Georgia Boy Read Free Page B

of Miss Susie and Hubert. Preacher Hawshaw had already stopped readings from the little black book, and as soon as the usher whispered something to him, he laid the book on the table and came running up the aisle towards us.
    “Look here, Mr. Stroup!” he said out loud. “Quit tolling that bell!”
    “What are you talking about?” Pa asked him. We kept on pulling the bell-rope and letting it run back upwards through the hole in the ceiling just as we had from the start. “I’m ringing the bell like you told me. What’s wrong?”
    “What’s wrong!” Preacher Hawshaw said, running his finger around the inside of his collar to loosen it up. Don’t you hear that ding-dong, ding-dong up there in the belfry?” Everybody in the church had turned around by that time and a lot of them were making motions at us with their hands. “What you’re doing is tolling the bell. That’s for a funeral. Stop making it ding-dong !”
    “What in the world do you want me to do?” my old man asked him. “When I was the janitor at the school house, I rang it just like I’m doing now. Nobody ever accused me of tolling it then.”
    “The school-house bell ain’t nothing compared in size to this one, Mr. Stroup,” Preacher Hawshaw said. “There’s all the difference in the world in size. The school-house bell would make the same sound no matter how you rang it. Now, quit ringing this bell the way you’re doing it. It makes people sad. It don’t set the right mood for a wedding.”
    “What do you want me to do to it then?” Pa asked.
    “Trill it!”
    “Trill it?” my old man said. “What’s that?”
    Preacher Hawshaw turned and took a quick look at the people in the church. Miss Susie and Hubert were still standing down in front of the pulpit waiting for Preacher Hawshaw to come back and finish reading the wedding ceremony, but Miss Susie looked as if she might drop out of sight any second, and Hubert looked as though he might leap right through the stained-glass window.
    “Ain’t you ever trilled a bell in your life?” Preacher Hawshaw asked.
    “More than that,” Pa told him, “I ain’t never heard about it before.”
    “It goes ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling-ding ,” he said.
    “It does?” Pa asked, still pulling on the rope the way we had from the beginning. “That’s something I never knew about, neither.”
    “Well, stop tolling it and begin trilling it, Mr. Stroup!” Preacher Hawshaw said. “There’s people in there who’ve already begun to cry!”
    “I just can’t change over right here in the middle of things,” Pa told him. I’ll need practice, anyway. I’ll just have to keep on like I’m doing. Next time I’ll do it the other way for you.”
    Preacher Hawshaw reached out to pull the rope himself, but just then Miss Susie Thing’s brother, Jule, rushed up to Hubert Willy and shoved him out through the side door into the cemetery, accusing Hubert of having something to do with the way the bell was ringing. Before anybody could get out there, Jule had begun fighting Hubert, and in another minute they were fist-fighting all over the graves and tombstones. Hubert’s nose began to bleed, and Jule tore a big hole in his pants when he stumbled over a wrought-iron marker on one of the graves that said, “Keep Off.”
    My old man told me to keep on ringing the bell while he went outside to watch the fist-fight. Preacher Hawshaw went, too, like everybody else in the church. I kept on ringing the bell just as we had from the start, and by then I could tell that it did make a ding-dong sound exactly like old Uncle Jeff Davis Fletcher rang it for funerals. Both Jule and Hubert were pretty badly beaten up by that time, but nobody tried to stop them, because everyone figured that the best thing to do was to let them fight it out and stop of their own accord when they were too tired to keep it up any longer. I pulled on the rope just like my old man told me to do, wondering how the same bell could make a