Chapter 5: The Wall Clock

Polly Arsenault called back on a Wednesday.

Henry was at the bench, cleaning the pivot holes of the cuckoo clock movement — the bellows had not yet arrived from Germany, but there was other work to do on the mechanism, the patient preliminary work, the making-ready — and the phone rang and he set down his pegwood and answered.

"Mr. Osgood? This is Polly Arsenault. You left a message about a wall clock."

"Yes. You brought it in August 2013."

"I remember. It was my grandmother's clock. A Sessions wall clock, walnut case, the kind with the pendulum visible through the glass. My grandmother hung it in her kitchen in 1955 and it ran every day until it didn't."

"The ticket says the pendulum swings but the hands don't move."

"That's right. That's exactly what it did. The pendulum would swing and the clock would tick and the hands just — sat there. As if the clock was running but refusing to go anywhere. Like a car idling in the driveway."

Henry looked at the wall clock, still on the shelf. He had not started it yet. It was seventh in the chronological order, and he was on fifth — the cuckoo clock — and sixth — the desk clock, already done — and seventh was next.

"I'm going to repair it," Henry said. "I wanted to let you know it's still here."

"Thirteen years," Polly said. "I feel terrible. I should have come back. I meant to. But life — you know. Things get ahead of you."

"There's no charge for the wait."

"There should be. Thirteen years of shelf space. That's worth something."

"It's worth the repair," Henry said. "I'll call you when it's ready."

He hung up and looked at the wall clock. A Sessions, American, probably from the 1940s or 1950s, the kind of clock that was sold in department stores and hardware stores and the Sears Roebuck catalog, the kind of clock that cost twelve dollars and kept time for fifty years, the kind of clock that hung in kitchens and dens and waiting rooms and did its job without complaint, without fuss, without the pretension of a French carriage clock or the sentimentality of a grandmother clock, just a clock, just time, just the thing on the wall that you looked at when you needed to know.

He lifted it from the shelf. It was lighter than the others, lighter than the grandmother clock, lighter than the schoolhouse regulator, because it was a simpler mechanism, a thirty-hour spring-wound movement with no striking train, no chime, no complication — just the timekeeping train, the mainspring, the gear train, the escapement, the pendulum, and the hands. Just time.

He set it on the bench and opened the back. The movement was compact and tidy, the kind of movement that American clock factories produced by the millions in the first half of the twentieth century, stamped and pressed and assembled by workers who could put together a movement in four minutes and did so all day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, and the movements were not elegant the way Swiss movements were elegant, were not jeweled, were not hand-finished, but they worked, they kept time, they did the thing, and that was enough.

He could see the problem immediately.

The cannon pinion was loose. The cannon pinion is the small tube that sits on the center arbor, the tube on which the minute hand mounts, and it is held to the arbor by friction — not by a screw, not by a pin, but by friction, a press fit, tight enough to turn with the arbor under normal conditions but designed to slip if the hands are turned backward, a safety feature, a pressure valve, and the cannon pinion on Polly Arsenault's wall clock was loose, had lost its friction, and the arbor turned freely inside it, the wheels spinning, the escapement ticking, the mechanism running perfectly, but the cannon pinion — and therefore the hands — not turning, the way a car's engine can run without the wheels turning if the clutch is disengaged, the way a heart can beat without the blood flowing if the valves are stuck.

The pendulum swings but the hands don't move. The energy is there. The regulation is there. The timekeeping mechanism is working perfectly. But the connection between the mechanism and the display — between the internal truth and the external expression — is broken, and the clock keeps its own time silently, invisibly, internally, a clock that knows what time it is but cannot say.

Henry removed the cannon pinion. He clamped it in the staking tool — a small press with interchangeable dies, used for pressing pins and tubes and friction-fit parts — and he compressed it slightly, reducing its inner diameter by a thousandth of an inch, restoring the friction, restoring the grip, and he pressed it back onto the arbor and it was tight, it gripped, and when he turned the arbor with his finger the cannon pinion turned with it and the hands would turn with the cannon pinion and the clock would show on its face what it knew in its mechanism, would externalize what had been internal, would tell the time.

The repair had taken thirty minutes.

He put the movement back in the case. He hung the pendulum. He wound the mainspring with the key and the clock began to tick and the minute hand began to move, imperceptibly, the way minute hands move, the way the hour moves, the way the day moves, so slowly that you cannot see the motion but you can see the result, the hand in a different place than it was before, the hour different, the day different, and you think: when did that happen? When did it become three o'clock? It was just two. Wasn't it just two?

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/20. Cannon pinion tightened (friction fit restored). Full service — clean, oil. Timekeeping accurate.

He called Polly Arsenault. "Your clock is ready," he said.

"Already?"

"The repair was straightforward."

"How much do I owe?"

Henry looked at the ticket. Alistair had written no price. On some of the tickets there was a price, on others there was not, and Henry did not know if the absence of a price meant Alistair had not yet estimated the work or if it meant Alistair intended to charge nothing, because Alistair sometimes charged nothing, sometimes repaired a clock and handed it back and said no charge, a habit that drove Frances to distraction and that Henry, who had spent twenty-four years in an industry where everything had a price and most things were overpriced, found both baffling and beautiful.

"Sixty dollars," Henry said. He had made up the number. It was less than the work was worth and more than Alistair would have charged and it felt approximately right, which was not a financial calculation but a moral one.

"I'll come by tomorrow," Polly said.

---

Robert Payne came in at noon.

The bell rang and a man was standing in the doorway, tall, gray-haired, wearing a barn jacket and work boots, the kind of man who could be fifty or sixty or seventy, the kind of man whose age is obscured by the outdoors, by weather, by the particular Vermont patina of wind and sun and cold that preserves some men and erodes others, and Henry could not tell which this was.

"Henry Osgood?" the man said.

"Yes."

"Bob Payne. You called my wife about a clock."

"The Seth Thomas. Come in."

Payne stepped inside and looked around the shop the way people do when they enter a place they have been before but not recently, the scanning, the searching for landmarks, the matching of the present to the memory, and Henry could see him doing this, could see him finding the counter and the pegboard and the two benches and the window and the chair, and could see him not finding Alistair.

"I'm sorry about your father," Payne said. "He was a good man."

"Thank you."

"I should have come back for the clock. I know I should have. I just — after a while it seemed like too long had passed. Like there was a statute of limitations on picking things up. Like if you leave something somewhere long enough it becomes part of the place and taking it would be like taking a brick from the building."

Henry reached behind the counter and took the Seth Thomas from the shelf. He set it on the counter. The brass bezel gleamed, the soldered joint invisible, and the clock was ticking, had been ticking since Henry wound it two weeks ago, keeping time in the shop the way it had once kept time in Payne's house, or Payne's office, or wherever Payne had kept it before he brought it here.

Payne looked at the clock. He picked it up. He turned it in his hands.

"My father bought this," he said. "At an antique shop in Stowe. 1983. He was not a man who bought things — he was frugal, careful with money, the kind of man who wore his shoes until they couldn't be resoled anymore — but he saw this clock and he bought it. I don't know why. Maybe the marble finish. He liked things that looked like other things. Wallpaper that looked like wood. Linoleum that looked like tile. A clock that looked like marble."

"It's adamantine," Henry said. "Celluloid over wood."

"He knew. He knew it wasn't marble. He didn't care. He said it was the idea of marble that mattered, not the marble itself. He was a philosophical man, my father, in his own way."

"The bezel was cracked," Henry said. "I silver-soldered it. You can see the joint if you look closely, but it's solid."

Payne held the clock up to the light. He turned it. He found the joint — the thin silver line, nearly invisible, the healed crack.

"You can barely see it," Payne said.

"That's the idea."

"My father would have liked that. The repair being invisible. The crack healed. He would have said something about — I don't know. Grace. He used that word. Grace."

Payne set the clock on the counter. He reached for his wallet.

"Eighty-five dollars," Henry said.

"After twenty-one years?"

"That was the price on the ticket."

Payne took out a hundred-dollar bill and set it on the counter. "Keep the change," he said. "Buy some oil or whatever it is you buy."

"Nye clock oil," Henry said. "Five dollars a bottle."

"Then buy three bottles."

Payne picked up the clock and held it against his chest and Henry thought that there was something in the way a person holds a clock — not the way you hold a tool or a book or a phone, but closer, tighter, the way you hold a living thing, a kitten, a baby, something that vibrates, something that ticks, something that has a pulse — and Payne was holding the Seth Thomas this way, against his chest, and the clock was ticking against his ribs, near his heart, and whether Payne could feel this Henry did not know.

"Your father fixed a clock for me once," Payne said. "Before this one. A different clock. A little travel alarm. It took him twenty minutes. He didn't charge me. He said, 'This one's on the house.' And I brought the Seth Thomas in later because I trusted him, because a man who fixes your travel alarm for free is a man you trust with a more expensive clock, and then I didn't come back and I've been thinking about why I didn't come back and I think it's because the trust was the point. The leaving. Knowing it was here. Knowing he had it. Not the clock, but the — the custodianship. The fact that someone was taking care of it."

Henry thought of Cal's words on the loading dock. People leave things where they think the things will be taken care of.

"He took care of it," Henry said.

"I know he did."

Payne left. The bell rang. The shop was quiet. Henry put the hundred-dollar bill in the cash drawer and looked at the empty space on the shelf where the Seth Thomas had been and he felt something that he could not name, something that was not satisfaction and not loss and not relief but was perhaps all three, the way a chord is not one note but three, and the feeling sat in his chest the way the hundred-dollar bill sat in the drawer, a fact, a transaction, a thing that had happened.

---

In the afternoon, after Marion's tea, Henry went back to the cuckoo clock. The bellows had not arrived. He could not fix the cuckoo without the bellows. But he could fix the rest of the mechanism — the timekeeping train, the striking train, the chain drive — and so he did, cleaning and oiling and adjusting, the patient work, the work of preparation, the work of making everything ready for the one part that was not yet here.

He thought about Payne's father. A man who bought a clock because it looked like marble. A man who liked things that looked like other things. There was something in this, something about representation and reality, about the clock-face and the mechanism, about the exterior and the interior, the presentation and the truth, and Henry thought about his own years in New York, in finance, where everything was representation — the suits, the offices, the expense accounts, the language of markets and positions and returns — a world of surfaces, of things that looked like other things, of numbers that represented money that represented value that represented — what? Work? Trust? Agreement? A collective fiction, maintained by consensus, that a piece of paper or a number on a screen was worth something, and Henry had believed this fiction for twenty-four years and had been good at it, had been very good at it, had made money and spent money and managed money, and then he had come back to Montpelier and sat at a bench and picked up a pair of tweezers and the thing in his hand was not a representation of anything, it was a pallet fork, steel, jeweled, real, and it either engaged the escape wheel or it did not, and there was no fiction about it, no consensus, no representation, just the mechanism, doing what it did.

He had not missed New York. This was the thing that surprised him, that continued to surprise him, six years later. He had expected to miss it — the restaurants, the theaters, the energy, the feeling of being at the center of something, the particular intoxication of a city that believes it is the most important place in the world and acts accordingly — but he did not miss it, had not missed it from the first week, had sat at Alistair's bench with Alistair beside him in the wheelchair and felt something settle in his chest, something that had been unsettled for twenty-four years, a gyroscope finding its axis, a pendulum finding its swing, a mechanism engaging.

This did not mean he was happy. Happiness was not the word. The word was — he did not have the word. Engaged was close. Present was close. Regulated was closest, though it sounded clinical, sounded like medication, sounded like something you did to a utility rather than something you felt in your chest, but regulated was what he felt, the feeling of his energy being converted into something useful, something measured, something that ticked, and the conversion was the shop and the bench and the tools and the work, and the escapement that regulated the conversion was — what? Alistair? The craft itself? The simple daily discipline of sitting down and picking up a tool and making a broken thing work?

He did not know. He cleaned the cuckoo clock's pivots and he did not know.

At six o'clock he turned off the lamp. He counted the clocks. Five finished: the grandmother clock, the carriage clock, the desk clock (Martin Leveque's — he needed to call Leveque), the schoolhouse regulator, the wall clock (Polly Arsenault was coming tomorrow). Two in progress: the cuckoo clock (waiting for bellows) and — he had not started the next one yet. The Elgin pocket watch. Thomas Wren's. The one with the cracked crystal and the crown that did not engage.

He would start it tomorrow, after Polly came.

Nine more. The shop was filling. The ticking was louder now, five clocks overlapping, five mechanisms keeping their own time, and when Henry turned off the lamp and stood in the dark the sound was like rain, like a forest, like something organic and multiple and alive, and he stood and listened and the clocks ticked and the shop breathed and the day ended the way the day ends, by becoming another day, by ticking over, the count wheel advancing one notch, the date changing, the calendar turning, the mainspring a little more unwound, the energy a little more spent, and Henry climbed the stairs and ate dinner and went to bed and below him the clocks kept time in the dark, faithfully, indifferently, for no one and for everyone and for the shop and for the memory of the man who had wound them and promised to fix them and could not and for the man who was fixing them now, the son, the boy who came back, the hands that did what the father's hands could not.

---

Polly Arsenault came at ten the next morning. She was in her sixties, short, round, wearing a green coat and a knitted hat, and she carried a canvas tote bag as if she expected the clock to be small enough to fit in it, which it was not.

"The wall clock," she said.

Henry took it from the shelf. He held it out to her. She took it with both hands and held it at arm's length and looked at the face and the pendulum and the walnut case and her eyes were bright and her mouth was set in a line that was not a smile but was the thing just before a smile, the preparation for a smile, the winding of the spring.

"It's ticking," she said.

"It is."

"It hasn't ticked in — I don't know. 2013? Before that. It stopped ticking before I brought it in. The pendulum swung but there was no tick. No — nothing. Just the swinging."

"The cannon pinion was loose," Henry said. "The friction fit. The part that connects the movement to the hands."

Polly looked at him. "So the clock was running the whole time? Inside?"

"Yes. The movement was fine. It was just the connection to the hands. The internal mechanism was keeping perfect time. It just couldn't show it."

Polly held the clock against her body. The ticking was audible, a small steady sound against the green coat.

"My grandmother would have loved that," she said. "She would have said it was like a person who knows the truth but can't speak it. She was like that — my grandmother. She knew things. She saw things. But she couldn't always say them. She was from a generation that didn't — that kept things inside. That let the pendulum swing and the hands not move."

Henry took the sixty dollars. Polly put the wall clock in the tote bag, which was not big enough, and the clock stuck out of the top like a baby in a carrier, the face looking up at the ceiling, the pendulum still, and she carried it out the door and the bell rang and she was gone.

Two clocks returned to their owners. Twelve on the shelf and the wall. Nine still to repair.

Henry sat at the bench. He picked up the next ticket.

Thomas Wren. January 17, 2014. Pocket watch, Elgin. Crystal cracked. Crown does not engage.

He opened the drawer where Alistair kept the pocket watches. There were three in the drawer — the Elgin, a Hamilton railroad watch that had been in the drawer since before Henry arrived and that had no ticket and no story and that Alistair had simply kept, the way people keep things, without reason, without plan, just the keeping — and a third, at the back of the drawer, in a small velvet pouch.

Henry took out the Elgin. He did not take out the velvet pouch. He knew what was in the velvet pouch. He was not ready for the velvet pouch. The velvet pouch was the last thing, the final clock, the fourteenth repair, and he was on the eighth, and there was an order, and the order was the discipline, and the discipline was the regulation, and the regulation was the thing that kept him from unwinding all at once.

He closed the drawer.

He held the Elgin in his palm. It was warm. Not from use, not from a pocket, just from the drawer, from the ambient warmth of the shop, but it was warm, and it sat in his hand like a small animal, round and heavy and still, and Henry opened the case and looked at the movement and began.