The Bells Read online

  “Shhhh,” his mother whispered, “there is no ghost.” And then she sang softly in his ear. I stood mesmerized by her singing, and by the warmth of their hearth, forgetting for a moment that these people could even see me. She paced back and forth and held her son’s drooping head at her neck. Then, suddenly, she glimpsed my shining eyes. “Aagg!” she bleated as if she had seen a rat. The gallant father leapt from his bench. One shoe flew past my head; the next hit my back as I scurried out the door. I stumbled and fell into the mud. As the father came after me swinging a bridle like a whip, I scurried off into the shadows. For several minutes, I cried behind a stall, but hunger soon overwhelmed me. I slipped inside the stall, and, on my knees, squirted warm goat’s milk into my mouth. I stole an earthen jar, filled it with milk, and carried it to my mother.

  We always feasted in the belfry, and threw the bones and pots and spits to the ravine below, where they gathered like the refuse of a bloody battle. We ate with our hands and tore the meat with our teeth, wiping our palms on the rags we wore. We had the luxurious freedom of the wretched.

  But this ended the day Father Karl Victor Vonderach realized I was not as helpless as I seemed.

  It was late spring, and an evening sun had just broken through after days of rain. The cows’ hooves squelched into the muddy fields. Water carved trenches in the soft earth, and then seeped into the ground, like sand pouring through loosely held fingers. Torrents rumbled in the ravines. Far off I heard the low hush of the river Reuss flowing through the valley.

  Then I heard an odd sound. It was like thunder, only smoother, and I had never heard such a noise before. At the same time, I heard a scream. I looked up at my mother, who was swinging her mallets. I pushed aside the bells, the running water, the cows, my mother, and for a few seconds I heard nothing.

  Then again—a scream.

  This sound was human, but not the weave of sound I knew from the town—a mess of hunger, anger, joy, and want. This was the sound of pain.

  I shut my eyes and held its memory. Four or five times it rose, vibrated at its highest note, and then was choked off as the screamer ran out of air. It terrified me, but still I climbed down the ladder from the belfry, freezing with every new scream, then hurrying on when it ended, chasing the echo. I ran out the side door of the church, climbed over a fence, and slid down the muddy field into the woods below the church.

  There is nothing above Nebelmatt but pasture and rock and snow. Below the village, the mountains drop away into forests and ravines, and there is only the occasional clearing until the pine forest meets the valley. I ran as fast as I could along a footpath into this steep forest, jumping off the larger rocks, letting the incline propel me. In a clearing that a fire had ravaged the summer before the path suddenly ended.

  I can still picture her face. Muscle and tendon bulged in her cheeks, in her neck, in her arms and in her hands, which clawed at the ground in front of her. Her skin was flushed the color of blood.

  The earth was trying to eat her. Its jaws grasped at her gut and tendrils of blood ran up the seams of her dress. All around her lay loose stones and dirt. A basket of wild garlic was strewn on the ground before her, like rose petals at a wedding.

  The screaming had stopped. I took several steps toward her on the loose ground and my feet were swallowed in streams of dirt and stones.

  There was a gargle of bile and blood in her throat. I heard the hum of taut muscles, the ferocious beating of her heart. She turned toward me with those blank eyes, and I wanted to stop her pain. I wanted to hold her like my mother had held me. I took another step, setting loose a rock the size of my torso. I jumped back to solid ground. This monster wanted me as well.

  Then I ran. It was late by then. The bells were silent and no one was in the fields. I could still feel her breath, and the subtle, hopeful change in the beating of her heart when she had seen me, so I ran faster, past the first quiet houses, past children playing on the rocky track, past Karl Victor’s house, whose high oaken door was closed. A few steps farther on, a dozen men sat at a wooden table of roughhewn planks. The men were ruddy with drink, their strong backs a wall high above my head.

  “Ivo says she has eyes like jewels,” one man said.

  “Please,” I whispered. The wall of backs did not break.

  “Even if they’re diamonds, he’ll still have to break her in,” said another. The others laughed. “Women from town are soft.”

  “Come,” I said louder. “She dies.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with soft.” The man above me had spoken now, and as I laid my hand on his back I felt the rumble of his laughter.

  I heard her scream again, this time from within my head, from that library of sounds I never can discard. I heard the bubbling in her throat, heard her claw at the dirt in front of her. Was she buried yet? I grabbed his shirt. A hand slapped mine away.

  “Please!” I yelled.

  The line of backs was as high as a cliff.

  I screamed.

  This was a sound even I did not hear coming. It was like a door thrown open in a space where only a wall had been before. It was as though so many spirits—of my mother, of that woman buried, of Father Karl Victor—flew out of my mouth.

  The scream lasted only the time it takes a stone to fall from the belfry and plop into the mud of the field. But in that time, the wall of backs had turned. Sober faces, startled eyes stared down at me. The children who had been playing were frozen in place. Women with babies in their arms hunched at the thresholds of their houses.

  Father Karl Victor Vonderach stood at his open door.

  “A woman is dying,” I said to the faces. “You must come.”

  At my command, the men stood up, knocking over the benches.

  I ran down the path through the woods, an army of feet behind me.

  “Landslide!” I heard one of them yell, and then they overtook me.

  They trod the loose ground, slipped, sent boulders rolling, fought through the landslide like swimming for a drowning woman in a river’s rapids. They were soon wiping blood and dirt and tears from their eyes, as they pulled her from the landslide, so gently, like a midwife with a newborn babe. They laid her on the path just downhill from where I hid behind a sapling.

  “Is she dead?”

  “She is warm.”

  “That does not mean anything.”

  The blood and dirt blotted her dress. Her face was slack and white, with brown streaks where the men’s fingers had held her neck and head.

  An older man limped down the path.

  “Keep him back. No father should see this.”

  Two men tried to hold him back, but he pushed past. He collapsed onto her, grasping her face in both his hands.

  “Please, God!”

  The men were pale, and I heard that pity was a clamp, quieting their steps, their heaving breaths, their racing hearts.

  I stepped from behind the tree and stood next to the man as he clasped his daughter and cried.

  I whispered in his ear: “She is alive.”

  He looked up at me. He swallowed. “How do you know?”

  “Listen.” I pointed to her lips. Her breath was a gentle but steady wave.

  For a moment he looked at me, and then I was pushed aside by a group of women. I climbed back up to the sapling and hid myself once more.

  As they prodded her and slapped and pinched her, as her eyes fluttered open and she smiled weakly at her father, their sounds grew louder. They laughed because tears were in their eyes. Women shouted orders. Behind the tree, I was invisible to all, save one.

  Father Karl Victor stood but three paces up the path. He didn’t seem to notice the injured woman. He ignored their pleas for a prayer. He stared as though he would burn me with his gaze. He growled each time he exhaled.

  “You can hear,” he whispered under his breath.

  I backed away, fleeing up the hill.

  “You can speak.”

  IV.

  In the belfry my mother s
aw the terror in my eyes, but when she tried to soothe me in her arms, I pushed her away. I shook my head. I took her hand and tried to pull her down the ladder. I pointed at a distant mountain—somewhere there would be a place where we could hide.

  In the sadness of her eyes, I saw she understood something of what I meant, my wish to flee him and this village. But she shook her head.

  I cannot leave, she seemed to say.

  And so we slept that night in the belfry, huddled under blankets as the falling night swept warm gusts up from the valley. My mother clutched her mallets to her chest. I could not sleep—only my ears would protect us in the night. I listened for an approaching step, for a hand on the ladder below us. But after midnight a wind came up, and lightning flickered up the valley. Rain began to fall. It soaked us through the open walls. My mother held me, and when the lightning flashed, I glimpsed terror in her eyes. At least twice a summer the church was struck, and I know she was thinking we should be huddled in our hut. As the storm moved over us, the bells sung a soft warning. My mother looked up, for she heard it in her gut. Run, they said.

  She took me in her arms and fled down the ladder. Lightning crashed, the echoes rumbled in the valley. I listened for the sounds of feet trudging in the mud, but in the torrent I heard the splotch of a thousand boots, the mashing of a thousand lips. In the thunder’s rumble I heard a million Karl Victors curse. She carried me across the field to our hut and barred the door. In the occasional flashes through the cracks I saw she held a mallet in her hand.

  Karl Victor came at the height of the storm, beating at our door. My mother shoved me into a corner, and though I tried to pull her down beside me, she slipped away and stood between the flimsy door and me. It lasted but three kicks. Timber snapped, and a white hand struggled through the gap and fumbled with the bar.

  “Goddamn you!” the priest yelled. He limped, for he had hurt his toes kicking in the door. His boots and cassock shone with mud when the lightning flashed.

  My mother leapt at him. But in the next flash of lightning he saw her coming—and without her bells she could not fight him. She swung her mallet with one hand while she clawed his face with the other. I pressed my hands against my ears as his one backhand slap dropped her to our muddy floor. I cringed and cried each time he kicked her with his boot. Then lightning struck our church with a crash and the bells rang out. Karl Victor covered his ears in pain, but the ringing only fed his fury. He kicked her again and again until she ceased to jerk in pain, and only then did he stop. She did not move.

  As the storm passed, the rain slowed. The bells still faintly hummed. My mother breathed in gasps. Karl Victor stood still, listening, waiting for the next lightning strike so he could see me. I huddled in the corner, pressing myself into the wood, but then a sob fought up my throat and burst in the darkness. Karl Victor stepped toward me and kicked the wall until he found me—then he kicked harder and faster, so hard into my gut I was sure I would never breathe again. He grabbed me by the neck and lifted me close.

  “You deceiving brat,” he said. He stank of uncooked onions. “I will see that you will never say a word.”

  Father Karl Victor Vonderach dragged me out of our hut. I screamed and reached for my mother, who lay unmoving on the ground, moaning as she exhaled. In a flash of distant lightning I saw her bloodied face. Karl Victor dragged me by my shirt until it tore, removed his belt, and looped it around my neck like a leash. “Try and run,” he hissed into my ear as if he would bite it off. “Go ahead and try.” As gray dawn rose, we descended into the forest. He tore off a pine branch and whipped me when I swayed too far to the side, when I walked too fast or too slow, or simply when his anger bubbled over. Tears fogged my eyes. I slipped and tripped and choked on my leash.

  He conducted me to the Uri Road, which was scarred with hoofprints, and my bare feet sank in mud almost to my knees. Karl Victor cursed. He looked up and down the road, but in the early morning he saw no horses or cart of which to beg a ride. He yanked at the scraps of my shirt, but that only tore it off. He took my thin arm and tugged until I felt that I might split, but the mud would not release me. Then suddenly there was a pop, and a sucking, and we tumbled, me before him. My face pressed into the cold mud, and then was lifted up by the belt around my neck. He dragged me down the road like a sack of oats, with a hand under each of my arms. When he slipped, he heaved me under him, and for a moment the world was black with mud. When he lifted me I gasped for air and clawed at my noose.

  We struggled like this for what seemed hours, before we reached the hard ground of a wooden bridge across the Reuss, and he dropped me on the mud-spattered boards. I lay panting, leaning up against the bridge railing, and he wheezed and coughed and spat globs of mud in my face. The flooded Reuss flowed beneath the bridge with the anger of spring rains and melting snow, and I tried to escape into its sounds: I pried current from current, heard the thunder of churning water, heard rocks rolled downstream by the flood. But my ears forced me to return. Karl Victor ground his hands together like a tightening rope about to break. His feet beat against the ground. His teeth chewed at his lip. He growled.

  I looked up through mud and tears. I perceived his face, which was crossed by scars from my mother’s nails. Blood flowed from his bitten lip. His cassock was soaked so much it clung about his legs. He grasped his hair with his hands as if he would pull it out, and he growled once more into the wind.

  I have often wished I could have heard inside Karl Victor’s head at this moment. What exactly had he planned? I am generous enough to believe that he had something in mind: perhaps to take me to Lucerne and deposit me at an orphanage; to sell me to a farmer in Canton Schwyz. But this mud—this knee-deep sludge that burped and sucked and splattered—made an island of that bridge. To bring me back to Nebelmatt was impossible, for there I would spread his shameful secrets. To continue dragging me for even another hundred steps might kill us both.

  His growl turned to a yell, and he kicked the bridge’s railing as he had my mother, again and again, but it was sturdy and would not break under his boot. He looked at me with red eyes, and when he spoke he spat blood into my face.

  “You were supposed to be deaf!”

  At that moment, I would have promised never to speak again. I would have offered to bite off my own tongue, if only he would let me go back to my mother. I would never leave our belfry again, even when the lightning threatened.

  He bent over me, his face so close that his sucking, mashing lips were as loud as the river. He heaved me up by the belt, pressing me against the rail with his hip. Then he clutched my head with both hands.

  “If God will not make you deaf, then I will have to do it.”

  Two fingers pressed into my ears like spikes. I howled and thrashed, but they pressed harder, tunneling so far they seemed to meet inside my head. I finally knew the pain that others felt when they heard my mother’s bells. His face was all I saw. His grimace turned from white to red. He pressed his fingers harder, and I screamed.

  My tiny hands pulled at his, but I could not move them.

  “Father!” I yelled.

  He dropped me as if I were a burning coal.

  I lay on the ground and held my head, awaiting the next attack, but it did not come. He stood frozen over me, his eyes wide and startled.

  I had not meant it as an accusation. In Nebelmatt they called him “Father.” I meant no more than that.

  “I am not your father,” he whispered. But I did not hear the words. I heard the trembling of his voice, the clamp upon his lungs, the shaking in his hands and jaw. And I heard how that single word, which had burnt him like fire, was true.

  Father? This word I knew: Fathers held their sons when they were hurt, whipped them when they were bad. They let them walk beside them as they drove cows up to pasture. I knew it well, but I had never thought it was a word for me.

  “I am not your father,” he said again.

  My father lifted me up. He held me up above him as if offering me t
o heaven. “You shall be silent,” he said.

  And then with a grunt, he threw me off the bridge and into the roaring Reuss.

  V.

  Had he watched the currents swallow me? Or turned to shield his eyes from his sin? All I know is that he did not venture to confirm that his son was actually dead. He did not follow the river long enough to see me washed clean of my rags and noose, as I flailed and gasped, as one current pulled me under and the next pushed me up. He did not watch as my strength gave out, as the white of the waves turned to black, and I began to drown. He did not watch my corpse sink as my lungs filled with water. He did not repent and try to save me.

  But his were not the only eyes on the Uri Road that morning. When I awoke, I heard their voices before I opened my eyes.

  “No, stay back. I would not touch him anymore.”

  The first voice was thin and tight, as though spoken through taut lips, but the second was deep and warm: “No need to worry. He is freshly bathed.”

  “Such a scrawny thing,” said the first. “Mere bones. He must have some disease. Listen to him cough.”

  “He drank half the river. And skin and bones, that’s normal here—nothing to eat in the mountains. Just grass and dirt.”

  Sharp stones jutted into my naked back. The sun was warm, but the wet bank was icy. I coughed again, bringing up water and a good deal else, then opened my eyes and saw two men looming above me. I looked from one to the other, and then back again, and my first thought was that God had never made two men more dissimilar.