I Can't

The church was built by the Amish just after the Great War. They wanted refuge from progress and the contagion brought home by the returning soldiers. Progress and the virus both spread through the countryside that year and the Amish thought both a kind of sickness. But later in the 20s they abandoned Everton when the first railroad began to bring city people looking for cool in the summer and the mountain air in the fall. So the church changed hands again and again over the years. First Episcopalians, then Latter Day Saints and finally Catholic. The townspeople thought God didn’t much care. The gospel’s the same no matter who’s preaching it and sinners all kneel the same anyway. The church had a bell with a rope. For years the clergyman would ring once at noon, twice at dusk and three times at midnight to end one day and begin another. The priest in 1946 was an old man. He was pious and tender but drank too much. When he said mass each dawn his hands trembled until he drank the consecrated wine. He was afflicted by gin each night and saved miraculously by the blood of Jesus each dawn. When the daily bell became too much a chore he enlisted a railroader named Robert Falter. Falter had helped lay the track for the train. He was a carpenter by trade, married just before the crash of 29, and his wife had a son the next year. As the Depression deepened he was laid off and, try as he might, was unable to find work. The boy, just four years old, died of consumption and his wife, stricken by guilt and grief, stepped off a west side pier into the icy Hudson River. They were victims of the age and of poverty and of life, too. And Falter carried the weight of their memory and his guilt until it broke him. He drank too much and slept too late and so could not hold down a job. But there was something about him. The air of great suffering that hung in his eyes. And when the townspeople looked into his face they felt ashamed but also sure that he was touched by something both terrible and holy. And in the way that great suffering often does he seemed burned clean of anything insignificant. The old priest hired him to dig graves in the cemetery one winter and so he became an odd jobber for the congregation. It was up to Falter to ring the bell each day though he often was late for noon and too drunk by midnight. Once he rang it for half an hour and the towns people were certain there must be a calamity, a fire or emergency. There was. He had run out of Thunderbird to put out the blaze in his memory. But like everything else in the country that year, in the winter of 1929 the church bell cracked. There was never enough money to fix it so pastor after pastor let it ring, a broken chime through the 1930s, the sound of something trying but unable to ring true, just like Tullio, and so became truer for the effort. At the post office each noon Tullio would ask the postal clerk if there was a letter for him. And each day the old man would sift thru sweetheart letters and wedding invitations, thru the draft notices and the ‘we regret to inform you” letters then gently shake his head. And each night the rain would fall, like Time does, soft at first then beating down on all creation until it filled the gutters and cleansed the headstones of the names of important men buried in the churchyard. It rained for a week and at night Tullio would listen to the sound of it tapping on the tin roof. A week later the old man finally handed him a letter. “This one's got some weight to it,” he murmured as he offered Tullio the envelope. Tullio stood for a long moment then reaching out his good hand took the letter. Then, to protect it from the storm, he pressed it against himself with his ruined hand. It had been years since he had run, but that day he tried. He limped. He shuffled. His heart began to race and his legs tried to keep up, a headlong kind of stumble away to a straighter kind of future. In the shed he laid the letter on his bench and stood staring at it. All around him were the damaged parts of things that no longer ran. Everything he had ever hoped for lay waiting before him. Then he went back to work. Later in the dark he sat looking at the envelope, afraid and hopeful. Finally near midnight he took a deep breath and stepped close. He picked up the envelope and pressed it first to his cheek, then to his forehead and finally to his heart. Then with his ruined hand he opened it. A ring rolled away and quivered, like a track does just before a train roars through. Then it settled, giving way to stillness. Inside was a single sheet of bone white paper. He unfolded it and read the words aloud …just two. “I can’t.” Tullio read them again and again. Then slowly he started to whisper the words to himself “I can’t…” His voice grew into a plea and then louder in protest. Then shouting he threw the door open and stepped into the storm. ‘I can’t. I can’t!’ he called out into the night. Outside the rain poured down and in the distance the cracked church bell began to chime. Tullio stared up into the sky then silently turned but slipped and fell to his knees and whispered like a prayer, “I can’t.” WLM