The Asked Question

In the foundry village of Ketter, the old founder had cast the valley's bells for forty years. On the morning of the great pour, the whole valley stood behind the rope to watch.

His apprentice, Oren, knelt by the mold and saw a dark stain along the seam. It looked like damp from the night's rain.

"Is it dry, Master?" he asked.

The founder did not look. He had not slept, and the crowd was waiting. "It is dry," he said, pleasantly, the way a man says the sun is up.

Oren waited for something more. Nothing came.

He had asked. He felt the asking settle in him like a coin paid, as though the matter were now settled between them. But the doubt had not gone anywhere. It had only moved. Before, it had lived in the space between the two of them. Now it lived in Oren's chest, and it was heavier there, because it was his alone.

To ask a second time would be to call the master a liar in front of the valley. It would be to say that forty years of bells counted for less than one stain.

So Oren took up the ladle.

The bronze went in. The damp met it. The mold spoke once, a sound like a great door slammed in a far room, and the morning went white.

Three men were burned. None of them died.

Later, the elders asked each of them what had been said. Oren said, "I asked." The founder said, "I told him it was dry." Both were true, and neither helped.

The broken mold stood in the yard all that winter, the stain still dark along its seam.

Oren became a founder himself. Before every pour, he put his hand to the seam before he spoke a word. He never again asked a question he was willing to have answered with a yes.