Chapter 19: Positional Adjustment

A watch lives in six positions. Dial up, when it lies on a table. Dial down, when it lies face-first on a surface, which it rarely does but the position must be accounted for. Crown up, when it stands on its side in a stand or a pocket. Crown down, when it hangs from a chain, the crown pointing at the floor. Crown left. Crown right. Six orientations, six relationships between the balance wheel and gravity, six opportunities for the watch to gain or lose depending on how the weight of the balance wheel is distributed, how the friction changes on the pivots, how the hairspring behaves when it is horizontal versus vertical, and a well-regulated watch must keep time in all six positions, must be indifferent to gravity, must tell the truth regardless of how it is held.

Henry built a timing stand. He took a block of walnut from the scrap pile — Cal's scrap pile, across the street, which Cal allowed Henry to raid whenever he needed a piece of wood, the way neighbors borrow sugar, the informal economy of proximity — and he cut six notches in the block, six positions, each one angled to hold the watch in a different orientation, and the block sat on the bench like a small altar, the watch moving from notch to notch over the course of the day, spending an hour in each position, the time recorded in a notebook — an actual notebook, paper, Henry's handwriting, not Alistair's backward-leaning script but Henry's upright, slightly cramped hand, the handwriting of a man who had learned to write in Vermont and had not unlearned it.

Day one.

Dial up: +1 second per hour. Good. Dial down: +2 seconds per hour. Acceptable. Crown up: +4 seconds per hour. Too fast. Crown down: -1 second per hour. Good. Crown left: +3 seconds per hour. Slightly fast. Crown right: +2 seconds per hour. Acceptable.

The positional variation was within the range of what could be corrected. The crown-up position was the fastest, which was common — in the crown-up position the balance wheel was vertical and the pivot friction was different and the hairspring hung differently and all of these factors conspired to make the watch run fast, and the correction was a matter of poise — adjusting the balance wheel so that its weight was evenly distributed around the staff, so that no one part of the rim was heavier than any other, so that gravity pulled equally on all points of the wheel regardless of orientation.

Henry examined the balance wheel under the loupe. The wheel had timing screws — small screws set into the rim at regular intervals, eight of them, and their purpose was exactly this, the adjustment of poise, the equalization of weight, and Henry turned two of the screws — a quarter-turn each, inward, adding weight to two points on the rim that needed it — and the adjustment was microscopic, was the addition of perhaps a milligram to each point, an amount that could not be felt or seen but that changed the balance wheel's behavior in the crown-up position enough to bring the rate from +4 to +2.

Day two.

Dial up: +1. Dial down: +1. Crown up: +2. Crown down: -1. Crown left: +2. Crown right: +1.

Better. The positional spread was smaller — the difference between the fastest position and the slowest was now three seconds per hour, which was six seconds less than day one — and Henry adjusted again, another quarter-turn on one screw, and timed again.

Day three.

Dial up: +1. Dial down: +1. Crown up: +1. Crown down: 0. Crown left: +1. Crown right: +1.

The watch was keeping time within one second per hour in all positions except crown down, where it was perfect, dead accurate, and the overall average was about one second per hour fast, which was twenty-four seconds per day, which was slightly more than Henry wanted — he wanted ten seconds per day or less — and he adjusted the regulator by the smallest possible amount, moving it toward the slow end, and timed again.

Day four.

Dial up: 0. Dial down: +1. Crown up: +1. Crown down: -1. Crown left: 0. Crown right: +1.

The average was now about a third of a second per hour fast, which was eight seconds per day, which was within specification for a 120-year-old watch, which was excellent, which was as good as Henry could get it without heroic measures — without replacing the hairspring, without remaking the balance pivots, without the kind of extreme intervention that would be appropriate for a museum piece or a competition watch but that was unnecessary for a watch that would live on a bench in a shop or in a pocket or in a drawer.

Henry wrote the final timing results in the notebook. He closed the notebook. He set it on the bench beside the watch and looked at them — the notebook with its numbers and the watch with its ticking — and the numbers were the translation of the ticking, the mathematical expression of the mechanical truth, and the truth was that the watch worked, kept time, was accurate, was regulated, was what it should be.

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While Henry was timing the Waltham, the shop changed around him.

He did not notice it at first. The changes were small, incremental, the kind of changes that accumulate below the threshold of perception, the way a pallet stone wears, the way a mainspring fatigues, the way time passes — and then one morning Henry looked up from the bench and saw that the shop was different from what it had been when he started the fourteen repairs, and the difference was not in the mechanism — not in the clocks, not in the benches, not in the tools — but in the feeling, in the atmosphere, in the quality of the air and the light and the sound.

The shop was alive. This was the change. The shop had been, when Henry started, a closed place, a dark place, a place of absence and obligation and the smell of a dead man's oil, and now it was alive in the way that a room full of clocks is alive — ticking, chiming, striking, cuckoo-ing, the ten remaining clocks producing a continuous tapestry of sound that was not music and not noise but something in between, something that had rhythm and variation and structure, and the structure was the structure of time itself, of the hours advancing, of the quarters chiming, of the ship's bell counting the watches, of the cuckoo calling from its box.

And there were people. Not many — the shop was not open, was still technically closed, the phone still going to Alistair's voicemail — but people came. They came because word had spread, the way word spreads in a small town, through the informal network of conversations at the co-op and the post office and the coffee shop, the network that is faster than the internet and more reliable, and the word was that Henry Osgood was in the shop and he was repairing clocks and the clocks were ticking and the cuckoo was calling and if you pressed your face to the glass you could see them, the clocks on the shelf and the clocks on the wall, and you could hear them if you stood quietly on the sidewalk.

People stood on the sidewalk. Not often, not in crowds, but occasionally, a person would stop and listen, would tilt their head toward the shop, would hear the ticking through the glass, and Henry would see them from the bench, a face in the window, an ear pressed to the door, and the face would smile or nod or simply look, and then the person would move on, and the shop would be quiet again except for the clocks.

A man came in on a Tuesday. The bell rang and Henry looked up and a man was standing in the doorway, young, in his thirties, holding a wristwatch.

"Are you open?" the man said.

Henry looked at the bench. The Waltham was in its timing stand, in the crown-left position. The notebook was open. The tools were laid out.

"Not officially," Henry said.

"My watch stopped. It's a Tissot. Automatic. It was my wife's. She — we lost her. Last year."

Henry looked at the man. He looked at the wristwatch in the man's hand. He thought about Margaret Corvin and her husband's desk clock. He thought about Sarah Halliday and the anniversary clock. He thought about the clocks of the dead and the living who carried them.

"Leave it with me," Henry said.

He wrote a ticket. A yellow ticket, from the pad in the drawer, the same pad that Alistair had used, the same yellow paper, and Henry wrote the man's name — David Mercer — and the phone number and the address and the description of the watch and the complaint — stopped, automatic, Tissot, wife's — and the date, and the handwriting was Henry's handwriting, upright and slightly cramped, not Alistair's backward-leaning script, but the ticket was the same, the system was the same, the promise was the same.

"I'll call you when it's ready," Henry said.

The man thanked him and left and the bell rang and the shop was quiet and Henry looked at the ticket in his hand — the first ticket he had written, the first promise he had made in his own name, not Alistair's name, not the fulfillment of Alistair's promise but the making of Henry's promise — and the ticket was yellow and the handwriting was his and the promise was his and the shop was his and the craft was his and he set the ticket in the box, in the H section, the first ticket in the section, the first entry in a new alphabet.

Another woman came on Thursday. A clock, a small travel clock, the crystal cracked. Henry wrote a ticket. K section. Karen Loughlin.

A man on Saturday. A pocket watch, a Hamilton, the crown stuck. Henry wrote a ticket. S section. Samuel Carr.

Three tickets in one week. Three new repairs. Three new promises. Henry had not decided to reopen the shop. He had not turned the sign, had not changed the voicemail, had not updated the website, had not announced anything to anyone. The shop had reopened itself, the way a flower opens, not by decision but by condition, by the accumulation of light and warmth and water, by the gathering of the necessary inputs, and the necessary inputs were the ticking of the clocks and the word on the street and the face in the window and the man with his dead wife's wristwatch, and the shop had opened the way it had opened in 1974, by a person standing at a bench and accepting a broken thing and writing a ticket and promising to fix it.

Henry put the three new clocks on the shelf. They sat next to the orphan clocks — the grandmother clock and the carriage clock and the ship's clock — and the shelf was full now, was populated, was the beginning of a new queue, a new list, a new set of promises, and Henry looked at the shelf and thought about Alistair's fourteen unfinished repairs and about the three new repairs that were the first of Henry's unfinished repairs, and he thought that this was how it worked, this was how a shop continued, this was how a craft continued — not by finishing everything and closing the door, not by completing the obligation and walking away, but by finishing some things and starting others, by closing old tickets and opening new ones, by keeping the queue alive, keeping the shelf populated, keeping the promises flowing, the way a mainspring keeps the energy flowing, the way a gear train keeps the motion flowing, the way time keeps the hours flowing.

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On Friday evening Cal came back from Burlington. Henry saw the lights go on in Cal's shop across the street, saw the barn doors open, saw Cal carrying boxes from his truck, and Henry went to the loading dock and stood there and waited and Cal came out with two beers and they sat in the cold and drank.

"How was the show?" Henry said.

"Good. Sold the maple dining table. The eight-footer. The family from Stowe."

"Good."

"Took an order for a cherry credenza. And a walnut bookcase."

"Good."

"How's the watch?"

"Running. Eight seconds a day. Positional adjustment is done."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means the watch keeps time no matter which way you hold it."

"That seems like a reasonable expectation for a watch."

"It's harder than it sounds."

Cal drank his beer. The street was dark. The streetlights cast their orange circles on the pavement. The capitol dome glowed. The shops were closed except for the restaurant on the corner, the town's nightlight.

"I had three people come in this week," Henry said. "With things to repair."

Cal looked at him. "Three."

"A wristwatch. A travel clock. A pocket watch."

"You took them?"

"I wrote tickets."

Cal nodded. He drank his beer. He looked at the shop across the street, at the light in the window, at the clocks visible on the shelf.

"You're open," Cal said.

"I'm not open."

"You're taking repairs."

"Three repairs."

"That's open. Three repairs is open. One repair is open. The moment you write a ticket you're open. The ticket is the opening. The ticket is the door."

Henry looked at the shop. The light from the bench lamp was visible through the window, a warm circle in the dark, and the clocks were visible, a row of shapes on the shelf, and Henry thought about the ticket and the door and the opening, and Cal was right, Cal was always right about the practical things, the things that were not about mechanisms or mainsprings but about the simple facts of being a person who does a thing in a place, and the simple fact was that Henry was a clockmaker in a clock shop and people were bringing him clocks and he was writing tickets and the tickets were promises and the promises were the shop and the shop was open.

"I didn't decide to open," Henry said.

"Nobody decides to open. You just open. It happens. The work comes and you do the work and the doing is the opening."

"That sounds like something my father would say."

"Maybe. He said a lot of things. Mostly to me, apparently."

Henry smiled. His third smile of the season, the rate accelerating, the frequency increasing, a mechanism that was speeding up, a balance wheel that was oscillating faster, and the smile was the smile of a man who was sitting on a loading dock with a friend in the cold, drinking beer, talking about work, and the ordinariness of this was the point, was the thing, was the life, was the daily tick that the escapement produced, not the dramatic chime or the striking of the hour but the ordinary tick, the background, the baseline, the thing that you don't notice until it stops.

"Cal."

"Yeah."

"Thank you. For telling me what he said. About my hands."

"I should have told you sooner."

"Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the timing was right."

"The clockmaker talks about timing."

"The clockmaker always talks about timing."

They finished their beers. Cal went inside. Henry went across the street to the shop. He stood in the doorway and looked at the bench and the clocks and the tools and the watch in its timing stand and the three new tickets in the box and the white cloth on the bench and the gold case on the felt pad and the lamp with the green glass shade and the stool with the shape of his father in its leather padding.

He sat on the stool. He sat in his father's shape. The shape did not fit — had never fit, would never fit, because Henry was not Alistair, was not the same shape, was not the same weight, was not the same man — but the sitting was the thing, the being in the place was the thing, the continuation was the thing, and the stool held him the way the shop held the clocks, the way the case held the movement, the way the barrel held the spring, imperfectly, inadequately, but holding, containing, keeping.

He picked up the Waltham. He held it in his palm. It ticked. It was warm from the lamp, from the bench, from the shop, and the ticking was steady and even and the watch was keeping time and the time was his, was Henry's, was the present tense, was now, and the now was enough, was the tick, was the beat, was the measured release of whatever was stored inside him — grief, love, skill, inheritance, the wound-up energy of a life that had circled back to where it started and found that the starting point was not the same place it had been when he left it, because he was not the same person, because the mechanism had been serviced, because the mainspring had been replaced, because the hairspring had been straightened, because the pallet stone had been reground, because the hands were steadier now, were patient now, were better now.

The watch ticked.

Henry held it to his ear.

He listened.