The Home for Wayward Clocks Read Free Page B

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