Chapter 2: The Seth Thomas

The escape wheel arrived from Maine on a Thursday, which was the day Henry drank beer with Cal Woodward, which meant that Henry spent the morning installing the wheel in the grandmother clock and the evening sitting on Cal's loading dock with two bottles of Long Trail and the particular silence that exists between men who work with their hands and do not need to narrate the fact.

The escape wheel was correct. Dale at Merritt's had found a match in his inventory — new old stock, he said, from a batch made in the 1940s, still wrapped in waxed paper, still bright, the teeth sharp and evenly spaced — and when Henry set it on the arbor and checked the mesh with the pallet stones he could see that it was true, that it ran without wobble, that each tooth engaged and released the pallet fork with the clean snap that clockmakers call the beat, the heartbeat, the clock's pulse.

He assembled the striking train. The new lifting piece dropped into the count wheel notches cleanly, finding the edge of each slot without sliding past, and when Henry wound the striking spring and triggered the mechanism, the hammer fell twelve times and stopped. Not thirteen. Twelve. The clock had lost its extra hour. The hour that did not exist was gone, and the clock was back to counting the hours that did, which were enough, which were all any of us get.

He oiled the pivots with Nye clock oil, one drop per pivot, applied with the oiler — a thin wire with a cup at the end, like a mosquito's proboscis, designed to deliver exactly the right amount of oil to exactly the right place, because too much oil is as bad as too little, too much oil migrates across the plate and gums the works and makes the clock sluggish, the way too much of anything — grief, memory, whiskey — migrates across the surfaces of a life and makes it sluggish.

He put the movement back in the case. He rehung the pendulum. He reattached the dial and the hands. He wound the mainspring with the key — seven half-turns, which was full wind for this movement — and he set the pendulum swinging and the clock began to tick.

The tick was good. Even and steady, the two beats equal in volume and spacing, which meant the clock was in beat, which meant the escapement was properly aligned, which meant the pallets were engaging the escape wheel symmetrically, which meant Henry had done this right, which meant — and here he caught himself reaching for a meaning that was not mechanical, not technical, not about the clock at all, and he pulled back, because a clock is a clock, and fixing one is not a metaphor, except when it is.

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/12. New escape wheel (Merritt's). New lifting piece (fabricated). Full service — clean, oil, adjust. Striking train synchronized. Clock strikes correctly.

Then he added: Owner: Edith Calloway. Last known: Rutland, VT.

He would try to find her. Not today. Today was for the second clock.

---

The Seth Thomas was simpler. It was a mantel clock from the 1920s, an adamantine-finish case — that imitation marble that Seth Thomas used in their black mantel clocks, a celluloid coating over wood that was supposed to look like Belgian slate and mostly looked like what it was, which was a clock trying to be something fancier than a clock. The bezel was cracked, the brass ring that held the glass over the dial, cracked cleanly in half the way brass cracks when it has been stressed for decades — not shattered, not broken, but separated along a line of fatigue, the metal finally giving up the argument with physics.

Robert Payne. June 2, 2005. Cracked bezel, movement sluggish.

Henry removed the bezel. The crack was clean, which was good. He could silver-solder it, which is the horologist's preferred method for joining brass — silver solder flows at a lower temperature than brass melts, and if you are careful, if you flux the joint properly and heat it evenly, the repair is invisible, the crack closed, the ring restored to a circle, which is the shape it needs to be because the glass sits inside it and glass does not compromise with irregular shapes.

He clamped the bezel in the soldering fixture and applied flux — a paste of borax and water, the same flux that clockmakers have used for two hundred years, older than electricity, older than the telephone, older than everything in this shop except the trade itself — and he heated the joint with the torch, a small butane torch with a fine tip, and the flux bubbled and cleared and the silver solder flowed into the crack like water into a riverbed, filling the gap, joining the halves, and when it cooled the bezel was whole again, the joint a thin silver line that would be invisible once he polished it.

He polished it. He used a succession of abrasives — 320 grit, then 600, then 1000, then a felt wheel with rouge — and the silver line disappeared and the brass gleamed and the bezel was round and the crack was gone, and this was the small miracle of repair, the closing of a wound so completely that you could not tell it had been there, and Henry thought about scars and about the difference between a scar and a repair, which is that a scar is what happens when the body fixes itself and a repair is what happens when someone else fixes it, and he thought that maybe the difference mattered and maybe it did not.

The movement was sluggish, as Alistair's ticket had noted. Henry removed it from the case and examined it under the loupe. The problem was old oil, dried to a varnish in the pivot holes, the kind of slow deterioration that happens over decades when a clock runs and runs and the oil breaks down and the friction increases gradually, so gradually that the owner doesn't notice until one day the clock starts losing time and then the owner adjusts the regulator and the clock runs correctly for a while and then starts losing time again and the owner adjusts the regulator again and this continues until the regulator is at its limit and the clock is still losing time and finally the owner brings it to a clockmaker and says it is sluggish, which is the right word, sluggish, because the clock is not broken, it is tired.

Henry cleaned the movement. He disassembled it completely — thirty-seven parts, not counting screws, laid out on the bench in the order of disassembly so he could reassemble in reverse — and he cleaned each part in the ultrasonic cleaner, a small tank of cleaning solution that vibrated at a frequency too high to hear, shaking the old oil and grime off the metal the way a dog shakes water off its coat, and the parts came out bright and clean, the brass gleaming, the steel silver, the jewels red as wine.

He oiled it. He reassembled it. He put it back in the case with the repaired bezel and wound it and it ran, the tick steady, the timekeeping accurate, and he wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/13. Bezel silver-soldered. Full service — disassemble, clean, oil, reassemble. Movement runs well.

Then: Owner: Robert Payne. Phone number on file.

Henry looked at the phone number on the ticket. It was a local number, Montpelier, a 229 exchange, and it was twenty-one years old. He picked up the phone and dialed it.

It rang four times. A woman answered.

"Hello?"

"I'm looking for Robert Payne," Henry said.

"He's not here right now. Can I take a message?"

"This is Henry Osgood, from Osgood and Son on Main Street. Mr. Payne left a clock with us for repair."

There was a silence. Then: "A clock?"

"A Seth Thomas mantel clock. He brought it in June 2005."

"2005?"

"Yes."

"That's — my God, that's twenty-one years ago."

"Yes."

"Bob didn't — I mean, he never mentioned —" The woman paused. "He's at work. I'm his wife. Well, his second wife. We married in 2010. I don't know anything about a clock."

"It's repaired," Henry said. "He can pick it up anytime."

"Isn't there — I mean, how much does he owe? For twenty-one years of — storage?"

Henry looked at the ticket. Alistair had written a price at the bottom: $85. Eighty-five dollars for a bezel repair and full service, which was the going rate in 2005, which was absurdly low even then, because Alistair had never charged what the work was worth, had always charged what the customer could be expected to pay, which was a different thing, a thing that Henry, who had spent twenty-four years in finance, found both admirable and maddening.

"Eighty-five dollars," Henry said.

"For twenty-one years?"

"For the repair. There's no storage charge."

Another silence. "I'll tell Bob," the woman said.

She hung up. Henry set the phone down and looked at the Seth Thomas and thought about Robert Payne, who had left a clock at a shop in 2005 and married a new wife in 2010 and apparently never mentioned the clock, and Henry wondered if Payne had forgotten or if he had remembered and chosen not to come back, because sometimes you leave a thing somewhere and the leaving becomes the point, the object abandoned not out of forgetfulness but out of some private logic that only the abandoner understands, and Henry thought about the things he had left in New York when he came back to Montpelier — the apartment on East 73rd, the suits, the leather briefcase, the espresso machine, the life — and he had not gone back for any of them.

---

At noon he started on the list. Not the next clock — the list. The list of owners.

He took the fourteen tickets and began calling. Some of the phone numbers were local. Some were long distance. Some had no phone number at all, just a name and an address, the way people left contact information in the days before everyone had a cell phone.

Edith Calloway. Marion had said she moved to Rutland, to a home. Henry called information — he still called information, he was fifty-two years old and this was a thing he did — and asked for nursing homes in Rutland. There were three. He called each one. The first two had no Edith Calloway. The third, Green Mountain Senior Living, said yes, they had an Edith Calloway, she was in room 214, but she could not come to the phone. Could they take a message?

"Tell her that her clock is ready," Henry said. "The grandmother clock she left at Osgood and Son in Montpelier. Tell her it strikes twelve now."

The woman on the phone said she would pass along the message. She said it in the tone of someone who passes along many messages that may or may not be received, and Henry thanked her and hung up.

D.K. The French carriage clock. No name, just initials, no phone number, just the letters D.K. written in Alistair's hand on the ticket. Henry stared at the initials. He had no way to find D.K. The ticket was from 2006. Twenty years ago. Two initials and a carriage clock and no other information, and Alistair had accepted the clock anyway, had written the ticket anyway, had promised to repair it with nothing but two letters to go on, and Henry thought about the trust implicit in that transaction — the customer trusting the clockmaker with an object of value, the clockmaker trusting that the customer would return — and both trusts had been broken, the clock unrepaired, the customer unclaimed, and Henry did not know which failure was worse.

The Weatherbee Estate. Schoolhouse regulator. Broken suspension spring. Handle with care — sentimental. The address on the ticket was on County Road in East Montpelier. Henry looked up the address online and found a real estate listing from 2016: the Weatherbee house, sold after the death of the last Weatherbee, a woman named Florence, who had been ninety-one. The listing agent was a company in Burlington. Henry did not call. The estate was dissolved. The heirs, if there were heirs, were elsewhere. The schoolhouse regulator had no one to go home to.

Handle with care — sentimental.

Sentimental. Alistair had written the word on the ticket because someone had said it to him, someone from the Weatherbee family, and Alistair had honored the word by writing it down, making it part of the record, so that whoever repaired the clock would know that it was not just a clock, it was a sentimental clock, which meant it carried more than time, it carried feeling, and you should handle it with care because you were handling someone's feelings and feelings are fragile, more fragile than suspension springs, more fragile than glass domes, more fragile than anything in the shop.

Henry set the Weatherbee ticket down.

Agnes Firth. Cuckoo clock. He tried the phone number. Disconnected. He looked up the name online. Agnes Firth, Montpelier, Vermont. He found an obituary from 2014. Agnes Firth, 88, died peacefully at her home on Terrace Street. Survived by a son, Leonard, of Portland, Oregon, and a daughter, Mary, of Charlotte, North Carolina. No local survivors. No one to call about a cuckoo clock with collapsed bellows and a bird that did not emerge.

Martin Leveque. Desk clock. Gains four minutes a day. The phone number was still valid. A man answered.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Leveque, this is Henry Osgood, from Osgood and Son."

"The clock shop?"

"Yes. You left a desk clock with us in 2012."

"I did?"

"A Swiss desk clock. It was gaining four minutes a day."

Silence. Then: "Oh. That clock. I forgot about that clock. My God. Is your father — I heard he passed."

"He did."

"I'm sorry. He was — I always liked him. He had a way about him."

"He did."

"So the clock — it's still there?"

"It's here. I'm going to repair it."

"After fourteen years?"

"Yes."

"Well." Martin Leveque made a short surprised sound. "I suppose there's no rush."

Henry noted on the ticket: Owner alive. Montpelier. Wants clock returned.

Polly Arsenault. Wall clock. Pendulum swings but hands don't move. The number rang through to voicemail. Henry left a message. He said his name and the shop name and that he was calling about a wall clock and would she please call back.

Thomas Wren. Pocket watch, Elgin. The number was not in service. Henry searched online and found a Thomas Wren in Barre, which was ten miles away, but the Thomas Wren in Barre was twenty-eight years old, too young to have brought a pocket watch to Alistair in 2014. He searched more and found nothing. Thomas Wren had been a common enough name to exist and an uncommon enough person to have left no trace.

Sarah Halliday. Anniversary clock. The number rang. A man answered.

"Hello?"

"I'm looking for Sarah Halliday."

"She's my mother. She's in the garden. Who's calling?"

Henry explained. The man — Sarah's son — said he would tell his mother. He said she still lived in the same house on Berlin Street. He said the anniversary clock had been a wedding gift. He said his father had died in 2018 and his mother still wound the spot on the mantel where the clock had been, which was something she did every Sunday morning, reaching for a key that was not there to wind a clock that was not there, and Henry heard this and wrote nothing on the ticket because there was nothing to write that was adequate to this information.

James Okonkwo. Bracket clock. The number was valid. Mr. Okonkwo answered. He was surprised. He said he had given up on the clock years ago. He said he would come by when it was ready.

Ruth Ainsley. Travel alarm, Jaeger. Henry found an obituary from 2021. Ruth Ainsley, 76, died at Central Vermont Medical Center. No local survivors.

Michael Corvin. Desk clock. Stopped. Owner deceased, per M. Corvin (wife). Henry tried the number. A recording said the number had been changed. No new number was available.

The ship's clock — no name. Chelsea. Striking mechanism jammed. Bell cracked. No name, no number, no address. Just the clock and the ticket and the description of its ailments.

Frances Osgood. His mother. Not keeping time. Please fix when you can.

Henry did not call his mother. His mother was alive and she lived on Elm Street and he could see her whenever he wanted and he did see her, every Sunday for dinner, sitting in the kitchen where he had grown up, eating the food she had always made — pot roast, mashed potatoes, green beans, the cuisine of a woman who had married an Englishman and learned to cook the way his mother had cooked, which was plainly but well — and they talked about the weather and the garden and the news and they did not talk about Alistair and they did not talk about the shop and they did not talk about the clock, her clock, the Ansonia from the living room mantel that was now sitting on a shelf in the shop with a yellow ticket in Alistair's handwriting.

Not keeping time. Please fix when you can.

Henry put the tickets away. He had found six of the fourteen owners, or their survivors. Two were alive and local. One was in a nursing home. Two had estates that were dissolved. One was his mother. The other eight were dead or moved or untraceable, and their clocks were orphans, timepieces without homes, mechanisms without purpose, and Henry would repair them anyway because the repair was the promise and the promise did not expire when the promisee did.

---

That evening he sat on Cal's loading dock. The October air was cold and smelled of woodsmoke and fallen leaves and the particular sweetness of Vermont in autumn, which is the sweetness of decay, the sweetness of things breaking down so that other things can grow, and Henry drank his beer and Cal drank his beer and neither of them spoke for a long time.

Cal was forty. He had grown up in Montpelier, had never left, had learned woodworking from his uncle, had opened his shop at twenty-five. He made furniture — tables, chairs, cabinets — from local wood, cherry and maple and walnut, and his hands were large and scarred and his forearms were dusted with sawdust and he was the kind of man who could be silent without the silence being awkward, which was a quality Henry valued above almost all others.

"You started on the clocks," Cal said.

"The first two are done."

"Which ones?"

"Grandmother clock. Seth Thomas."

"Twelve more."

"Twelve more."

Cal drank his beer. A car passed on Main Street, its headlights sweeping across the fronts of the shops. The capitol dome was lit, the gold leaf catching the spotlights, glowing against the dark sky like a small sun that had been placed there to remind the town that something important was happening, or had happened, or might happen again.

"You going to reopen the shop?" Cal said.

"I don't know."

"People ask me. They come in with a clock and ask if I know a clockmaker and I say there's one right across the street and they say they thought the shop was closed and I say it is and they say well then there isn't one right across the street and I say there is, he's just not taking new work right now, and they look at me like I'm speaking French."

"I'm not taking new work right now."

"I know. I'm just saying."

"A woman came in yesterday with a carriage clock. I said no."

"You can say no."

"I know I can say no."

"You can also say yes."

Henry looked at his beer. The label was wet, the condensation dripping down the glass, and he peeled a strip of the label off and rolled it between his fingers and dropped it on the dock.

"The fourteen first," he said.

Cal nodded. He understood this, or he understood enough of it — the obligation, the sequence, the idea that some things must be finished before other things can be started — because woodworking had its own version of this, its own queue of orders and promises, and Cal was a man who finished what he started, which was why his furniture was good, which was why people waited six months for a table, which was why the waiting list on his wall had thirty names on it and each name was a promise and each promise was a kind of clock, ticking toward the day when the table would be done and the customer would come and take it home and put things on it — plates, books, flowers, elbows, the accumulated weight of daily life.

"You ever think about why people leave things?" Henry said.

"Leave things?"

"At a shop. For repair. And then never come back for them."

Cal considered this. "I've had it happen. A guy brought in a rocking chair. Broken runner. I fixed it in a week. Called him. He said he'd come by. Never did. Called again. Said he'd come by. Never did. Chair sat in my shop for a year. Finally I put it on the sidewalk with a FREE sign. Gone in an hour."

"Did you ever find out why he didn't come back?"

"No. Didn't ask. Figured it was his business."

"Some of the clocks in the shop have been there for twenty years. The owners — some of them are dead. Some of them moved away. Some of them just stopped coming."

"Maybe they got a new clock."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe they didn't want it fixed. Maybe they wanted it to be somewhere. To be safe. Like putting a dog in a kennel."

Henry looked at Cal. This was an unexpected thought from a man who mostly thought about dovetail joints.

"You think people leave clocks at a clock shop the way they leave dogs at a kennel?"

"I think people leave things where they think the things will be taken care of. Whether they come back or not."

Henry drank his beer. He thought about the fourteen clocks and about the people who had left them and about the word sentimental on the Weatherbee ticket and about Agnes Firth's cuckoo clock with its collapsed bellows and its bird that did not emerge. He thought about his mother's Ansonia on the shelf, not keeping time.

"My father wrote tickets for all of them," Henry said. "Yellow tickets. His handwriting. The problem, the owner, the date."

"I know. I saw them. He showed me once."

"He showed you?"

"Years ago. Before you came back. He brought me over one afternoon and showed me the shelf and said, 'These are my failures.' That's what he called them. His failures."

Henry set his beer down. He had not known this. He had not known that Alistair had shown Cal the shelf, had called them his failures, had used that word, which was not a word Alistair used lightly, which was not a word Alistair used at all, because Alistair believed that a thing either worked or it did not and the word failure implied a judgment that was irrelevant to the mechanism — a clock did not fail, it simply stopped, and the stopping was not a moral condition, it was a mechanical condition, and the solution was not blame but repair.

But Alistair had called them his failures. The unfinished repairs. The tickets he could not close. The promises he could not keep because his hands had begun to shake and the shaking had gotten worse and worse until the hands that had assembled a thousand movements could not hold a pair of tweezers, could not steady a screwdriver, could not guide an oiler to a pivot hole, and the clocks had accumulated on the shelf like evidence, like a verdict, like the physical manifestation of a man's diminishment.

"He didn't say that to me," Henry said.

"Maybe he couldn't."

"Maybe."

They finished their beers. Cal went inside. Henry walked across the street to the shop and climbed the stairs to the apartment and lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about the word failures and about the way a man can carry a word for years without saying it to his son, the way a mainspring can carry tension for decades without releasing it, the way a clock can strike thirteen at midnight for twenty years and no one fixes it because the one person who could fix it cannot hold the tools.

He fell asleep. He dreamed of nothing. He woke at six and went downstairs and sat at the bench and looked at the next ticket.

D.K. September 19, 2006. French carriage clock. Not running. Customer says last ran 1997.

No name. No phone number. Just initials and a clock that had not run for twenty-nine years, that had been silent for almost three decades, that had been brought to Alistair by a person identified only by two letters who had never returned, and the clock was still here, still silent, still not running, and Henry picked it up and turned it in his hands and looked at the brass case, tarnished green, and the porcelain dial, yellowed, and the movement visible through the glass panels on the sides, the wheels still, the escapement frozen, the mainspring — he did not know about the mainspring, did not know if it was wound or run down, did not know if there was energy stored in it or if the energy had been released long ago, spent, gone, and the clock had nothing left to give.

He would find out. He would open it and look and he would find out what was wrong and he would fix it and the clock would run and it would not matter that D.K. was unknowable, untraceable, two letters and no more, because the repair was not for D.K. The repair was for the clock. The repair was for the ticket. The repair was for the dead man's handwriting that said not running and meant fix this and meant I promise and meant I am sorry I cannot.

Henry opened the case.