Chapter 7: The Cuckoo

The bellows arrived from Germany on a Monday, in a small brown box with customs stickers and stamps that told the story of their journey — Schonach to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to New York, New York to Burlington, Burlington to Montpelier — and Henry opened the box at the bench and lifted out the two bellows, each one wrapped in tissue paper, each one perfect, the leather supple and tight on the wooden frames, the air channels clear, and he held them in his hands and thought about the distance they had traveled, from the Black Forest where the original clock was made to a shop in Vermont where the clock had sat for sixteen years with its bird inside its box, waiting.

He had already cleaned and oiled the movement. He had already checked the chain and the weights and the striking train and the count wheel. The bellows were the last piece, the missing organ, the lungs that would give the bird its voice, and Henry set about installing them with the care of a surgeon transplanting a vital part, because the bellows had to be precisely aligned with the pipes, the air channels had to seal, the linkages had to move freely, and if any of these conditions was not met the bird would not sing, would emerge from its box and open its beak and produce silence, which was worse than not emerging at all, because a bird that tries to sing and cannot is a sadder thing than a bird that stays in its box.

He mounted the first bellows. The wooden frame fit into its cradle, the leather expanding and contracting as he pressed it with his finger, the air moving through the channel to the pipe, and the pipe sounded — a clear, high note, the upper note of the cuckoo's call, the first syllable, the cu of the cu-ckoo — and the sound was startling in the quiet shop, a sound that did not belong here, a sound from a forest, from a mountain, from a place where birds called from the tops of fir trees and the air smelled of resin and snow, not from a shop on Main Street in Montpelier where the air smelled of brass and oil and Darjeeling.

He mounted the second bellows. Pressed it. The lower note sounded — the ckoo, the descending minor third, the completion of the call — and the two notes together were the cuckoo, were the bird, were the small mechanical imitation of nature that had delighted and annoyed people for three hundred years, since the first cuckoo clock was made in the Black Forest in the 1730s by a clockmaker whose name has been forgotten but whose invention has not, an invention that turned a timepiece into a performance, a mechanism into a creature, a clock into a thing that lived, that breathed, that spoke.

Henry connected the linkages. He tested the mechanism. He wound the striking spring with the chain and pulled the trigger and the door opened and the bird emerged — the linden-wood bird with its painted feathers and its open beak and its black-dot eyes — and the bellows pumped and the pipes sounded and the bird said cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo and retreated and the door closed, and Henry counted: three. Three o'clock. He checked his watch. It was ten-fifteen in the morning. The count wheel was in the wrong position, which was easily fixed, a matter of advancing the wheel to the correct notch, and he advanced it and triggered the mechanism again and the bird emerged and said cu-ckoo ten times and retreated, which was — he checked his watch — wrong, it was ten-seventeen, not ten, but close enough to know that the count wheel was now in approximately the right position and would synchronize as the clock ran.

He hung the cuckoo clock on the wall, next to the schoolhouse regulator. The two clocks looked absurd together — the austere oak regulator with its clean lines and its institutional purpose, and the carved Black Forest cuckoo clock with its decorative vines and its little door and its whimsical bird — but they both ticked, they both kept time, they both did what clocks do, and the contrast was the contrast between function and performance, between the clock that tells you the time and the clock that announces it, between the clock that sits on the wall of a schoolroom and says this is the time, act accordingly and the clock that hangs in a kitchen and says this is the time, and isn't it delightful?

He wrote on the ticket: Repaired 10/28. New bellows (Kuckucksuhrenshop, Schonach). Full service — clean, oil, adjust. Chain drive serviced. Striking train synchronized. Bird emerges and calls correctly.

Then: Owner: Agnes Firth (deceased 2014). Son: Leonard, Portland OR. Daughter: Mary, Charlotte NC.

He would write to them. He did not have phone numbers for Leonard or Mary Firth, but he had names and cities, and he could write letters — actual letters, on paper, in envelopes, with stamps — because some communications deserve the weight of paper, the formality of an envelope, the deliberateness of a stamp, and telling someone that their dead mother's cuckoo clock has been repaired and is ready for collection is such a communication.

He sat at the bench and wrote two letters. He used the shop stationery — cream paper with OSGOOD & SON, MAIN STREET, MONTPELIER, VERMONT printed at the top, stationery that Alistair had ordered in 1982 and that still sat in a box in the drawer, the box nearly full because Alistair rarely wrote letters, preferring the phone, preferring the voice, the accent, the particular Somerset cadence that made everything he said sound more considered than it might have been — and Henry wrote:

Dear Mr. Firth (Mrs. Firth),

Your mother, Agnes Firth, left a cuckoo clock at our shop for repair in November 2010. I have completed the repair. The clock is running well and the cuckoo mechanism is functioning.

I understand that your mother passed away in 2014. I am sorry for your loss.

If you would like the clock, please contact me at the shop. If you do not want the clock, I will find it a home.

Sincerely, Henry Osgood Osgood & Son

He addressed the envelopes. He did not have street addresses, only cities, so he wrote Leonard Firth, Portland, Oregon and Mary Firth, Charlotte, North Carolina and he knew this was insufficient, knew the post office would return them, knew that a letter addressed only to a name and a city was a letter that would not arrive, but he wrote them and stamped them and set them on the counter because the writing was the point, the attempt was the point, the gesture of reaching out across the distance to say your mother's clock works now, your mother's bird sings now, and if the letters did not arrive then the gesture was still made, the way a clock still keeps time even if no one is in the room to read the dial.

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Seven clocks repaired. Seven voices ticking in the shop. The grandmother clock and the carriage clock and the desk clock and the wall clock on the shelf. The schoolhouse regulator and the cuckoo clock on the wall. The Elgin pocket watch on the shelf, its tick too small to hear from across the room but there, present, a whisper in the chorus.

Seven clocks, and the first volume of work was done, or nearly done — the first tranche, the first layer, the clocks that were repairable with skill and patience and parts from Merritt's in Maine and Kuckucksuhrenshop in Germany. The easy ones, if any of them could be called easy. The ones whose problems were mechanical, identifiable, solvable. A bent escape wheel. A cracked bezel. Dried oil. A broken suspension spring. A loose cannon pinion. A broken clutch spring. Collapsed bellows. Problems with names, problems with solutions, problems that could be described on a yellow ticket and resolved at a bench.

The next seven would be different. Henry knew this the way you know a thing you have been avoiding knowing, the way you know the weather is going to turn, the way you know a conversation is going to become difficult, the way you know that the road ahead is steeper than the road behind. The next seven clocks were the complications — the anniversary clock with its torsion spring and its glass dome, the bracket clock with its quarter-hour chime that was out of tune, the travel alarm that did not sound, the desk clock of the deceased Michael Corvin, the ship's clock with its jammed striking mechanism and its cracked bell, his mother's Ansonia, and the last one, the one in the velvet pouch, the one he was not ready for.

Complications. In horology, a complication is any function beyond simple timekeeping. A date display. A moon phase. A chronograph. A repeater. An alarm. A chime. The word comes from the Latin complicare, to fold together, and a complication is a folding-together of functions, a layering of mechanisms on top of the basic timekeeping train, and each complication adds complexity and fragility and beauty and the possibility of failure, because the more a clock does, the more ways it can break, the more surfaces there are for friction, the more springs there are to fatigue, the more wheels there are to wear, and the most complicated watches in the world — the Patek Philippe Supercomplication, the Vacheron Constantin Reference 57260 — are also the most fragile, the most temperamental, the most demanding of their keepers, like brilliant difficult people who require constant attention and give extraordinary things in return.

Henry was not afraid of complications. He had been trained by Alistair, who had been trained by his own father in Somerset, who had been trained by a master horologist in Bristol, and the training went back generations, a chain of hands teaching hands, and somewhere in that chain someone had taught someone how to repair a quarter-hour chime and how to adjust a torsion spring and how to tune a bell, and the knowledge had been passed down like a mainspring passed from barrel to barrel, the energy transmitted, the skill preserved.

But the complications were harder. Not just mechanically — emotionally. The anniversary clock was a wedding gift, probably. The bracket clock's chime was a voice, a sound that filled a room at quarter-hour intervals, a sound that became part of the household, part of the family, and when it went out of tune the family heard it, heard the wrongness, heard the discord, and bringing it to a clockmaker was like bringing a sick pet to a vet — you were bringing a member of the household, not just a machine. The ship's clock had a cracked bell, which meant its voice was broken, which meant it could not announce the watches, could not ring the hours, could not do the thing it was built to do on the thing it was built for, and Henry thought about voices and bells and the things that break when voices break.

And his mother's clock. The Ansonia that was not keeping time. The clock from the mantel on Elm Street, the clock that had ticked through Henry's childhood, the clock that Frances had brought to Alistair as if he were any clockmaker, the clock that Alistair had written a ticket for as if she were any customer, and the clock sat on the shelf and did not keep time and Henry had not yet opened it, had not yet looked at the mechanism, had not yet diagnosed the problem, because diagnosing the problem would mean fixing it and fixing it would mean returning it and returning it would mean going to the house on Elm Street and placing the clock on the mantel in the space where the lighter paint was and his mother would hear it tick and it would be the sound of the house with Alistair in it, the sound of the years when the clock was on the mantel and Alistair was in his chair and Henry was a boy and then not a boy, and the sound would be the same and nothing else would be the same and Henry did not know if this was a kindness or a cruelty.

He would deal with it later. He would deal with all of it later. For now, seven clocks were done and seven were waiting and the day was ending and the light was changing and the shop was full of the sound of ticking and the cuckoo clock was counting the hours and at three o'clock the bird emerged and said cu-ckoo three times and Marion came through the connecting door as if the bird had summoned her, as if the cuckoo were an announcement, a herald, a small wooden bird declaring that it was time for tea.

"I heard that," Marion said. She set the cups on the benches. "Agnes Firth's clock?"

"The bellows came from Germany."

"It sounds just like it used to. Agnes would bring it in sometimes — before she left it for repair, I mean — she would bring it in to show Alistair. She was proud of it. She said her husband bought it on their honeymoon. They went to Germany in 1962. Munich. The Black Forest. They bought the clock at a shop in Triberg, which is the cuckoo clock capital of the world, apparently. She said her husband carried it on the plane in his lap, all the way from Frankfurt to Boston, because he didn't trust the luggage handlers with it."

"It's a good clock," Henry said.

"She said the bird was the first thing her children heard every morning. It would cuckoo at seven and the children would wake up. She said they grew up thinking all birds said cuckoo. They were confused by robins."

Henry smiled. He did not smile often — not because he was unhappy but because smiling was a thing he did rarely, a thing he reserved, the way a clock reserves its striking for the hour, not because it cannot strike at other times but because the striking is more meaningful when it is measured — and Marion saw the smile and smiled back and they sat with their tea and the cuckoo clock ticked on the wall and the bird waited behind its door for the next hour and the shop was warm and the light was golden and the afternoon was the kind of afternoon that you do not notice while it is happening but that you remember later, years later, as a good afternoon, as an afternoon when things were right, when the clocks were ticking and the tea was hot and someone was telling you about a woman who carried a cuckoo clock home from Germany in 1962 and whose children thought all birds said cuckoo.

"Marion," Henry said.

"Yes."

"Why do you bring two cups?"

She looked at Alistair's bench. The cup sat there, steaming, untouched.

"Because I always brought two cups," she said.

"I know. But he's not here."

"I know he's not here."

"So why two?"

Marion picked up her cup and held it in both hands and looked at the steam rising and did not answer for a long time, and Henry waited, because Marion was a woman who answered when she was ready and not before, and the waiting was part of the answer, was part of the communication, the way a rest in music is part of the music, the way a silence in a conversation is part of the conversation.

"Because stopping would be an ending," she said. "And I'm not ready to end it. The two cups. The tea at three. The walk through the door. It's a ritual. It's the last ritual. Everything else has ended — the conversations, the companionship, the friend sitting at the bench. But the ritual is still here. The ritual is the container. And as long as the container exists, the thing it contained still has a shape. Still has — edges. A beginning and an end. Three o'clock. Two cups. The bench. If I stop bringing two cups, the shape dissolves. The edges blur. And then it's just — gone. Not ended. Gone."

Henry understood. He understood the difference between ended and gone. Ended was a clock that had stopped — it could be wound again, started again, the stopping was a pause, not a conclusion. Gone was a clock that had been destroyed — the mechanism broken beyond repair, the parts scattered, the case empty, the thing that had been a clock now nothing, no possibility of ticking again, no future, no resumption.

The two cups kept Alistair ended, not gone. The ritual preserved the shape of the friendship the way a clock case preserves the shape of the movement, even when the movement has been removed, even when the case is empty, the space inside is still the shape of what was there.

"I'll keep coming through the door," Marion said. "If that's all right."

"It's all right."

"And I'll keep bringing two cups."

"I know."

She finished her tea. She took her cup and left Alistair's cup. The cup sat on the bench and the steam rose and faded and the tea cooled and the afternoon ended and the clocks ticked and the cuckoo bird waited in its box for the next hour and Henry sat at the bench and looked at the seven finished clocks and the seven unfinished clocks and the drawer with the velvet pouch and the stool that held the shape of his father and the cup that held the tea that no one would drink.

He turned off the lamp.

He climbed the stairs.

Below him, the cuckoo emerged at five o'clock and called into the empty shop, five times, the two notes descending, cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo, cu-ckoo, and no one heard it except the other clocks, which did not hear it because clocks do not hear, do not listen, do not know they are not alone, and the bird retreated and the door closed and the shop was quiet except for the ticking, which was not quiet at all, which was the sound of seven mechanisms converting stored energy into measured time, which was the sound of the mainspring unwinding, which was the sound of the escapement regulating, which was the sound of the work so far, the first seven, the foundation, the beginning.

The mainspring. The first volume. The stored energy. The thing that drives the mechanism.

Now the complications.