A
nd so learning is difficult for you. Imagine not knowing the alphabet, not knowing there even is such a thing. Imagine recognizing the sound of numbers, but only as warnings that thrust from your mother’s mouth as she counts backwards. “You have five seconds to get to the root cellar, young man! Five…four… three…” You never hear the two, one; by then you are running, tumbling down the steps into the darkness, because if you get there before she finishes the countdown, you usually escape a beating and only have to tolerate the twin thunderclaps of the root cellar doors being shut, and the scrape of a tree branch as it’s pushed through the latch. Being alone in the dark is scary, but not as bad as being alone while the welts on your skin burn so badly, you can’t imagine why they don’t glow in the dark. Why they don’t throw up huge red beams of pain, bringing a firestorm to the underground damp of the root cellar.
School pulls you, lures you away with the promise of pleasure and brightness and sound from the awful familiarity of home. You try so hard. You watch the others, you listen to your teacher, and you begin to make headway. By the end of kindergarten, you not only know your letters, but you are reading. And it is something you love to do. The weekly class trip to the school library is a treasure and you always carry home your carefully chosen book gripped tightly in both your hands. But sometimes, you don’t get to read it. Sometimes, if you accidentally sound out a word that you don’t recognize and your voice shatters the silence into shreds of consonants and vowels, your mother tears the book away from you, tosses it across the room, and down to the root cellar you go. Sometimes for days.
You take to quickly reading your library book on the bus ride home. If you get to read it again, and again, it’s a gift and so, so delicious.
Imagine.
Imagine doing all your homework silently. Imagine doing everything silently. You have to be invisible. But you try, because it is the only way to be, and you want to please your beautiful mother, even as you fail, and fail, and fail again.
Leaving kindergarten behind, you also have to leave behind the toy clock, but you harvest relationships with two others. The alarm clock in the root cellar, which you can wind all by yourself now, and your mother’s anniversary clock, visited on secret forays to her room while your mother sleeps on in the sun. The alarm clock becomes your brother, your best friend, and the anniversary clock grows into a friendly older woman who could have been your mother. Who you wish was your mother. In your mind, the clocks’ pendulums ripen into hearts and their voices express the deepest desires in their souls. In your soul. The clocks speak for you and to you and with them there, you imagine that your life is crowded with company. With love and concern and want and need. A developing history of picnics and county fairs, good-natured arguments and late-night whispered conversations. Family. A family so different from just you and your mother.
Imagine.
James could. Clocks provided warmth and warmth was what James needed. Clocks never used their hands and voices to hurt, and their bodies, round and square and rectangular and solid, never coiled like a cat on the floor. James could give them all the solace and comfort he learned to crave. The comfort and warmth he saw all around him as the kids whispered secrets and laughed and pushed each other on swings at recess. As they held each other’s hands and danced in dizzy circles around each other and around Maypoles and Ring-Around-The-Rosie. As they dashed past him after school to waiting mothers’ arms and embraces. James watched closely then, tried to imagine what it would be like to have slender arms encircle him, rosy lips plant a kiss on his cheek. He dreamed of his mother’s hair falling around his face and shoulders like a bright blonde cloak.
Instead, he embraced the steady ticking of a clock. And the clocks embraced him. They were always there. They were always with him, even in the dark. Even when he hurt. Especially when he hurt.
Imagine.
A
fter breakfast the next day, James checked his schedule to see who needed winding. There were quite a few and so he set about collecting the necessary keys from the old card catalog cabinet. The card catalog itself was a find, sold when What Cheer’s library went to a computer system instead of the old drawers full of cards. They sold off the cabinets, and the day of the sale, James made sure he was there early. Sure enough, they pulled one from way in the back; it was a beautiful thing, easily from the early nineteenth century. So he bought it and kept it in the control room, using it to store individual identification index cards and all the different keys for the clocks. Each clock was given a number when it moved into the museum. That number went on a card, along with where James bought the clock and when, and the clock’s location in the house. If there was a key, that was stored there too.
That day’s keys jangling from a ring attached to his belt loop, James traveled through all three floors of the house, stopping in several rooms. Nine o’clock came and went and he paid attention as the clocks chorused their glory. In the morning, the clocks’ chiming always reminded James of being in a church. There was a reverence as their voices raised in rooms filled with the early sun.
When the winding was finished, James looked out the front door. There were no cars parked on the street and nobody strolled on the sidewalk. He propped the door open, an invitation to tourists, but set the alarm so that anyone crossing over the threshold would be announced with the sound of a doorbell. Westminster chimes, of course. He could hear this down in his workshop and he wanted to get to work on the broken four-hundred day clock, the waltzer. All that was left was to set the new crystal and balance the movement, and then the clock would breathe again.
As James got to work, he remembered the estate sale where he bought the clock a few years ago. The man had it on a back shelf of the garage, almost hidden away, but James found it, as he found all abandoned clocks. It was lovely, just old enough to avoid the battery, and its version of “The Anniversary Waltz” was full-throated and pensive. James admired the way the four beveled crystals on the pendulum caught the sunlight.
There was no price tag, so he turned to the man. “How much for this clock?” he asked. He knew there was the possibility it wasn’t for sale, but in such instances, he always asked. Sometimes it only took that request to get someone to sell.
The man took the clock from James and held it for a moment. He opened his mouth and closed it and James stepped back, giving him room to make his decision. James never tricked anyone out of their clock; if the clock was loved, it was best left alone. But here, as it was shoved on a back shelf in a cold garage, James imagined that the clock didn’t feel loved and he wanted to make it warm. He knew that asking for its price would either earn him the clock or the clock an honored place back in its home. But then the man said, “Twentythree dollars.”
That was an odd price and amazingly low. James thought about offering more, just to be fair, but the man’s face, stiff with stoicism and yet with just a softening of sadness around the eyebrows and the mouth, made James reach quietly for his wallet. “I’m happy to pay it,” James said.
The man glanced at James, then looked away. “It’s silly, I suppose,” he said. “It’s how long we were married. Twenty-three years.”
James liked him for that, for translating those years into the clock’s worth, though James wondered why the years stopped, why the marriage was referred to in the past tense. Was the wife dead or just gone? It didn’t feel right to ask, so James quietly handed over the money and helped to pack the clock upright in a box. “It doesn’t need to stop running,” James said when the man reached out to stop the pendulum. “Let’s just pack paper around the dome and it should be fine. I don’t live far from here.”
James took over the clock’s packing, though the man kept his hands perched on the edge of the box. James felt the warmth of his touch, and maybe the missing wife’s too, dissipate from the clock’s brass base. He quickly said, “It’s a great day for an estate sale. Lovely weather,” to get the man’s mind off the memory being packed gently with paper.
The man nodded and turned away. “She left. Two days after our anniversary.”
James froze and despite his ministrations, the clock stopped running. The man’s shoulders were set, braced really, a straight line from the left to the right. But James saw a muscle quiver at the base of his neck. As the man trembled, James lifted the dome and pushed the crystal balls. The clock hesitated, but then swung back into motion. The man’s neck muscle smoothed and his shoulders relaxed and James resumed packing the box.
“I’m sorry,” James said. Those two words didn’t seem like much, but what else was there to say? James knew that cruelty couldn’t be soothed by words. Actions, whether leaving a husband or striking a child, left nothing but silence. James held the box against his chest.
“I bought her that clock for our tenth anniversary. I have the key taped to its base. Be sure to wind it on October first.”
He looked so forlorn that James held the box out. “Are you sure you want to sell it? It’s not big, it could fit anywhere…and it might help you. To remember.” James felt the clock inside hold its breath. “The good parts, anyway.”
“No,” the man said. “I can’t forget. Not the good or the bad. That’s the problem.” He crossed his arms. James hesitated a moment more, but the man closed his eyes. “Please take it,” he said.
And now this clock was broken and resting quietly on James’ workbench. James felt like he hadn’t taken care of it, not when someone was able to slip by and bring it harm. For a moment, James felt that seller, the deserted husband, standing behind him, watching him balance the crystal balls, trying to revive the clock, and he could see the accusation in his eyes. No clock deserved to fall, to go from secure to insecure, to hit the ground and feel the life knocked out of it. This clock still struggled to live, its three-balled limp quickly turned into a full and rolling sweep. James shoved the sad man out of his sight, out of his room, and watched the pendulum twirl, testing how long he would be able to detect the new crystal. It was a very close match, the same size, the same weight, but the clarity was just a little different. It wasn’t as old as the others and so the light that shot through was clear, not yellowed. After a couple dozen turns though, it became harder to pick out and James imagined the youth of that crystal ball spreading to the rest of the clock. It needed weight and balance…yet a shot of youth didn’t hurt either.
The pendulum paused longer than it should before it switched directions and so James opened the back, tightened and oiled the parts, set things to rights. He closed the door and nudged the pendulum again, then watched as the balls spun without a hitch, without a hesitation. That left only the matter of the glass dome replacement. This clock was a standard size and so that wasn’t a problem; James just fetched a spare from the skeleton closet and then covered the clock in safety and security. He felt the clock sigh then, echoing James’ own breath, felt the clock relax back into its life like a butterfly visiting its cocoon.
He carried it back to its customary place. Setting it firmly on the table, James made sure that all four legs were balanced, it was centered, not near any edges, and he promised it safety. He told it there was no need for fear and he asked for forgiveness. James failed once; it would never happen again. The clock’s breath quickly blended in with the others, its tick quiet and smooth. James wondered if it ever thought about the twenty-three year old marriage it represented. He wondered if it missed the man or his wife.
It wasn’t hard for James to imagine missing someone who hurt you so much. No matter what other people said. No matter if it didn’t make sense.
The top of the hour arrived and the clock, like the others, began to sing. James sat down and listened, hearing its voice above all the rest. The sound of its chime, a gentle ring, soft in timbre, deep in echo, offered James forgiveness. The volume grew, the voice deepened; this clock knew it alone had James’ attention. It sang for that wife, sad and cruel enough to leave, and it sang for that husband, wise enough to give her a beautiful clock for their anniversary, yet left ultimately alone. And it sang for the clock-keeper, in celebration of the sanctuary James provided.
It wasn’t alone. No one in that house was ever alone. James made sure of that.
When the clock’s song was over, when the choir fell silent again, James reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. There was the father’s check for four hundred and fifty dollars. Yet the clock was fine. James fixed it without any outlay. The clock was worth a little bit less now, with the not-quite-matching pendulum ornament. James held a four-hundred dollar profit.
He looked at the address on the check. The family was from Georgia. James thought about tucking the check into an envelope, sending it with a note of apology to that peaches and sunshine state, thick with accents like molasses.
But then he thought of the look on that boy’s face. And the touch of the mother’s hand, her voice soft as she said her son’s name. That family already had so much. So much that James couldn’t begin to imagine. And yet he still wanted it so badly, this unimaginable thing, that touch, that voice, that look; his fingers clenched into a fist, crumpling the check.
Carefully, James smoothed it, then returned it to his wallet. That much money could go a long way in fixing the broken or saving the lost and abandoned. That much money could keep this house running. And James too.
At least that was something.
A trip to the bank was in order.
L
iving in What Cheer, Iowa, the only time a car was needed was to get out. James could walk the length of the town in just fifteen minutes or so. He laughed when they put in the drive-through at the bank and he made a habit of walking through it. No one cared. James pretty much did whatever he wanted, since he saved the sorry little town. Even though he never intended to.