She looked at him sideways, and the dry thing that happened to her face when she was almost amused happened. "The memorial committee met Tuesday," she said. "Pearl told me. They're raising the bell. County engineers, a frame at the mine mouth, a proper place." She paused. "They asked if the bell should be — complete. If the crown should have what was taken from it."
Marcus understood her. He thought of the cracked bell in the flooded dark, and of a small black sphere riding a leather cord against a woman's throat, and of two hundred people standing in the sun not talking.
"Whatever you decide," he said, "it stays above ground. Your rule."
"My rule," Ilsa said, like she was trying the words to see if they still fit. "We'll see if it's still mine to make."
Chapter 28 — The Keeper's Choice
They brought the bell up on a Tuesday, in the rain, which Pearl said was correct and the county engineer said was a scheduling problem. A crane on a flatbed picked its way up the mine road, and a crew in hard hats went down the shaft on a work platform the way Marcus and Ilsa had gone down on rope and carpentry and stubbornness, and came up slow, an hour later, with the bell in a sling.
It was smaller than Marcus remembered and bigger than he expected, both. In the chamber it had been a shape in flashlight dark, a presence. In the daylight, streaming water, crusted with a century of mineral and mud, it was a bell: cracked from crown to lip along one side, the crack black and old, the iron gone the color of river stone. The crowd that had gathered at the mine mouth — fifty people, maybe, in rain jackets, holding coffee — made the sound crowds make at a birth or a launch, something between a word and a breath.
They had cleaned the worst of it by Friday. The frame went up Saturday: two great timbers and a crossbeam, built by a crew out of Beckley with Marcus consulting and then, because his hands wouldn't stay out of it, with Marcus on the tools alongside them, setting the headstock the way it would have been set in 1911. The bell hung at the mine mouth where the old bell frame had stood, close enough to the sealed shaft head that you could lay a hand on each in two steps. A bronze plaque was coming. For now there was a wooden sign, routed and painted by Pearl's nephew: KESTREL MINE. 1911. THEY ARE NAMED INSIDE.
Tomasz Marek's remains had been brought up the week before the bell, quietly, by people whose job it was, and buried in the churchyard on the hill's far side in ground that had waited a hundred and fourteen years, between two of the widows. Ilsa had stood at that graveside with her hat off and said nothing, and Marcus had stood behind her and said nothing too, and it had been enough.
The dedication was set for Sunday afternoon, and the county wanted a moment in it — the engineer's phrase, a moment, delivered with the helplessness of a man who has read the file and knows a ribbon-cutting won't do. Pearl asked Ilsa on Saturday night, at Marcus's kitchen table, with the sphere's cord lying loose around Ilsa's neck and a cup of tea going cold at her elbow.
"You don't have to," Pearl said. "Nobody's owed it. That's the whole point of the thing being yours."
"I know," Ilsa said. "That's how I know I can."
On Sunday the rain had cleared to that washed gold light the Hollow got in October, and the mine mouth was full: the families again, the town, the state men back in clean clothes, Earl's cousin in her chair with the photograph. The bell hung dark and patient in its new frame. When the short speeches were done — the engineer, the county commissioner, Pearl, who read nothing this time because she said the names were already spoken where they counted — Ilsa walked up the slope alone.
There was a step-stool set at the bell's side for the plaque crew. She climbed it. Marcus watched her take the cord over her head with both hands, careful, the way you lift something sleeping. The sphere swung once in the sun. At the crown of the bell there was the socket where, before the casting of the grief irons, a plug of the bell's own metal had been struck out and poured — a round scar, a hundred and fourteen years old, the exact size of what she was carrying.
She set the sphere into the crown of the bell with both hands, and let go of it, and stepped down, and her hands hung empty at her sides, open, like a woman who has put down a bucket after a very long carry.
"It stays above ground," she said, not loud, to no one in particular and to everyone. "It stays where hands can reach it. It's kept. That's the whole of the law."
That night Marcus woke at 2:47 by a habit older than the month, and lay in the dark of his own house listening.
Nothing knocked.
No three raps leaned up through the floorboards from the capped dark. No answer came from the walls. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the hill a dog commented once on nothing and thought better of it. Beside him — in the room across the hall, he corrected himself, and then didn't correct the thought that had put her closer — Ilsa slept, in the front room she'd taken as a guest and kept as a person with nowhere else she had to run to, and he could hear, faintly, that she slept without dreaming, the way exhausted people sleep when the exhaustion finally ends.