The fourth stair of the bell tower was a plank of old cypress, worn pale in the middle by a hundred years of boots. I knelt on the stair below it with a flashlight in my teeth, and my hands, which had skinned deer and bound up broken legs, were shaking like a boy. Behind me stood Anna Krause, and behind her a Texas Ranger named Delgado whom I had called at dawn, a stocky, calm woman who had asked me exactly one question: “Josh, are you willing to be the one who finds it?”
The plank lifted with a quiet squeak. Underneath, in a hollow my father must have carved with a chisel, lay a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with a watchmaker thread. Inside were three things: the coat of a young woman, faded blue wool, torn at one pocket, a hymnal with a small pressed flower between the pages, and a gold pocket watch with the case popped open. In the back of the case, in the neat tiny writing of my father, was a note.
The note said: “Found in the furnace coal bin, March 15, 1990. The coat belonged to Liesel. The watch belongs to Reverend Hahn. I know because I repaired it in 1984 and I put my own mark inside the case. I handled the watch only with a cloth. God forgive me, I had a family to feed and I was afraid. I have rung the bell every year since. When I am gone, someone must listen. W. Albrecht.” Anna read it over my shoulder and put her fist against her mouth.
Some voices ring on long after the one who raised them has gone, and they are not wasted, because they wait for the day the truth is ready to answer.
Ranger Delgado bagged each item with gloves, slow and careful, and took them to the laboratory in Austin. It took eleven weeks. The coat still held what a clean sealed plank can keep for thirty five years. The inner case of the watch carried a thumbprint, and the lab matched it to the print on file from the Reverend Hahn, who had been fingerprinted in 1998 when he was appointed to the school board. Then they matched the coat. Every one of them matched.
They came for him on a Monday, in the retirement apartment behind the church where he had lived since his last sermon. I stood across the street with Anna, holding her arm. Reverend Hahn opened the door in his cardigan and looked at the Ranger, and then at the paper, and then, past her, at us. He did not argue. He asked if he could put on his good coat, and he asked if someone would bring his hymnal, because he did not want to leave it behind.
He confessed in the interview room before they had finished reading the warning. He was eighty two, and he had carried it for thirty five years. He said that on the night of March fourteenth he had walked Liesel to the choir room to talk about a scholarship, that he had put his hand on her and she had pulled away and run, and that he had caught her on the stairs. He said he had not meant it. Anna sat in the next room with a cup of cold coffee and listened to every word through the glass.
The sheriff of 1990 was long dead, and the town had never spoken of what was said to my father that morning. The county commissioners called a meeting, an unusual thing in a small town, and for three hours people stood up and apologized to Anna, to the memory of Liesel, and to my father, who had kept the secret in the only way a frightened man could. An old woman I did not know came up afterward and said, “I heard the bell every March, and I told myself it was the wind.”
Reverend Hahn pleaded guilty in the fall and was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he served in the medical unit of a state facility, where he died two winters later. He sent Anna a letter before he died. She read it once, and then she handed it to me, and said I could burn it or keep it, but she would not hold it. I put it in the bottom of the church safe, unread, with the oilcloth, and I have never opened it. Some things are for God.
On March 14th the following year, I went to St. Paul at three in the morning with Anna and a thermos of coffee. The congregation had asked to come, and when we reached the church yard, we found nearly two hundred people standing in the dark in their coats, holding candles in paper cups. Nobody spoke. I took the key from the nail where my father had kept it, climbed the stairs to the tower, and Anna came up beside me, and together we took the rope in our hands.
We rang it nineteen times, once for every year Liesel lived. The sound rolled out across the creek and the hills, slow and deep and full of sorrow, and below us I heard people weeping and holding on to one another. After the nineteenth, I rested my hand on the cold bronze, and Anna did the same. Then she smiled for the first time since I had known her. “Once more,” she said, “for Walter.” And we rang it a last time, softly, so that he would know someone had been listening.
