The Bell Tower Button War

Harvey Bowen was thirty-four years old, and he had been losing to Calvin Fitzgerald for sixteen years.

Not losing everything. Losing most things. That was worse.

It started back when they were both eighteen, at the county fair. Livestock judging. Harvey had a ewe he'd raised from a lamb, a good one, a blue ribbon type of ewe. Calvin showed up with a nearly identical ewe from a farm two miles down the road and somehow walked off with first place. Nobody could explain how. Calvin himself couldn't explain how. He just smirked, and Harvey had been scowling at him ever since.

Sixteen years of it. Tractor pulls. Pumpkin weights. Chili cook-offs that ended with the fire department showing up. Harvey won the chili thing once, in fairness, but Calvin disputed the results for so long the church had to stop holding the cook-off entirely, which Harvey considered a moral victory anyway.

So when Ester Kelley announced her retirement after thirty years playing the organ at Saint Dunstan's, and Amara Horn started planning the party on the church lawn, Harvey knew exactly what he was going to do. And he knew Calvin would try to do it better.

The plan was simple. Ester's grandmother's button jar. She'd told Harvey about it once, years ago, while he was fixing a fence post near the church and she was out getting air between services. Her grandmother had collected buttons her whole life. Hundreds of them. Ester kept the jar on the windowsill of the organ loft and said it was the only thing she'd take with her when she retired.

Harvey was going to hang that jar from the beam at the top of the bell tower. The highest point in the whole parish. Ribbon, a hook, done. A send-off nobody would forget.

He told his neighbor Bert about it over the fence on Wednesday.

"You're gonna what," Bert said.

"Hang the button jar off the beam in the bell tower. Ester's jar. It's her favorite thing."

"Why?"

"Because it'll be perfect, Bert."

"Because Calvin won't have thought of it."

"Because it'll be perfect," Harvey repeated, and Bert sighed like a man tired of hearing about Calvin, which he was.

* * *

Saturday afternoon, Harvey drove out to Saint Dunstan's with the jar in a padded box on the passenger seat. He'd gotten it from Amara the day before, after swearing on his mother's grave he'd be careful with it. His mother was alive and living in Ipswich, but Amara accepted the oath anyway.

The church sat on a low rise with a graveyard spilling down the hill behind it. Limestone tower, squat and old, the kind of building that looked like it had been argued into existence. The party lawn was already half set up. Folding tables. A banner Amara had clearly fought with and lost to.

Amara Horn was fifty-two and had run every church social for a decade, and she met Harvey at the door with the expression of a woman who already knew the future.

"Harvey Bowen."

"Morning, Amara."

"I know what you're here for." She handed him the jar anyway. It was heavy, glass, packed full of buttons in every color imaginable. "And I know what day it is, and I want your word you're not going to start anything with Calvin."

"Start anything? Me?"

"Harvey."

"I'm hanging a jar, Amara. It's a tribute. It's heartfelt."

"It's a competition. I've known you since you were a boy in Sunday school, sitting in the third row pinching Calvin Fitzgerald's arm under the table." She pointed a finger at him, which she did often, and it worked, which was annoying. "Ester deserves one nice afternoon. One. If the two of you turn her retirement into a circus, I will personally see to it neither of you is welcome at another church event as long as I'm secretary."

"That seems excessive."

"I'm a church secretary. Excessive is my whole job." She softened a little. "It's a lovely idea, the jar. It would be lovelier if you two did it together."

"We're not doing anything together."

"Right. Lovely. Go on." She waved him off and went back to fighting with the banner.

Harvey carried the jar around to the tower door, set the box down, and was untying the ribbon from his pocket when he heard the truck.

Calvin's truck. Of course it was Calvin's truck.

Calvin Fitzgerald was thirty-four, built like a haystack with arms, and he came around the corner of the tower carrying an extension ladder over one shoulder and a cordless drill in his other hand like it was a sidearm.

"Oh no," Harvey said.

"Oh yes!" Calvin leaned the ladder against the tower wall and grinned. "Morning, Harvey. Nice jar. Shame it's gonna be mounted properly instead of dangling off a string like a maypole."

"Mounted. You're mounting it."

"I'm mounting it. Bracket, two screws, level, done. It'll sit up there till the Lord comes back." He patted the drill. "You've got, what, ribbon? Ribbon's for gift baskets, Harvey."

"Ribbon is traditional. It's elegant. It honors her."

"It's lazy is what it is." Calvin looked up at the tower. "I also brought a longer ladder, so."

"So what?"

"So mine goes higher."

"That's the same ladder length, you've just bought a new one."

Calvin paused. "It's a better ladder."

Harvey looked at the jar, then at Calvin, then at the tower door, which stood open on the bottom of a spiral stair that went up and up into the dark. The thought arrived fully formed: whoever got to the beam first won. Not the ladder. Not the drill. The beam.

"You know," Harvey said, picking up the box, "the stairs are the real route. Ladder only gets you to the window."

"And the stairs," Calvin said, already moving, "start right here."

They went through the door at the same time, which meant neither of them fit, which meant it became a shoulder thing immediately. The spiral stair was narrow, stone, worn hollow in the middle by four hundred years of bell-ringers, and the two of them took it like a tug-of-war in a chimney.

"Get off my elbow," Harvey said, two turns up.

"Get off my elbow, you mean." Calvin was behind him, which meant ahead of him on the curve, pressing in. "Your idea, I'll give you that much. Hanging the jar. Been sitting on that one long?"

"Since Tuesday."

"Ha! I thought of it Wednesday, so you're one day ahead, which is a first for you." A shove, not gentle. "Drill's still better though."

"Drill is loud and horrible. You'd put hardware into a four-hundred-year-old beam. There's probably a law."

"There's definitely a law about shoving, and you just broke it."

"That was a nudge."

They went around another turn. The window slit threw a stripe of light across the steps and they both hit it and blinked like moles. Below, faintly, Amara's voice carried up through the glass, telling somebody where to put the folding chairs.

"Move over," Harvey said.

"It's a spiral, there's no over!"

"Then go slower so I can pass."

"That's not how passing works either."

Harvey got a hand on the center post and hauled himself up half a turn, and Calvin grabbed his belt and hauled him back, and for a second they were both wedged in the stairwell breathing like kettlebells, the button jar clutched against Harvey's chest between them.

"She taught us Sunday school," Calvin said, suddenly, quieter.

"She did."

"Third row. Arm pinching."

"You started it."

"Whatever. Race you to the rope platform," Calvin said, and shoved past.

The platform was worse than the stairs. It was a wooden shelf bolted into the stonework, maybe four feet square, with the beam overhead and two bell ropes hanging down like dead snakes. Calvin got there first, which was infuriating, and found a loose wooden ladder lashed along the wall and swung it up to lean against the beam.

"Watch this," he said, and started climbing.

"Watch you what, fall? Gladly."

Harvey stood on the platform holding the jar, and that was the problem. The jar. He couldn't climb with it and he couldn't leave it, because Calvin would drill a hole in the beam before he got a foot up. So he stood there as an idiot holding a jar of buttons while Calvin went up the ladder rung by rung, big and steady, reaching for the beam with the drill raised like a torch.

Then the ladder foot slipped.

It happened fast. The left rail skidded off the platform edge, Calvin's boots went sideways, and the drill clattered off into the corner somewhere. Harvey didn't think. He just dropped the jar, grabbed Calvin's belt with both hands, and hauled.

He hauled too well. Calvin came off the ladder entirely and into Harvey, and the two of them staggered backwards together into the bell ropes, and one of the ropes caught Calvin across the chest, and that was the only thing that kept them both on the platform instead of going off it into four hundred years of nothing.

So there they were. Stuck. Calvin's chest against Harvey's face, Harvey's arms locked around Calvin's middle under the belt, both of them breathing hard, one bell rope pinned between