty-eight summers in this country and knew when to keep cloth between him and varnish.

His hands were on his knees, palms down, the way they had been at the same hour of every Sunday I could remember.

The last verse ended. The pastor, a man I did not know, younger than I had expected, came forward. He read the verse the way my grandfather had read it for forty years. Let us not be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

The bolted door was at the back of the sanctuary, to my left as I sat, eight feet from my elbow. The door I had fallen down twenty years ago. The bolt on it looked new.

Through the high window I could see the cemetery. The McAdoo plot, the Hightower plot, a dozen others I could not have named on any other day. Across the county road, half hidden in pines, stood Mt. Pilgrim AME, smaller building and smaller graveyard. My grandfather had preached there once in 1974, by invitation, and never again, by what arrangement nobody alive in either congregation now remembered. The pines did most of the work between the two yards.

The pastor’s eulogy was brief and respectful, and I do not remember most of it. He said my grandfather had been a man of his word, which was true, and a man of the Word, which was also true, and the room said amen at the right places. The sound of two hundred amens in a wooden room is a sound I had not heard in fifteen years and had not known I missed.

At the end he said, “Reverend McAdoo asked, before he went, that the bell be rung by his grandson Silas. Silas has driven a long way. We will go out to the yard now, and we will hear the bell, and then we will eat.”

He looked at me. The room looked at me. I stood up.

II. The climb

The bolt was new.

I had not understood, sitting in the pew, what new meant. From close, with my hand on it, I understood. It was a hasp bolt, the kind you buy at a hardware store in town for under five dollars and screw into wood with eight screws. The screws were not weathered. The brass had not yet gone green at the edges. The wood around the hasp was lighter than the wood around the door because somebody had taken a chisel to it to seat the plate flush. Somebody had wanted the door to close right. Somebody had been using this door.

I had assumed, walking up the aisle, that the bolt was the bolt I remembered, the long iron drop-bolt the deacons had put on in 2006 after the boy fell. I had assumed I would have to fight it. The new hasp slid open under my thumb.

The stair went up between two walls of unpainted pine. Twenty-two steps. I had counted them at eleven, going up. I had not counted them coming down because at eleven you do not count what is happening to you, you only feel it later as a number you must have known. Twenty-two had been waiting for me ever since, and I climbed them now in the order they had been waiting in.

The first three were the porch steps of any house in this country, dry and clean, and they did nothing to me. The fourth was where the heat began to gather, because the stairwell had no window and the louver vent at the top was small and the August sun had been at the tin roof since six in the morning. By the fifth step the heat was a hand on the back of my scalp, pressing down.

I had climbed this stair the first time for no reason I could give to the EMT or to my mother or to the principal of the elementary school across the road, who came over when she heard, or to my grandfather, who did not ask. I had climbed it because the door was there and the door was not locked and at eleven I had wanted to see what was at the top of a door nobody was going through. There is not, I now think, a better reason than that, for an eleven-year-old. There is not, I now think, a different reason than that, for the men in my family.

The seventh step was where the wood softened. I felt it through the soles of my shoes the way you feel a soft spot in a porch board, the give that is not give yet but is the memory of give in a board that has held people for sixty years. I stepped over it. The second time, you step over it.

The cracked riser was the eleventh. I knew it would be. I had not been told it was still cracked, because nobody had told me anything about this stairwell since 2006, but I knew it would be cracked because the bolt downstairs had been new and the riser had not. Somebody had been climbing this stair for years, alone, with a small chisel and eight screws and brass and a careful key, and had not fixed the riser. To fix it would have been to admit that the riser was the thing the deacons should have fixed in 2006. Somebody had needed the deacons to have failed.

I stepped over the cracked riser. I stepped over it the way I had not stepped over it the first time. There was a brown stain on the riser below it, dry and old, the color of weak tea, and I did not look at it long enough to be certain it was mine.

Above the cracked riser the stairwell turned. Not a landing, just a slight turn to the right, a cant of about ten degrees, where the framers had worked around a roof brace and had not bothered to disguise it. The light got worse here. The louver vent at the top was just visible above me, four steps up, and the cicadas were coming through it in waves, the way they will at three in the afternoon in August in this country, the sound rising and rising and then breaking like a fever and rising again. I had not heard cicadas like that in the desert. The desert had a cicada but it was a thinner thing.

At the turn, low on the wall, behind a cross-brace I would not have noticed at eleven and did not notice at thirty-one until my eye dropped looking for footing, there was a piece of paper folded into a yellowed envelope, tucked into the gap between brace and stud. The envelope was the color paper gets when it has been in heat for years. The fold across the middle had darkened where a hand had touched it more than once.

I crouched and reached behind the brace and pulled it out.

The envelope was not sealed. It had been opened and folded shut and opened and folded shut many times. The single sheet inside was church-office stationery, Bethel Baptist Church, Bienville Parish, Louisiana, est. 1889, and below the letterhead, in pencil, in handwriting older than I remembered my grandfather’s being:

Lord, I am not yet what You wanted.

That was the whole letter. No date. No signature. The pencil was pressed deep enough into the paper that I could feel the dent on the back of the page with my thumb.

I read it once. I read it again. I read it a third time and the third time was the time I understood it, not because the reading changed but because something in me had taken three readings to catch up to the page.

The bolt downstairs had been his. The hasp and the chisel and the eight screws had been his. The riser had not been fixed because the riser was his to step over. The boy at eleven had climbed this stair for no reason because the boy at eleven was not the first to climb this stair for no reason. There was no first. There was a line of men in my family who had climbed up to be alone with what they could not say in the room below, and the rope, and the bell, and the small square room with three louver vents, had been the only office any of them had ever held.

Not yet had been in my mouth before I was old enough to know what I was saying. I had said it to strangers and I had said it to myself and I had said it once at eleven years old as the answer to a question I should not have known how to answer. The phrase had been in me from somewhere, and the somewhere was this stairwell, this envelope, this pencil. I had not put it there. It had been waiting.

I folded the page and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

III. The bell

I climbed the rest of the way up.

The bell housing was at the top of the stair, in a small square room with louver vents on three sides and the rope coming down through a brass-rimmed hole in the ceiling. The rope was hemp. The peg the rope was wrapped around was a stub of black walnut driven into a beam, two inches across at the head, four inches in the wood. My grandfather had driven that peg himself in 1968. My father had told me that once at a Texaco station in Vivian, Louisiana, when I was thirteen, and I had not thought about it again until now. He had told me the way a man tells you something he is glad to be telling and not sure he should be. He had told me his father had driven it on a Saturday with a piece of black walnut he had cut from his own woodlot, and that he had carved the date into the side of it, 6 / 14 / 68, and that the date was his wedding anniversary, and that nobody else in the church knew this, and not to tell anyone. He had not told me why I should not tell anyone. I had not told anyone. The date was right there now in the beam where I could see it, and my grandfather was an hour from going into the ground.

I stood in the bell room and put my hand on the rope. The hemp was darker where men had pulled on it. Forty years of my grandfather, ten years of the man before him, three deacons, two janitors, the boy who had rung it once in 1962 on a dare. I knew the hand-darkening of an old rope when I saw it.

He had been eighty-three years old. I knew this because my mother had said it on the phone last week and because the obituary in the Bienville Democrat had said it and because my father had said it at the wake the night before, twice, once at the casket and once on the porch with a paper plate. Eighty-three.

I took the rope in both hands and I pulled.

The bell spoke. It is not the right verb but it is the only verb. A church bell at the top of a forty-foot tower is a body the size of a man. When it speaks it speaks through the building, through your ribs, through the yard, through the pines across the road. The people standing in the yard heard it the way I heard it, in the chest first and in the ear after.

I pulled again. Two.

I pulled and I counted. By twenty my arms knew what I was asking of them. By forty the rope had started to take the skin at the heel of my hand, not break it yet but ask after it. By sixty the rope was breaking it. By seventy-two I could feel the blood on the hemp under my palms, slick where the hemp had been only rough, and I did not stop, because to stop was not in the agreement I had made on the phone with my mother last week. I had agreed to ring the bell. I had not agreed to ring it carefully.

Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three.

I let the rope go. It hung from the brass-rimmed hole in the ceiling, swinging a little, and there was blood on the hemp at the height of my hands, and a smear on the peg where the rope had whipped against it, and my palms were open at the heel and the wound did not hurt yet. The wound on the hand was the wound on the head moved down to where I could see it. I did not think the sentence in those words at the time. I am writing it that way now because that is what it was.

IV. The descent

I came down the stair. The cracked riser was where I had left it. I stepped over it.

My father was at the foot of the stair.

He had not gone outside. The bolt had been thrown back, which meant somebody had opened the door for him, or he had opened it himself, but he had not come up, and he had not gone out into the yard with the others. He had been standing in the doorway of the stairwell for the forty minutes the bell had taken, and his shirt was dark down the front from the heat, and his eyes were red, and his hands were at his sides.

He looked at my hands first. Then at my face.

“You held the rope longer than he ever did,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded once. He did not say anything else. He turned and walked out into the yard and I followed him out into the yard, and the door of the stairwell closed behind us, and somebody, I did not see who, slid the new hasp shut.

The pies were still under the tea towels on the folding table. The fellowship hall had a window air conditioner running and the line for it was beginning to form. My father went over to the line and got behind a man I half-recognized from when I was twelve, and the two of them did not speak but stood together, which was its own kind of speaking.

I went toward the car.

A woman about my mother’s age, in a navy dress, touched my sleeve. “Your granddaddy used to say you’d preach one day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A second woman, older, with a cane and a face I should have known and did not, touched my other sleeve. “He talked about you all the way to the end.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A third woman, younger than I was and a face I did not know, in a black dress that had been her sister’s or her mother’s, did not touch my sleeve. She stood in my way and looked at my hands and said, “What did you do to your hands?”

I looked at her. I said, “I rang the bell.”

She said, “I know you did. I asked what you did to your hands.”

I could not answer her. I walked around her to the car.

The car had been in the sun for two hours. I opened the door and stood beside it while the heat came out, and then I got in and put my hands on the wheel, and the blood at the heel of my palms tacked to the leather a little and then let go. I drove out of the gravel lot and onto the county road and past Mt. Pilgrim AME and past the cemetery and onto the parish road that would put me onto the interstate at Minden in an hour.

The note was in my jacket pocket. The bell was still in my chest. It would be in my chest for a long time and I knew that, sitting in the car, the way you know the weather is going to break before it breaks.

The desert was waiting where I had left it.

I had not arrived yet.