In Progress 2022

Lightfoot and Sons: CLOCKS

The heavy barn door swings shut silently, without a bang or a click, without a sound from its great iron hinges. Faria finds himself in a warm darkness. At first he can see nothing, but as his pupils dilate he becomes aware of a dim glow some 40 feet away. There is a workbench and over it hangs a single light shaped like a lantern. At the bench a man [PG1] is tapping something with a hammer, very regularly, like a metronome, with a pause after every four taps.

As Faria approaches he can make out that the man holds a chisel in his other hand. He is shaping a piece of wood. He is an older man, and he does not look up as Faria approaches.

The woodworker taps the head of the chisel to edge it toward where his thumb holds the wood, and as the blade touches his flesh he stops and begins again. Slices of wood curl away from the gleaming blade like butter for some elegant table. The room smells of wood, cherry, maple, and birch beneath a thick layer of must.

Behind the workbench and to the left are cases with shelves holding variously shaped and sized pieces of wood. Above them squares, planes, and clamps are hung from pegs. Chisels, drill bits, and rasps stand in rows, their ends fitted into holes in the shelves. U-shaped carpenter’s braces hang from pairs of nails along with over a dozen saws of different sizes and shapes various as to the size and the number of teeth on their blades.

The worker is dressed in loose-fitting corduroy overalls, a rough black sweater that looks hand-knitted, and a leather apron. In the dim light his hands seem huge, freakishly out of proportion to the rest of his body, which is spare to the point of skeletal. He is only about five feet tall. He wears thick half-framed spectacles and squints at his work. Close behind the workbench and to the right a pot-bellied stove, regaled with fanciful design and heavy chrome, glows red. Beside it but at a safe distance is a box that is probably filled with coal. Heat swims off of the top of the stove and climbs its sides distorting the space behind it as might an old puckered windowpane.

Well behind the stove, in the dim recesses of the barn, is a row of chairs and the forms of two more white-haired men, one who seems to be watching the clockmaker at his craft, the other slumped in his chair as though asleep.

The room is surprisingly warm, given its volume. Faria stands and waits and in the warmth his eyelids start to fall . He jerks himself awake to keep from falling over. The clockmaker still does not acknowledge him, and so the visitor wonders if this strange place has rendered him invisible.

When the craftsman does look up, it is with a certain nonchalance, as though having this man standing in front of his workbench was no more remarkable than the bench itself and the customary contents of the shop.

“I’ve come to pick up what my uncle ordered, Sebastian Faria.”

The light is so dim that he wonders how the man can see what he is doing. He does not respond. Faria is not surprised. He stands still, readjusting his weight on his feet, spreading them a bit wider. He has learned something about the culture of the region.

After a few minutes, the clockmaker gets up from his bench, turns, walks by the stove and passes his silent audience. He disappears through a doorway and vanishes into the gloom beyond it, the sound of his steps on the creaking floor-boards growing fainter and fainter until they are inaudible. A few minutes pass, and, once again, Faria can hear his steps, almost imperceptible at first as though they were starting from a considerable distance, surely further off than the apparent size of the building would allow. Lightfoot re-emerges cradling a large wooden case, a case for a large wall-clock. He places it on his bench carefully and rubs it with a piece of leather. It is constructed of a light-colored wood with inlays of something darker.

“Is that oak?”

“Curly maple. Inlays are walnut.” He pauses and lifts the clock to set it on-end. And then a bit peevishly, “That’s what he asked for.” Faria moves toward the workbench and picks up the clock. It is much heavier than he expected after watching the little clockmaker carry it.

“Wait while I put the works in it.” With that he disappears once again, returning with a brass mechanism in one hand and a pendulum in the other. “Didn’t think no one would come for it. Specially after I heard they took him away. Sorry to hear that.” He places the clock on its face and opens the hinged back. Then he sets to work with his brace and some screws.

Faria looks around the room, his eyes now adjusted to its dimness. There are clocks everywhere, on shelves, hanging from the walls, and standing upright on the floor. They are of varying styles. One is a brass inlaid Louis XIII^th, three others are simple, elegant Shaker grandfathers. There is a German Cuckoo clock, but most of the stock have the spare and elegant look of 18^th century American design. There are mantle clocks and banjo clocks. Cornelius is so impressed by the skillful mimicry and by the designs and craftmanship, that only after a span of what must be several minutes does he realize that each clock records a different time. Not one of them is running.

The old man looks up and notices his guest’s interest. “That way, one or another of em is sure to be dead right, twice a day.” An almost imperceptible wrinkle above his upper lip tries to serve for a smile.

It takes the old man about fifteen minutes to install the works. Then he wraps the pendulum in newspaper. “Don’t want it bouncing all over the goddamned place. You’ll figure out how to hang it once you get it up to the house.” He looks up. “You taking it on that motorcycle?”

Faria realizes that his reputation has arrived before him. “No. I’ve got his pickup.”

Then the clockmaker closes the back of the case again and locks it with a brass key. Again he wipes the clock off carefully. “Ya know, he didn’t pay for it.”

“I know. How much is it?”

“Seventeen hundred and twenty-seven.” He wraps a piece of burlap around the clock and then fastens it with hemp rope. “Put it in the truck for ya.”

Cousin Bert in a fever of trust has given Faria a wad of bills. Faria counts out seventeen of them and then the twenty and a five and two ones, wondering just how so crooked a sum has been calculated. The clockmaker counts the bills twice and folds them and puts them into a pocket of his overalls. Then he picks up the clock as though it were weightless and heads out the door.

In the light of day Mr. Lightfoot looks older. He walks bent at the hips even after he deposits the heavy clock in the truck bed. He seems to be in a hurry to get back to his workbench. And then, to Faria’s surprise, “You come back any time at all.” It is the kind of expression he would have expected to hear a thousand miles south of where he was.

II

Faria strains to manhandle the old pickup, which seems to have a disinclination for straight lines. Faria considers it more like herding than driving. He has to correct his course constantly and tends to overcorrect so that when the old truck strays to the dangerously to the right he ends up with an even more dangerous stray to the left. After a while he is able to calibrate his reactions to the point where anyone observing his progress would think he might know where he is going and is getting there,

And there are observers. Milly Whitney, the handsome proprietor of The Green Hornet glances out of her front window, alert, as village people are, to the presence of anything new or strange. And Faria, a big man in his early sixties, unkempt to the point of being downright dirty, fits those categories well enough even if he had not made his entrance on a motorcycle older than half of the town’s inhabitants. From her knees in her vegetable garden, Emily Snowe looks down at the highway and watches the old truck wander by. Abner Day, sitting on his porch towards the outskirts of the village looks up from yesterday’s Bennington Banner and raises his right hand but does not wave, an action that has been his lifelong habit when he recognizes an acquaintances.

The truck is almost as derelict in appearance as its driver. Where paint remains on it, what must have been a bright red is now an uneven brownish, a hue that makes the large patches of rust less conspicuous than they might be. It is not innocent of Bondo, either. The left front fender, newer looking than the rest of the truck, is candy-apple green. a noticeable line of white smoke, emanating not from the tail pipe but from some source under the bed leaves a temporary trace of the truck’s progress. Inside, a mostly static feature of National Public Radio, something about how salt-water crocodiles have stopped laying eggs on some anonymous Pacific atoll, is losing its contention with the clangs, rattles and noisy valves of the machine. The inspection sticker, mercifully encrusted in grime, is two years old.

It is only John Keane, with his dungarees precarious on what should be his hips and already a fifth of vodka to the good although it is barely noon, looks up from his dissection of an old IBM desktop and waves at Faria as he passes. Faria tries to beep the horn without success.

© Peter Grudin, 2022.

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