Chapter 25: The Clock

The clock needed winding on Sundays. The spring that drove the mechanism — the mainspring, coiled in its barrel, the energy stored in the tension of the metal, the tension released through the gear train at a rate governed by the escapement and the pendulum, the rate precise, the rate producing the tick, the tick producing the time — the spring unwound over the course of seven days, and on the seventh day the spring was nearly spent, the tension nearly exhausted, and the clock needed winding or the clock would stop.

Nora had wound it every Sunday for twelve years. She had wound it with the brass key that came with the clock, the key that fit the winding arbor on the face, the small square hole above the six, and the winding was seven turns, always seven, the number she had determined through years of practice — seven turns brought the spring to full tension without overwinding, without putting excess stress on the mainspring, without the risk of breaking the spring that would end the clock's life as surely as the breaking of a wick mechanism ended a lamp's. Seven turns. She had known this. She had known it in her hands.

Now Eamon wound it. He drove to Harbor Hill every Sunday at ten in the morning, the drive a ritual within the ritual, the twenty-three miles on Route 1, the coast road, the road he knew in his body, and he arrived at the yellow Victorian and climbed the stairs to the second floor, south side, and he opened the door and she was there, in her chair or on her bed or standing at the window looking at the water, and he came in and he wound the clock.

He wound it with the brass key. He wound it seven turns. He wound it standing on his toes because the clock was high on the wall, hung high so that the pendulum had room to swing, and the winding was the reaching and the inserting and the turning, the key in the arbor, the spring tightening, the tension building, the energy being stored for the week, the seven days of ticking that the seven turns would produce, the one-to-one ratio of turns to days, the symmetry of it, the engineering of it, the simple mechanical fact that energy in equaled energy out and the equation balanced and the clock kept time.

This Sunday was a Sunday in late May. The light through Nora's window was the late spring light, warm, the angle of it shifting as the sun climbed higher each day, the light reaching further into the room, touching the far wall now where in February it had barely reached the windowsill, and the light was the measure of the season, the light the clock that the earth kept, the planet's winding as regular and as reliable as the key in the arbor, the earth turning and the seasons advancing and the light changing and the clock on the wall ticking in counterpoint to the clock of the sky.

Nora was in her chair. She was looking at the window, at the garden below, at the green that was everywhere now, the green of the spring, the leaves on the trees and the shoots in the beds and the grass in the lawn, and the green was the color of the returning life, the life that the winter had suppressed but not killed, the life that came back because the life always came back, because the earth tilted and the sun returned and the warmth returned and the seeds that had waited in the frozen ground felt the warmth and responded, and the responding was the green.

She turned when he came in. She looked at him. The looking was the looking of these weeks, these months since the move — the looking that was searching, that was reaching, the hand in the fog closing on a shape that was almost there, and the shape was his face and the face was familiar, was known in the place below the names, and the knowing was visible in her eyes even when the naming was not.

"Hello," she said.

"Hello, Nora."

"You brought bread."

He had. The loaf in the cloth, the Tuesday bread, baked two days ago, still fresh enough, the crust holding, the crumb dense enough to last, and she knew the bread before she knew the man, the bread arriving in her recognition the way the lighthouse arrived in a mariner's vision before the shore — the first thing seen, the identifying mark, the signal that said: you know this, you have seen this before, this is the thing that comes from the place where you used to be.

He set the bread on the table beside her chair. He went to the clock.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Winding the clock."

She watched him. He reached up, the key in his right hand, and he inserted it into the arbor and he turned it, one, and the spring took the turn and the tension increased, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and the spring was wound and the clock was wound and the week was set in motion, the seven days of ticking that would carry the time from this Sunday to the next, the bridge of hours and minutes and seconds that the mainspring would cross, tick by tick, and on the other side of the bridge the next Sunday waited, and on that Sunday Eamon would come again and wind the clock again and the bridge would be built again.

"You wind it on Sundays," she said.

"Every Sunday."

"I used to wind it."

He set the key on the table. He looked at her. The sentence — I used to wind it — was a sentence that contained a life, a past, a knowing that the present could not hold but that the past could still release, the way the fragrance of kerosene still came from the walls of the oil room in the tower, the scent embedded in the brick, persistent, independent of use, present long after the purpose was gone. She did not know who had wound the clock. She did not know that the clock had hung in the kitchen of the keeper's house for twelve years. She did not know that the winding had been her ritual, her Sunday duty, her version of the cleaning of the lens. But she knew that she used to wind it. She knew this in the place where the useds were stored, the deep archive, the memory that was not episodic but procedural, not the what but the how, not the story but the motion.

"You did," he said. "You wound it every Sunday. Seven turns."

"Seven turns."

"You taught me."

She looked at the clock. The pendulum was swinging, the tick steady, the sound filling the room with the rhythm that was her rhythm, the rhythm of the keeper's house, the rhythm that she had carried from the kitchen to this room, the rhythm transplanted like a cutting from a garden, the plant moved to new soil, and the plant had taken, the plant was growing, the clock was ticking, the rhythm was alive.

"Show me," she said.

He took the key. He held it out to her. She took it. She held it in her right hand, the way she had always held it, and she stood, slowly, the standing an effort, the body stiff from the chair, the joints slow to respond, and she went to the clock and she reached up, on her toes, and the reaching was the reaching of a woman who had done this ten thousand times, the posture familiar, the stretch familiar, the key in the hand familiar, and she inserted the key into the arbor and turned.

One. Two. Three.

The spring was already wound. He had wound it. The key was turning against a spring that was at full tension, and the turning required more force than it would have required against an unwound spring, and she felt the resistance, felt the stiffness, and she stopped.

"It's wound," she said.

"I wound it when I came in."

"Then why did you let me try?"

"Because you wanted to."

She lowered her hand. She held the key. She looked at the clock, the face of it, the white dial, the black numerals, the hands pointing to ten and fifteen, the time correct, the time kept, and she looked at the key in her hand, the brass key, the small object that connected her to the mechanism, and the holding of the key was the holding of the function, the function that had been hers.

"Keep the key," he said.

"You need it."

"I'll get another one. Keep that one."

She closed her fingers around the key. She held it in her fist, the brass warm from her hand, the key small enough to disappear in the grip, and she went back to her chair and sat down and the key was in her hand and her hand was in her lap and the clock was ticking and the room was the room and the Sunday was the Sunday.

He sat in the visitor's chair. He broke the bread. He gave her a piece and took a piece and they ate, the bread good, the flavor developed, the culture maturing with each week, each feeding, each baking, the bread becoming more itself with each iteration, the way any maintained thing became more itself with time, the patina deepening, the character accumulating, the surface telling the story of the use.

"This is good bread," she said.

"Thank you."

"Where does it come from?"

"I make it. At home."

"Where is home?"

"On a point. In the bay. There's a lighthouse."

"A lighthouse."

"A lighthouse. With a lens. I clean it every morning."

She ate her bread. She chewed slowly, tasting it, the taste reaching the places that the words could not reach, the taste connecting to the feelings that the names could not find, and the taste was the taste of home, of the kitchen, of the windowsill, of the culture that she had started and he had continued, and the taste was the thread, the warp, the line that ran from this room in Rockland to the kitchen on the point and that the disease could not cut because the disease did not operate in the place where taste was stored, in the ancient brain, in the first brain, the brain that had evolved before language, before names, before the capacity to forget.

An aide came at eleven, a young woman named Sarah, the garden aide, the woman who worked with the residents in the beds and the paths, and Sarah said, "Nora, we're going to the garden. Would you like to come?" and Nora said, "Yes," and she stood, and as she stood she put the brass key in the pocket of her robe, the blue robe, the robe with the thin elbows, and the key was in the pocket where the list had been, the pocket that had held the navigational chart, the buoys in the channel, and the list was gone now, the list was in the log in the tower on the point, but the key was there, the key was the new thing in the pocket, the new marker, the new buoy.

Nora went to the garden. Eamon watched from the window of her room, the window that looked out at the garden below, and Nora was in the garden with Sarah and they were kneeling at the beds and Nora's hands were in the soil and the hands were working, the hands that remembered the soil and the roots and the weeds and the difference between the thing that was growing and the thing that was not, the hands that knew the garden the way Eamon's hands knew the lens, through repetition, through practice, through the ten thousand acts that wrote the knowledge into the muscle and the bone.

He watched her work. He watched from the window the way he had watched from the gallery — from above, at a distance, the keeper's vantage, the elevated perspective that allowed him to see the whole without being in it, the seeing that was his form of participation, the watching that was his form of presence, and the presence was the love, and the love was the watching, and the watching was the keeping.

He left at noon. He left without saying goodbye because saying goodbye required the first saying of hello and the hello had not been the hello of a wife to a husband but the hello of a woman to a man who brought bread, and the goodbye would be the same, would be the goodbye of a woman to a man who wound her clock, and the man who wound the clock was not the same as the husband in the woman's mind even though the man was the husband and the husband was the man and the distinction was the disease, was the fog, was the gap that widened with each visit, the boat drifting further from the dock.

He drove home. Route 1. He stopped at the hardware store in Rockland. He bought a clock key, a brass key, the same size, a standard size for schoolhouse clocks, the key that fit the arbor, the key that turned the spring, and the key was a dollar ninety-five and the key was the replacement and the replacement was necessary because the original was in Nora's pocket, was in the pocket of the blue robe, was held in the hand that had wound the clock for twelve years, and the holding was the keeping, and the keeping was hers.

At the point he went to the tower. He climbed the seventy-two steps. He sat at the desk. He lit the brass lamp. He opened the log.

1330. Clear. SW 5-10. Temp 59. Barometer 30.12. Visited N. Bryce, Harbor Hill. Clock wound. Bread delivered. N. Bryce participated in garden work. Name not recognized. Bread recognized. Clock winding recognized. Clock key given to N. Bryce, replacement purchased. Connection maintained. Keeper on watch.

Clock winding recognized. The entry said what the entry said. The winding was recognized. The act was known. The motion was remembered. The hands reaching up, the key inserting, the turning — these were stored in the place where the disease had not gone, in the procedural memory, in the body's archive, and the archive was intact, the archive held, and the holding was the thing, the holding was the last holding, the holding of the body when the mind had let go.

He closed the log. He blew out the lamp. He went down. He went to the house. The kitchen was quiet. The counter had the jar with the starter, the jar on the windowsill, the culture fed, the culture resting. The wall had the rectangle where the clock had been, the paint slightly different, the wall remembering.

He took the new key from his pocket. He held it. The brass was cold, was new, was without the patina of twelve years of Nora's hand, was without the warmth of her grip, was a new key for an absent clock, a replacement for a thing that was not here, and the key was functional, the key would work, the key would turn the spring, and the spring was in Rockland, and the clock was in Rockland, and the woman was in Rockland, and the key in his hand was the key to a clock that was twenty-three miles away.

He put the key in the desk drawer of the keeper's office, with the tide charts and the spare pencils and the brass tacks and the small tools and the list. The list and the key. The navigation chart and the winding mechanism. The things that Nora had given him, the things she had placed in his keeping, the things that were hers and that he held for her because she could not hold them herself, because the holding required the remembering and the remembering was the thing the disease was taking and the taking was the trajectory and the trajectory was the trajectory.

He stood at the desk in the keeper's office, in the tower, on the point, and outside the window the bay was blue and the light was the May light and the day was Sunday and the clock in Rockland was ticking and the clock in the keeper's office was silent and the silence was the absence and the absence was the presence and the presence was the love.

He went to the house. He went to the kitchen. He fed the starter. It was not a feeding day — it was Sunday, the feeding days were Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday — but he fed it anyway, because the feeding was the thing he could do, the one thing, the maintenance, the attention, and the culture accepted the feeding the way it accepted every feeding, without judgment, without schedule, without the knowledge that the feeding was unscheduled, the culture simply receiving the food and consuming it and growing, and the growing was the living, and the living was the thing.

He stood at the windowsill and watched the culture absorb the flour and the water, the surface dimpling, the paste incorporating, the feeding happening, and the feeding was the winding, and the winding was the keeping, and the keeping was the love, and the love was the thing that the clock measured but could not contain, the thing that the time counted but could not account for, the thing that ticked and ticked and ticked in the room in Rockland and in the kitchen on the point and in the man who drove between them every day, carrying bread, carrying the key, carrying the love that was larger than the mechanism, larger than the spring, larger than the seven turns that wound the week.