The Home for Wayward Clocks (21 page)

As soon as James read that last word, he felt his stomach rumble. The last time he ate was at lunch yesterday. He looked up at Ione who laughed. She took the notebook.

“I’m sure you haven’t had brekfast,” she said. “I’ll go see what I can russle up.”

Breakfast, James said silently, and rustle. “There are doughnuts in the cabinet. They’re yesterday’s day-olds, from the bakery. And there’s coffee too.”

She wrinkled her nose. Then she and Neal left and James was alone.

Really alone.

He looked around at all his clocks and for the first time, he felt friendless among them. They all talked to each other, curved in a circle that didn’t include James. He couldn’t hear them and they stared at him with blank faces. They held themselves back and all that was left was this awful hollow silence. No ticking. No rhythm. Nothing to keep James company. Nothing to keep James steady.

A flash of gold caught his attention and he looked at the bedside table. The dancers whirled away there, to the left, to the right, then to the left again. It was nine o’clock, the top of the hour, and no one, not even this sad clock that belonged to James’ mother, said anything to him. This clock knew James better than anyone else and it couldn’t reach him.

James hesitated, then firmly put his bandaged hand into the center of the pendulum. The clock stopped.

Closing his eyes, James thought about stopping other clocks. Felix, the cat he just fixed. The dwarf tall clock in the living room. The steady forward-moving plain-faced office clock.

James thought about stopping them all.

They couldn’t talk to anyone but him. They wouldn’t.

S
omeone touched his shoulder and James opened his eyes. Ione stood there with a tray. Behind her, Cooley carried two mugs of coffee. James sat up and Ione nestled the tray over his knees. He looked at it, wondered where it came from. He didn’t own any such thing, breakfast in bed was ridiculous. Cooley placed one mug in front of James, then handed the other to Ione. She smiled at James, pointed to the tray, then patted her chest.

Cooley brought it over.

The food smelled really good and his stomach growled again. Scrambled eggs, bacon, two pieces of toast spread with butter and jelly. James knew he didn’t have any bacon in the house and the eggs were probably outdated. “Where did all of this come from?” he asked out loud.

Ione pointed her mug at Cooley, who shrugged. She grabbed the notebook. “Mr. Simmons gave me all this stuff,” she wrote.

Gene and Molly too. James thought about resisting. About telling Ione and Cooley to go away, throwing the food across the room, going downstairs and getting his usual day-old doughnut. But it just smelled too damn good. And some odd internal voice told James that maybe if he ate well, ate healthy, his ears would get better faster. He needed his ears to get better.

While James ate, Ione and Cooley talked. James saw their mouths moving, saw their shoulders shake in laughter. His fork fell a few times, slipping through his bandaged fingers, and they looked over, concern on their faces. But he wasn’t about to let himself be fed. Then Cooley took the notebook again. “Sum clocks stopped. Do U want me 2 wind them?”

James froze and the food he just ate threatened to come back up. His heart slid, fell off rhythm, then began to jump over hurdles. James knew it was just that some clocks were due to be wound, he knew it, but somehow, it felt like he killed those clocks with his thoughts. He only thought about stopping them and they stopped.

James squeezed his eyes shut. He had to wind the clocks. He was the clock-keeper, not a clock-killer.

Ione patted his arm and he looked at her, startled. “Oh-kay,” her lips formed. James thought for a moment of the rhythm of her heart against his cheek. He imagined it now, steady as if a clock tapped him gently with its pendulum, and he slowed that pendulum down until his heart met it, beat for beat. When James felt settled again, he pushed the tray away. “I have to wind those clocks,” he said. “There are others that will be due too.”

Then he stared at his hands. At his fingers, stiff in the bandages.

Ione took the notebook. “Let Amy Sue help you,” she said. “She helps me out every weekand at the store. She’s very carful with the clocks, never broke a won. Let her help.”

Weekend, careful, one. James put the notebook in his lap and wished for a red pen. His mother’s anniversary clock sat unmoving beside him, still exposed, still unprotected, the dancers holding their breaths. The clocks weren’t safe. What choice did he have? It was either let Cooley do the winding or let all those clocks die. One by one, all around him. It wouldn’t matter if his hearing never came back; there’d be nothing to hear anyway. Carefully, James poked out a bulky finger and started the pendulum on his mother’s clock. It hesitated, then swung into its rhythm. It was still alive. He had to find a replacement dome.

James looked at Cooley. “Why aren’t you in school?”

Cooley said something, then Ione wrote on the notebook. “Perent/teacher confrences,” James read. He wondered about that, wondered if Cooley was skipping school and using him as an excuse.

Then he thought about the tourists. Alarmed, he grabbed for the notebook, but Ione immediately began scribbling again. “It’s OK,” she wrote. “We closed the Home just until you get back on your feet again. You can reopen on Monday.”

No tourists. Mixed blessing; no other people traipsing through the house, but no revenue either. James sighed and threw back the covers. “Come on then, Cooley,” he said. “I’ll have to show you what to do.” Ione grabbed at his arm, trying to pull him back into the bed, but he shook her off. “Ione,” he said, the name foreign on his tongue. He wondered how it sounded. “It’s not just the stopped clocks that have to be wound. There are others. Some get wound every day. I’ll have to show Cooley which clocks they are and where I keep the keys. It’s too complicated, I can’t do it from here.” James’ tongue felt clumsy and he wondered if he was forgetting how to talk. Ione frowned, but then she crossed the room to the closet. She looked through the clothes, finally pulling out a robe. She must have understood. While James stuck his arms into the sleeves, Cooley looked under the bed and found James’ slippers. They were useless though; his bandaged feet were too fat to fit. James kicked the slippers back under the bed, a move he instantly regretted as pain shot up through his toes to his ankle. He let loose a string of curses that made Ione turn away and Cooley smile. “Sorry,” he said when the pain slid away. Then they went downstairs, James leading the way, Cooley taking up the end, Ione in the middle, carrying the tray.

Cooley and James left Ione in the kitchen and moved on toward the office. James couldn’t help but notice that everything was cleaned and put back in its place. The bucket and rags were gone, the floor as clean as could be. There was no sign of last night’s nightmare. Even the knife was gone. James shuddered, then glanced automatically at his security cameras. Except for Ione in the kitchen, all the rooms were empty.

Fetching the clipboard, James flipped it to the appropriate day. “Here,” he said to Cooley, handing her the schedule. “This is a list of everyone that needs to be wound. I have them all organized into groups. Clocks that need to be wound every day, clocks that are 5-day, 8-day, 31-day, and so on.”

Cooley seemed to study the list. The tilt of her head reminded James of Diana, the way she used to pore over books, the way she used to pore over him, and he quickly looked away. “I keep all the keys and notes on the individual clocks in here.” James pointed to the old card catalogue. Quickly, he explained how it was organized, according to the type of clock and the amount of time required between windings. When he was done, Cooley shook her head. “What?” he asked. “It’s really very simple, anyone could understand it. Don’t you get it?”

She glared, then found a pen. James flinched when she wrote at the bottom of the schedule. He never wrote on the schedules, that way, they could be used over and over, until a new clock had to be added to the list. Then he retyped each of them.

“U should buy a computer,” James read. “Way easier.”

He sighed. “I don’t need a computer. It’s easy. I never have a problem.” Checking the schedule, James turned to the card catalogue to start collecting the day’s keys. But he couldn’t wrap his fingers around the tiny handles of the drawers.

Cooley touched his shoulder, then opened a drawer herself. One by one, checking the list, going back to the card catalog, writing questions on the schedule, she collected the keys. There were twenty-seven clocks to be wound that day. James showed her how to sort the keys by room, using individually marked keyrings. He had her take the index card for each clock out of the drawer, tucking it into her back pocket for reference. James didn’t need them, but she might. She was the one who needed to learn.

They started in the living room. A mantel clock waited for them, as well as an 800-day and a cuckoo. It was odd for James, odd and uncomfortable and disconcerting, seeing someone else wind his clocks. Seeing Cooley. “Be careful!” he called out more than once. “You wind, you don’t crank!” She snarled back at him, her lips curled, saying God knows what, he couldn’t hear, but she eased up, her fingers relaxing, her wrist going soft. The clocks needed a gentle touch, not a bully.

James let her stand in front of the cuckoo clock a good long while. He could see her trying to figure out which key belonged and where it would fit. Her shoulders braced, she was so determined not to ask for help. When her eyebrows descended in a dark cloud, forming a black V, and her fingers began frantically flinging the keys around the ring, James spoke up. Softly. “There’s no key for a cuckoo clock, Cooley,” he said. “See the weights? It’s driven by weights and pulleys. You pull on the three chains. One chain controls the hands, one controls the pendulum and one controls the cuckoo bird.” She stared, then put the keys down on a table. There was a resigned set to her shoulders as she began carefully tugging on the chains. “Easy,” James said. “It’s like you’re pulling on the clock’s heartstrings.” He could tell she was frustrated; he knew she thought she’d never get it. He’d never admit it to anyone, but he stripped enough gears when he was learning about clocks. There might even be a few clocks in the backyard cemetery that were the results of his first unknowledgeable and clumsy attempts. But no one would ever know. No one except Diana, he corrected. He wondered if she ever told anyone. He wondered where she was. She would certainly be a help right now. Though she was an old lady. Old, like him. That was hard to imagine.

Cooley’s fingers on the chains reminded James of Diana’s; long, slender, tiny-knuckled. A purple-stoned ring glimmered from Cooley’s left hand and he remembered Diana’s ring. He remembered the coolness of her skin as he slid it onto that finger, that steady finger that never shook or pointed or jabbed. It was just a promise ring, a tiny silver band with threads of turquoise running through it in waves, but it was all James could afford at the time, with the Home so new. He knew that Diana understood what it meant, what he wanted it to be. She took the ring with her when she left. James wondered if she wore it now, the silver embedded in the wrinkles of a much older, heavy-knuckled hand.

Diana used to wind the clocks, back when the Home was young. There weren’t nearly as many clocks as now. And back then, it wasn’t just James’ bedroom that was sealed off, but theirs, the one they shared. He didn’t want the tourists to see the bed Diana always forgot to make, the sheets still twisted like their bodies the night before.

James wasn’t as worried about the clocks then, as long as they ran, as long as their ticking filled his ears. He needed to be around that sound. He could trust Diana to wind them, to look at him over her shoulder as she did so and laugh. Her sound as sweet as any Westminster chime.

Then she broke a clock, overwound it so the spring sagged and drooped out of the bottom of the base. And instead of burying the clock, James discovered the excitement of searching for parts, digging through backrooms of clock shops or into piles of discarded, disemboweled clocks at the flea markets. He fixed that clock by himself and then moved on to fix others, putting them back together, filling the Home with the noise that kept his blood flowing, his heart beating. And Diana came along for the ride, she tried to keep up. But she couldn’t.

Nobody could. Not even a young girl. James looked at Cooley now, standing in front of the cuckoo clock, smiling as the bird popped out and chirped its gratitude.

“This is only temporary,” he said, as much to himself as to her. “Only until I get these damned bandages off.”

Eventually, they worked their way to the back east bedroom. The birdcage clock was on the list and James stood under it, saving it for last, while Cooley moved around to the others. He craned his neck to see the clock’s face, flat against the bottom of the cage, and he was relieved to see it was still on time. It was almost the top of the hour and in a few minutes, the golden bird in the cage would start to sing. It wasn’t one of the ones that stopped; James didn’t have the heart to ask Cooley which ones she saw, which ones fell silent when he wished them dead. He would find them on his own and he would fix them, if he had to remove his bandages himself. It was his fault they stopped. He would show them that the clock-keeper could still be trusted.

Cooley joined James and together, they craned their necks. Birdcage clocks were unusual, crafted in Switzerland near the end of the eighteenth century. James always figured they were popular until people began to complain of perpetual pains in their necks. The only way to truly see the time was to stand directly under the cage and look up. The clock face couldn’t be seen from across the room; you only saw the bird cage. The discovery of the clock was often a great surprise.

This clock was delicate and gold, the bars made from thin braids. They were far enough apart that the bird could easily have flown away, if it chose to, and it looked like it was in the act, its wings spread as it stretched from its perch. The birdsong was actually a music box, so the bird’s voice was a twinkly tinny unrecognizable tune. But it was cheerful and the bird always called to James at the top and halfway through the hour. It was like having spring caught in a cage, always ready to perform. James’ clock was unusual in that it also chirped the hour. Most birdcage clocks just sang; you didn’t know the time unless you stood under it and looked up.