Chapter 10: The Desk Clock

The desk clock had belonged to a dead man, and the dead man's wife had brought it to a dead man, and now a living man was holding it in his hands, turning it over, looking at it in the lamplight, and the living man was Henry and the dead men were Michael Corvin and Alistair Osgood and the wife was M. Corvin, first name unknown, a letter on a ticket, a single initial the way D.K. was two initials, and Henry wondered if there was a pattern here, a tendency among grieving people to abbreviate themselves, to shrink their names to letters, to become smaller, to take up less space, as if the death of the person they loved had removed the justification for their own full name and they were now operating on a reduced alphabet, a smaller set of characters, the minimum required to be identified.

Stopped. Owner deceased, per M. Corvin (wife).

The clock had stopped. The owner was deceased. Alistair had written these two facts on the ticket as if they were parallel, as if the stopping of the clock and the death of the owner were two versions of the same event, and maybe they were, maybe they were connected, maybe the clock had stopped because the owner died, which was superstition, which was magical thinking, which was the kind of thing that Alistair would not have believed because Alistair believed in mechanisms and not in magic, but which Henry found himself believing or wanting to believe, because the alternative — that the clock had stopped by coincidence, that the mechanism had failed at the same time the man had failed, that the two events were unrelated, unconnected, two things happening at the same time in the same universe without reference to each other — seemed worse, seemed colder, seemed like a universe in which nothing was connected to anything and a man's death was no more significant than a spring breaking.

Henry opened the clock. It was a Swiss desk clock, similar to the one he had repaired for Martin Leveque but different — this one was older, heavier, with a more substantial movement, a movement with a striking train, a movement that chimed the hours on a small coiled gong, and the stopping had been caused by the mainspring, which was broken. Not fatigued, not set, but broken — snapped, the steel fractured at a point about two-thirds of the way from the center, the coils on one side still wound tight in the barrel and the coils on the other side loose, limp, the tension gone, the energy released in a single instant, not measured out tick by tick through the escapement but released all at once, violently, the way a mainspring releases when it breaks — a sudden unwinding, a violent spin of the barrel, and then nothing, silence, the mechanism dead.

A broken mainspring is not common. Mainsprings are designed to last decades, are made from specialized steel alloys that resist fatigue, that hold their tension, that coil and uncoil millions of times without breaking, and when a mainspring does break it is usually because of a flaw in the metal, a microscopic crack that propagates over time, a weakness that was there from the beginning, present in the steel at the moment of manufacture, invisible, undetectable, waiting for the day when the accumulated stress would exceed the remaining strength and the spring would give way.

Henry removed the broken mainspring from the barrel. It came out in two pieces, the coils springing loose, the steel uncurling like a snake uncoiling, and he set the pieces on the bench and looked at them. The fracture surface was clean, crystalline, the kind of fracture that metallurgists call a fatigue fracture, the kind that begins as a tiny crack and grows with each cycle of stress, each winding and unwinding, each coiling and uncoiling, until the crack reaches a critical length and the remaining cross-section of the spring cannot support the load and the spring fails, suddenly, completely, without warning.

Without warning. Michael Corvin had died — of what? Henry did not know. The ticket did not say. The ticket said stopped and owner deceased and nothing else, and Henry did not know if the death was sudden or slow, if the man had been sick or well, if the stopping of the clock had coincided with the moment of death or with some other moment, the moment of diagnosis or the moment of collapse or the moment when M. Corvin — Margaret? Mary? Martha? — had picked up the clock from the desk and carried it to the shop and set it on the counter and said, in whatever voice she had, in whatever state she was in, my husband is dead and his clock has stopped and I need one of these things to be fixable.

Henry ordered a mainspring from Timesavers in Arizona. This one he could not find in Alistair's stock — the barrel was an unusual size, the spring an unusual width — and he placed the order and waited, the way he had waited for the escape wheel, the way he had waited for the bellows, the waiting that was part of the work, the patience that was part of the craft, the recognition that some things take time and that the time is not wasted, is not lost, is part of the repair, the way the rests in a piece of music are part of the music.

While he waited, he cleaned the movement. He disassembled it — forty-eight parts — and cleaned each one in the ultrasonic tank and inspected each one under the loupe and found them all sound, all in good condition, the wheels true, the pivots bright, the jewels clean, the striking train intact, the gong uncorroded, and the movement was, in every respect except the mainspring, a working mechanism, a healthy machine, a clock that wanted to run and could not because the one thing that provided the energy — the one spring, the one coil of steel — was broken.

He thought about this. A mechanism in perfect condition, every part functional, every wheel true, every pivot polished, and the one thing that was broken was the source of energy. The mainspring. The drive. The force that moved everything else. Without it, the clock was a sculpture, a collection of beautifully made parts arranged in the correct configuration but doing nothing, going nowhere, keeping no time, and the only thing needed to transform it from a sculpture into a clock was a single coil of spring steel, a spiral of stored energy, a wound-up thing.

The mainspring arrived three days later. It was the correct size, the correct width, the correct thickness, and Henry coiled it into the barrel using the mainspring winder — a tool that looked like a pepper grinder, a cylindrical handle with a slotted post that gripped the inner end of the spring and wound it into a tight coil that could be inserted into the barrel — and the winding was physical work, the spring resisting, the steel pushing back, the energy being stored as Henry turned the handle, his hands doing the work of compression, converting his muscle into potential energy, converting food into spring tension, converting life into mechanism, and the spring went in, and the barrel closed, and the energy was stored.

He reassembled the movement. He oiled the pivots. He installed the barrel. He attached the click spring that prevented the mainspring from unwinding backward. He wound the clock — twelve half-turns — and the mechanism began, the wheels turning, the escapement ticking, the gong waiting for the hour, and the clock ran.

He let it run for a day. He timed it. Accurate to within two seconds per day. He let it run for another day. Still accurate. He triggered the striking train and the hammer fell on the gong and the gong rang, a clear sustained tone, and the clock struck twelve, twelve tones, the sound of noon or midnight, the sound of the day's meridian, and the sound was good, was clean, was the sound of a mechanism that had been silent for eight years speaking again.

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 11/10. New mainspring (Timesavers, AZ). Full service — disassemble, clean, oil, reassemble. Striking train tested — gong sounds correctly. Timekeeping: +2 sec/day.

Then: Owner: Michael Corvin (deceased). Left by M. Corvin (wife). No current contact.

He set the clock on the shelf. Ten finished. Four to go.

---

She came on a Thursday.

Henry was at the bench, working on the ship's clock — the next repair, the next clock in the chronological order — and the bell rang and a woman was in the doorway. She was in her sixties, tall, thin, wearing a gray coat, her hair pulled back, her face the kind of face that had once been very beautiful and was now something else, something that was not less than beautiful but was different from it, the way a clock that has been running for decades is different from a clock that is new, the mechanism the same but the surfaces changed, the edges softened, the shine tempered.

"I'm looking for the clock shop," she said.

"You've found it."

"Osgood and Son."

"Yes."

She stepped inside. She looked around. Her eyes moved over the counter, the pegboard, the benches, the shelf of clocks, the wall where the schoolhouse regulator and the cuckoo clock hung, and Henry watched her look and saw that she was not searching the way Payne and Okonkwo had searched — she was inventorying, was cataloging, was taking in the whole shop the way a person takes in a room they have entered for the first time but have imagined many times.

"I'm Margaret Corvin," she said.

Henry set down his tools. "Mrs. Corvin."

"You have my husband's clock."

"I do. I've repaired it."

"I know. I called last week. The number on your website. There was no answer, but the voicemail said the name and I knew it was the right place."

Henry had forgotten about the voicemail. Alistair's voice was still on the voicemail — You've reached Osgood and Son, clock repair, Main Street, Montpelier. Leave a message and I'll ring you back — and Henry had not changed it, had not recorded a new greeting, had left Alistair's voice on the machine the way Marion left the second cup on the bench, a form of preservation, a refusal to overwrite.

"You heard my father's voice," Henry said.

"I did. He sounded English."

"He was. Somerset."

"My husband brought me here once. In 2018. December. It was snowing. Michael's clock had stopped and he — Michael was already sick, he'd been diagnosed in October, and he wanted the clock fixed before — he didn't say before what. He just said he wanted it fixed. He said a man should have a working clock. He was like that. He believed in — in things working. In order. He was an engineer."

"The clock was stopped," Henry said. "The mainspring was broken."

"He brought it here and your father took it and wrote a ticket and Michael paid — I don't remember how much — and your father said it would take a few weeks and Michael said that was fine, he had time. He said that. He had time. And then he died. In March. Three months."

Henry went to the shelf. He took down the desk clock. He brought it to the counter and set it down and the clock sat there, ticking, the gong waiting, the hands moving, the mechanism running on the new mainspring, the new energy, the new coil of steel that replaced the broken coil, and Margaret Corvin looked at it.

"It's ticking," she said.

"Yes."

"It wasn't ticking when he brought it in. It was silent. He carried it in his hands, in the snow, and it was silent, and now it's ticking."

She reached out and touched the case. Her fingertips on the wood, the lightest touch, the way you touch a sleeping child, the way you touch a thing that might be dreaming.

"I didn't come back," she said. "After Michael died. I didn't come back for the clock. I couldn't. The clock was — it was his. It sat on his desk at home, in his study, and when he wound it every week I could hear the winding from the kitchen, the click-click-click of the ratchet, and when he died I could still hear it, the clicking, even though the clock was here and not on the desk and not being wound, I could hear it, and I couldn't come here and pick it up because picking it up would mean taking it home and putting it on the desk and winding it and hearing the clicking for real instead of in my memory and I didn't know which would be worse, the real clicking or the remembered clicking, and so I stayed away. For eight years. I stayed away."

Henry stood behind the counter. The clock ticked between them. The shop was quiet except for the ticking — ten clocks now, ten voices — and the quiet was the kind of quiet that exists between two people who are sharing a moment that neither of them asked for, a moment that was created by the intersection of their separate griefs, his father and her husband, two dead men, two stopped clocks, and the moment was here and they were in it and the clocks ticked.

"You changed the mainspring," Margaret said.

"It was broken."

"But the rest is the same? The mechanism? The gears? The — everything else?"

"Everything else is the same. I cleaned it and oiled it, but it's the same movement, the same parts. Just a new mainspring."

"So it's running on new energy."

"Yes."

"But with the same mechanism. The same — the same insides."

"Yes."

Margaret looked at the clock. She looked at Henry.

"That's enough," she said. "That's — that's actually enough. The same mechanism. New energy. That's enough."

She picked up the clock. She did not hold it against her chest the way Payne had, the way Okonkwo had. She held it at arm's length, in front of her, the dial facing her, the hands showing eleven-twenty, and she looked at it the way you look at a face you haven't seen in a long time, a face that is the same and not the same, a face that has been preserved in memory and is now real again and the reality is both more and less than the memory, more because it is real, less because it is real, and the realness is the thing, is the fact, is the click-click-click of the ratchet.

"How much do I owe?" she said.

"Your husband paid when he brought it in."

"Eight years ago."

"The ticket says paid."

This was a lie. The ticket said nothing about payment. Henry did not know if Corvin had paid or not. But Margaret Corvin was standing in the shop holding her dead husband's clock and her eyes were the color of lake water and her hands were trembling slightly, not the tremor of Alistair's hands, not the tremor of disease, but the tremor of a feeling that is too large for the body that contains it, the way a mainspring that is too strong for the barrel will distort the barrel, will push against the walls, will make the barrel shake, and Henry said the ticket said paid because it was the right thing to say and because Alistair would have said it, because Alistair would not have charged a widow for a clock that had sat on his shelf for eight years, because Alistair understood that some transactions are not financial, that some debts are paid in the currency of showing up, of finally coming back, of walking through the door.

"Thank you," Margaret said.

"You're welcome."

She left. The bell rang. Henry stood behind the counter. He picked up the ticket for Michael Corvin's desk clock and wrote: Collected by M. Corvin (Margaret), 11/12. No charge.

He set the ticket in the box with the other completed tickets — the tickets for the grandmother clock and the carriage clock and the Seth Thomas and the schoolhouse regulator and the cuckoo clock and the wall clock and the desk clock and the Elgin and the anniversary clock and the bracket clock and the travel alarm — eleven tickets, eleven completed repairs, eleven promises kept, and the box was filling the way the shop was filling, with the evidence of work done, of obligations met, of the slow steady progress of a man working through his father's failures, which were not failures at all but deferred promises, promises that had been waiting for the right hands, the steady hands, the hands that could do what the shaking hands could not.

Three to go. The ship's clock. His mother's Ansonia. The last one.

Henry went back to the bench. He picked up his tools. He began.