“The calling of the bells”

“The calling of the bells” is the summons of Haven’s newly installed church carillon, sounded for Ruth McCausland’s funeral. It draws residents toward a carefully staged civic-religious ceremony, but the gathering also reveals that their apparent unity has become a shared mental vigilance: the bells call the town together even as the town’s collective consciousness watches the outsiders among it.

The carillon and its purpose

The bells heard at Ruth’s funeral are not the old Methodist churchbells. Reverend Lester Goohringer had complained about the old bells’ gonging, and the church had acquired a programmable carillon. He selects hymns that had been favorites of Ruth’s, including familiar Methodist and Baptist standards, and takes pride in watching people move toward the church as the music carries across Haven. The new sound gives the funeral a deliberate ceremonial shape: the bells are both a practical summons and a musical tribute to the woman being buried.

The ceremony is conceived as a three-act affair, beginning at the Methodist church, continuing with graveside rites, and ending with refreshments at the town library. The repeated invocation of the bells as calling, then as crying, makes the sound carry more than one emotional register. For Goohringer it is an occasion to honor Ruth in style; for the narrative it also becomes an audible sign that the town’s ordinary public rituals are taking place inside a profound change.

A summons heard by townspeople and strangers

The carillon reaches people in very different circumstances. Haven’s oldest resident, Dave Rutledge, hears it and heads toward the church. Until early July he had been nearly deaf and had suffered from poor circulation; now both have improved, and he feels markedly younger. His renewed ability to hear the music makes the bells a small but concrete instance of the bodily changes affecting Haven’s residents.

The sound also attracts visitors who do not share the town’s history. Annabelle, visiting with a congressional aide, is charmed by the hymns she remembers from childhood. She wonders how a town of Haven’s size can afford such a fine carillon. Her response registers the music as inviting and beautiful, even while the scene around her contains unsettling details that she cannot interpret. In this way, the bells present Haven to outsiders as a place of apparent hospitality before the limits of that welcome become clear.

The funeral’s public face

Residents answer the summons in twos and threes. The post office closes so Nancy Voss can attend; local families and familiar figures arrive, including Newt Berringer and Dick Allison, who support Ruth’s feeble predecessor, John Harley. These individual acts of attendance make the gathering look like an ordinary expression of communal grief and respect.

But the ceremony is also described as a charade, an enactment of the town’s claim that it loved Ruth. The contrast is not simply between sincere and insincere mourners: the bells bring together people whose minds are changing, and whose public behavior does not disclose the full nature of that change. The funeral’s formal acts—music, procession, eulogy, and the promised refreshments—give the town a recognizable social script, even as that script conceals a new collective condition.

Collective listening and the altered town

As the residents assemble, their minds draw together into one mind. They watch the outsiders and listen for any thought that sounds wrong. Thus the carillon’s summons has a parallel inside the town: the public sound gathers bodies at the church, while mental communication gathers inhabitants into a network capable of mutual awareness and suspicion. The community’s togetherness is real, but it does not amount to uncomplicated fellowship.

The passage also places the bells amid evidence that Haven’s transformation reaches beyond thought. Dave’s improved hearing and circulation are presented alongside the town’s developing mental connection; elsewhere, Ruth recognizes that residents have been knowing things without understanding how, and the network can unite people in a search for the missing David Brown. At the funeral, however, that capacity serves as a watchful collective presence. The calling therefore marks a threshold between the familiar town ritual and the changed community that performs it: a hymn summons mourners, but the town answers as something more unified, and more guarded, than a congregation.