James felt that the key to the town of What Cheer should have meant something. The promise that the Home for Wayward Clocks would remain open when he was gone should have made him feel safe, should have made him feel that the clocks were safe, in good hands. But the council just couldn’t imagine the need to have someone live there, in the museum, to be with the clocks through the day and into the night.
James knew the need. The clocks did too. He felt their gratitude as he tended to them. But it was more than tending. You just don’t leave your family alone and unprotected at night.
James found the graveyard clock in the exact center of the fireplace mantel on the second floor. He thought of it sitting on a grave late at night in the dark, the fresh dirt pulling at its legs. Did it worry about being buried? About being pulled under, trapped away from the light and the air? James imagined that it did, and he knew how it felt to be held in the cold underground. Did it think its voice would never be heard again, its heart stilled with the crumbling of the grave, a dead hand wrapped around the pendulum? Around the clock’s heart? James deliberately kept this clock in the center of the mantel, where it could feel the warmth from the noonday sun falling in the windows, where it could draw in the heat from a late-night fire, the flames flickering in playful shadows on the wall.
James wanted this for all his clocks. To feel warm and safe and secure. And to know that someone was always close by. To know that the closing of a door, the click of a lock, didn’t seal in loneliness forever.
I
didn’t even notice his name at first. I read the obituaries for years and learned to block out those capital-lettered names until I found what I needed to know:
Were they my age?
What did they die of?
When I found someone younger, I felt lucky and thought, There but for the grace of God goes me. When it was someone older, I thought it was his or her time and I hoped and prayed that I made it even longer. Even longer than the ones that said one-hundred and two. But when there was someone my age, I had to read what killed them. It was usually the cancer and then I wondered if it was after me too. Only then did I look at the name. I would sound it out, compare it to my own, add up syllables, vowels, consonants, and feel relieved when our names didn’t match up. I could always find some way that we were different. And then I felt I would have at least one more day to live. To wait.
So at first, the name whipped by, a blur of block letters. I saw my age so I read the cause. Prostate cancer. And I let out a breath because that’s one thing that can’t get me. Us women seem to have an overabundance of spaces and places that fall victim to the cancer, so I’m always glad when I find a kind that has no choice but to leave me alone. But then I looked at the name.
And I thought, It can’t be. And then I thought, Oh, no. Because it was Jerry. And Jerry wasn’t ever supposed to die.
For a while, I just stared at his name, printed so fine, like a title in bold black. His proper name always did have a high class ring to it: Gerald R. Endicott. It was that “cott” that did it. There’s just something almighty about it. But he was always Jerry to me.
I scanned the rest of the obituary. He was survived by his wife and three sons and five grandchildren. And me, I wanted to add. He was survived by me, though I never in my life wanted to live on this world without him someplace on it.
And suddenly, it was like that world hollowed out. Like all the insides just fell away, leaving only the sky and ocean blue shells with the crusts of green and yellow land. I was scattered like the dirt of the world; there was suddenly no possibility of Jerry to fill me.
I wandered into the living room and sat on the couch. I wondered if I should go to the funeral, if I could say goodbye. I hadn’t seen Jerry face to face in over fifty years; no one at his funeral would know me.
Fifty years. Yet every day, Jerry walked with me to my mailbox, he drove with me across town to the hardware store or the dress shop. He told me what to buy, what tool to use, what looked good. When I sat down to eat my supper, he sat across from me and made me laugh with tales from his workday. And at night, I always slept on the left side of the bed, leaving the right side for him.
On my mantel was the old clock Jerry and I found when we were sixteen. We were wandering through the graveyard, figuring on finding a hidden shady spot to fool around, when we found this clock on someone’s grave.
“That’s really weird,” I said and I squatted down to give it a closer look. The clock wasn’t working; one of its hands hung loose while the other seemed soldered on the number four.
Jerry knelt next to me. “Pretty though,” he said, even though it wasn’t. “Like you.” Then he lifted the thing up. It was so heavy, it made him grunt. “I’m going to give it to you, to show you that I’m yours for all time.”
He carried it to the far back corner of the graveyard, then set it under a tree. It was there and then that I let him do all the things he ever wanted to do. He was mine for all time and I was so grateful and in love that there didn’t seem to be any reason to say no anymore. After-ward, we lay in the grass, his entire body pressed against my bare back, his arm around my middle and his hand between my breasts and over my heart. And I reached out and held the loose hand on the clock. I wanted to thank it. The time it brought me sealed the deal with Jerry. He was mine for all time. He thought I was beautiful.
We brought the clock to my home, taking turns carrying it and sometimes each holding an end and carrying it together. Then Jerry kept my mama busy talking in the kitchen while I stumbled with it up the stairs and hid it on the floor of my closet, under a jumble of clean clothes I always forgot to hang up.
My mama found it, of course. I told her we got it at the junkyard and she told me to get rid of it. I said no, because Jerry said it was pretty like me. She shook her head, but she let me keep it then. She understood about me and Jerry. She always said a girl like me was lucky to get a guy like him. The day he left for college, she cried. I didn’t. I knew he’d be back, even if she said he wouldn’t. The clock sealed the deal; he was mine for all time.
That clock sat on my bedroom dresser the four years Jerry was away and I stayed home and worked at the Super Mart. And it came with me when I moved into my own place above the store. I kept the clock, even though I hadn’t heard from Jerry much in most of those four years. I kept it because I had to prepare a place for him and me and the clock held our time together. I brought it with me to the few other places I lived and it’s been on this mantel since I bought the house when I turned thirty-five. I was tired of waiting on Jerry to buy us a house so I decided just to make the decision for him. Only widow women and divorcees and old maids owned homes, I thought, but I told myself I wasn’t one of those, I was just waiting on Jerry, and I went out and bought one anyway.
I knew what happened to him. I saw his graduation announcement in the paper and I attended the ceremony, way in the back row. He got a job a state away and eventually, I followed him there and got a job too, head cashier in the grocery store. I hoped I would bump into him, that he would come through my line and I would smile and he’d remember to come home. I about died when I read his wedding announcement. I thought about going, like I did to his graduation, but I just couldn’t. I’d have to go home and my mama would be there and she would give me that look that told me she’d been right all along. I knew I should give up then, like my mama said, but I never did. I figured he was smart enough to realize he made a mistake. And I figured his wife could always die. Women get the cancer everywhere. Like my mama.
His house was about two miles away from mine. He had his three boys and sometimes, I drove by on a Sunday afternoon, just to see them playing football in the front yard. I decided they were my sons by association. I wondered what would happen to them now.
The clock on the mantel chimed and I blinked away my dry-docked tears. That clock was beautiful now, completely different than when we found it. Years ago, before I followed Jerry to the next state, I brought it to a clock shop and museum. The guy there lived with clocks the way old women live with cats and I figured if anyone could fix it, he could. And he did. When I got it back, it was shiny and ticking and both hands clung to the right numbers. The biggest surprise was the chime; it rang four times an hour, Westminster, the clock guy said, and the sound was deep and sad, like it remembered the graveyard. It cost me my whole paycheck to have it fixed, but it was worth it; the clock ran perfectly after that. All I had to do was wind it every other week. Sometimes I forgot, but I noticed right away when that sound went missing. At night when I sat on my couch, I closed my eyes and pretended the clock’s voice was Jerry’s, telling me how pretty I was and how he was mine for all time.
And now, the clock was the only voice Jerry had left.
Looking at that clock, I felt sorta mad. I waited over fifty years for that man. He wasn’t supposed to die first, his wife was! Why, with all her secret organs and innards, didn’t she get the cancer? Maybe he didn’t eat right, maybe he didn’t exercise. It got him. It just got him. And now he wouldn’t ever be coming home and resting on the right side of the bed.
It felt like when he went to college and never wrote to me, even though he promised he would. That last night before he left, we lay together on the back seat of his car and he told me he’d write every day and call every weekend and come home whenever he could. He said it and I let him have me so many times because I wanted him to get his fill of me so he wouldn’t get hungry in school.
Maybe I shouldn’t have given him his fill. Free milk, my mama said. Maybe if I’d waited, he’d be waiting now, instead of me.
And then I got even madder. For four years, I wrote to him, but he never wrote back. I called him, but he was never there. I called his folks, trying to find out when he’d be home, but they said he was too busy at school. Too busy to come home at Thanksgiving? Too busy to come home at Christmas? For four years? My mama laughed.
I gave him his fill. He said I was pretty and he was mine for all time.
And then I got the maddest I’ve ever been in my whole life. I went up to that clock and I wanted to make it stop ticking and making its noise and talking to me the way Jerry did. But I didn’t know how; I just wound the clock a couple days before. There was no way to unwind it, no battery to pull out, no cord to yank from the wall. It wasn’t that kind of clock. So I hauled the thing forward and it tried to hold fast onto my mantel, digging big claw marks in the wood. I yanked it around, pointed the beautiful face away from me, and opened its back compartment. There were all sorts of moving parts there, a small round pendulum and little wheels and springs that went back and forth, and I grabbed each and every one. I pulled them out and I threw them around the room until there were no more moving parts and then I pulled out what was left. I heard the tings and pings as metal hit my walls, my lamps, my floor, but the one sound I listened for finally gasped and disappeared. The clock stopped ticking.
Panting, I shoved it back on the mantel, pressing its face against the brick of my chimney. I heard the scratch as the glass hit the rough surface. It wasn’t beautiful anymore, this clock. It wasn’t even pretty, like Jerry said it was when he gave it to me. It was a wreck.
I was wrecked. Jerry was wrecked forever.
Going back to my couch, I swept away all the clock parts and then I sank into the cushions. I looked at the clock shell and I shook. I was mad and sad at the same time and I wanted so much to cry, but my chest was clenched up and nothing would come out.
I kept looking at the clock until the dry heaves stopped. And I knew it wasn’t enough to tear it apart. It just wasn’t enough. I got up and on hands and knees that were suddenly old and creaky, I began to search for all the scattered clock parts.
I
stayed hidden behind our tree and watched as Jerry’s casket was lowered into the ground. Jerry returned to our home state for burial, wanting to be planted next to his mama and daddy, and my mama, though she was four rows over, and I returned with him, carrying the clock in a rolling suitcase on the plane. Security took forever. The clock was too heavy to carry for an old lady like me, an old lady getting older every day, every minute. There was just no need to be young anymore.
I saw the wife and I knew she would be next, as wrinkled and crinkled up as she was. She must have been crying, the way her shoulders moved and a hankie kept going up to her big nose, but no sound reached me. I thought maybe she had the cancer of the voice-box and couldn’t talk anymore. I gave up smoking thirty years ago so I’d never lose my voice.
I watched while they buried him and I watched while the diggers filled his hole up with dirt. Then I watched nothing, just the empty air around his stone, until it was too dark to see.
The clock and I rolled together over the dead people until I got to Jerry’s new grave. The clock pinged and rattled with every bump; I had found all those ripped-out pieces and stuffed them back inside.
Carefully, remembering to lift with my knees, I put the clock in front of Jerry’s stone. The clock sat on a grave just like so many years ago. This time, though, it sunk into fresh dirt. When Jerry and I found it, it was on bright green grass.
“I’m giving you back this clock, Jerry,” I said to the dirt. “I can’t believe I kept it all these years. But you gave it to me and you said it proved that you were mine for all time, so I thought it was a promise. I couldn’t throw away a promise.”
His stone was so stark. There was just his name and the dates of birth and death. No inscription, no fond remembrance. It made me sad, but at the same time, I had to push down a need to kick it.
“You were supposed to come back, Jerry. You promised. And I kept waiting…there were no other men. Not once.” And there weren’t. I never dated. No one else ever asked. No one else ever loved me.