The footsteps were very slow. One step. A long pause. Another step. Like someone climbing a mountain.
Sam's hand tightened on the flashlight.
A head came up through the opening in the floor. White hair, wet with rain. Then thin shoulders in a plaid bathrobe. A hand like a bundle of sticks reached out, found the rope in the dark without looking, and started working at the knot.
Sam clicked on his flashlight.
The old man didn't even jump. He just squinted into the light, and said in a thin, sharp voice:
"Well, don't just stand there, boy. Help me ring it. The creek's coming."
His name was Arliss Combs. He was ninety-eight years old, and he lived at Maple Grove, the county care home, a block and a half from the church.
In January of 1937, he had been nine years old. His father was Reverend Combs, the pastor of Grace Methodist. And on the night of the flood, when the sexton's arms gave out, it was a nine-year-old boy who climbed up on a crate and pulled the bell rope for an hour by himself.
Sam knew all of that by two in the morning. He knew it because he walked Arliss back to Maple Grove in the rain, holding an umbrella over him, and Arliss talked the whole way.
The night nurse was frantic. Arliss had been getting out through the laundry room door. She'd thought he was sleepwalking. The doctor said it was his memory. Sometimes, at night, it was 1937 again.
"He keeps saying the creek is coming," the nurse said. "Every night this week. He's been sitting at the window all day, staring at it."
Sam looked at the old man in the chair by the window, already dozing.
The window faced Hollow Creek.
Sam didn't sleep that night. Something bothered him, and he'd learned in the Marines that when something bothers you, you go look.
At first light, he walked down to the Creek Road bridge.
The water was high. Higher than he'd seen it. Brown and fast and loud, full of sticks. It had rained four days straight. And there were other things. The beavers that lived below the bridge had dragged branches up the bank, higher than usual. The cows on the Hersh farm across the creek were all standing at the very top of the pasture, bunched together, as far from the water as the fence would let them.
Sam called Earl.
Earl called the county. The county said the creek gauge upstream had been broken since September and nobody had fixed it. They said the weather service had a flood watch out for the region but nothing for Hollow Creek specifically.
"Sam," Earl said. "What's your gut say?"
Sam looked at the cows on the hill.
"My gut says a ninety-eight-year-old man has been watching this creek through a window for a week," he said, "and he's the only one of us who's ever seen it flood."
By noon, the rain was coming down in sheets.
Earl had his deputies going door to door on Creek Road. But there were thirty-one houses, a lot of old folks, and some families who didn't answer their doors to anybody. Then the storm knocked out the cell tower on the ridge, and the county's emergency text alerts went nowhere.
At 2:40 in the afternoon, the water came over the Creek Road bridge.
Sam was already in the bell tower.
He didn't think about the beams. He didn't think about the engineer from Columbus, or the bake sales, or the sign. He untied the knot, the same neat knot Arliss had untied, and he pulled.
The flood bell rang out over Pine Hollow for the first time in daylight in eleven years.
Down on Creek Road, people heard it. People who'd learned the story in third grade. They didn't need a text alert. They knew exactly what that bell meant. They grabbed their kids and their dogs and their medicine and they went to high ground.
Sam rang it for two hours. When his arms gave out, Walt Brenner climbed the stairs and took a turn. Then Hank. Then two boys from the Panthers football team who'd never pulled a bell rope in their lives.
The beams groaned. They held.
By dark, Hollow Creek was four feet deep across the bottom of Creek Road. Eleven houses had water in their basements. Two had it in their kitchens.
Not one person was hurt. Every family made it out.
Every single one.
The church had the money for the tower by Christmas. It turned out a lot of people on Creek Road had been meaning to give to the bake sale.
On the Sunday the new beams were finished, they brought Arliss Combs over from Maple Grove in a wheelchair, bundled in three blankets. Two deacons carried him up the stairs, chair and all, which the insurance company did not need to know about.
Arliss looked up at the old bell for a long time.
Sam put the rope in his hands. Arliss's fingers were too weak to pull. So Sam put his own hands around the old man's, and they pulled together.
The bell rang out over Pine Hollow, clear and strong.
Arliss closed his eyes and smiled.
"Told you," he said. "The creek was coming."
