The Ninth Stirring
Evelyn Carver came back to the town the way most people come back to a house: with the weight of things to set in order pressed against her palms and the reluctance to open certain doors. The road into the place narrowed to a single lane between hedges and stone walls, the harbor visible in ragged slices between the roofs. She had not meant to stay. She had meant to sign whatever papers and leave again, to carry the small business she ran in the city with its careful schedules and brass gears. Instead the house at the end of Hallow Lane—her father’s house, four rooms and a workbench that still smelled faintly of oil and lemon rind polish—opened to her like an unfinished sentence.
He had been gone three weeks when she unlocked the front door with a practiced twist. There were more chairs than she remembered, and the clock on the mantel stopped at the hour of his last breath. She moved through rooms like someone who has learned how to make acquaintance with absence. Fingers traced the hem of a handkerchief folded on a table; a thin line of soot lay where a candle had burned low. The workshop attached to the house had the deliberate clutter of a life that made things to keep them honest: spools of wire, racks of small weights, a jar of used screws that looked like a city of tin roofs. A set of brass calipers watched her with the same impartiality her father had once used when teaching her how to measure the space between one tooth of a gear and the next.
The bell tower had always been the town’s shoulder—an idle, hulking thing of iron and clapper on a promontory above the harbor, where gulls more often landed than men. It was not the sort of landmark for postcards; it had a lean toward the sea, a loner’s posture. For years it had been silent. The civic clock at the square kept the town’s hours well enough, but the bell sat in its brick mouth like a harbour anchor left too long in mud. Children tied ribbons to the tower’s rail, older folk left coins in its lintel; it collected the habits people left lying around them.
She told herself she had come to repair a clock and nothing more. She told herself she needed to finish the inventories, to organize the boxes, to cancel the subscriptions that had come with another life. She told herself these things because it was easier than telling herself what she had wanted, day after day, since she had first learned to unwind the mechanism of grief. Theo’s name came to her like a spark when she reached for a tool—quick, brief; sometimes enough to make her fingers clench around a screwdriver and stop.
The town had a way of waiting for people who left. A neighbor crossed the lane to nod at her, the carpenter who used to teach the children at the community hall. He asked about her father with a caution that meant the wound was known and too fresh for novelty. ‘We kept an eye on things,’ he said. ‘Still, nothing like you could do for that clock, Ev. You always had the knack.’ He said her old nickname with the tenderness of someone practicing a memory. She accepted the condolence and a pie wrapped in brown paper, and she let it sit on the counter because she did not yet have the appetite for someone else’s kindness.
She found the watch on the third afternoon, in a place she would have sworn she had already cleared. A box tucked beneath the rafters of the attic, behind the old winter coats, held the kind of small private things people keep because they cannot decide what to do with them: a scraped photograph, a rusted key, a bead from a bracelet Theo had broken the summer he learned to whittle. The watch was brass and hesitated in shape, the face bearing a lousy little crack near the numeral twelve. His initials were engraved on the back, I remember, but the sense of remembering felt like a fact read from someone else’s handwriting. She lifted it out with the reverence of a thief—because it belonged to him and she had no right to touch it again and because somehow touching it felt like bringing a small, unauthorized warmth into a cold room.
It had not ticked in years. She curled it into her palm and found the glass face colder than she expected, the hands frozen in a position that belonged to a day she could not picture. When she turned it over, finger and nail caught on a small notch and the tiny key wound as if by command. For a moment she thought she had wound it; for a moment she thought the mechanism inside was only rust and memory. But then there was a sound—one small, purposeful click—and the hands moved, insistent and small as a heart. She put the watch flat on the workbench and, as if from the other end of town, the bell in the tower answered with the faintest of replies: a single, distant toll that might have been wind.
Evelyn paused the way people do at the edge of a line they cannot yet cross. It was easy to tell herself the bell had been struck by the wind, that the town’s dray had rattled a rope somewhere. It was easier to tell herself that reason than to hear the other truth that crouched behind her ribs. She had not spoken to the river for five years because there was nothing to be said; she had not read the name on a gravestone in the churchyard because the letters had become something beyond language. The bell’s note was a small thing, a proof that the tower could still speak if wind and time made it willing. The watch’s tick was less forgiving. It kept time in her hand like the measure of a pulse she had no right to claim.