The Home for Wayward Clocks (6 page)

So he set off for the bank. The check was warm in his pocket and he whistled, planning ahead for the weekend, a trip out of town to a flea market thirty miles away. He hoped for good weather, for sun breathing warmth down his neck as he wandered from booth to booth, hands in pockets, glancing around and under and over tables for clocks. Some sellers knew James from past experience and they would have clocks waiting for him, hidden away in their vans and trucks, so that he would have the first opportunity to buy. While James appreciated this, he really liked dealing with new sellers. The ones that didn’t know him, and didn’t know clocks, and so he could buy them for a few bucks and a song.

Heading down the street, James glanced at all the markers pointing out the town’s attractions. The signs were everywhere, at every corner, little white arrows pointing this way and that as if people passing through wouldn’t just naturally run across these places because there was nowhere else to go. The Home For Wayward Clocks, this way. The gift shop, that way. Lodging, a small Victorian house transformed into a bed and breakfast, just across the street from the museum. A restaurant. All tourist necessities were available in What Cheer now. The town finally looked like its name, inquisitive, eager to help, to serve and entertain. Eager to survive, really. A few years before, the town was covered in a shade of drab. Nothing here but corn and unemployment, cows and depression. And a man who lived alone in a house full of clocks.

Nobody liked James then. All they knew about him really was that he moved to What Cheer when he was a young man, lived in an apartment above the gas station, and worked for years as the night time janitor at the public schools. He didn’t like to spend much money; the cashiers hated to see him coming because they knew he would have a fistful of coupons that would all have to be tallied off the final bill. He bought clocks though and it became a common thing to see young James, middle-aged James, and now old James walking down the street, holding a clock or two. He saved enough money to buy the run-down Victorian, run down like the rest of the town, and then he fixed it up and filled it to the eaves with clocks.

Now, even with What Cheer thriving, the townsfolk still didn’t like him. He didn’t talk much and what little he said usually wasn’t very nice. But because he didn’t talk, they didn’t know his past, they didn’t know what he survived; they couldn’t imagine what made him into a grumpy and strange old man who collected clocks. But they did know that he managed to save their butts when the town was going through a bad economic depression.

At that time, What Cheer wasn’t the only thing shaded in drab and depressed. James was too. Being a janitor wasn’t much, but it felt like a lot when James was laid off. It was okay for a while, he looked for work, but then the food started running out. There was electricity to pay for. Telephone. The telephone was the first thing to go. He kept looking for jobs on an empty stomach and with nothing to put in the telephone box on the applications. But everyone else was looking too and those lucky enough to be working weren’t hiring.

One night, James sat in the middle of his living room, staring at his bank book. There wasn’t much left. The only thing he had worth selling was the clocks and as he looked around at them all, he knew he would die first. And his entire ticking family would die with him. He thought about taking a box of matches and setting himself on fire, letting the flame spread to the others, and in the end, the ashes would all be blended. No James, no clocks, no heart nor pendulums nor faces nor arms, just a single pile of gray, the house an extension of the clock burial ground in the back yard.

James decided the electricity could go. He wondered how long he could make the money last, buying only bread and peanut butter. Soon there would be no money for gas to drive to job interviews. The only places to look would be within walking distance, within What Cheer itself. Where there was nothing.

James slept that night in the living room, his hands clenched around his bank book.

The following day, he drove to the next town on his last quarter tank of gas to see if any jobs had opened up. On the freeway, he passed billboard after billboard, most blank, some sporting a bright red sign that said, “Your business advertised here! Thousands of viewers each day!” The roads were full of strangers passing through Iowa as fast as they could. There was just nothing to see except Iowans starving in the middle of all that corn.

Those red letters stayed in James’ eyes after he drove past, stayed there like stamps on his corneas. They flashed neon.
Your business advertised here!
He thought of his house, of all his clocks, the way people looked at him strangely when he passed them on the street.

Maybe there
was
something to see in Iowa.

So James came up with the idea for the Home for Wayward Clocks. He took what little money he had left and rented a billboard, and then he went to the hardware store and bought an OPEN sign. He propped his door and waited.

It was a horrible hard decision, to let strangers into his home, walking on his stairs and carpeting and hallways. Breathing his air. Tourists bent and peered and commented on all the members of James’ family. He felt like he no longer tended to the clocks; the clocks now tended to him as they drew in tourists and passers-by hungry for a break from the endlessness of Iowa. The strangers brought their wallets with them. And with their wallets came the renewed ringing of the telephone, the steady burning of electric lights and the humming of the refrigerator, keeping everything fresh and cold and good. James fixed the clocks, the clocks fed James, and his ingenuity and fortune spread to others.

The lady across the street created the bed and breakfast, the Time To Sleep Inn. The restaurant in town, a little lunch counter, became the Tick-Tock Quick-Stop Restaurant, open twenty-four hours a day. A clock tower was built, a wrought iron and brick modern affair with Westminster chimes that went off every fifteen minutes and could be heard throughout the town. It stood next to the official “Welcome to What Cheer, Iowa, Home of the Home for Wayward Clocks” sign. The clock tower was usually off by about twelve minutes, something which brought James no end of frustration. A gift clock shop opened up, It’s About Time, selling clocks as souvenirs since James refused. The only thing James sold at the Home, other than admission and repair services, was postcards. He had some especially made, featuring the Home For Wayward Clocks sign in front of the house and shots of the various rooms. The gift shop only kept modern clocks in stock, all batteries, all electric. The owners agreed not to offer any repair services, as that was James’ area. A lot of their clocks came back to him.

The mayor gave James the key to the city. But James hadn’t planned on saving What Cheer, he planned only on saving his clocks and himself.

Everyone knew that if James ever decided to move, if he packed up all the clocks and took the Home away, the town would lose its edge and sink back into that gray time when there were no tourists, there was no money. So wherever James went, there were smiles and handshakes and his back was slapped until it stung, and then the people turned and rolled their eyes behind his back. James was offered free meals at the restaurant, but he refused and they insisted and eventually settled for having Saturday night specials delivered to his door. Coupons were slid to him like contraband in the grocery store. Only the kids remained the same, generation after generation, laughing at James and making crude remarks whenever he passed. The kids didn’t care that he saved the town. They only wanted to get out.

On weekends, a steady stream of visitors waited in line to get in to the Home. Weekdays were quieter. The town bustled on weekends, breathed easier and rested during the week, a familiar pattern in tourist areas like Las Vegas and Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon. And What Cheer, Iowa. James blocked certain rooms off, like his bedroom and bathroom, his workroom in the basement. But the rest of the house was wide open, the clocks ticking in wary welcome. They understood, they knew there was no other way except to let people in. With some of his profits, James bought the security system and built the control center so that he could see into all the rooms at once, making sure that no one got hurt, no one got taken. But the only way the security system worked was to make sure he was alert. All the time. James thought of the waltzer and he shuddered. He had to take better care.

Coming to the bank, James strolled up to the drive-through lane. Even though he knew it was coming, he still jumped when the voice squawked at him through the speaker. “Hello, James, what can I do for you today?”

“Just cashing a check, Sophie,” he said. He was relieved that it was his favorite teller. There were so many young ones, with flouncy blonde hair and long red nails, and James never knew what to say to them. Sophie was safe. Her brown hair was tucked behind her ears and she always smiled and just said what had to be said.

The money came back out through the tube and James counted it just to make sure, even though Sophie never made mistakes. “Thanks,” he said.

“Don’t spend it all in one place,” she said.

James would. There was a flea market. Clocks were waiting.

On the way back home, he stopped at the small graveyard behind the Catholic church. Many visitors who came to the Home also stopped there. There seemed to be a connection between a fascination with clocks and a fascination with death, and James just couldn’t understand it. He spent most of his life trying to avoid death, and here, people sought it out. Folks stood over the graves, pondering how each person died, what each person saw. Just the way they stood in front of the clocks in the museum, each with a placard like a headstone, and they marveled over the history those clocks must have ticked through. The dust of ancestors settled on the movements, the bones fallen to ash in the graves.

For a while, after the clock boom, James wondered if the church would hang out a shingle too, advertising the graves, charging admission. Time To Die Cemetery, the sign would say. A person standing in a ticket booth shaped like a crypt would collect five dollars a head. But thankfully, the church never put out a sign. The priest was willing to let tourists have picnics there, among the gravestones. They ate chicken from the Tick Tock Quick Stop, the smell of fried batter mixing with fresh dirt and old flowers wilted in pots.

On this day, the graveyard was empty and James nearly stepped in, making it as far as the grass on the other side of the gates. He thought about reading the names, the dates, doing the math in his head for fun so he could figure the age of the body under the stone. But he didn’t. The clocks beckoned. James just didn’t like people much, alive or dead.

But he did glance around quickly before turning away. Once, a woman brought him a clock that she said she found on her husband’s fresh-dug grave. It turned out to be a clock James fixed once before, for someone else. He couldn’t go by a graveyard now without taking a quick look. In case someone was there he knew. In case a stranger was there. The graveyard struck James as the worst place to abandon a clock, even worse than the side of the road or on a pile of garbage. This was the place of the dead where no one was ever heard from again.

It was a mantel clock that the woman found and brought James and so he thought about mantel clocks as he walked home. Those clocks were designed to truly sit on a mantel, right above a fireplace. The original clocks were extremely heavy, made from marble or brass, and once a mantel clock was hefted above a fireplace, it was intended to stay there. The clocks were thought of as permanent home furnishings, like a couch or armoire; their heaviness guaranteed them a lifetime on one mantel. But lifetimes change and so the clocks moved anyway and many sat in various rooms in the museum.

Over the years, mantel clocks became lighter, carved from wood, rich mahogany or classic oak. They began sitting on more than mantels. They squatted on shelves, on bedside tables and desks. James had two fireplaces and on those mantels were ten of the original brass and marble clocks; five on each. He dusted and cleaned them where they sat; only once a year did he pick them up and move them. Their heaviness always made him ache the next day, an ache of purpose and accomplishment and a job well done.

Returning home, James walked through the rooms and checked on the clocks, even though the winding was done for the day. James never knew when a problem might show up, when a clock would inexplicably fall ill, even if it was just ticking away a few hours, a few minutes, before. Mantel clocks were still on his mind and so he paid special attention to them. James imagined that sometimes a certain clock sent out distress signals when there was a problem somewhere, and those signals reached him, infiltrated his brain waves and started him thinking about that certain genre of clock. So he wondered now if there was a problem somewhere with a mantel clock that led him to think of them on a day when everyone was already tended. He started out in the living room, at the first mantel full of heavy originals. Stopping before each one, he listened for pauses, for catches in the breath and the rhythm.

He laid his hands on each of the clocks as he went by, patting their backs, stroking their hands. Some of the hands were old and ornate, requiring a delicate touch so they wouldn’t lose any more of their gold or their flexibility. Other hands, though younger, were stubborn and resistant, alerting James to the need for a drop of oil to encourage them on their journey around the face. When the clocks chimed, he stopped and stood in place, his eyes closed, his head tilted.

Whether the clocks sang a song or simply doled out the hours, their voices reached him and he opened his heart and listened. Like he used to listen to his mother, before her heart closed forever, closed like a fist against his face. James felt like a Christian receiving Jesus; it was his responsibility to listen to the clocks. They chose him to hear their souls.

James thought of that graveyard as he moved again through the rooms, pausing, listening, touching. The graveyard made him think of his own death and he worried about who would tend to the clocks when he was gone. The town council promised James the Home would be well taken care of; they’d find somebody, if only he left the Home to them, to their direction. It was good to know that the museum’s doors wouldn’t close when James’ eyes did for the final time, but there needed to be somebody special there. He or she needed to be more than a caretaker, a supervisor, someone who opened the door in the morning and locked it at night, from the outside.