The Lullaby Bell

They call it the lullaby bell. It rings once at first dark, one long note, and the children of Meern go to sleep on it.

[Dinan, France] Photograph via Wikimedia Commons

The road to Meern follows the river for a while, then loses interest and climbs the hill on its own. I walked it slowly. The cat rode in the basket on my back, sitting on the charm box, which he is not supposed to do.

“You’re on the charms,” I said.

“They work fine under me,” said the cat.

It was autumn. The buckwheat had been cut and the fields had a shaved look. There was no wind, so the smoke from the chimneys stood up straight. I had last come to Meern around the time they put a new roof on the well god’s shrine. The roof no longer looked new. That told me something, though nothing exact. For me the years don’t line up properly. Certain afternoons stay large, and whole decades go thin.

At the first house a woman was taking washing off a line. She looked at the basket, at the small bells and paper tags tied to it, and her face did the thing village faces do when a charm has broken. Relief first. Then embarrassment about the relief.

“The mender,” she said. “You’ll have heard about the bell.”

“I heard about supper,” said the cat.

The woman was Mrs. Prell, who kept the inn. The inn had three rooms and smelled of boiled barley. She asked my name while she showed me up the stairs. I told her people mostly call me the mender. She said that must be convenient. I agreed that it was. From the window of the room I could see the square and the bell tower, a stone stump with a wooden cap, the bell hanging in it like a plum that had decided against falling.

They call it the lullaby bell. It rings once at first dark, one long note, and the children of Meern go to sleep on it. They have gone to sleep on it for a long time. I know because I tuned it, back when the shrine roof was new.

“Since spring it’s gone sour,” said Mrs. Prell. She set down barley soup, pickled radish, and a trout for the cat, who had not been offered a trout but received one anyway. “Flat, and with a buzz in it. Like a fly shut in a jar. The babies won’t settle on it. Nobody in this village has slept properly since the frost went. Kott the baker salted the sweet loaves twice. The headman fell asleep at his own meeting.”

“That sounds usual,” said the cat.

“It is usual,” said Mrs. Prell, “but he used to do it after the arguing. Now he does it before, and the arguing needs him.”

I ate the soup. It was good soup, barley and a little pork fat. Outside, the light went from weak tea to iron. At first dark, the bell rang.

Sour was the right word. The note came out a finger’s width under where it should sit, and beneath it lay the buzz, patient, like it had moved in and unpacked. Across the square a baby began to cry with the confidence of long practice.

“There,” said Mrs. Prell.

“There,” I agreed.

The cat put his chin on the trout’s skeleton. “I’ll examine it in the morning,” he said. He examines nothing. It is important to him to say it.

In the morning there was fog to the knees. Mrs. Prell gave me tea and bread with plum jam. The jam was last year’s and had gone a good dark color. The bell keeper came to fetch me, an old man called Anselm, with a face like a walnut and knees that announced him from the bottom of the stairs.

“You look the same,” said Anselm.

“You were shorter,” I said.

“I was eight,” said Anselm.

We climbed the tower. Anselm climbed the way a person eats a thing they are saving. One step, a rest, one step. The cat went up the outside of the wall in about four movements and was waiting at the top with an expression.

The bell was decent bronze, greened at the shoulder, bright at the lip where the clapper kisses it. Inside the crown, where nobody ever looks, hung my charm. A braid of hair, river reed, and red thread, with a paper tag folded five times, one word inked inside. The braid had gone grey and light, like a plant in winter. Nothing had chewed it. Nothing was torn. It had simply stopped.

“Not broken, is it,” said Anselm, watching my face instead of the bell.

“Not broken,” I said. “Finished.”

“Finished,” said Anselm, the way you taste a plum you suspect.

The pitch of a bell like this was never in the bronze. Bronze holds a note the way a bucket holds water, that is, it holds whatever you pour in. Long ago I tuned this one to a voice. There was a girl in Meern then who hummed the lullaby better than anyone, hummed it while shelling beans, with a scab on her knee and her heels knocking the bench. I braided her hair into the charm. A charm tuned to a living voice keeps as long as the voice keeps, and about one season after.

“Mira,” said Anselm. He said it before I could. “She went last winter. In her sleep, in the cold snap after the new year.” He looked at the braid for a while. “That was Mira’s hair. All this time.”

“All this time.”

“She never said.”

“She was twelve when she gave it. Twelve year olds forget by supper.”

Anselm laughed, and then did not. “Ninety one, she was. I can’t put the scab on the knee together with the ninety one.”

“I can’t put the ninety one together with the scab,” I said. Both of these were true. I remember the bean shelling afternoon better than I remember most of the years since. As I said, the years don’t line up.

The cat sniffed the old braid. “Smells like nothing,” he reported. “Nothing is the hard kind.”

There was a simple way to do it. Find the next best hummer in Meern, some girl or boy with the tune already in them, and borrow sixty years of somebody again. I stood in the crown of the tower and found I didn’t feel like doing that twice.

“Tell the village to come to the square at first dark,” I said to Anselm. “Everyone who can stand in it. They should bring nothing. I’ll take what I need off them there. It’s less than a coin’s worth.”

Word went around by way of Mrs. Prell, which in Meern is faster than any bell.

I spent the afternoon under the tower, redressing the clapper rope, which did not need it, because if you sit still with work in your hands a village will come and tell you things. Kott was sure the damp had got into the bronze. A boy was sure it was the spring thunder. An old woman with a cane said, the bell is grieving, and went on without stopping. She came the closest. The cat spent the same afternoon asleep in one of Kott’s bread baskets. Kott pretended to mind, and moved the basket into the sun.

They came at first dark. Kott with flour still in his eyebrows. Lina, who is young, carrying the baby Doro, who was awake out of principle. The headman, half asleep already on arrival. Two old women who had raised their voices at each other all summer over a fence, standing apart on purpose and near each other by accident. Children. The twins, who had followed the cat all afternoon offering him halves of things, stood where the cat could see them being good.

From each I took a thread’s worth. A hair. A strand teased off a shawl. A bit of fishing line from a boy whose hair his mother would not spare. Lina cut a wisp from Doro’s head, and Doro permitted it with suspicion. From Anselm, one grey hair, which he picked out slowly, looking for a proud one.

Then I asked them to hum the lullaby. All of them, together, while I braided.

They were terrible. I want to be fair about this. They were very terrible. Kott hummed low and certain and wrong. The headman hummed a different lullaby entirely, possibly from a different village. Lina had the tune right but kept stopping to joggle Doro. The twins hummed at each other, loudly, as a contest. And in the middle of all of it the tune itself sat and wobbled, the way the moon sits in a rain barrel. Wrong in every part. There in the whole.

“This is the worst sound I have ever heard,” said the cat, “and I have heard you sing.”

“Hum,” I told him.

“I will not.”

He did, though. A small cracked drone. The twins were watching, and he performs for the smallest available audience.

People think I catch the note. I don’t. The note was never once hummed correctly in that square, so there was no note to catch. What a charm holds is the leaning. At first dark in Meern, everyone leans the same way, toward sleep, on behalf of somebody smaller than themselves. That is the whole trick. It is not much of one, and it took me two hundred years to learn, so I don’t explain it often.

I braided the hairs and threads with red thread and one reed from the river, wrote a word on a tag, folded the tag five times, and climbed the tower while the humming went on below, no better than before. I tied the new braid in the crown. The old one I left where it was. There is no rule about that. It is where Mira is, as much as she is anywhere.

Anselm rang first dark, late by a quarter hour, which the village forgave.

The note came out whole. Lower than before, a shade, and rounder, with no buzz in it at all. The humming under the tower trailed off into listening. Doro’s eyes did the long blink, then the second, longer one, and stayed down. Two other children went out like lamps. The headman also.

“It’s different,” said Anselm, his hand still on the rope. “It used to be brighter.”

“It used to be Mira.”

“And now it’s,” he said, and left it there.

“All of you. It will drift a little low as the children in it grow up, and come back up when you add the new ones. Send me a hair when there’s a wedding, if anyone remembers. It isn’t necessary. It’s tidy.”

Anselm nodded. Then he said, not quite asking, “It won’t finish again. All at once.”

“Not unless the whole village finishes at once. And then there’d be nobody up at night to mind.”

“There’s that,” said Anselm, and gave the short laugh of an old man checking arithmetic he has already done in the dark.

That night, Meern slept. I know because I lay awake listening to it, which is a habit and not a complaint. In the morning Mrs. Prell was ashamed and delighted to have overslept, and there were eggs, and the dark jam, and a second trout that the cat described as negotiated. She would not take money for the room. So before we left I redid the charm over her kitchen door, the one against ants, which had worn thin and was admitting ants of good character only.

“What was wrong with it?” she asked.

“Nothing. It had gotten polite.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s firm.”

“Like you,” said Mrs. Prell, and went red, and gave us bread for the road.

The twins walked us to the last fence and offered the cat half a bun. He accepted it in full.

We left late, on purpose, taking the long way down so the road would still hold us at first dark. The fog had come back to the knees of the fields. The cat rode in the basket, on the charm box.

“Did the lullaby have words?” he asked.

“It did.”

“What were they?”

“I forget. The goat is in, the fire is banked, morning comes anyway. Along those lines. I only ever kept the tune.”

“Hm,” said the cat, meaning he had checked the answer for fish and found none.

At the turn where the road remembers the river, the dark finished arriving, and behind us the bell rang. Small, with the distance. The new note. Not brighter. Rounder.

“Better than the bells in the capital,” said the cat.

“Is that so,” I said.

“It is so,” said the cat.

We went down along the water. Behind us, Meern was falling asleep on the sound of itself. I thought I would come back before the shrine needed its third roof. I have thought that kind of thing before. The cat shifted on the charm box and settled. I let him.