The Cope

by Carl Bosch, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I

They dug it out on the ninth day, which was a Tuesday, in October 1951, with frost on the slag heap behind the foundry and the pit still warm enough at the bottom that Pius Hennes worked in his shirt.

The earth came out first, the rammed clay they had beaten in round the mould with wooden pounders a week and a half before, then the iron weights from the top, then the cope itself in pieces. It came away in the brown curved shards it always came away in, the inner face burned black and glazed. Matthias Wolter stood at the edge of the pit with his hands in his coat and said nothing until the shoulder of the bell showed.

It should have shown as one clean line, curving down from the crown. It did not. A third of the way down there was a ridge in the bronze, a lip as thick as a finger, running round the bell's waist on the side that faced the shed, and below the ridge the surface stood out from the line it should have kept. The cope had given there, pushed outward. The metal had gone into the gap it left and set.

"Chain," said Wolter.

They brought the hoist over on its rail and took the bell up by its crown loops, and it came out of the pit turning slowly, three thousand eight hundred kilograms of bronze that weighed, when they put it on the scale that afternoon, four thousand one hundred and ten. Nearly three hundred kilograms of metal had gone where no metal was meant to be. The ridge ran two-thirds of the way round and faded. Above it the bell was right. Below it, on the bulged side, the wall was perhaps eight millimetres thicker than the drawing.

Anneliese Wolter laid the template against it, the long board cut to the profile, and the board would not sit. She tried it on the other side and it sat. She tried it again on the first side and wrote down the gap at six heights in her notebook.

Her father struck the bell once with the leather hammer. It gave a note, and under the note something else, a wobble that came and went, as if two bells of nearly the same size had been struck at once in a room a long way off.

"That goes back in the furnace," he said.

II

The parish of St. Marien in Lahnfeld had lost its great bell in March 1942, when the trucks went round the district taking the bronze. Two smaller bells had gone with it. In 1947 the two small ones had come back from the yard at Hamburg with a chalk number on each, and the parish had hung them again and rung them at the Easter Mass, and the large one had not come back, because it had been melted.

For four years the parish collected for a new one. Pfarrer Hammes had brought the money to Kellerbach in a briefcase the previous spring, and with it a box of things people had given: candlesticks, a mortar and pestle, door handles, a christening cup, a brass shell casing from the first war that someone's grandfather had kept on a mantelpiece. Most of it was brass and would not do. Wolter had put it to one side and bought copper and tin from the dealer in Siegen, and the parish's bronze, the little of it there was, had gone into the first pour.

Wolter's largest bell before this had been one thousand one hundred kilograms, for a church at Montabaur, in 1938. His father's largest had been smaller. The foundry was a shed, a reverberatory furnace with a brick chimney, the pit, the hoist, a lathe in the lean-to that Wolter had built himself from a lathe bed out of a railway workshop, and a yard full of loam under tarpaulins.

Anneliese had been at the technical college in Aachen from 1946 to 1949, in the metallurgy department, among men who had come back from the East and wore their army trousers to lectures. She had written her diploma on the porosity of tin bronzes. Her father had paid for this, and at the end of it had said only that he hoped it would be of use, in the voice of a man buying a tool he did not expect to need.

III

That evening she took the cope apart a second time, on the floor of the shed.

Pius had stacked the shards on sacking as they came out, and she laid them face up by where they had sat: the crown pieces in a ring, the shoulder, the waist, the sound-bow at the bottom where the bell is thickest. On the side that had faced the shed there was a crack running up from the waist through the shoulder, almost to the crown, and the edges of the crack were filmed with bronze, thin as foil. It had opened while the metal was still running, and not after.

She measured the thickness of every shard with calipers at three points and wrote the figures on them in pencil. Then she weighed them on the sack scale, a few at a time, and added the weights up.

The cope was three fingers thick all over. It was three fingers thick because her father made it three fingers thick, and his father had, on every bell from the little hand bells for a school to the one at Montabaur.

At the far end of the shed there was a blackboard that had once been for the order book. She cleaned it with a wet rag and wrote down what the metal had done.

The metal in the mould, standing up to the pouring cup, pushed outward against the cope with a pressure that depended on how far it stood below the cup. Not on how much of it there was; on how tall. The new bell stood half as high again as the Montabaur bell. The pressure at its waist was therefore half as much again. And the area of cope the pressure acted on was larger by the square of that, more than twice as much. The force pushing the cope off the bell, the sum of all that pushing on all that surface, went up as the bell's weight went up, as its height cubed: three and a half times the Montabaur bell.

The cope, three fingers thick, had grown only in area. It weighed a little more than twice what the Montabaur cope weighed. The rammed earth round it had been beaten in by the same two men with the same pounders, to the same hardness.

She wrote the two figures beside each other. Three and a half. Two and a bit. Underneath she wrote: The earth made up the difference. On that side the earth was rammed last, after dark.

Her father came in while she was writing it, and read it, and went to stand by the shards.

"Then we ram it harder," he said. "We make the cope thicker. Six fingers. We put twice the iron on top."

"It would hold," she said.

"Then."

"Show me the bell you made in 1928."

He did not move for a while. Then he went out into the yard and came back with it, a little bell of perhaps forty kilograms that hung in the shed doorway and was struck at noon. He turned it up and held it under the lamp, and she looked at the inside of the lip, where there were holes in the bronze like the holes in a loaf, a ring of them, some as big as peas.

"I made that cope thick," he said, "because the Neuhäusel bell had a fin on it the year before. The gas had nowhere to go."

"Where does the gas come from?"

"You know where it comes from."

"Say it."

He told her: from the loam, from the water still in it however long you dried it, from the hair and the dung burning, from the core, from the air in the mould itself. The bronze came in at eleven hundred degrees and everything in the mould that could become gas became gas at once, and it had to leave through the loam, and the loam had to be open enough to let it leave. A good cope breathed. You could put your mouth to a dried cope and blow through it, if you had the lungs. Make it dense or thick and the gas stayed in the metal and came out as holes, and a bell with holes in the lip cracked in its first winter.

She wrote on the board, in a column on the left:

The cope must take the shape of the false bell exactly. The cope must let the gas through. The cope must hold against the metal.

"It does all three," said her father. "It has always done all three."

"It did at one thousand one hundred kilograms."

He looked at the columns. "And it does two at three thousand eight hundred."

"It does two at three thousand eight hundred. To make it do the third, you have to make it worse at the second. Thicker loam is stronger and breathes less. Denser loam is stronger and breathes less."

"Then how is it done in Bochum?"

"In Bochum they cast steel bells in sand flasks. We don't want a steel bell."

"No," he said.

She drew a line across the board under the third sentence and wrote beside it, on its own: Not the loam.

IV

The smith at Kellerbach was a man called Thelen who mostly did horseshoes and the hoops for the cooper at Hachenburg and had made, during the war, a great many things he would not talk about. Anneliese went to him on the Thursday with a drawing.

It was a cage. Twelve iron ribs, curved to the outside of the cope, standing a hand's breadth off it, bolted at their feet to the iron base plate the core sat on and gathered at the top into a ring. Six iron bands round the ribs, one at each of the six heights where she had measured the bulge, drawn up tight with turnbuckles. A cage of iron, outside the cope and separate from it.

"And between?" said Thelen, putting his finger on the hand's breadth.

"Coke breeze," she said. "Dry, broken small. Rammed, but not hard."

He understood it faster than her father had, perhaps because it was not his cope. The loam would do what loam did: take the shape and let the gas through. It could be made as thin and as open as her father liked. When the metal came in and pushed, the cope would press out against the coke, and the coke against the iron, and the iron would not move, because iron did not care about the height of a bell. The gas would come out through the loam into the coke, and through the coke, which was all holes, up to the top and out at the vent pipes.

"Iron's dear," said Thelen.

It was. The iron for the cage cost four hundred and sixty marks, which was more than the coke and loam for every bell her father had cast that year together. The tin had to be bought again besides: in a remelt a bronze loses tin to the furnace, burned off as white smoke and dross, and she had worked out from the analysis of the first heat that the metal had come out at twenty-one parts in the hundred, a part short, and would come out shorter. They needed eighty kilograms to bring it back, and tin was dear that year, because of the war in Korea.

Wolter paid for it. He did not tell the priest.

They broke the bad bell on the Saturday. Pius hauled the drop weight up on the frame in the yard, a pointed iron weight on a rope, and let it go onto the sound-bow, and the bell did not break but rang, enormously, so that the dogs in the village started up one after another and a woman came out of the house on the corner. On the fourth drop it cracked, and on the seventh a piece came out of the lip the size of a dinner plate, and after that it came apart in the way bronze comes apart, in big glittering grey pieces with a crystal face like broken sugar.

Anneliese picked up a piece from the bulged side, from the ridge, and looked at the break under her glass. The grain at the fin was fine and close, finer than in the wall behind it. That metal had been thin and had frozen fast. She put it in her pocket and kept it.

V

The second mould took five weeks.

Her father built the core on the base plate as he always had, brick and loam over the iron spindle, the strickle board turned round on it to give the inside of the bell. Over the core, the false bell, loam the thickness of the bronze to come, smoothed with the second board and coated with tallow. Onto the false bell, the inscription: the parish's name, the year, the old bell's dedication to Our Lady, and under it, because Pfarrer Hammes had asked, Genommen 1942. Wiedergegeben 1951. The wax letters were pressed from wooden forms her grandfather had carved, and the forms were worn so that the S was a little shallower than the other letters.

Then the cope. Wolter made it thinner than he had ever made a cope: two fingers. He mixed it himself, as he always mixed it, the loam from the pit by the Nister, sand, chopped hair from the tanner at Bad Marienberg, horse dung, and he mixed it more open than before, with more of the dung, and when it was built and dried over the fire for a week he went and put his mouth to it and blew, and came away and nodded.

They lifted the cope off on the hoist and broke the false bell out from inside it, the tallow coming away clean so that the inscription lay reversed and perfect in the inner face of the cope, and they lowered the cope back down over the core, the gap between the two now exactly the shape of the bell. Thelen's cage went on in pieces, the ribs bolted to the plate, the bands drawn up, and Pius and Anneliese filled the hand's breadth with coke breeze in buckets, a little at a time, and tamped it with a broom handle. The whole thing went down into the pit on the hoist, and the earth went in round it, rammed in daylight, all sides together.

They lit the furnace at four in the morning on the twenty-ninth of November. The metal was ready at two in the afternoon. Her father skimmed it, and stirred it with a green birch pole, which made it boil, and took a sample in a ladle and poured it on the floor and looked at the colour of it as it set.

The pour took four minutes. When the metal reached the mould the vents began to burn, small blue flames standing up from the pipes at the top of the pit, which was the gas coming out of the loam and through the coke and taking fire in the air, and they burned for a long time after the metal had stopped running, a ring of them, quiet. Pius took his cap off. Her father stood by the pit and watched them until they went out, and then went to bed, and Anneliese sat in the shed with the lamp and the blackboard until it was light.

VI

They gave it twelve days to cool, three more than the first, because her father said so and gave no reason.

The earth came out, and the cage, bolt by bolt, the ribs blackened and not one of them bent. The coke had sintered in places into a crust that broke off in plates. The cope came away in the brown curved shards it always came away in.

The shoulder came out of the cope in one clean line, curving down from the crown, and went on curving to the lip. There was no ridge. Anneliese put the template against it on the side that had faced the shed and the board sat, all the way down, and she put it on the other side and it sat there too.

On the scale it weighed three thousand eight hundred and forty kilograms, which was the drawing and the tuning metal, the extra her father always left on the inside to be turned off.

Wolter struck it with the leather hammer.

It gave one note, without anything under it. The note went on for a long time in the shed, and a chisel on the bench by the lathe sang with it, very thin, and stopped. Wolter put his hand flat on the bronze and held it there until the bell was quiet under his hand. Then he took the tuning fork out of his coat, the one marked D, and struck it on his knee and held it to his ear, and struck the bell again.

"Sharp," he said.

"How sharp?"

"As sharp as I made it." He took the chalk from the ledge of the blackboard and went down on one knee under the bell where it hung from the hoist, and reached up inside its mouth, and made a mark on the inner wall above the sound-bow, and another a hand's breadth higher, where the metal would come off.

When he stood up he gave her back the chalk. Beside her three sentences, at the bottom of the board, he had written a line of his own, in the square capitals he used for the order book: the mix of the cope, loam, sand, hair and dung, in parts. Then the date.

Pius was already bringing the chain.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ā Carolō Boschiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Carl Bosch, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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