Chapter 1: The Fourteen

The shop smelled of brass and oil and time, which is to say it smelled of his father, which is to say it smelled of the particular combination of Nye clock oil and metal filings and the ghost of Darjeeling that had seeped into the pine workbench over fifty years, and Henry stood in the doorway at six forty-five on a Tuesday morning in October and breathed it in because the alternative was to step forward and begin.

The sign above the door said OSGOOD & SON in gold leaf that Alistair had applied himself in 1974, the year he opened the shop, the year Henry was born, as if the two events were the same event, as if a clockmaker and a son were a single gesture toward the future. The ampersand had been repainted twice. The gold leaf had dulled to something closer to honey. The sign did not say which Osgood or which son, and now it was technically accurate in a way it had not been six months ago, because there was only one of each and they were the same person.

Henry stepped inside.

The bell above the door rang — a small brass bell that Alistair had salvaged from a ship's clock in 1983, and its tone was clear and high and it faded slowly the way good bells do, the way they are supposed to, the overtones lingering after the fundamental has gone, and Henry had heard this bell ten thousand times and it had never once sounded like this, which was the sound of a room that did not answer back.

He set his coffee on the counter. The counter was oak, worn smooth where customers had leaned their elbows for half a century, asking about their clocks, and behind it rose the pegboard wall where Alistair had hung the finished repairs in brown paper bags, each one tagged with a yellow ticket. The pegboard was empty now. It had been empty for months. What remained were the unfinished ones.

Fourteen.

Henry knew the number the way you know a number that has been sitting in your chest, not because he had counted recently but because Alistair had counted constantly in his last years, the way a man with shaking hands counts the things his hands cannot do, and the number had become a weight they carried between them, passed back and forth like a pocket watch — here, you hold it, no, you — and now Henry held it alone.

He walked to the back of the shop where the workbenches were. There were two benches, side by side, each with its own lamp and loupe and set of screwdrivers, because when Alistair opened the shop he had built two benches and when Henry asked why, years later, Alistair had said, "Because the sign says 'and Son,'" as if the bench had been waiting for thirty years, patient as a clock that has been wound but not yet started.

On Alistair's bench — the one on the left, closer to the window, where the morning light came in at an angle that Alistair said was better for seeing the teeth of an escape wheel — sat three clocks. A Seth Thomas mantel clock with a cracked bezel. A cuckoo clock from the Black Forest, its bellows collapsed. A French carriage clock in a brass case, tarnished green, that had not run since 1997 according to the date on the yellow ticket.

On Henry's bench — the one on the right, which had been Henry's bench for six years, ever since he came back from New York to find his father's hands trembling over a watch movement like a man trying to thread a needle in an earthquake — sat two clocks. A schoolhouse regulator with a broken suspension spring. A small Swiss desk clock whose owner had died in 2019, according to the obituary Henry had found when he tried to call the number on the ticket.

The remaining nine were on the shelves along the back wall. They sat in a row like patients in a waiting room, and each had its yellow ticket tied to the winding key or tucked inside the case or taped to the glass, and on each ticket was Alistair's handwriting — small, precise, slightly backward-leaning, the handwriting of a man who had learned to write in Somerset and never unlearned it — describing the complaint, the customer's name, the date the clock was brought in.

Henry stood before them.

The oldest ticket was dated March 14, 2003. A grandmother clock — not a grandfather, which is over six feet, but a grandmother, which stands about five — brought in by a woman named Edith Calloway. The complaint, in Alistair's hand: Strikes thirteen at midnight. Customer distressed. Henry did not know Edith Calloway. He did not know if she was alive. He knew the clock, though. He had looked at it with Alistair two years ago, when Alistair's hands could still point even if they could not grip, and Alistair had said the striking train was out of synchronization with the count wheel, which was a problem of alignment, which was a problem of patience, which was — Alistair had said, leaning back in his wheelchair, his hands folded in his lap like sleeping birds — a problem of listening to the clock until it told you where it hurt.

Henry pulled the yellow ticket from the grandmother clock and read it again.

Strikes thirteen at midnight. Customer distressed.

He set it on his bench. Then he went to each of the other thirteen and pulled their tickets and laid them out in a row on the bench, chronologically, left to right, a timeline of unfinished work.

March 14, 2003. Edith Calloway. Grandmother clock. Strikes thirteen at midnight. June 2, 2005. Robert Payne. Mantel clock, Seth Thomas. Cracked bezel, movement sluggish. September 19, 2006. No name — just initials, D.K. Carriage clock, French. Not running. Customer says last ran 1997. April 8, 2008. The Weatherbee Estate. Schoolhouse regulator. Broken suspension spring. Handle with care — sentimental. November 30, 2010. Agnes Firth. Cuckoo clock, Black Forest. Bellows collapsed. Bird does not emerge. February 14, 2012. Martin Leveque. Desk clock, Swiss. Gains four minutes a day. August 3, 2013. Polly Arsenault. Wall clock, American. Pendulum swings but hands don't move. January 17, 2014. Thomas Wren. Pocket watch, Elgin. Crystal cracked. Crown does not engage. May 22, 2015. Sarah Halliday. Anniversary clock, German. Torsion spring broken. Glass dome chipped. October 9, 2016. James Okonkwo. Bracket clock, English. Quarter-hour chime out of tune. March 1, 2017. Ruth Ainsley. Travel alarm, Jaeger. Alarm does not sound. December 20, 2018. Michael Corvin. Desk clock, Swiss. Stopped. Owner deceased, per M. Corvin (wife). July 7, 2019. No name. Ship's clock, Chelsea. Striking mechanism jammed. Bell cracked. April 2, 2020. Frances Osgood. Mantel clock, Ansonia. Not keeping time. Please fix when you can.

Henry read the last ticket three times. The handwriting was his father's. The customer was his mother. The date was three weeks after lockdown began, when no one was going anywhere, when Alistair was still standing at this bench, when Frances had brought her clock in — the one from the living room mantel on Elm Street, the one that had ticked through Henry's childhood — and Alistair had written a ticket for it as if she were any customer, as if a wife of fifty-two years needed a yellow ticket, and Henry thought: or maybe that was the tenderness of it, the formality, the treating of her concern as legitimate, documented, queued.

Not keeping time. Please fix when you can.

He left the tickets on the bench. He turned on the lamp — the old articulated lamp with the green glass shade that Alistair had bought at an estate sale in 1979 — and it cast a warm circle on the wood, on the tools, on the first ticket, on the words Strikes thirteen at midnight, and Henry sat down.

The stool was Alistair's. Henry had been sitting at the other bench, the son's bench, for six years, but today he sat at the father's bench because the father's bench was where the work was, and the stool held the shape of a man who was no longer there, a slight depression in the leather padding that Henry's weight did not fill in the same way, and he felt this, the not-fitting, the sitting in a space shaped for someone else, and he thought that this was perhaps what inheritance was: sitting where someone else sat and feeling the gap.

He pulled the grandmother clock toward him.

It was walnut, darkened with age, the case carved with a restrained flourish around the dial — acanthus leaves, he thought, or perhaps oak leaves, the kind of carving that a good cabinetmaker does to show he could do more but chose not to. The dial was porcelain, the numerals Roman, the hands steel with a blued finish that had faded unevenly. The clock stood thirty-eight inches tall. It was heavy in the way that old things are heavy, not just with material but with the accumulated weight of every mantel it had ever sat on, every room it had ticked through, every midnight it had struck, correctly or otherwise.

Henry opened the back of the case.

The movement was visible now — the brass plates, the wheels, the pillars that held the plates apart, the arbors on which the wheels turned, and there, in the center, the escapement. A recoil escapement, anchor type, the pallet fork sitting astride the escape wheel like a rider on a horse, and Henry could see immediately that the escape wheel was slightly bent — not much, a fraction of a degree, but in horology a fraction of a degree is the difference between twelve strikes and thirteen, between time kept and time lost, between a clock that tells the truth and a clock that lies.

He reached for the loupe.

It was a 10x Bausch & Lomb, the same one Alistair had used for forty years, the brass housing worn smooth where Alistair's eye socket had pressed against it ten thousand times, and when Henry raised it to his own eye he felt the warmth of the metal — not Alistair's warmth, not anymore, just the ambient warmth of the shop, but he felt it — and through the loupe the movement became a landscape, the wheels became fields, the pivots became towers, and the bent escape wheel became obvious, a hill where there should have been a plain.

He would need to remove the movement from the case. He would need to disassemble the striking train. He would need to straighten the escape wheel or replace it, and he suspected replacement because a wheel that has been bent for twenty years has been bent past memory, the metal has forgotten what straight was, and sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a mechanism that has forgotten its shape is to give it a new one.

He set down the loupe.

Through the front window he could see Main Street. Montpelier in October, the maples on fire, the capitol dome catching the early sun, the street still quiet at seven in the morning. Marion's bookshop — Thibault Books — was dark, the CLOSED sign in the window. Marion opened at ten. She had opened at ten for thirty years, and at three o'clock every afternoon she walked through the connecting door between the two shops — a door that Alistair and Marion had cut through the shared wall in 1996, without permits, a fact they were both proud of — and she brought two cups of tea and they sat at the bench and talked about nothing in particular, and now Alistair was dead and Marion still came at three and she still brought two cups and she set the second one on Alistair's bench and it sat there until it was cold and then she took it away.

Henry had not asked her to stop. He did not know how to ask her to stop. He did not know if he wanted her to stop.

He turned back to the clock.

The first step was to remove the hands. He reached for the hand puller — a small tool like a miniature crowbar, padded at the tips to avoid scratching the dial — and he eased the minute hand off its friction-fit post, then the hour hand, and set them on a square of felt. Then the dial, held by four small screws at the corners, which he removed with the 1.2mm screwdriver from the set of twelve that lived in a leather roll on the bench. The screws were brass, original, and they turned easily despite twenty years of neglect, which meant Alistair had oiled them at some point, had turned each one a quarter-turn and back to keep them free, and Henry knew this because this was what Alistair did — he maintained things, he tended them, he kept the screws turning even on clocks he had not yet repaired, the way a doctor might check a patient's vitals while they waited for surgery.

The dial came off. Behind it the movement was fully exposed, the two trains visible: the timekeeping train on the left, the striking train on the right, and between them the count wheel, the flat disc with notches cut around its circumference that determined how many times the hammer fell on the bell for each hour. The count wheel was the clock's memory. It knew what hour it was because of where it had stopped, and if it stopped in the wrong place, or if the mechanism that advanced it slipped, then the clock would remember wrong, would strike nine at noon, would strike thirteen at midnight, would announce hours that did not exist.

Henry looked at the count wheel.

He could see it. The lifting piece — the small lever that engaged with the count wheel's notches — was worn. The tip was rounded where it should have been sharp, and when it fell into the notch for twelve it was sliding past, catching the edge of the next notch, falling into the space that would be thirteen if thirteen existed, and the clock, obedient to its mechanism, struck the hour it was told to strike regardless of whether that hour was real.

Customer distressed.

Of course she was distressed. A clock that strikes thirteen is a clock that has lost count of time, and time is the thing we agree on, the shared fiction that lets us meet for dinner at six, that lets us say goodnight at ten, that lets us believe the day has a structure, and when a clock in your living room announces an hour that does not exist, it is a small crack in the agreement, a suggestion that the structure is not as solid as you thought.

Henry made a note on the ticket: Lifting piece worn. Slipping past 12th notch. Replace lifting piece. Check count wheel for wear. Straighten or replace escape wheel.

Then he set the ticket down and sat for a moment.

Fourteen clocks. He had no customers waiting. The shop was technically closed — had been closed since Alistair's death, though Henry had not put up a sign, had just stopped answering the phone, had let the Google listing go stale, and eventually people stopped coming, the way water finds its way around a stone. He had no reason to repair these clocks except that they were here and they were broken and his father had written tickets for them and the tickets were promises, and Henry did not know many things about himself but he knew this: a promise written on a yellow ticket in a dead man's handwriting is not a promise you can throw away.

He would start with the grandmother clock. The clock that struck thirteen. He would fix the lifting piece and straighten the escape wheel and clean the pivots and oil the train and put it back together and it would strike twelve at midnight and no more, and then he would try to find Edith Calloway and give her back her clock and her clock would keep time again and she would not be distressed.

And then the next one. And the next. All fourteen, in order, oldest to newest, the way you read a book, the way you live a life, the way time moves — forward, always forward, one tick at a time, regulated by the escapement, measured by the count wheel, announced by the striking train.

Henry picked up his screwdriver and began.

---

The movement came out of the case in one piece, held together by the four pillars that connected the front plate to the back plate, and Henry set it on the movement holder — a small wooden cradle, shaped like a V, that Alistair had made on the lathe in 1988 — and it sat there, exposed, the way a body sits on an operating table, all its organs visible, all its secrets laid out.

He could see the full train now. The mainspring barrel, coiled tight with potential energy. The center wheel, the third wheel, the fourth wheel, each one smaller than the last, each one spinning faster, the energy cascading through the gear ratios the way water cascades through locks in a canal — controlled, measured, stepped down from the brute force of the mainspring to the delicate oscillation of the pendulum. And at the end of the train, the escape wheel, the last wheel, the one that interfaced with the escapement, the one that released the energy one tooth at a time, tick by tick, second by second, the one that made time out of force.

The escape wheel was definitely bent. Henry could see it without the loupe now, a slight wobble as he turned it with his finger, a deviation from true that was small in absolute terms — maybe two-tenths of a millimeter — but catastrophic in relative terms, because the clearance between the escape wheel teeth and the pallet stones was measured in hundredths of a millimeter, and two-tenths might as well have been two feet.

He would need a new escape wheel. He knew this and he did not want to know this because ordering a new escape wheel for a grandmother clock from the early twentieth century meant calling Merritt's in Maine or Timesavers in Arizona and describing the wheel and waiting for them to find a match or fabricate one, and this could take weeks, and Henry did not want weeks, he wanted to begin and finish, he wanted the satisfaction of the first clock done, the first ticket resolved, the first promise kept.

But you cannot rush a clock. This was the first thing Alistair had taught him, sitting at this bench, Henry's hands under Alistair's hands, Alistair guiding the tweezers to the pivot, saying: "The clock does not care about your schedule. The clock cares about its own time. You are not in charge. The mechanism is in charge. You are the servant of the mechanism."

Henry had hated this. He had been forty-six years old, a man who had managed accounts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, a man who had lived in Manhattan and worn suits that cost more than this shop's monthly rent, and his father was telling him he was the servant of a brass wheel the size of a dime. But Alistair was right. Alistair was always right about clocks, if not always about sons.

Henry picked up the phone and called Merritt's.

"Merritt's Clock Supply, this is Dale."

"Dale, it's Henry Osgood, up in Montpelier."

"Henry. I was sorry to hear about your father."

"Thank you."

"He was a good man. Bought from us for forty years. Never argued about price, which is more than I can say for most."

"I need an escape wheel," Henry said. "For a grandmother clock, American, early twentieth century. I think it's a Herschede but the maker's mark is worn. Thirty teeth, about an inch and a quarter diameter, steel. Anchor escapement."

"Thirty teeth on a grandmother?"

"It's a fine movement. Better than most."

"I'll look. Give me a few days."

"Take your time," Henry said, and he meant it and he did not mean it, the way you say take your time when you want to say hurry.

He hung up and sat at the bench and looked at the disassembled movement and thought about what he could do while he waited. The lifting piece, for one. He could fabricate a new lifting piece on the lathe. The count wheel was fine — the notches were clean, the spacing correct, the problem was all in the lifting piece, the part that did the reading, not the part that held the information. It was a problem of interpretation, not of truth. The clock knew what time it was. It just couldn't say it properly.

Henry clamped a piece of steel rod in the lathe and began to turn it. The lathe was a Sherline, small and precise, the kind of lathe that clockmakers use, not the kind that machinists use, and it sang as the metal turned, a high thin sound that Henry had always loved, the sound of material becoming shape, of potential becoming actual, of a rod becoming a lever that would fall into a notch and tell a clock what hour to announce.

He worked for two hours. The lifting piece took shape under his hands — the taper at the tip, the curve at the shoulder, the flat where it would sit against the lifting pin — and when it was done he held it up to the light and turned it and it was right, it was the correct shape, it was the shape that Alistair would have made, and he knew this because Alistair had taught him how to read the old part and make the new part from the reading, the way a scribe copies a manuscript, preserving the text while replacing the page.

He set the lifting piece down and cleaned his hands with a rag and stood up and his back ached from two hours of hunching and he walked to the front window and looked out at Main Street.

The street was alive now. Cars parked along the curb. People walking. The co-op across the street with its doors open, the smell of coffee reaching even here. Cal's woodshop — Woodward Fine Woodworking — was open, the big barn doors pushed back, and Henry could see Cal inside, moving between his machines, a man in sawdust the way Henry was a man in brass filings, each of them engaged in the ancient human project of making broken things whole or making raw things finished, and Henry raised his hand and Cal raised his hand and this was enough, this was the greeting, this was the daily acknowledgment that they were both here, both working, both alive.

Marion's shop was open now too. He could see her through the glass, shelving books, moving with the deliberate grace of a woman who had spent thirty years handling objects that mattered. She was seventy-two. She had been Alistair's friend for thirty years, since she opened the bookshop next door in 1996, and their friendship had been built on proximity and tea and the shared understanding that a shop is not just a business but a practice, a daily discipline, a way of being in the world.

Henry checked his watch. It was nine-fifteen. He had five hours and forty-five minutes until Marion came through the connecting door with two cups of tea.

He went back to the bench.

The remaining work on the grandmother clock would have to wait for the escape wheel, but there was cleaning to do — the pivots needed polishing with pegwood, the pivot holes needed clearing of old oil, the plates needed wiping, the springs needed inspecting — and this was the work that Henry could do, the preparation, the groundwork, the making-ready, and he was good at this, he had always been good at this, the patient preliminary work that makes the final assembly possible, and he thought that perhaps this was what the last six years had been — the preparation, the groundwork, the making-ready for something he had not yet understood.

He picked up a stick of pegwood — a thin rod of hard wood, sharpened to a point — and began cleaning the first pivot hole. The pegwood went in, turned, came out black with old oil and grime, and he wiped it on the rag and sharpened it again and went back in, and the hole came clean, the brass gleaming, the pivot turning freely in the jewel, and this was satisfaction, this was the small good thing, the making of one part right so that all the parts could work together, and he moved to the next hole, and the next, and the morning passed.

At noon he ate a sandwich at the bench. He had brought it from home — from the apartment above the shop, the apartment where he had lived for six years, the apartment where Alistair had lived before the stroke when he moved back to the house on Elm Street because there were too many stairs — and the sandwich was turkey and swiss on rye and he ate it without tasting it because his mind was in the clock, was in the pivots, was in the count wheel and the lifting piece and the escape wheel that was somewhere in Maine being looked for by a man named Dale.

At one o'clock the bell rang and Henry looked up and a woman was standing in the doorway. She was in her fifties, carrying a clock, a small brass carriage clock, and she looked at Henry and said, "Are you open?"

Henry looked at the fourteen tickets spread across his bench. He looked at the grandmother clock disassembled on its cradle. He looked at the woman and her clock and he said, "No. I'm sorry. Not right now."

The woman nodded and left and the bell rang again and the shop was quiet.

Henry had not said when. He had not said come back in a week, come back in a month, come back when the fourteen are done. He had just said not right now, which was both honest and incomplete, which was how he said most things.

At three o'clock the connecting door opened and Marion came through carrying two cups of tea. She was small, white-haired, dressed in a blue cardigan and gray slacks, and she moved through the shop with the familiarity of a woman who had made this walk a thousand times. She set one cup on Henry's bench and one cup on Alistair's bench and she sat in the chair by the window — the chair where customers used to sit, the chair with the needlepoint cushion that Frances had made in 1990 — and she sipped her tea.

"You've started," she said.

"The grandmother clock," Henry said.

"Edith Calloway's?"

"You know her?"

"Knew her. She moved to Brattleboro in 2008. Then to a home in Rutland. I don't know if she's still alive."

Henry looked at the ticket. 2003. Twenty-three years ago. Edith Calloway had brought her clock to Alistair twenty-three years ago and Alistair had written a ticket and the clock had sat on the shelf for twenty-three years and Edith Calloway had moved away and possibly died and the clock still struck thirteen at midnight, would strike thirteen at midnight tonight if Henry wound it, would strike thirteen tomorrow and the next day and the next, and it did not know that its owner had gone, it did not care, it was a clock, it kept its own broken time regardless.

"I made a new lifting piece," Henry said.

"Good," Marion said.

She did not ask what a lifting piece was. She had spent thirty years next to a clock shop and she had learned the vocabulary the way you learn the vocabulary of a neighboring country — not fluently, but enough to nod at the right moments, enough to know that a lifting piece was a part and that making a new one was progress.

They sat in silence. Marion drank her tea. The cup on Alistair's bench steamed, then stopped steaming, then sat there, cooling.

"He would have liked this," Marion said. "You, doing the fourteen. He talked about them."

"I know."

"He felt badly. That they sat so long."

"I know."

"He said the hardest part was not the repair. It was the ticket. Writing the ticket meant promising. And he couldn't keep the promise. Not with his hands."

Henry looked at his hands. They were steady. They were his mother's hands, long-fingered, narrow, the hands of a pianist or a pickpocket, not the thick square hands that Alistair had had before the tremor, and he had always been aware of this difference, the way a son is always aware of the ways he is not his father, and for years he had thought it meant he was not suited for this work, that the work required Alistair's hands, and then Alistair's hands had failed and Henry's hands had become the only hands and they had turned out to be fine, more than fine, better in some ways — steadier, more precise, more patient — and Henry did not know what to do with this, the knowledge that his hands were better than his father's hands had been, the knowledge that the son's body had surpassed the father's body, because this was supposed to be a triumph but it felt like a theft.

"Thank you for the tea," Henry said.

Marion took her cup and Alistair's cup and went back through the connecting door. The door closed softly. Henry heard her moving in the bookshop, the shuffle of books, the creak of the old floor, and then the sounds blended with the sounds of his own shop — the tick of the wall clock, the hum of the lathe motor on standby, the occasional car on Main Street — and the afternoon continued.

He worked until six. He cleaned all the pivot holes. He polished the plates. He inspected the mainspring and found it sound — coiled tight in its barrel, the metal springy and true, no signs of fatigue or setting, and he thought that a mainspring that had been wound tight for twenty-three years and was still good was a remarkable thing, a testament to the steel and to the maker and to the fundamental stubbornness of stored energy, which does not dissipate just because no one is using it, which waits, which holds, which is ready.

He turned off the lamp. He stood up. He looked at the grandmother clock, disassembled on its cradle, waiting for a new escape wheel and for Henry's hands and for the moment when it would tick again and strike twelve at midnight and no more.

He locked the front door. He climbed the stairs to the apartment. He ate dinner alone. He went to bed.

In the dark, he thought about the lifting piece. About the way it had felt to make it — the lathe singing, the metal turning, the shape emerging from the rod the way a word emerges from silence, not created but revealed, and he thought that this was what Alistair had meant when he said the clockmaker does not invent the mechanism, the clockmaker discovers the mechanism, the mechanism was always there, waiting in the metal, and the clockmaker's job is to remove everything that is not the mechanism, the way a sculptor removes everything that is not the statue.

He did not think about his father. He thought about the lifting piece.

This was, he understood, the same thing.