Chapter 13: The Pallet Stone

Grinding a pallet stone is the kind of work that separates clockmakers from clock repairers, the way composing separates musicians from performers, the way setting a bone separates surgeons from doctors — it is the deep work, the foundational work, the work that requires not just knowledge and skill but an understanding of the principles, the geometry, the physics, the relationship between the angle of the pallet face and the impulse of the escape wheel and the arc of the pendulum, and if you do not understand these relationships you cannot grind a pallet stone, cannot restore the geometry, cannot bring the escapement back to its correct function, and the clock will continue to lose time and the owner will continue to adjust it and the adjustment will continue to be a daily burden.

Henry understood the relationships. Alistair had taught him. Not in the first year, not in the second — in the fourth year, after Henry had cleaned a thousand pivots and oiled a thousand jewels and replaced a hundred mainsprings and a hundred suspension springs and had earned, through the patient accumulation of competence, the right to attempt the deep work. Alistair had sat beside him at the bench and drawn the diagrams — the escape wheel, the pallet fork, the angles, the impulse planes — and the diagrams were precise and clear and Henry had studied them and internalized them and then Alistair had set a worn pallet fork in front of him and said, "Fix it."

Henry had fixed it. Not well — the first attempt was rough, the surface not quite flat, the angle not quite right, the clock running but not accurately — and Alistair had looked at it and said nothing, which was Alistair's way of saying it was not good enough, and Henry had done it again, had ground the stone again, had checked the angle again, and the second attempt was better and the third was better still and by the tenth attempt Henry could grind a pallet stone flat and true and the clock would keep time and Alistair would nod, which was Alistair's way of saying it was good enough.

Now Henry sat at the bench with his mother's clock and a worn pallet stone and the accumulated experience of two years of grinding pallet stones and he began.

The pallet fork was in his hand. It was a small piece of steel, shaped like a ship's anchor — which was why it was called an anchor escapement — with two arms extending from a central arbor, and at the end of each arm was a pallet stone, a small rectangle of hardened steel, set into the arm at a precise angle, and the entry pallet — the one on the left, the one that the escape wheel tooth struck first as it advanced — was concave, was worn, was the source of the problem.

He clamped the pallet fork in the grinding fixture. The fixture was a small brass block with a groove that held the fork at the correct angle, the angle that presented the pallet face to the grinding surface at the precise orientation needed to restore the flat, and Henry set the fixture on the grinding plate — a flat piece of cast iron, lapped to a mirror finish, coated with a thin layer of diamond compound, the abrasive that would remove the steel from the pallet face, a thousandth of an inch at a time, the way water removes stone from a riverbed, slowly, patiently, irresistibly.

He began to grind. The motion was a figure eight — the fixture moving across the plate in a figure eight, the diamond compound cutting the steel, the pallet face losing its concavity, becoming flat, becoming what it had been fifty years ago when it left the factory, and the motion was smooth and even and rhythmic and Henry's hands moved without thinking, the way a pianist's hands move on familiar keys, the muscle memory doing the work while the mind watches from a distance, monitoring, checking, ensuring that the pressure is even, that the angle is correct, that the grinding is proceeding as it should.

He ground for ten minutes. He stopped. He examined the pallet face under the loupe. The concavity was still visible — a shallow bowl in the center of the stone, the low point polished by the diamond compound, the high edges still showing the original surface — and the concavity was smaller, was diminishing, was being erased by the grinding, and Henry resumed, the figure eight, the smooth motion, the diamond compound working.

Twenty minutes. He stopped again. The concavity was nearly gone. The pallet face was almost flat, a thin crescent of the original surface remaining at one edge, the rest ground flat and bright, and Henry could see the boundary between the old surface and the new surface, the line between fifty years of wear and twenty minutes of restoration, and the line was sharp, was clear, was the border between the clock's past and the clock's future.

He ground for five more minutes. The crescent disappeared. The face was flat. He examined it under the loupe — flat, uniform, the diamond compound having removed the exact amount of material needed, no more, and the pallet stone was restored, was what it had been, was ready to engage the escape wheel with the correct angle and the correct impulse and the correct duration.

He reinstalled the pallet fork. He engaged the escapement. He set the pendulum swinging.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

He listened. The two beats were equal. The asymmetry was gone. The tick was the same duration as the tock, the entry beat matching the exit beat, the pendulum swinging symmetrically, and the sound was even, was regular, was the heartbeat of a healthy mechanism, and Henry closed his eyes and listened and the evenness was the sound of rightness, the sound of a thing that has been corrected, the sound of the daily adjustment no longer being necessary.

He timed the clock against his watch. After one hour: no loss. After two hours: no loss. After three hours: one second gained, which was within tolerance, which was the normal variation of a clock of this age and type. The Ansonia was keeping time.

He let it run overnight. In the morning he checked: the clock had gained four seconds in twelve hours, which was eight seconds a day, which was not perfect but was close, was much closer than four minutes an hour, was the difference between a clock that needs daily adjustment and a clock that can be left alone for a week, and Henry adjusted the regulator — a small movement, a nudge toward the slow end — and timed it again and the gain decreased and after another day the clock was accurate to within two seconds per day, which was excellent, which was as good as an Ansonia could be expected to do, which was good enough.

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 11/18. Entry pallet stone reground (worn concave — 50 years of use). Escapement beat restored. Full service — clean, oil, regulate. Timekeeping: +2 sec/day.

He set the clock on the bench. He did not put it on the shelf with the others. He would take it to Elm Street. He would place it on the mantel. He would hear it tick in the kitchen where it had ticked for forty-five years, in the room where he had eaten Sunday dinners, in the house where his father had lived and his mother still lived and the clock was still the clock even though the pallet stone was reground and the oil was new and the only thing that remained of the original was the mechanism itself, the brass and steel and springs that had been assembled in a factory in Ansonia, Connecticut, in the 1890s, a hundred and thirty years ago, when the world was a different world and the clock did not know it.

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He did not take the clock that day. He sat with it. He sat at the bench and the clock ticked beside him and the ticking was even and steady and he thought about the pallet stone, about the fifty years of wear, about the concavity that had formed one escape wheel tooth at a time, one tick at a time, the steel losing material at a rate that was undetectable in any single oscillation but that accumulated over millions of oscillations into a visible, measurable, consequential change.

This was what time did to things. Not dramatic damage, not sudden breakage, not the mainspring snapping or the bell cracking, but the slow accumulation of small effects, the imperceptible wearing that only becomes perceptible in retrospect, when you look back over the years and realize that the thing is not what it was, that the surface is not the surface it was, that the angle is not the angle it was, and the change was so gradual that you never noticed it happening, only that it had happened.

This was what time had done to his mother's clock. And this was what time had done to his parents' marriage, probably — not a dramatic break, not a crisis, not a mainspring snapping, but the slow wearing of the surfaces that touched, the daily contact between two people who were different in ways that mattered, the English clockmaker and the Vermont woman, the man who lived in his shop and the woman who lived in her house, the man whose hands were his identity and the woman whose hands were her own, and the contact had worn them, had changed the angles, had introduced an asymmetry, and the marriage had drifted, had lost time, had required daily adjustment, and Frances had adjusted and adjusted and adjusted until she was tired of adjusting and had brought the clock to the shop and said fix it.

Henry did not know if this was true. He did not know the interior of his parents' marriage the way he knew the interior of a clock. A clock could be opened, examined, diagnosed. A marriage could not. A marriage was a sealed case, a movement you could hear ticking but could not see, and you inferred the mechanism from the sound, from the tick, from the drift, and the inference might be wrong, might be the projection of the son onto the parents, the reading of the child's anxiety into the adults' arrangement, and Henry had done this before — had read his parents' marriage as unhappy when it might have been simply quiet, had interpreted their restraint as distance when it might have been respect, had assumed that the lack of visible affection meant the lack of affection when it might have meant the opposite, might have meant an affection so deep and so private that it could not be displayed without diminishment, the way Alistair's compliment about Henry's hands could not be said to Henry without becoming unseemly.

He did not know.

He knew the clock. The clock had a worn pallet stone and the pallet stone was now reground and the clock kept time and he would take it to Elm Street and put it on the mantel and it would tick and his mother would hear it and the ticking would be even, would be steady, would not require adjustment, and this was what he could do — not fix the marriage, not understand the marriage, not diagnose the marriage, but fix the clock, attend to the clock, grind the pallet stone flat and restore the beat and put the clock back where it belonged.

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On Sunday he took the clock to Elm Street.

He carried it from the car to the front door, wrapped in a towel, the way Michael Corvin had carried his desk clock in the snow, and Frances opened the door and saw the clock in his arms and her face changed — not dramatically, not a collapse or a breakthrough, but a shift, a small movement, the kind of movement that a pallet stone makes when the escape wheel tooth releases it, a slight rocking, a giving way, and she stepped back and Henry came in and went to the living room and unwrapped the clock and set it on the mantel.

It fit. Of course it fit — it had sat there for forty-five years, the lighter rectangle on the paint was its rectangle, its outline, its shadow — and the clock settled into the space the way a key settles into a lock, the way a hand settles into a glove, the way a thing returns to the place it was made for.

Henry wound it. Seven half-turns. The mainspring tightened. The clock began to tick.

The sound filled the room. Not loudly — the Ansonia was not a loud clock, was not a ship's bell or a bracket clock chime, was just a mantel clock with a modest tick — but the sound filled the room the way a familiar sound fills a room, by completing it, by adding the element that had been missing, by restoring the acoustic landscape to what it had been, and Henry could feel the room change, could feel the space rearrange itself around the sound, the furniture and the walls and the air and the light all adjusting to the presence of the clock, the presence that had been absent for six years.

Frances stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She was holding the dish towel she had been using when Henry arrived — she had been drying dishes, had been drying the Sunday dinner dishes, had been doing the thing she always did on Sunday afternoon — and the dish towel was in her hands and she was looking at the clock and the clock was ticking and the lighter rectangle was hidden now, covered by the clock, and the mantel was complete.

"It's even," she said.

"I reground the pallet stone."

"I can hear it. The tick. It's even. It wasn't even before. Before, it limped. Tick-tock, tick-tock, like a person walking with one leg shorter than the other. Now it's even."

"It was worn. Fifty years of the escape wheel teeth sliding across the pallet stone. The stone developed a concavity. The concavity changed the impulse. The clock lost time."

Frances came into the room. She stood at the mantel. She put her hand on the clock, on the top of the case, the way you put your hand on a dog's head, the way you put your hand on a thing you have missed.

"Your father looked at this clock," she said. "Years ago. Before his hands. He looked at it and he said it needed attention and I said what kind of attention and he said the kind he couldn't give it. He said it needed patience. He said he didn't have patience, he had skill, and skill was not the same thing. He said the clock needed someone who would listen to it."

"He said the same thing to Cal. About my hands."

"I know. Cal told me."

Henry looked at his mother. "Cal told you?"

"Cal tells me everything. Cal has been telling me everything for six years. He comes by on Tuesdays. Did you not know that?"

Henry did not know that. He did not know that Cal Woodward, the woodworker from across the street, the man he drank beer with on Thursdays, came to Elm Street on Tuesdays. He did not know this and he should have known this and the not-knowing was a reminder that there were entire regions of his mother's life that he did not map, did not track, did not know about, and the reminder was a form of shame, the mild shame of a son who has assumed that his mother's life was contained within the boundaries he could see — the house, the kitchen, the Sunday dinner — when in fact her life extended beyond those boundaries, included visitors and conversations and confidences that he was not part of.

"He's a good man," Frances said. "Cal. He reminds me of your father in some ways. The hands. The quiet. He sits in the kitchen and drinks coffee and doesn't say much and I don't say much and it's — it's company. It's the company of someone who works with their hands and understands what that means."

Henry nodded. He understood what that meant. He understood it at the bench, in the shop, in the quiet mornings when the only sounds were the ticking of the clocks and the small sounds of his tools, the click of the tweezers, the whisper of the pegwood, the sigh of the oiler, and the understanding was not intellectual but physical, was in the hands, in the fingers, in the small precise movements that converted attention into action, that turned listening into repair.

"The clock sounds good," Frances said.

"It should keep time now. You won't need to adjust it."

"No more adjusting."

"No more adjusting."

Frances looked at the clock. The pendulum was visible through the glass front of the case, swinging left and right, the arc even, the beat steady, and the second hand — the Ansonia had a second hand, a thin wire hand on a subsidiary dial at the six — swept around its dial in a smooth continuous motion, a small circle inside the larger circle of the minute hand, a wheel within a wheel, a time within a time.

"Henry," Frances said.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

The word sat in the room the way the clock sat on the mantel — in its proper place, filling the space that had been empty, completing the thing that had been incomplete. Thank you. Two words. The words a customer says when the repair is done and the clock is returned and the transaction is closed, and Frances was not a customer, was his mother, but the words were the same words and they meant the same thing and they also meant more than the same thing, meant thank you for the repair and thank you for the attention and thank you for listening and thank you for coming back, six years ago, and sitting at the bench and learning the craft and being the hands, and the thank you was a payment, not in dollars but in recognition, in the acknowledgment that the work had been done and the work had been good and the clock was keeping time.

They ate dinner. Pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans. The clock ticked on the mantel. The sound came into the kitchen, through the doorway, over the table, the way it had always come, the background, the accompaniment, the heartbeat of the house, and Frances served the food and Henry ate and the clock ticked and the evening was the kind of evening that is not remarkable while it is happening but that becomes remarkable later, in memory, when you realize that it was the first evening in six years that the clock had ticked on the mantel, the first Sunday dinner since the lighter rectangle had been filled, the first time in a long time that the house sounded right.

Henry drove home. He parked behind the shop. He went inside.

Twelve clocks done. Twelve of the fourteen. Two remaining.

But one of the two was done — the Ansonia was delivered, was on the mantel, was ticking in the house on Elm Street — and the only repair still to be done was the last one.

The one in the velvet pouch.

The one in the drawer.

The one that Alistair had been working on when the stroke came.

Henry stood in the dark shop. The clocks ticked around him, ten voices (two had been returned, one delivered), and the ticking was the sound of the work so far, the sound of twelve promises kept, twelve tickets closed, twelve mechanisms restored, and the sound was good, was full, was the sound of a shop that was doing what it was supposed to do, even though the shop was closed, even though there were no customers, even though the only person in the shop was the son of the man who had opened it.

He went to the bench. He opened the drawer. He looked at the velvet pouch.

Not yet.

He closed the drawer. He climbed the stairs. He went to bed.

Not yet. Soon. But not yet.