James found a price tag taped to the back of the clock. Six-hundred dollars. Then he carefully opened the longcase door, splitting the sides of the girdle, and looked inside. On a lower corner, there was the signature: James Wilder, 1823. This clock was worth at least five times its asking price. These underwear hawkers had no idea what they were doing. And after what they did to the body of that clock, defiling her, flaunting her, giving her a body she neither had nor wanted, James was going to take full advantage of their ignorance.
But he would have saved her even if she wasn’t a Wilder. She needed help; she’d been hurt.
James pulled off the price tag and carried it up to the cash register. Counting heads, he saw that he would have a while to wait; he was now thirteenth in line. The woman in front of him turned.
“What would you want a clock like that for?” she said. “If they don’t sell it, maybe they’ll burn it, and then it’ll never have to look like that again.”
James cringed at the thought of that clock falling away to ashes. And he was surprised at the faces of the other women, turning in line to look at him. “The clock will be fine,” he said. “I’ll give it a good home.”
The twelfth woman squinted. “You’re going to keep it in your bedroom, aren’t you?” she said. The other women murmured.
James opened his mouth, ready to snap back, wanting to remind these women that they were all in line with armfuls of the same type of garment the clock wore. How did that make them any better? But something in the twelfth woman’s face caught him, stole his words away. While her expression was angry, her face was flushed with prettiness. She reminded James of his mother, who was always beautiful, but especially so when she was in high rage. James remembered admiring her, even as she raised her arm to strike or drew a collar tight around his neck. It was so hard to be angry at a beautiful woman. Yet this twelfth woman was softer, there were lines around her eyes and mouth, silky as the burnished hair that fell to her shoulders. In her arms, she held a pile of those underthings, brightly colored and, he remembered from Diana, impossibly soft to the touch. The other women clutched their underclothes or let them dangle from fingers and wrists and elbows. But this woman, this twelfth woman, hugged hers. Even as she was angry, she hugged.
“I’m going to refinish the clock,” James said quietly. “I’m going to restore her. She will be beautiful.”
The twelfth woman looked at him and then her mouth lifted, just a bit, deepening the small lines. James wanted to trace them with his finger. “As beautiful as she used to be?” she asked.
“More beautiful than ever.”
She smiled full then. “Thank you,” she said and turned to wait in line.
Of all the clocks James brought home from Des Moines that weekend, that dwarf tall clock was his treasure. It took weeks of careful stripping and staining, but eventually, she stood in the living room, gloriously shining and singing. James often wished that the twelfth woman would find the Home, come see what he did to this clock, hear her in all her glory.
That night, the clock just finished singing when James was startled by a rapping on the window above the sink. Leaning against the glass was the owner of What Cheer’s gift clock shop, It’s About Time. Not knowing exactly what to do, James opened the window. “Neal? What are you doing out there?”
“Hi, James.” Neal stepped back and smiled, tipping his sweat-stained baseball cap. “I rang your doorbell several times, but you didn’t answer. I was heading around back to see if you were in the repair shop when I saw you here at the sink. Didn’t you hear the bell?”
The doorbell. James remembered hearing the dwarf tall clock’s Westminster chimes and a myriad of other songs and bells. He must have gotten lost for a moment. “I guess I didn’t. Go back to the front door, I’ll let you in.”
Drying his hands on the way, James wondered what Neal could want. James didn’t get visitors often; at least, not visitors he knew. The tourists came and went, but the people in town remained just the people in town. Not friends. Just folks that James lived alongside.
Neal was waiting by the time James opened the door. They shook hands and James led Neal into the living room. He looked around and whistled. “I always forget what this place looks like inside,” he said. “You make my little gift shop look…look…”
“Fake?” James asked. “Cheap?”
Neal glanced quickly at James. “My clocks are fine. People like them.”
James shrugged. Whenever they talked, which wasn’t often, James commented on Neal’s merchandise. It’s About Time carried battery-powered clocks and most were ceramic, little statues of angels and dogs and lighthouses. Some were those miniature brass clocks that ran on a watch battery. There wasn’t a single clock in Neal’s store that had to be wound. James had heard complaints about it too, from tourists who came back to the Home after going to It’s About Time. They wanted clocks like James’, they said, and he wouldn’t sell his and Neal sold junk. James always sent them to antique stores and flea markets. Flea markets were like an animal shelter for clocks, he told them. Go find the unwanted and you’ll get yourself a treasure.
They settled down, Neal on the couch, James in his recliner. The clocks huddled around, their ticking soothing James’ nerves, but Neal became jumpy.
“I don’t know how you can stand it, James,” he said. “It’s so noisy in here.”
Neal’s clocks were voiceless. “So what can I do for you, Neal?”
He leaned forward, laced his fingers and dangled his hands between his knees. “Well, I came from a town council meeting. I volunteered to come ask you a favor.”
James sat back and put his feet up, figuring it would probably be another request to find a fill-in. “What is it?”
“The clock tower stopped working this morning. Well, right before noon. The hands look to be just about joined. We thought maybe you could fix it, save the town a few bucks.”
Several of the clocks went off, indicating the quarter-hour, and James sat for a moment and thought. He’d heard the clock tower earlier that morning, James remembered tilting his head toward the sound just as he poured his second cup of coffee, around ten. He couldn’t recall hearing it since and wondered why he didn’t notice the gap. “I’ve never looked at a clock that large before,” James said when the clocks fell silent. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do anything.”
“Oh, c’mon, James,” Neal said. He waved his hands. “Look around. How many of these have you fixed? How different could the clock tower be, other than bigger?”
What Cheer’s clock tower wasn’t huge; it only rose about forty feet up. Its black iron scrollwork rolled between four creamy brick legs. The clock’s four-sided face itself was plain. Just flat white with black numbers. It made James angry when he first saw it. This was a clock that was supposed to represent the Home and the rest of the entire town, inviting visitors to come visit and enjoy. It should have been beautiful, maybe an unusual silver face with alabaster roman numerals, or an aristocratic crackled oval face, transplanted from an older forgotten clock. But the town went cheap and just hauled that plain face up the pretty tower. James refused to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony, even though he was asked to cut the ribbon with those huge shiny gold scissors passed over from Shop Around The Clock’s grand reopening. At home that day, James heard the high school band play a brassy fanfare, followed by the clock’s first chime. It was five minutes past noon. His own clocks laughed, a jolly ticking of pendulums echoing around the Home; the clock tower was already slow.
It was left that way because it was so hard to adjust. When the tower was built, nobody thought to put in a staircase. For half the year, when Daylight Savings Time kicked into effect, the clock was a whole hour off. It was shameful.
“How do you figure I can get up there to fix it?” James asked.
Neal shrugged. “The council talked about that. The fire department could help out. Use one of their ladder trucks or something.”
That made sense, though James didn’t much relish climbing a ladder forty feet into the air. For a moment, he pictured himself riding the ladder up, the truck shooting him like a cannonball as he hung onto the rungs. James shuddered. This was the fire department; wouldn’t they have to keep him safe? “All right then. I’ll give it a shot.” If this worked, James thought, he would be able to go up the clock once a month or so to adjust the hands to the correct time. He couldn’t fix the town’s cheapness, but he could try to make What Cheer look accurate and respectful.
Neal rubbed his hands together and stood up. “That’s great, James. We appreciate it. In the morning, I’ll have my wife run over and watch this place for you while you work on the tower.”
“No,” James said quickly. Neal’s wife was a vacant woman who spent most of her days shuffling around the gift shop in her worn-out furry bedroom slippers. She carried a lavender feather duster and when she finished dusting the entire shop, she turned around and started over again. “I’ll just close up for a bit in the morning.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, James.” Neal pulled off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair. James could see why he wore that cap; the hair he had left was stringy and thin, a sort of nondescript corn color. “Give it a break. Ione won’t hurt anything. It’s just for one morning.”
James shook his head. A worn-out fuzzy-slippered woman armed with a duster could do more harm than Neal had the brains to imagine. “No offense to Ione, Neal,” James said. “But nope.” He looked over Neal’s shoulder at an old office wall clock, one that told time long before battery power took over. Its electric cord made a thin brown stripe down the wall. “Look,” James said. “I’ll go over after closing time. Six o’clock. That gives me several hours of daylight to work.” It would also give him one heck of a long workday.
Neal seemed satisfied, but he still groused. “You’ve gotta get off your high horse, James,” he said. “You’re getting up there, you know? Long in the tooth. You’ve got to find a helper for around here.”
James stood up sharply. “If I’m getting up there, then maybe I shouldn’t be climbing around a clock tower,” he said. “Us old folks break our hips easily, you know.” He waited for a moment, then narrowed his eyes. Neal always wanted to get into the Home; of all the people on the town board, he was the most vocal about James getting a replacement. James pictured Neal here and his wife, scattering their ceramic thoughtless clocks among the others, their faces sporting pricetags. And then he imagined some of his own clocks as well, with pricetags dangling from their pendulums. Neal always said, “Gotta move the merchandise.” He could move a lot more merchandise with a house the size of the Home. Getting Ione here, even for just one morning, could be the first step in a long complicated take-over plan, because it would take complication to get James out. He leaned forward. Better to nip this in the bud now. “You’re not getting in here, Neal. You and your wife are not getting your hands on my clocks.” James felt the clocks brace themselves. They knew if there was going to be a fight, James had to be the winner.
Neal stared, then snorted and shook his head. “You are something, James,” he said. “I don’t know what, but you’re something. Every time I think you’re finally going over the deep end, I wonder how I could ever tell.” He shouldered past James and headed for the front door.
James kept his back turned. “Call the fire department,” he said. “Have them there at six-fifteen sharp.”
“Six-fifteen, sure,” Neal said and then there was the slam of the door. James sighed and sat back down in his recliner, putting the footrest up, waiting for the ticking to settle down again. From around the house, the sounds of clocks striking the three-quarter hour floated past like a warm shower. James felt his shoulders relaxing; his neck popped. His pulse, which sped up during the exchange with Neal, slowed down and he filled his lungs with air, let it out. The clocks sighed as well.
James focused again on the office wall clock. It was a plain thing, white face with black border, black also on the numbers marching around the rim. The second hand moved forward with a jerky audible thud. That was the reason James bought this clock; it reminded him of all those years of classroom clocks, high above the teacher’s head, the sound of that sticky second hand reassuring the students that time was passing and they would soon be set free. But for James, being on his own after the school bell rang wasn’t much; he spent most of his time at his desk in his bedroom. Or long uncounted hours down in the root cellar, when his mother locked the doors. Those classroom clocks led James through all twelve years of school, pushing him forward, dangling time in front of his nose like a carrot, except that carrot always led away from the bright and noisy classroom to the silence of his bedroom, the sting of his mother’s voice and hand, the dampness and dark of the root cellar.
Those clocks appeared in doctors’ offices too, and dentists’, any place where most people wanted time to go faster. The move up, move up, move up sound, the step by step that the second hand took around that face, got people through the tough moments by letting them know that time goes on and on and on and before long, they’d be out of one situation and into another. It never promised that the next situation would be any better; only that the current one would soon be in the past.
So when James found this clock at a foreclosure sale, he bought it. A free clinic in Oskaloosa shut down and everything inside was sold. James went to that sale because he never knew what he might find in odd places, and what he found in Oskaloosa was this reminder. Every day when tourists invaded his house, he heard the steady thudding of this clock’s second hand, telling him that before long, it would be evening and he’d be alone with his family again. Not having to share them with anybody. When people like Neal came by, or Cooley, the clock told him that they wouldn’t be around forever; they’d leave him alone eventually.
Lately though, as he watched it, as he sat there even that night, it reminded him of something else too. Of Neal saying to get off his high horse and find a helper. A clock’s time goes on and on and on. James’ time wouldn’t.