My grandfather whispered, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Mrs. Hale raised an eyebrow and looked at my grandfather for an instant and resumed her impassive demeanor.
“I guess you know this is one hell of a clock,” my grandfather said. “Simon Willard. If the works are what I think they are, this is the only one of these he ever made.”
“Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather,” Mrs. Hale said, by which she meant her great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. “There are some clockwork roasting jacks in the fireplace in one of the old kitchens, as well, that he made for Mr. Revere when they were in business together.”
The house enchanted me. I felt a mix of awe and longing and embarrassment at the awe and longing. I wondered how many kitchens there could be, whether the huge outer house contained several others, nested one inside another, like Russian dolls, each smaller and more primitive than the one immediately encapsulating it, until, arriving at the center, one would find a mud hut, and in the middle of its earth floor a charred depression in which sat ashes, dead to appearance, but from which the gentle breath from someone kneeling in the dirt and putting his face to them, close enough to whisper a confession, would arouse an orange ember, crystalline, nuclear, at the very heart of Enon’s greatest virtues and its innermost corruptions.
“And there is the orrery, of course,” Mrs. Hale said. “Mr. Willard made it for my grandfather, for Christmas 1799, the year there was so much snow.” She talked about and among the generations of her family and their acquaintances as if they were all alive and their doings recent or, if not recent, remote but personally recallable. “That is in my grandfather’s study. One of Mr. Willard’s brothers — I think it was Aaron — made several orreries, but Simon made just the one, for my grandfather, as a token of his affection.” Mrs. Hale stopped herself abruptly, as if catching herself in the sin of demonstrativeness, offering so much information. It occurred to me that she must be lonely. I looked from Mrs. Hale to my grandfather.
“What gives, Captain?” my grandfather asked.
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“An orrery is a mechanical model of the solar system,” Mrs. Hale said. She seemed pleased at the opportunity to instruct somebody.
“Oh. That sounds wonderful,” I said and smiled, at a loss for the correct response.
“Yes, it is quite wonderful. What do you think about the clock, Mr. Crosby?”
My grandfather said, “Well, let’s take a look and see what’s what. Set that ladder right in front there.” I opened the ladder and stood it in front of the clock. My grandfather climbed up and the two of us removed the hood together and I placed it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. My grandfather looked at the clock’s works and whistled again. He said, “This is it, boy. Boy, is this ever it.”
“I’ll leave you two gentlemen to your work,” Mrs. Hale said. I smiled and nodded and she walked off into the reaches of the house.
“Open the case and take the weight off,” my grandfather said. He handed me an old-fashioned key he’d taken from the front ledge of the hood before we had removed it. I inserted the key into the keyhole and opened the door. The old air fell out of the clock, dry, held in the cubic shape of the case for who knows how many years until I opened the door and it collapsed out into the contemporary atmosphere, distinct and nearly colonial for a moment and then subsumed, and I wondered how old it was, if it contained any of Simon Willard’s breath. I lifted the lead weight and unhooked it from its pulley wheel. It felt like removing the heavy heart of the clock. I laid the weight on a rug at the foot of the stairs. It thudded onto the wool like an object from another, outsized planet with twice the gravity of our own. A heavy lead heart, I thought. That has to do, too, with the burning ember in the center of the house.
“Get that flashlight,” my grandfather said. “Shine it down right there and let’s see what’s what with this tricky little zon of a beetch.” I stood at the foot of the stepladder with the flashlight held above my head, pointing down at the works and the chains depending from them, while my grandfather fiddled around, pulling and poking and muttering and humming to himself. I looked at the furniture and the paintings and the rugs and the sconces. I tried to see through doorways into other rooms.
“Hey, who turn out da lights?” my grandfather said in the French-Canadian accent he used for jokes. I had aimed the flashlight beam away from the clock, looking at Mrs. Hale’s house. I pointed the beam back onto the dull, dusty mechanism, which, I noticed for the first time, was especially simple.
“I let go this bear’s ass, you find out who turn out da lights!” I said and pointed the light back at the clock.
“Now you hold that steady, Junior, right there, and leave us find out just what the hell …” My grandfather’s voice trailed off. He inserted a long, slim flathead screwdriver into the works and stuck an arm down into the case of the clock and tugged on the chains from which the weight had been hung. The works clicked for a second, but then the chains seized.
“Ooh, you tricky little bastard,” my grandfather said. He spoke to clocks like that when he fixed them — as intimates, as if they were both adversaries and patients against whom he had both pitted himself and to whose well-being he had sworn an oath. My attention wandered again. A window I could not see threw a crosshatched apron of light across the floor at the far end of the hallway through which we had come to reach the clock.
“Now you just wait one sweet, precious minute …”
“You got it, Gramp?”
“Jesus, Leviticus …”
“Is that it?”
“Julius, Augustus …” My grandfather used the screwdriver shaft as a fulcrum and bent some part of the works a little and pulled on the weight chains and they didn’t move and so he bent a little more and pulled again and the chains moved and kept moving. He stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket and pulled the chains with both hands like a deckhand hoisting a sail.
“Ha ha!” he barked. Mrs. Hale reappeared almost as if on cue.
“Have you met with success, Mr. Crosby?” she asked.
“I can’t say for sure,” my grandfather said. “But I think we are cop-a-cetic.” He patted his forehead with a folded tissue. “That clock is something else. I’d have hated like hell to take it apart.” In fact, he’d have loved nothing more than to have taken the works home and mounted them on one of the six-foot wooden frames he used for repairing tall clocks, for the sheer pleasure of having such a rare — in truth, unique — piece in his home for a month or six weeks. But he also knew that this was not an artifact with which to trifle, and the less fiddling with it, the better. “We’ll leave it for now and see how it does. If it stops, you just ring me and we’ll come back and take another look.”
I put the tools back in the physician’s bag and folded the stepladder and rehung the weight in the clock and replaced the key on the ledge of the hood.
“Between this clock and those jacks and that orrery, I suppose you know you’ve got a regular museum here,” he said to Mrs. Hale.
“You may see the orrery, if you like,” Mrs. Hale said. She and my grandfather looked at me.
“Oh, I’d love it,” I said.
The orrery stood on an oak dais in the middle of a room that had been the study of probably eight generations of Mrs. Hale’s forefathers. Four brass legs supported two horizontal brass dials connected by vertical posts, in between which was a series of coaxial shafts, stacked with telescoping gears, and a long brass hand crank with a wooden handle. A kettle-sized brass sphere, set above the middle of the upper dial, represented the sun. Its surface was so polished and reflective it not only threw the room’s light back out, as if generating the glow itself, but also seemed to possess depth, as if one might be able to plunge into its fish-eyed fathoms, into another brassy room. The planets and their moons were made of proportionally sized ivory balls. Each was fixed at the end of a brass arm. My grandfather and I stood looking at the marvelous machine in silence.