Tardy Town {a glimpse}

The mysterious circumstances pertaining to the town christened Tardy, and all that followed.

At precisely 3 o’clock in the dead of a chilly Thursday night in December, the St. Sanctus church bell sounded across the little town of Tardy. Precisely seven people in the town were still awake that night and thus were the few who heard the bell’s clangourous hollow din reverberating from its mount in the Church tower.

Raymond Rechid was one of the seven not yet claimed by the realm of sleep, and truth be told Raymond had no choice but to hear the bell’s clamour, as he was Tardy town’s staunch bell-ringer.

While the mass of Tardy town’s inhabitants were tucked soundly in bed, Raymond would nightly make his way to the Church - a short two streets walk from his unintended bachelor abode - turn the bulky rusting key in the old wooden Church tower door, and there he would carry-out his appointed duty of the ringing of the bell. As St. Sanctus’ sole subservient, Raymond was also appointed to be dreary daily altar server, lonesome aisle sweeper, makeshift pallbearer and unavoidable-if-undesired gravedigger.

In comparison to these humdrum chores, he simply relished ringing the town bell; the thud of the clapper against the bell’s inner rim, the pouring of sound all around him filling the tower to its brim, the quivering sensation eddying down the bell’s rope through his hands.

He knew the bell so intimately that with just the slightest flick of the wrist he could direct the clapper to the bell’s sweetest spots, allowing for differing degrees in the sound’s tonality and texture to resonate and reverberate across the town. For those two or three minutes each night Raymond Rechid ceased to be a sad thirty-six year old bachelor whose only purpose in life was to perform St. Sanctus church’s dirty work. He transformed into a conjurer of sound; a straight-backed and not so socially shunned kindred spirit of Quasimodo.

Fr. Dione, the parish priest, grimaced at the tolling of the bell. Perched like an old balding vulture at the end of his bed, Fr. Dione’s reason for being awake at such an ungodly hour was not out of any pious religious devotion. Quite simply it was Fr. Dione who paid Raymond Rechid’s weekly wages out of the St. Sanctus’ daily monetary gatherings. And quite simply, if Raymond was to miss any one of his never-ending appointed church duties, Fr. Dione would, with a feeling of relief befitting any miserly old man, refuse to pay Raymond his entitled sum; a sum that even an ordinary Tardy town child would scoff at.

Somewhat grudgingly, Fr. Dione picked up his thumb-sized graphite pencil from his bedside table and crossed the Thursday night box off his scrutinisingly extensive Rechid’s weekly performance checklist. Pulling back the stiff as cardboard bed sheets, he crawled underneath for some well needed shuteye.