Florida FAST Practice Test 1

The Weight of Bells

¹For forty-one years Gideon Hale had climbed the ninety-two steps of the Saint Brendan's tower at a quarter to seven, and for forty-one years the town of Ardmore had set its clocks by him rather than the other way around. Shopkeepers rolled up their awnings at the first stroke. Mothers pulled children from their beds at the second. By the seventh, the whole valley seemed to have taken a breath and agreed to begin.

²The letter from the town council arrived on a Tuesday, folded in thirds as neatly as a surrender. It thanked him for his "long and faithful service." It informed him that an electric striking mechanism, purchased with a gift from the Finch family, would be installed before the first frost. It did not ask his opinion. Gideon read it twice at the kitchen table, then laid it face down beside the sugar bowl, as if it were a card he had not yet decided to play.

³"It's a kindness, Uncle," said June, his grand-niece, who had come to sweep the parlor and stayed to watch him not eat his eggs. "Your knees—"

⁴"My knees have climbed that tower more times than the council has met." He said it mildly, the way he said everything, but he did not look at her.

⁵The electrician came the following week, a young man named Calvin Ives with a toolbox the size of a coffin and a cheerful, unbreakable politeness. Gideon met him at the base of the tower and climbed ahead of him, slowly, without once using the rail. At the top, the great bronze bell hung in the half-dark like a sleeping animal, its rope coiled on the floorboards beneath it.

⁶"She's a beauty," Calvin said, setting down his box. "Cast in 1868, the plaque says. You must know her well."

⁷"I know her voice," Gideon said. "The rest of her I leave alone."

⁸Calvin worked for three days, bolting a gray steel housing to the frame and threading black cable down the inside of the tower like a vine growing the wrong way. Gideon came each morning at a quarter to seven and rang the bell around him. The young man would stop whatever he was doing and stand very still, hands at his sides, until the last stroke had rolled out over the rooftops and faded somewhere beyond the river.

⁹On the third morning, as Gideon reached for the rope, Calvin asked, "How do you know how hard to pull? The pattern's never quite the same."

¹⁰Gideon considered the question longer than it seemed to deserve. "Monday is for work, so it's plain. Saturday she can sing a little. When someone in town has died, you hold back on the fourth stroke—let it hang a moment before the fifth—so people know to listen." He shrugged. "Nobody taught me. You just hear what the day needs."

¹¹Calvin was quiet. Then he opened a notebook and wrote something down, and Gideon felt, absurdly, as though he had been robbed.

¹²The machine was switched on the first Monday of October. Gideon did not go to the tower. He sat on his porch with his coffee and his coat buttoned to the throat. At seven o'clock exactly the bell spoke: seven strokes, evenly spaced, each one arriving on the second. It was the sound of a bell ringing, and nothing more than that. Across the street, Mrs. Adela Finch paused with her watering can and smiled up at the tower as if a gift had been delivered to her personally.

¹³All that week the bell rang perfectly, and all that week Gideon felt the town waking up a little wrong, the way a room feels wrong when someone has moved a single chair. He said nothing to June. He was not a man who complained about weather.

¹⁴On Saturday the strokes came, and something in them lifted—the third arriving a half-beat early, the sixth swelling as though the bell had drawn a deeper breath. Gideon set down his cup. The following Thursday, when old Mr. Bryce from the feed store was buried, the fourth stroke hung in the air for a long moment, and the fifth came after it like a hand laid gently on a shoulder.

¹⁵That evening Gideon climbed the ninety-two steps for what he already knew would be the last time. He used the rail. At the top he found the steel housing humming faintly, and taped inside its door a card in a careful, square hand: MON—PLAIN. SAT—SING. FUNERAL—HOLD THE FOURTH. Beneath it, smaller: Corrections welcome. —C.I.

¹⁶Gideon read it twice. Then he took the pencil from his shirt pocket, and under SAT he added: but not too much. He stood for a while with his palm flat against the cold bronze, the way a man might stand beside a horse he had sold to a good neighbor, and then he went carefully down.