And so you are born and your mother treats you like a dog. A runt, a whelp, a cur. Imagine being two years old and the collar around your neck feels as natural as your diaper. More natural, in some ways, and in some ways, more comfortable. Your mother often forgets to change your diaper. The soft puppy collar around your neck doesn’t hurt until she hooks you to the leash, drags you down the cement steps to the root cellar. Then it does hurt. Even when you run, you can’t keep up with her, and the steps are still hard for you to navigate. But as the collar digs in and your breathing constricts, you know it will end as soon as she drops you in the box, locks you in the cage. Then you can lie in the dark and listen to the clock tick, play with the little bell on your collar. The soft sounds are as smooth and soothing as a mother’s voice is meant to be.
Imagine.
Imagine being five years old and sent off to school for the first time because, your mother tells you, she has no choice and so you must go. You climb onto the school bus that day and you don’t know what to do, and so the driver leads you to a seat and pushes you into it. Surrounded by all the noise of happy raucous children fresh from a summer of lake swimming and playing in the park, you look out the window, try to catch a last glimpse of your mother. But she is inside already, the door closed, and you know she’s found a favorite sunny patch and has curled up to sleep.
At school, you touch the tender skin of your neck, free to the air, no collar there, it’s hanging on a hook in the root cellar, waiting for your return. You squint in the bright light of the kindergarten room and watch the children. Everything about them is foreign. They run from toy to toy, learning station to learning station, and you wonder what they are doing. There are blocks and magnetic letters and puzzles and big sheets of paper next to buckets of crayons. But you don’t know what any of these things are for. You head for the safety of a dim corner, out of the sun, and find a small clock toy, a toy that you can wind and it ticks and tocks and plays a little tune and it feels familiar, so you sit facing the corner, turn your back to all the others, to all the shrieks and laughter and rough and tumble, and you wind the clock, over and over, and rock to its rhythm.
Imagine not knowing how to play.
Imagine the release from a leather collar making it more difficult to breathe, rather than easier. Imagine not understanding, not recognizing, freedom. How could you recognize what you’d never known? It’s like trying to find a word in the dictionary when you don’t know how to spell it.
By the end of that first day of school, you know you are very, very different. And everyone else, the teacher, the children, seem to recognize that too, and they step carefully around you, and nobody asks you to play. You sit alone and you hold your clock and you watch the world go by. A world that seems more wonderful and vibrant by the minute. Yet you just don’t know how to join in. And nobody seems to know how to show you.
Imagine.
James didn’t have to imagine. He knew. At five years old, what was unimaginable to everyone else was commonplace to James. As common as making a peanut butter sandwich or flipping a pillow to the cool side in the middle of the night. And while James lived every day with the unimaginable, with root cellars and collars and tethers and belts, his own imagination began to stretch to impossible contortions. As he sat with his back to a world he longed to be in, he looked into a clock face and listened to the ticking with his whole heart. At home, down deep in the root cellar, he turned his face in the dark toward the alarm clock and the deep and sonorous tick told him stories and made him smile. He listened to the clocks and he believed they listened to him. He talked to them, telling them about his day, telling them about the strange world that he just didn’t understand, and they talked back and surrounded him with a worn and comfortable quilt of familiarity. At school, the toy clock’s tick was an invitation to play. At home, the alarm clock’s tock was his after school milk and cookies. To James, they were enough. Because he just didn’t know any better.
Imagine.
On this day, a mid-morning in mid-September, sixty-eight years after that first day of kindergarten, James knew immediately that he’d made a mistake. He always told himself to never turn his back, to never turn away from the security monitor when outsiders were in his house, but he did anyway, and as soon as he did, it proved fatal. There was a pile of keys that needed to be sorted by clock type and as he reached for them, just for a second, for barely a breath, a crash echoed throughout the house. He didn’t even have to look back at the monitor to see where it came from; he knew. As soon as the sound reached his ears, it slid straight down to his heart and he heard that clock calling. Crying for rescue.
James flew from his chair and down the hallway, up the stairs to the third floor, to the middle room on the right. The last place where he saw the tourists, a gray-haired man holding hands with his soft-spoken wife, both of them followed by their sullen teenage son. When James saw that boy, hunched behind his parents as they paid the admission, James knew he was trouble. Hair down to his shoulders, pockmarked face, jeans black and big enough to stuff dozens of clocks down the legs. James wondered if there was any way he could convince the husband and wife to leave the boy outside, that he’d be happier playing his Gameboy or GameCube or GameThis or GameThat, whatever it was that he held clenched in his dirty hands. Could James do that and still seem hospitable, still welcome this couple into his home and museum, the Home for Wayward Clocks? Still pay their admission and help him to support himself, support his clocks, support the whole town? The only way to keep those clocks ticking was money and the only way to make money was to keep those clocks ticking. In the end, James chose polite silence and watched this family walk to the first room, the living room, and then he hurried to the control center to study them on the security camera. He felt all the clocks stiffen in every room, on every floor. They sensed danger as well.
Closing his eyes, James silently apologized to the clocks and he promised to keep up a stern vigil. But when those keys were just out of his reach, he turned. And he heard every clock in that place that trusted him call his name just before the crash. The victim’s voice was the loudest of all.
James recognized that voice and as he entered the room, he already knew who it was, but praying, he said out loud, “Please, please don’t let it be the Anniversary Waltzer. Please.” The parents moved away and the boy slunk to the other side of the room. There was the four-hundred day clock, the one that sang the Anniversary Waltz every hour, the one whose four crystal-cut balls at the base of the pendulum threw rainbows around that room every day at noon, when the sun fell in just right. Its glass dome was shattered, one hand was bent, the other spoked upwards through the broken shards on the floor. One of the four crystals was missing, but from the purple and pink and green flashes James saw in the mess of dome glass, glass that doesn’t throw colors, he knew where the crystal went. In pieces everywhere. “Oh, no,” he said and knelt carefully, trying to assess, to determine damage and the possibility of repair. He listened closely for a heartbeat.
“I’m sorry,” the father said. “My son bumped against it. Of course we’ll pay for it.”
“Bumped into it?” James shot a glare at the boy who sneered, then looked away.
“Yes, bumped it,” the mother said. “Brian, come over here and apologize to the man.” She held out her hand, held out her hand to a boy who must have been sixteen years old at least, and she smiled. The boy’s head snapped upright and he pushed his hair away from his face. His eyes went wide and when he stepped forward, James witnessed a moment of gentleness, the quick brushing of a mother’s fingers with her son’s, and James’ breath caught and his heart paused and he wondered if he’d been wrong.
But still, there was a broken clock, a possibly dead clock, and James seethed. Carefully, he picked the base out of the pile and set the clock upright. Its pendulum tried to spin, but it was out of balance with the missing ball. It was like watching a dog with two broken legs try to run.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said quietly.
The mother stooped down. “Really, he didn’t mean it. What can we pay you for the clock?” She touched James’ shoulder and he froze, feeling the warmth in her fingertips. But he knew how quickly that could change. All she had to do was raise her hand, close her fingers. He shrugged her away.
“This was a four-hundred day clock,” James said. Seeing their confused faces, he conceded and fell into the layman’s language. “An anniversary clock.” James remembered buying the clock at an estate sale, the seller’s sad face as he packed it in a box. “It celebrated,” James said, “a marriage.” In the garage that day, the seller’s face was sodden with love, with sorrow. He said he gave his wife the clock on their tenth anniversary, but his wife left before their twenty-third. The seller said he couldn’t stand to look at the clock anymore.
James couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t the clock’s fault.
The father cleared his throat.
James sighed and stood, lifting what was left of the clock. “It was worth four hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “I don’t know if it can be fixed.”
The wife gasped, the son snorted, but the father and James stood and looked each other in the eye. With the clock’s body warm in James’ hands, he didn’t flinch. Then the father got out his checkbook. They left immediately, the boy’s baritone whine hushed as they went through the hallway to the door.
Setting the clock carefully on a table, James extricated the missing hand from the pile of glass. The pendulum kept trying to work, staggering forward and back, and that cheered him; it meant the movement was mostly intact. It was likely that only a few of the tiny pieces would have to be replaced, pieces knocked loose by the fall. The hard part would be finding a new crystal ball for the pendulum. It was extremely difficult to come up with an exact match, but a match was necessary or James was afraid the clock’s internal equilibrium could be gone forever. It would be like giving someone the wrong type of blood.
He went for a broom and dustpan and his burial supplies. After carefully sweeping up the remains, the parts so broken, they could never be used in this clock or transplanted into another, James put them onto a piece of royal blue crushed velvet. Pulling the corners together, he tied it shut with a piece of fine leather, making it into a small velvet pouch. A fitting casket for clock parts that served their time well.
James carried the pouch and the clock to his basement workshop. The pouch would be buried later in the graveyard behind the house. He bedded the clock on a piece of lambs wool and tucked the folds into the pendulum, gently convincing the clock to stop its struggles. It needed to rest during the repair. The first step was to try and find a match to the ball; if there was a match among all the stored clock parts in the basement, then James could move on to checking and adjusting the movement.
James went to a closet and started looking through boxes of skeleton parts. Three boxes alone held all sizes and shapes of pendulum ornaments. Sighing, he stacked one box on another to take back to the control center at the front of the house. He would know the match when he saw it. He knew exactly what to search for. When it came to clocks, James knew it all. And what he didn’t know, he imagined.
In the tiny town of What Cheer, Iowa, James was called the Clock-Keeper; he was the keeper of the clocks. They graced his life, blessed him with their time and chime, told him of their past, looked into his future. As he walked up the stairs and back through the house that day, James marveled at his family of timepieces, all huddled safely under his roof. Mantel clocks and wall clocks, grandfathers and grandmothers. Cuckoos, cathedrals and old-fashioned alarm clocks. So many were unwanted; he found them in Goodwills and St. Vincent’s, rummage sales and flea markets, in the middle of garbage piles or just perched precariously on the curb of a street. James picked them up, paid for them if necessary and lovingly tucked them under his jacket where he felt them settle in against his skin, sigh in relief. If they didn’t work, he tried to fix them, opening their bodies, carefully repairing and oiling parts or replacing them completely from the boxes of skeletons. There were so many that couldn’t be fixed; they looked intact, but when he worked his way inside, there was just a mess. Parts so twisted, they were unrecognizable, or parts so old and dead, he could only replace them if he found the clock’s identical twin.
James never threw a clock away, even if it couldn’t be fixed. After harvesting the useful parts from the clock’s heart and lungs and intestines, he buried the rest in the graveyard. Then he found a spot for the outer shell, the body and face, in the middle of a batch of working clocks. James imagined that the dead felt better around the living. And he felt better for them.
As James walked toward the control room, the chimes began to go off. It was eleven o’clock and the clocks were settled now, relaxed, with only James in the house. If he listened carefully, he could distinguish all of the voices, determine which clock each was, where it sat in what room. He noted the absence of the anniversary clock’s waltz and he felt a jolt of sadness. But the others raised their voices and James knew the songs would go on for ten minutes or more. Key-wound and weight-wound clocks tended to not be very accurate; they were affected by the weather and by the environment around them. James struggled to provide a stable home, he struggled to imagine what a stable home was, but changes were always just under the surface.
In the control room, James looked up at the clock he hung there, a solid wall clock shaped like a sunburst. Its rays leapt out in gold and silver, extending nearly three feet from the face. This clock had no voice, it was meant to be silent, and he always glanced up at it and at other silent clocks as the others chattered. Looking into their quiet faces, James felt the clocks receive his affectionate acknowledgment and so they continued on their steady tick.
He looked at clocks first thing in the morning, last thing at night. They told him where to be, what to do, who he was. How could he not be faithful to something he looked up to so many times a day and searched for in the middle of the night when he woke up disoriented and disturbed from his dreams? Their ticking resonated through to his own heartbeat, their chime rushed in his blood.
James took a quick check of the security monitors. The front door was closed, but unlocked, and the porch was empty. In each of the rooms, the sounds began to die away as the clocks settled in to wait for their next performance. For some, that was the quarter hour. For others, there were thirty or sixty minutes of rest. And the silent ones made use of this quiet time to send their ticks out louder than the others, making sure they could be heard, that they were an active part of the family.
James began to sift through the boxes of pendulum ornaments, sending bright crystal balls and diamonds and hexagons in a shiny rain through his fingers. There were figures too, horses and dancers and cherubs and sealed-together hearts. He set aside the balls to compare their heft and clarity and to find the one that would be a perfect match for the waltzer.
For James, the clocks were companions. Friends that would never leave. Family that gave darkness a body, a shape, a sound to listen to when there was nothing else. Without them, the darkness would have the stillness, the hopelessness of a grave, a root cellar hidden behind a house, the dirt pulled over his head, no way out, and he would forget to breathe. But the clocks told James to breathe, to always move on to the next inhale, the next step. The clocks talked to James in a way no one else ever did. They had the softest voices he ever heard. He didn’t duck when they spoke.
Soon, he had eighty-four cut crystal balls balanced on the desktop. He closed the boxes, placed them on the floor, and then stepped back and studied the balls as the light fell in from the window and set them on fire. Like a song played low on a radio for company, James heard the quarter-hour being chimed. He glanced at his watch; it was indeed eleven-fifteen. Watching the secondhand for a moment, James thought he detected a hesitation. Did he wind the watch this morning? He couldn’t remember, though he also couldn’t imagine forgetting. Carefully, he took the tiny stem between his thumb and forefinger and gave a gentle twist. It was tight. Fully wound.
Nothing in the museum that told time had a battery in it. The new clocks, the modern ones charged by a battery, were efficient, but they didn’t touch James’ heart. There was no contact, no touch, not like with the others, the wind-every-8-days, 14-days, 31-days variety. Those modern clocks were even equipped with light sensors to turn off their sounds during the night; clocks were not meant to be silent at any time, but especially not at night. It was the middle of the night when James heard them the clearest, when he snuggled deeper, alone in his bed, while the old grandfather down the hall somberly chimed three and then was echoed by all the others, floor by floor. The comfort of those sounds came to James in his sleep and he sighed and smiled and rolled over for the next set of dreams.
Quickly, he began to eliminate the crystal balls. Too large, too small, too bright, not enough color. He held them until his hand was full, weighted like a boy with marbles, and then he gently returned them to the boxes. The balls narrowed down, forty left, thirty, twenty, ten. And then three. These he balanced one by one on his palm, then rolled them through his fingers, checking all angles, looking at them in the sun and in the dark when he cupped his hands around them. One ball began to stand out more than the others and James felt a weight lift from his shoulders. The missing piece was here. The waltzer would live again.
All the living clocks would outlast James; their hearts would keep beating after his stopped, as long as there was someone to wind them, to touch them and nudge them forward. James hoped even the dead clocks would live on, that there would always be somebody to take care of them, to treat them as if they were alive and still functional.
James imagined that time was coming; he knew he needed to train another clock-keeper. And he didn’t know where to begin. There were so many that needed care and so many strangers out there that just couldn’t be trusted. That would sneer and bump into clocks the moment a back was turned. As soon as a mistake was made.
As James walked back to the workroom, the chosen crystal ball in his pocket and the others in their stacked cartons in his arms, he heard his heartbeat echo the clocks’ welcome and he felt himself connect in a way he couldn’t with anything or anybody else. It was as if their hands and arms moved around him as they moved around their numbers. It was like being held in a timeless embrace.
The day passed as usual, James watching for visitors, taking care of himself and the clocks, working on the waltzer. He worked through the afternoon and after supper, stopping only when his eyes began to water and blur so badly, he could no longer concentrate. He apologized to the clock, telling it he wished he was younger, just ten years would have given him the ability and energy to stay up all night until it worked. But as the clock rested silently on the lambs’ wool, James could see its age and knew it understood his. It needed to sleep and so did he. The clocks understood him when he was young, and now he was old, alongside of them, and they still understood. He went up to the third floor, changed into pajamas, then sat on the edge of his bed.
On the bedside table was another four-hundred day clock, his mother’s anniversary clock. James’ father gave it to his mother on their first wedding anniversary. James remembered his mother winding it every November twelfth, the only day that the clock needed to be wound. That’s why anniversary clocks were given that name; they were given as gifts for celebrations and only needed to be wound once a year on that important day, a way to commemorate the event. After a time, when his mother no longer cared to remember her marriage, James wound the clock, and he wound it still, on November twelfth. Only he remembered the union that brought him to life.
James’ mother’s clock originally sat in a place of honor, the middle of her big multi-mirrored dressing table. The pendulum was a party of four couples dancing, spinning around and around, to the left, then to the right, every fifteen seconds, and as a little boy, James grew dizzy watching them and their reflections. His mother’s dressing table was a glittering ballroom. The dancers almost always looked happy and the young James wanted them to stay that way. He concentrated on them especially hard during moments when his mother’s voice rose to a shrill yowl, his father’s desperate hum an underlying accompaniment to the dancers’ feet and his mother’s lament.
As his parents’ voices grew and twisted, the dancers twirled faster, their ankles flexing on top of cruelly pointed toes. The women’s gloved hands on the men’s shoulders crept toward their throats. Once, when his mother’s voice reached a new crescendo, James lifted the clock’s glass dome to stop the dancers from hurting each other. He wanted them to go back to the flash of their feet, the heat of their embrace. It was James that got hurt though; his mother said she didn’t like animals playing with her things. It didn’t matter that James wasn’t playing at all. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t an animal, not outside of her imagination…he knew he was a little boy.
And later, when his father was gone and James was thirteen and his mother melted into a sleeping cat on the floor, even the clock didn’t matter to her. It sat, unwound and unwatched, unadmired on her dressing table. James took the clock, stole it away, and set it on his own desk. He missed the mirrored reflection, but once he wound the clock, the dancers spun away while he did his homework. The ticking soothed him and he missed it the most on those days and nights when his mother locked him in the root cellar. He wanted the clock to be happy; it needed someone to pay attention. Once the clock was used to his room, out of the limelight of the sparkling ballroom, but the center of James’ attention, the pendulum moved a little more slowly, a little more smoothly, and the dancers relaxed from an anxious jitterbug to a waltz. His mother never mentioned the clock’s disappearance, though James imagined she knew where it was.
Sixty years later, seated on the edge of his bed, James watched the clock and admired the same dancers as they followed the same path, day after day after day, to the left, to the right, to the left again, still every fifteen seconds, and their joints were as smooth as when he was thirteen or ten or six or four. That clock never broke, James made sure of that, and he kept it behind the closed door of his bedroom, out of the public’s eye. The clock sang and danced through his father’s disappearance and death and then his mother’s, and James’ own journey from the root cellar to the Home for Wayward Clocks. When James wound that clock every November twelfth, he thought of his father, the soft voice, the gentle hand, telling an eight-year old boy that he’d be back soon, to take care, I love you. And James thought of his mother, during her beautiful moments, when she was curled on the floor, asleep, her blonde hair awash in rainbow sunlight refracted through the front window. James thanked them for the only thing they ever gave him, this life, this path of time and ticking and tucked-away memories.
James watched the clock every night and when he was eased into sleep, he spun with the dancers, slipping from one woman to the next, hand to hand, chest to breast, danced to oblivion where time finally stopped.
Oh, if only.
In the Home for Wayward Clocks, James imagined he was never alone; he was never in silence. There was such comfort in that.