Chapter 33: The Balance Wheel

On a Sunday morning in June, Henry wound the grandmother clock.

Seven half-turns. The same seven half-turns that Eleanor Paxton had wound in 1930, that Edith Calloway had wound in 1990, that Henry had wound every Sunday since October, the chain of windings extending backward through nearly a century, the weekly ritual, the replenishment, the putting-in of the energy that the mechanism would spend over the coming week, converting the stored force of the wound mainspring into the measured release of the escapement, one tick at a time, the energy parceled out in equal increments, each tick the same duration, each tick the same force, the escapement regulating, the balance maintaining, the clock running.

The key turned. The spring tightened. The resistance increased with each half-turn, the spring's protest against being wound, the mechanism's reluctance to store more energy, and at the seventh half-turn Henry stopped, because seven was the number, because seven was what Edith had specified, because seven was the agreement between the winder and the wound, the contract, the understanding that this much energy and no more was the correct amount, was the amount that would keep the clock running for a week without overstressing the spring, without pushing the mechanism past its designed capacity, and the contract was the care, was the custodianship, was the promise.

He set down the key. He looked at the clock. The walnut case, the porcelain dial, the blued hands, the lifting piece that he had fabricated on the lathe, the count wheel with its notches, the striking train that now struck twelve at midnight and not thirteen, the mechanism that had been Edith Calloway's complaint and was now Henry's responsibility, and the clock ticked, even and steady, the tick of a grandmother clock that was 124 years old and that was running on a part that Henry had made and on a promise that Henry was keeping.

He thought about Edith. Ninety-five now, at Green Mountain Senior Living in Rutland, the woman who had said the boy has good hands, the woman whose grandson Peter had brought the second Waltham, the twin of Alistair's watch, and Peter had told Henry that Edith was well, was comfortable, was knitting in her room, and Henry thought of Frances knitting in her kitchen on Elm Street, the green scarf growing, and the two women knitting in two different rooms in two different towns, connected by the thread and the needles and the age and the son and the grandson and the clockmaker who served them both.

He thought about Frances. The vertigo had not returned. The Epley maneuver had worked, the crystals repositioned, the biological mechanism corrected, and Frances was cooking pot roast on Sundays and knitting scarves and winding the Waltham once a month and the Ansonia once a week and the house on Elm Street was running the way it had run for decades, the domestic mechanism, the household clockwork, the meals and the rituals and the seasons turning.

Lena had gone to dinner. In May, on a Sunday, as Frances had requested, and Henry had driven Lena to Elm Street and Frances had opened the door and looked at Lena and looked at Lena's hands and taken Lena's hands in her own hands — the old hands holding the young hands, the knitter's hands holding the clockmaker's hands — and Frances had said, "Good hands. Still hands." And Lena had said, "Thank you, Mrs. Osgood." And Frances had said, "Frances. Mrs. Osgood was Alistair's mother. I'm Frances." And the pot roast was served and the Ansonia ticked and the dinner was the dinner and the passing of the hands from one generation's inspection to the next was the passing, was the approval, was the matriarch's assessment of the new link in the chain.

Henry stood in the shop. It was early, seven o'clock, the June sun already up, the light coming through the windows at the summer angle, which was different from the winter angle, which was different from the autumn angle when he had first opened the shop, and each season's light was a different light on the same bench, the same tools, the same brass, and the light changed but the work did not change, was the same work in every light, the same pivots, the same wheels, the same oil, the same patience.

The shop was different now. Not in its mechanism — the benches were the same, the tools were the same, the lamp with the green glass shade was the same, the stool with the shape was the same — but in its population, its occupancy, its daily life. Two people worked here now. Two pairs of hands. Two cups of tea at three o'clock. Two sets of tools on two benches. And through the connecting door, the empty room that had been the bookshop, the room that Marion had said was not empty because the ticking came through the wall, and the room was still empty of books and still full of sound, and Henry had not decided what to do with it, had not expanded into it, had not filled it with clocks or furniture or anything, had left it empty, had left the door open, and the emptiness was a possibility, was the space in which the future could occur, the uncut metal, the unwound spring, the potential.

He went to the bench. He sat down. He looked at the clock that was waiting for him — a wall clock, a customer's clock, a routine repair — and he looked at Alistair's bench, Lena's bench, empty now because it was Sunday and Lena did not come on Sundays, and the bench was empty and the bench was full, full of the tools and the loupe and the lamp and the stool with the shape that was now Lena's shape as well as Alistair's shape, the stool holding both shapes the way wood holds every shape that has ever pressed it, the compression permanent, the record indelible.

On the shelf beside the grandmother clock sat the other orphan clocks, the clocks that had stayed, the clocks that had no home or whose home was this shop. The schoolhouse regulator ticked on the wall, the Weatherbee estate clock, handle with care — sentimental, the clock with no one to go home to, the clock that was home. The ship's clock with its new bell sat on the shelf, its eight bells marking the watches of a day that was not a sailor's day but a clockmaker's day, the nautical time transposed to the terrestrial, the sea clock on dry land. The carriage clock of Diana Kessler — D.K. — was gone, collected by her son in November, but the ticket remained in the box, the yellow ticket with Alistair's handwriting, Not running. Customer says last ran 1997, and the ticket was the record, was the memory, was the paper that held the past.

The cuckoo clock was gone. Sent to Bend, Oregon, to Leonard Firth, and Leonard had written again, a short note, handwritten, saying the clock was hanging in his kitchen and the bird called at seven and his wife, who had never heard it before, had said the bird sounded like a question, and Leonard had said no, the bird sounded like an answer, and the disagreement was the beginning of a conversation that would continue for as long as the clock called, which would be for as long as the clock was wound, which would be for as long as Leonard or his wife or their children or their grandchildren pulled the chains every day, the left chain for the timekeeping and the right chain for the cuckoo, the way Henry had written in his letter, the instructions traveling with the clock the way the clock had traveled from the Black Forest to Boston to Montpelier to Oregon, the care portable, the custodianship transferred.

Henry sat at the bench and the shop was quiet except for the ticking, except for the layered percussion of the remaining clocks, the grandmother clock and the schoolhouse regulator and the ship's clock and the bracket clock on the shelf and the wall clocks in the queue, the chorus diminished by the departures — the cuckoo gone to Oregon, the carriage clock gone to Diana Kessler's son, the Ansonia gone home to Frances — but still a chorus, still a choir, still the multiple voices of mechanisms keeping time, and the diminishing was not a loss but a distribution, was the spreading of the ticking from one room to many rooms, from one shop to many houses, and the spreading was the purpose, was the reason the clocks were repaired, not so that they could tick in the shop forever but so that they could go home and tick in the rooms where they belonged, on the mantels and the walls and the nightstands where they measured the domestic time, the home time, the time that is not the time of the clock but the time of the people who live with the clock.

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On Tuesday morning Henry sat at the bench at six-forty-five.

It was a Tuesday. A Tuesday in June. Not the Tuesday in October when he had first opened the shop, not the Tuesday in December when he had repainted the sign, not any of the Tuesdays on which the significant arrivals had come — the grandmother clock, the letter from Edith Calloway, the Mudge — but an ordinary Tuesday, a Tuesday without significance, a Tuesday that was just a Tuesday, the day after Monday, the day before Wednesday, a day that was defined not by what would happen on it but by what happened on it every week, which was the work, the sitting at the bench, the opening of the clock, the looking through the loupe, the listening to the tick.

The coffee was on the counter. The lamp was on. The clocks ticked. The bell above the door was silent, waiting.

On the bench was a clock. Not a significant clock, not a Mudge or a Vienna regulator or a Waltham Grade 620, but an ordinary clock, a mantel clock, American, Seth Thomas, circa 1950, the kind of clock that sat on the mantel of a house in a town in Vermont and ticked through the decades and was not noticed until it stopped and was not appreciated until it was silent and was not brought to a clockmaker until the silence became uncomfortable, became the absence that was louder than the presence, the missing tick that was more audible than the existing tick, and the owner had brought it in and said, "It stopped," and Henry had said, "I'll fix it," and the exchange was the exchange that had happened in this shop ten thousand times over fifty-two years, the simple transaction, the promise, the ticket.

Henry opened the back of the clock. He looked at the movement. He put the loupe to his eye — Alistair's loupe, the brass warm from his hand, the glass clear, the magnification familiar, the landscape of the mechanism opening before him like a country he had visited many times and that was always the same and always different — and he looked at the wheels and the pivots and the mainspring and the escapement.

The escapement. The anchor escapement, the recoil type, the standard American escapement, the pallet fork rocking on its arbor, the pallet stones engaging the escape wheel teeth, the escape wheel turning, tooth by tooth, the energy released in increments, the regulation maintained, and the escapement was the heart, was the center, was the thing that made the clock a clock and not just a collection of wheels, because without the escapement the mainspring would unwind in a single rush, the wheels would spin freely, the energy would dissipate in seconds, and there would be no ticking, no regulation, no time — just the noise of a spring unwinding and then silence. The escapement was the thing that said not yet, that held the energy back, that metered the release, that converted the continuous force of the spring into the discrete beats of the tick, and the conversion was the clock's purpose, was the mechanism's reason, was the escapement's function.

Henry understood the escapement. He had always understood it — had understood it technically, mechanically, the geometry of the pallets, the angle of the impulse, the physics of the oscillation — but now he understood it differently, understood it the way you understand a word that you have used for years and that suddenly reveals a meaning you had not seen, a deeper meaning, a meaning that was there all along but that required time and experience and the accumulation of repairs and losses and gains and the slow turning of the seasons from October to June to make visible.

The escapement was the regulation. The escapement was the thing that said not all at once. The mainspring was wound, was full of energy, was ready to release everything in a single moment, and the escapement said no, slowly, one tick at a time, one beat at a time, one second at a time, and the slowness was the point, was the purpose, was the reason the clock existed, because time is not a rush, is not a flood, is not the instantaneous release of everything that has been stored — time is the measured giving, the daily portion, the weekly winding and the weekly unwinding, the Sunday seven half-turns and the Saturday nearly run down, and the cycle repeats and the repetition is the time and the time is the life and the life is the living of it, one tick at a time.

Henry thought about Alistair. About the sixty years at the bench. About the hands that had been steady and then trembling and then still. About the fourteen clocks that had been the unfinished work and that Henry had finished, one by one, the grandmother clock and the cuckoo clock and the carriage clock and the mantel clock and the schoolhouse regulator and the ship's clock and the bracket clock and the pocket watch and the anniversary clock and the wall clock and the desk clock and the travel alarm and the Ansonia and the Waltham, each one a problem and a promise, each one a mechanism that required attention, each one a link in the chain from the past to the present, and the fourteen were finished now, were all finished, were repaired and returned or repaired and kept, and the finishing was not the end but the beginning, was the clearing of the bench that made room for the new work, the next clock, the next tick, the next customer who came through the door with a mechanism that had stopped and that needed to be started again.

He thought about Thomas Osgood in Somerset, the great-grandfather he had never met, the first link, the first hands, the hands that had held the first tools and taught the first skills and started the chain that had traveled from England to Vermont, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, from a workshop in a market town to a shop on Main Street in Montpelier, and the chain was four generations long and was growing longer, was extending past the Osgoods into the Vasquezes, past the blood into the craft, past the name into the work, and the extension was not a dilution but an expansion, not a weakening but a strengthening, because every new link made the chain more resilient, more capable of surviving the breaks that time inflicts — the tremors, the strokes, the deaths, the departures, the moments when the chain seems to end and then does not end, does not break, because someone else sits at the bench and picks up the loupe and puts it to their eye and sees the landscape and begins.

He thought about the balance wheel. The balance wheel of a watch, the oscillating wheel that swings back and forth, back and forth, five times a second, eighteen thousand times an hour, the wheel that is the watch's heartbeat, the wheel that the hairspring brings back after every swing, the wheel that goes forward and comes back, forward and comes back, and the going forward is the living and the coming back is the remembering and the oscillation between the two is the balance, is the equilibrium, is the thing that keeps the mechanism running at its proper rate, not too fast and not too slow, not rushing toward the future and not clinging to the past, but swinging between them, between the living and the remembering, between the new work and the old work, between the Osgood and the Son, between the father and the child, between what was given and what was made.

The balance wheel. The volume. The title. The name for this part of his life, this part of the story, this part of the mechanism — the balance wheel, the oscillation, the going forward and the coming back, the living and the remembering, the new and the old, the teaching and the learning, the chain extending and the chain remembering, the ampersand connecting.

Henry looked at the clock on the bench. The Seth Thomas, 1950. An ordinary clock. An ordinary repair. The ordinary work that was the substance of the practice, the daily bread, the substrate on which everything else was built — the Mudge repair and the balance staff fabrication and the fusee chain rivet and the Vienna regulator and all the extraordinary work that came through the door on Tuesdays and that tested his hands and extended his skill — all of it built on this, on the ordinary clock, on the routine repair, on the cleaning and oiling and adjusting that was the craft's foundation, the groundwork, the thing that had to be done well before anything else could be done at all.

He picked up his screwdriver. He began to disassemble the movement. The screws came out. The plates separated. The wheels lay on the cloth, each one in its place, each one a circle, each one a gear in the train that connected the mainspring to the escapement, the stored energy to the regulated release, the wound-up to the ticking, and the wheels were brass and the screws were steel and the oil was synthetic and the hands that held the tools were flesh and bone and nerve and the hands were steady, were still, were the good hands that Alistair had said were better than his own, and the hands worked, disassembling, cleaning, inspecting, oiling, reassembling, the sequence that was the same every time, the sequence that Henry had learned from Alistair and that Alistair had learned from Thomas and that Thomas had learned from his teacher and that the teacher had learned from the teacher before him, the sequence going back centuries, the chain of hands, the chain of skills, the chain of patience, the chain.

He reassembled the movement. He installed the mainspring. He reattached the dial. He set the hands. He wound the clock.

The clock ticked.

The tick joined the chorus. The Seth Thomas, 1950, ticking with the grandmother clock, 1903, and the schoolhouse regulator, 1920, and the ship's clock, 1965, and the bracket clock, 1890, the voices of five decades joining, the choir expanding, and the expansion was the shop's breathing, the inhale of clocks arriving broken and the exhale of clocks departing repaired, the systole and diastole, the contraction and expansion, the heartbeat of the practice.

Henry wrote the ticket. His handwriting, upright, slightly cramped, the handwriting that was his and not Alistair's, the handwriting that went on the tickets now, that filled the box sections A through W, that was the record of Henry's practice the way Alistair's handwriting had been the record of Alistair's practice, the two handwritings in the same box, on the same tickets, the father's and the son's, and the box held them both and the box was the archive and the archive was the shop's memory.

He set the ticket in the box. He set the clock on the shelf. He sat at the bench.

The morning advanced. At seven Lena would arrive. She would stand at her bench, at Alistair's bench, and she would pick up her tools and she would begin. At ten the first customer might come, or might not. At noon Henry would eat his sandwich at the bench. At three Marion would come through the connecting door with two cups of tea. At five Lena would leave. At six Henry would close the shop. At seven he would sit on the loading dock with Cal and they would drink their beer and the evening would be warm and the mountains would be green and the sky would be long with light.

And tomorrow would be Wednesday and the day after would be Thursday and the week would pass and the next week would follow and the weeks would become months and the months would become seasons and the seasons would turn the way the balance wheel turns, forward and back, forward and back, the oscillation that is the time, the oscillation that is the life, the oscillation that is the mechanism running, and the mechanism was the shop and the shop was the work and the work was the hands and the hands were Henry's hands and Lena's hands and before them Alistair's hands and before them Thomas's hands and the hands were the chain and the chain was the craft and the craft was the keeping of time, not the measuring of it but the keeping of it, the holding of it, the caring for it, the way you keep a promise, the way you keep a shop, the way you keep going, one tick at a time.

Outside, Main Street was waking. The co-op was opening. Cal was pushing back his barn doors. The capitol dome was catching the early light. The sky was the blue of June, the deep blue, the blue that was not the pale blue of December or the gray blue of March but the full blue, the committed blue, the blue of a day that knows what it is.

Henry sat at the bench. The loupe was warm. The brass was warm. The lamp was on. The clocks ticked. The escapement released, and released, and released, the energy metered out in equal portions, the time advancing in equal steps, the day beginning the way every day began, with the sitting and the looking and the listening and the waiting for the clock to tell him what was wrong, and the clock told him, and Henry listened, and the listening was the work, and the work was the life, and the life was the ticking, and the ticking was the sound of a man at a bench in a shop on a street in a town in Vermont, doing the thing his father taught him, doing the thing his father's father taught his father, doing the thing that would be taught to the next pair of hands and the next pair after that, the chain extending, link by link, tick by tick, the mainspring unwinding, the escapement regulating, the balance wheel oscillating, the time keeping, the time keeping, the time kept.

He picked up his tools. He began.