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ImaReadImaRead Stories · No. 00

Illustrated Story

The Voice in the Bell

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 20

Alma at the Bench Among the Tuning Hammers

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.

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ImaReadFolio 03 — 20

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.

ImaReadFolio 04 — 20

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ImaReadFolio 06 — 20

ImaReadFolio 07 — 20

The Bell Is Hoisted Into the Unfinished Tower

ImaReadFolio 08 — 20

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.

ImaReadFolio 09 — 20

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 reply came the next day. Father Renier would come to see the bell, he said, on the following Monday. He did not write of blame.

He came. He stood over the pit for a long time, looking down at the cracked bell with the half-finished inscription and the relic in its crown. He did not speak for so long that Alma began to wonder if he had forgotten how.

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

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

ImaReadFolio 10 — 20

"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."

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ImaReadFolio 11 — 20

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 did not tell anyone she was doing this. She did not tell Eitan. She did not tell Miro. She worked alone in the workshop in the evenings, when the boys had gone, fitting the broken halves back together on the turntable and rebuilding the core over them, layer by layer, with the same clay and the same cow hair, the same scoring and the same channels. The broken faces she cleaned with a wire brush and a solution of vinegar and salt, and then she pressed them together with bands of iron and let them dry.

ImaReadFolio 12 — 20

The Bishop Opens His Eyes After the Undertone

ImaReadFolio 13 — 20

Alma Listens Alone at the Belly of the Bell

ImaReadFolio 14 — 20

"Yes," she said.

He looked at her for a long time. "What is it?"

"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.

ImaReadFolio 15 — 20

The bell was hoisted into the tower by a team of men and a system of ropes and pulleys that had been set up the week before. Alma supervised the hoisting from below, calling up through a speaking tube to the men in the tower. The bell rose, swung, settled into its yoke. The ropes were let go. The bell hung free.

Father Renier went up into the tower with the brass theca. He came down a few minutes later, his face gray.

"It is set," he said.

They went out into the churchyard. The bishop, who had been waiting in the porch, came forward. He was a tall man with a long jaw and small, careful eyes. He looked at Alma as if he had never seen a bellfounder before.

"The bell," he said, "is to be struck."

"Yes," said Alma.

He nodded to one of his attendants, who went up into the tower. There was a long pause. The townspeople stood in the churchyard, their faces upturned. The wind moved in the pines on the ridge. A dog barked, far off.

The bell rang.

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ImaReadFolio 16 — 20

Alma at the Empty Pit, Waiting for the Boys

ImaReadFolio 17 — 20

He did not finish the sentence. He turned and went into the church.

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.

ImaReadFolio 18 — 20

"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."

ImaReadFolio 19 — 20

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.

ImaReadFolio 20 — 20

She sat at the bench. The light came in through the open door. The river ran in the valley below.

She waited for the boys.

ImaRead20

Alma was the bellfounder. She had inherited the pit from her father, who had inherited it from his sister, who had married a man from over the western ridge and left no one to hold the ladle but him. The pit was not, strictly, a pit. It was a circular brick-lined chamber, sunk four feet into the ground, with a domed cover that could be wheeled aside on iron rails when the metal was ready to pour. Above it rose the furnace — a stone throat tapering toward the sky — and to the side the great brick drying kiln, and beyond that the workshop with its long workbench, its racks of chisels, its tuning hammers of three weights, its fire-blackened stools. Beyond that, the yard: heaps of sand and loam and charcoal; a stack of broken crucibles; a wagon without wheels; a goat, sometimes, tethered to a post, watching with the resignation of the long-suffering.

She was forty-three in the year of the new bell. Her hands were wide and short-fingered, with burn scars that had paled over the years to the color of old wax. Her hair she wore in a thick braid pinned against her neck. Her mouth, her apprentices said, was a mouth that had learned not to ask for things.

The new bell was commissioned by Father Renier, the new pastor of the unfinished church — a small dark man with the kind of voice that made one lean in. He had come down from somewhere north, with a letter of presentation and a leather case containing a relic: a fragment of bone, brown as a chestnut, set in a brass theca and said to be a splinter of the martyr Cleophas, who had been stoned at a gate and had not, so far as anyone could tell, founded a town or converted a people or done anything that ought to require a church bell at all. Alma had looked at the relic without touching it. "We don't need a saint to cast a bell," she said.

"No," said Father Renier. "But the people want one. And the relic must be enclosed."

Enclosed. The word for it was incorporatio in the older books, though no one Alma knew used that word. It meant this: when the bell was finished, when it hung in its tower and had been christened with water and chrism, a small cavity in the crown would be opened, and into it would be set the relic, and a little plate of bronze would be soldered over the hole, and the bell would be the bell of Saint Cleophas, and Saint Cleophas would be its patron, and the people would say they had something.

"The bishop will want a name," Father Renier said. "And a voice."

"A voice is mine to give," Alma said. "A name is yours."

She thought of her father, then. He had died two winters back, sitting at the kitchen table with his hands around a cup of cider. He had not been old. He had simply stopped, the way a bell stops when the rope is let go. She had found him in the morning. He had been cold, but his face had been the same face he had worn for years. She did not know what to make of that, and she had not, in two years, made anything of it.

The core dried for six weeks by the fire of the kiln. In the deep of winter, when the river froze along the banks and the valley was a white seam between black pines, she mixed the casting loam — a particular blend of the clay from the riverbank and the sand from the eastern ridge and a measure of ground brick — and built the cope over the dried core, the outer mold, in two halves that would be lifted and joined and sealed with fresh clay. This was the most delicate work. The cope had to be exactly the shape the bell was to be. Every curve, every thickness, every nick of the chisel on the wax had been translated into a corresponding ridge or valley in the outer mold. If the wax figure was the dream, the cope was the memory of the dream. Between them, in the space that was the thickness of the bell's wall, the bronze would run.

In the first week of February, with the snow coming down in slow, heavy flakes, they broke out the mould.

Hand-drawn pencil sketch on aged paper, graphite hatching, sepia monochrome, refined medieval concept art, varied line weight, production design board. Low-angle wide shot, the camera placed near the…

This was the moment she liked best and feared most. The cope was taken off in halves. The wax — what had not run out already, through vents she had set at the crown and the rim — was now coaxed out with hot irons and scraped clean. The core stood exposed, ghostlike, perfectly hollow. Into this hollow space, between core and cope, the bronze would go.

She set the cope back in place with Miro and Eitan. They sealed the seam with bands of fresh clay pressed with the heel of the hand. They set the pouring channels. They wheeled the great domed cover back over the pit on its iron rails. They banked the furnace.

The metal came in late February, on three wagons from the smelter over the ridge: seven hundredweight of copper, four hundredweight of tin, a hundredweight of old bronze from broken bells and worn cauldrons, the salvage of a generation. It was stacked in the yard under tarps, each ingot stamped with its source. Alma inspected every one. She rejected four of the ingots — too brittle, too pale — and sent them back with a boy and a letter.

The pour was set for the second week of March, when the river was high and the air still held the cold.

The week before, a boy came down from the parish with a purse of silver and Father Renier's compliments and a question. Was the relic to be set into the mold before the pour, or into the bell after? The bishop — there was a new bishop now, a man who had never seen a bell cast — had written to say it must be set before.

Alma set the boy to scraping crucibles. She did not answer. The question was not really a question. It was a demand wrapped in deference, the kind of thing clerics had always done, and would always do, and which she had learned to navigate the way one navigated a logjam on the river: by pushing slowly.

In the old days, the relic went in after. Everyone knew this. The bell was cast, hung, christened, then the relic was set into the crown with prayers and chrism. To put the relic into the mold was to put it into the path of seven hundredweight of molten metal at the temperature of a baking oven, which would, of course, consume it. To consume a relic was — there was no church law against it, that she knew of, but there was a sense in which one did not do it, the same sense in which one did not throw bread onto the floor or name a child after a stone.

She sent a letter to Father Renier. She did not mention the bishop. She said only that, in her craft, the relic was set after. She said she would not do otherwise.

The Second Pour Into the Recast Mold

The reply came two days later, brought by the same boy, his ears red with cold. Father Renier would come himself, in person, on the morning of the pour, and would set the relic into the mold himself, with his own hands, before the metal was charged. He had, he wrote, the bishop's permission for this; the bishop, it seemed, did not wish to be the one to consume a relic, either, but also did not wish to be the one to disobey his predecessor's directive. Father Renier had offered himself as the intermediary. It was, Alma thought, a canny move. If the relic survived, the bishop had ordered it placed. If it did not, Father Renier had been the one to place it.

She did not write back. She went out to the pit.

The morning of the pour was overcast but dry. The air smelled of snow that had not yet decided to fall. Father Renier arrived early, on foot, in his black coat and his fur-lined hood, carrying the brass theca in a velvet bag. He had the look of a man who had not slept. Alma took him into the workshop and gave him a stool by the fire and a cup of the cider Miro had been heating. He sat and held the cup in both hands and did not drink.

"I have done this once before," he said. "Not here. Over the western ridge."

"And?"

"The bell rang for nine years and then cracked. They said it was the relic's fault. They said the saint was unquiet."

"What do you think?"

He looked at her then, and she saw that he was not a small man at all, only a man who had learned to make himself small. "I think," he said, "that bells crack because they are badly tuned, or because they are struck wrong, or because the air of the place is wrong. I think saints are as quiet as the dead. I think we put words into their mouths because we have none of our own."

Hand-drawn pencil sketch on aged paper, graphite hatching, sepia monochrome, refined medieval concept art, varied line weight, production design board. Medium close-up at low angle, the camera placed…

Father Renier Hears the Undertone in the Workshop

She liked him for that, though she did not say so. She nodded at the velvet bag. "Open it."

He opened it. The brass theca lay in the velvet like an egg in a nest. The relic inside was a small dark splinter, no longer than the first joint of her little finger. She did not touch it. She showed him, instead, the small opening in the cope at the crown of the mold — a hole the breadth of her thumb, leading down into the space between core and cope. "You set it in here," she said. "Gently. Do not press. Do not touch the sides."

"And then?"

"And then we pour."

He took the theca out of the bag. He held it in his right hand and pressed his left hand against his chest, briefly, as if checking that his heart was still there. Then he reached into the hole in the mold and set the theca down on the core, into the small cup she had fashioned in the clay for it. His hand came out chalky. He closed his eyes. He said something under his breath — a prayer, she supposed, or a name. She did not listen. She stepped back.

"Miro," she said. "Cover."

Father Renier Sets the Relic in the Crown

The dome was wheeled into place over the pit. The seams were luted. The furnace had been banked since midnight; the bronze was already coming up to heat in the crucible, a hundredweight at a time, the long-handled ladles passing it up the chain of hands from the furnace-mouth to the lip of the pouring cup. The metal was the color of a setting sun, then the color of a new copper penny, then, as it cleared the lip, the color of nothing on earth. It ran into the mold with a sound like a long, slow exhalation. Steam rose from the vents. The smell was acrid and mineral, the smell of the world's deep insides, the smell her father had smelled, and his sister before him, and the founder over the western ridge, and the founder before her, and the founder before him, back into a past she did not bother to count.

The pour took an hour. At the end of it, the pit was a low red glow seen through the cracks of the dome. Alma set the boys to banking the furnace and cleaning the crucibles. Father Renier stood by the workshop door and did not speak. He looked ill. She gave him a mug of small beer and told him to go home.

He went.

The bell cooled for nine days. On the tenth, they broke out the mold.

This was a thing she had done a hundred times, and each time her hands were steady, and each time she felt the steadiness was a kind of lie she told the metal. The cope came away in halves. The core was broken out with hammers and chisels, the brick dust falling in dry sheets, the smell of it chalky and old. The bell stood exposed in the pit, still hot, the color of a thundercloud, the surface rough with the skin of the mold. She did not touch it. She walked around it once, twice, three times, looking. Eitan and Miro stood back and watched her watch it.

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."

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.

In June, the rains came. The river rose. The foundry pit took water, which she had to bail out three times in a week. She was beset by a cough she could not shake, and her hands, for the first time in her life, began to crack at the knuckles and bleed when she worked the clay. She did not slow down.

In July, she cast again. This time Father Renier did not come. He sent a boy with a note saying that the relic was still in the keeping of the parish, and that the bishop had agreed, with some reluctance, that it might be set after, as the custom was. Alma set the note on the bench and went out to the pit.

The pour went well. The metal ran cleanly. The steam rose from the vents in a steady, white column. The smell was the same, and her hands, she noticed, had stopped bleeding.

Hand-drawn pencil sketch on aged paper, graphite hatching, sepia monochrome, refined medieval concept art, varied line weight, production design board. Extreme wide shot from the back of the churchyar…

The bell cooled for nine days. On the tenth, she broke out the mold. The bell stood in the pit, the color of a thundercloud, the surface rough with the skin of the mold. She walked around it once, twice, three times. There was no crack.

She ran her hand along the shoulder. The inscription was there, faint under the roughness, the name of the saint, the name of the pastor, the date, the verse. She knelt and pressed her ear to the belly of the bell. She listened.

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.

He came up to see her, two days before the hanging. He had not seen the bell since the pour. He stood in the workshop doorway and looked at it for a long time. It hung from the tripod, dark, heavy, the inscriptions barely visible under the skin of the mold.

"May I?" he said.

She nodded. He went up to it and put his hand on the rim, the way he had put his hand on the rim of the broken bell in the spring. He closed his eyes.

"Strike it," he said.

She struck it with the heaviest hammer. The bell rang. The tone filled the workshop, spilled out into the yard, went up into the air over the valley. She saw the pigeons on the roof of the kiln take flight. She saw Miro, who had been stacking charcoal in the yard, look up. She saw Eitan, who had been carrying water from the well, stop and set down his buckets.

The undertone was there. She had been afraid it would not be, in front of a witness. But it was there — that lower, slower note, under the bell's voice, like a thing heard from a great distance, or from a great depth.

Father Renier opened his eyes.

"There," he said.

Hand-drawn pencil sketch on aged paper, graphite hatching, sepia monochrome, refined medieval concept art, varied line weight, production design board. Wide shot at low angle, the camera placed at the…

It rang as Alma had shaped it — the deep, bright tone she had coaxed out of the metal over the weeks of tuning. It went up the valley and down the valley and across the river. The pigeons in the tower took flight. The children in the churchyard put their hands over their ears and grinned. The bishop closed his eyes.

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.

She sat at the bench and listened. The river ran. The wind moved in the pines. The bell, on the hill, was silent.

She did not know, she thought, whether the saints were quiet, or whether they were not quiet, or whether the word quiet meant anything at all when applied to the dead. She did not know whether the bell had a voice, or whose voice it was, or whether the undertone was a flaw or a miracle or a trick of the air. She did not know whether her father had heard something, in the pit, in the evenings, when the metal was cooling, or whether he had heard nothing at all, and had only sat with his hands around the cup because there was nowhere else to put them.

She knew that she would cast another bell. She knew that the bell would be cast well, or as well as she could make it. She knew that it would ring, and that the people would hear it, and that some of them would say they had heard an undertone, and some of them would say they had not, and that no one — not the bishop, not Father Renier, not Eitan, not Miro, not she herself — would ever be able to say for certain what the undertone was, or whether it was there at all.