The Bell Ringer's Last Call

The ad said "night shift, rural location, must be comfortable with livestock proximity." I have been a journalist for eleven years, thirty-four of them alive altogether, and I have learned that any job listing which mentions livestock proximity is either a cult or a story. In this case it turned out to be both, sort of, though the cult part took some digging.

I'd been living out of my Corolla for three months by then, parked at various rest stops and the occasional generous cousin's driveway, writing freelance pieces for a regional magazine that paid late and complained often. The magazine wanted a piece on Nightjar Farm, which had somehow gotten a call center contract for a mail-order seed company, and which had recently suffered a basement flood that had killed their server room stone dead. The rumor I'd been handed, third-hand and greasy, was that the night bell ringer marked shifts with a pocket knife for reasons nobody could explain. That was the angle. The entire pitch, more or less, and I'd told my editor I could be funny about it.

So I showed up at the converted sheep barn on a Tuesday in March, two weeks after the flood, with a thermos of coffee and a notebook I'd already stained with thermos coffee twice before.

The night shift, it turned out, did not operate out of the barn. It operated out of a trailer parked in the paddock, a caravan really, the kind of thing retirees tow to the coast and then regret. There was a generator humming somewhere behind it and a single light over the door, and standing under that light was a lanky man in a flannel shirt holding what appeared to be a brass handbell the size of a grapefruit.

"Riley?" he said.

"That's me."

"Welcome to Nightjar." And then he rang the bell. Right beside my ear. Full swing.

I jumped about a foot and a half, and my coffee went everywhere, mostly onto my notebook, which now reads as a weather report for the left margin. The man had the decency to look apologetic, but not much of it.

"Sorry," he said. "I ring it every time someone arrives. It's a system."

"Could you maybe warn a person before the system?"

"That would defeat the system," he said, and he wasn't joking, which was somehow worse. His name was Allen Massey, he was thirty-nine, and he had the specific calm of a man who has decided that if the world ends he will simply note the time of the ending in a logbook.

The trailer was cramped and smelled faintly of damp carpet, because everything here smelled faintly of damp carpet, the flood being two weeks old and the cleanup being the kind that happens between other jobs. There were four folding tables in a row, four headsets, four water coolers, and one of the water coolers was still dripping. Not gurgling. Dripping. A slow, patient drip onto a towel that had clearly given up.

The owner, Elias, came in maybe ten minutes after I did. He was forty-one, broad, and had the distracted air of a man doing four jobs at once in his head, two of them failing. He shook my hand as if checking it for rain.

"You're the temp. Good. Listen, don't mind the bell."

"I'm already minding the bell," I said.

"Allen rings it for breaks, shift changes, emergencies. Break is two short. Shift change is three. Emergency is, well." He paused, as if remembering. "It's long. You'll know it's long."

"That's very reassuring."

"Eh, nobody's died." He said it the way other men say good morning, and then he walked me to my workstation, which was a folding table wedged between a headset and the dripping water cooler. The table wobbled when I touched it. He handed me a rag for the drip and a stack of call scripts and said, "The server room's a write-off, so everything's manual for now. Write everything down. Allen will show you the rest." And then he was gone, back out into the dark, off to do one of his other failing jobs.

The first three hours were quiet. Seeds, mostly. People calling about tomato varieties, about delivery windows, about whether a particular pumpkin would survive a frost, and one man who wanted to know if we sold anything that could kill a specific weed without him having to kneel down. I took notes, partly for the exposé and partly because the notebook needed something on the right margin to balance the coffee on the left.

Then came the lull, and with it, Allen.

He was sharpening a pocket knife when I turned around. That's not a figure of speech. He had a whetstone out on his table, a little rectangular thing, and he was drawing the blade across it at a low angle, slow and even, like he'd done it ten thousand times, which he probably had.

"Is that the knife?" I asked. "From the rumor?"

"What rumor?"

"The one where you signal shifts with it."

He looked almost offended, which for him was a twitch of one eyebrow. "I don't signal shifts with it. I signal shifts with the bell. The knife opens boxes." He held it up. It was small, worn, the handle dark with years of hands. "Scripts come in boxes. Boxes need opening. Simple as that."

"Who started the rumor?"

"People see a knife and a bell and make up the rest. Rural places run on that." He tilted the blade toward the light. "This was my grandfather's. He was a shearer out past Dubbo. Used it fifty years and sharpened it every Sunday night, whether it needed it or not."

"Did it need it?"

"It always needed it. That was the point. You do a thing every week, you don't have to think about whether to do it." He ran his thumb carefully along the flat of the blade, not the edge, and then held the whetstone out to me. "Want to try? You hold it flatter than you think. Everyone starts too steep."

And here is the part where I should tell you I remembered I was there undercover, that this man was a subject, that the knife was material. Instead I took the stone and he stood behind my shoulder adjusting my wrist, and my heartbeat did something unprofessional. Two years earlier I'd had a fling with a guy from the paper, thirty-two years old and we both were, and it had ended with him forwarding my draft to his girlfriend for "feedback," so my instincts around men who keep their word were rusty and unreliable. Allen kept his word. You could tell within an hour. He said the break bell would ring at eleven and it rang at eleven, two shorts, not a second early.

The recorder I'd brought was running in my bag the whole time, because of course it was, and around one in the morning it caught something I will treasure until I die. A customer, elderly by the sound of him, called in absolutely furious, and I mean furious, because a goat had gotten into his letterbox area and eaten his seed catalog. Not damaged. Eaten. He wanted to know, in a voice shaking with righteous anger, whether we could send a catalog the goat wouldn't eat, and whether the goat could be billed.

I had to put my hand over my mouth and look at the wall. My shoulders were going. Allen, across the table, watched me struggle with the flat, patient smirk of a man who has heard the goat call before. He has heard it many times, I'd learn later. It comes every March.

"That one's yours to log," he said, when I'd mostly recovered.

"I can't log that."

"You have to. Policy. Everything gets logged."

I wrote it down. The recorder got it too, and I made a quiet mental note to delete that file before it ever reached my editor, because some stories you keep for yourself.

The generator died at two in the morning.

It didn't die politely, either. It coughed twice, made a sound of a man clearing his throat before a difficult apology, and then the trailer went black all at once. The heaters stopped. The little strip light over the desk stopped. The fridge in the corner stopped with a sort of offended clunk, as if it had been interrupted mid-sentence.

"Well," Allen said, in the dark.

"That's it? Well?"

"What else is there. It's a generator. They die. It's the one thing they do well."

I felt my way along the table edge. The window above the filing boxes had been jammed since before I arrived, and with the generator down there was no fan, and no fan meant that within twenty minutes the trailer would be a sauna full of two people and a fridge full of warming yogurt. Allen solved it the way he seemed to solve everything, which was quietly and with the knife. He got up, found the window in the dark by