The Man Who Fixed The Clock

The clock above the courthouse in Bellweather, Ohio, had been stopped at 4:17 for twenty-three years.

Nobody remembered why.

Some said lightning. Others blamed a winter storm in 2002, though Earl Pritchard insisted it had stopped in August because he remembered standing beneath it eating a peach when the hands quit moving.

Earl remembered a great many things that nobody else did. He also remembered things that hadn’t happened, including a visit from Johnny Cash to the county fair and a tornado that carried his cousin’s tractor into Indiana.

The town had grown accustomed to the clock.

Children learned to tell time by other means. People arranged meetings by saying “after lunch” or “before the bank closes,” which was how people had arranged meetings long before anybody thought to put a clock on a building.

And every afternoon, when the courthouse bell failed to ring, nobody noticed.

Except Walter Finch.

Walter was seventy-eight, a retired watchmaker who lived in a white house on Maple Street with a porch swing that hadn’t moved since his wife, Ruth, died eleven years earlier.

He had repaired watches for forty-six years in a narrow storefront between the hardware store and a bakery that changed owners six times but never changed its cinnamon roll recipe.

Walter could fix nearly anything with hands and gears. He could make a grandfather clock keep time within three seconds a month. He could repair a pocket watch that had spent thirty years at the bottom of a dresser drawer.

But he’d never fixed the courthouse clock.

“Too big,” he’d always said.

Then one Tuesday in April, he walked into the mayor’s office carrying a brown leather satchel.

“I’d like to fix the clock,” he said.

Mayor Ellen Brooks looked up from a stack of invoices.

“Which clock?”

Walter pointed toward the window.

“Oh.” She considered this. “Why?”

“It’s broken.”

“Well, yes, Walter. But it’s been broken a long time.”

“That’s usually how things get when nobody fixes them.”

Ellen took off her glasses.

“How much would it cost?”

“Nothing.”

That made her suspicious. Municipal projects in Bellweather had never cost nothing. The last free improvement had been a donated park bench that eventually required $1,800 in concrete work and a special meeting about liability.

“Do you need equipment?”

“A ladder.”

“What kind of ladder?”

“One that reaches.”

The mayor approved the project on the condition that Walter sign a waiver and not tell anyone the town had hired him.

“That shouldn’t be difficult,” Walter said. “You haven’t.”

The following Saturday, Walter climbed the narrow wooden stairs inside the courthouse tower.

He carried his satchel, a thermos of coffee, and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

Earl Pritchard watched from the sidewalk.

“Lightning,” Earl announced to anyone passing. “Hit that clock in ‘02. Fried the whole works.”

“You told me August,” said Margaret Hines, who was sweeping the steps of the florist shop.

“Summer lightning.”

“You said a winter storm last Christmas.”

“That was the other clock.”

“There isn’t another clock.”

Earl considered this.

“That’s why nobody remembers it.”

By eleven, three people had gathered beneath the tower. By noon, there were fourteen.

Walter appeared briefly at the open window, looked down, and disappeared again.

“What’s he doing?” someone asked.

“Fixing the clock,” said Margaret.

“I can see that. What’s taking so long?”

Margaret leaned on her broom.

“Twenty-three years, apparently.”

Inside the tower, Walter found dust thick enough to write his name in, two abandoned bird nests, and a clock mechanism that had been neglected but not destroyed.

The gears were intact. The weights were sound.

The problem was a bent steel pin, no longer than a man’s little finger.

Walter removed it, examined it under his magnifying glass, and shook his head.

“All this trouble,” he said.

He straightened the pin with a small tool from his satchel, cleaned the gears, and applied fresh oil.

At 2:36, the mechanism moved.

One gear turned, then another. The great hands on the courthouse face shifted forward for the first time in twenty-three years.

Below, the people on the sidewalk cheered.

Walter didn’t hear them.

He was listening to the ticking.

He had nearly forgotten how beautiful a large clock could sound.

By Monday, the courthouse clock had become the most discussed event in Bellweather since the high school principal accidentally drove a riding mower into the duck pond.

People walked past the square just to look up.

The mayor received six congratulatory telephone calls and one complaint that the ticking was too loud, though the caller lived four blocks away.

The Bellweather Register printed a photograph of Walter standing beneath the restored clock.

The headline read:

LOCAL MAN GIVES TOWN BACK ITS TIME

Walter cut the article out and folded it into his wallet.

He didn’t say much about it.

That was his way.

But each afternoon he walked downtown and sat on the bench across from the courthouse, watching the hands move.

At exactly four, the bell rang four times.

Walter always smiled.

Then he went home.

Three weeks later, a woman named Caroline Mercer came to see him.

She was sixty-three, with gray hair pulled into a loose knot and the sort of careful manner people develop when they are about to ask a stranger something personal.

“Mr. Finch?”

Walter was tending the roses beside his porch.

“That’s me.”

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not unless you’re a rabbit.”

She smiled.

“My mother was Evelyn Mercer. Evelyn Bell before she married.”

Walter’s pruning shears stopped.

He looked at her for a moment.

“Your mother worked at the bakery.”

“Yes.”

“She made the best apple turnovers in the county.”

“She did.”

Caroline reached into her handbag and took out a small envelope.

“I found this among her things after she passed. It’s addressed to you.”

Walter wiped his hands on a cloth.

The envelope was yellowed, with his name written in a neat, slanting hand.

He knew the handwriting before he opened it.

Ruth’s.

He sat down on the porch steps.

Inside was a single sheet of stationery.

Walter,

Evelyn said she would keep this until the right time. I told her that was a foolish thing to say to a watchmaker’s wife.

I know you will be angry with me for making arrangements behind your back, but you have spent your whole life fixing things for other people, and I worry that when I’m gone you’ll forget how to do anything for yourself.

I also know you have wanted to fix the courthouse clock since it stopped. You’ve told me a hundred times you could do it in an afternoon.

So do it.

Not because the town needs to know what time it is.

Because I remember how happy you were when you had something worth getting out of bed for.

And Walter, when you finish, please sit somewhere in the sunshine.

Love, Ruth.

Walter read the letter twice.

Then a third time.

Caroline sat beside him without speaking.

At last he folded the paper carefully along its old creases.

“Your mother kept this eleven years?”

“She did.”

“Why didn’t she bring it sooner?”

Caroline looked out toward the street.

“She said you weren’t ready.”

Walter gave a small laugh.

“How would she know?”

“Well,” Caroline said, “she worked with your wife for thirty years. Apparently they discussed you quite a bit.”

Walter shook his head.

“That sounds right.”

Caroline hesitated.

“There’s something else.”

She reached into her bag again.

“My mother asked me to give you this too.”

It was a photograph, taken sometime in the late 1980s.

Walter stood outside his watch shop in shirtsleeves, holding a clock he’d repaired. Ruth was beside him, one hand resting on his shoulder.

They were both laughing.

Walter couldn’t remember what had been funny.

He studied the photograph for a long time.

Then he touched Ruth’s face with his thumb.

“She was something,” he said.

Caroline nodded.

“She looks happy.”

“She was,” Walter said. Then he corrected himself. “We were.”

That summer, Walter began spending his afternoons in the courthouse square.

He brought a folding chair at first, until Margaret Hines complained that he looked like a man waiting for a parade that had been canceled.

She convinced the mayor to place a new bench beneath the maple trees.

The dedication plaque read:

IN APPRECIATION OF WALTER FINCH — FOR KEEPING BELLWEATHER ON TIME

Walter objected to the wording.

“I don’t keep the town on time,” he said. “I fixed a clock.”

The mayor told him it was too late. The plaque had already been ordered.

Besides, there was a limit to how much accuracy the town could afford.

Walter accepted this.

Most afternoons he sat beneath the maple trees with a book he rarely opened.

Sometimes he talked to people.

Sometimes he watched the traffic.

Sometimes he did nothing at all.

At four o’clock, when the courthouse bell rang, he took the folded letter from his shirt pocket and read it.

Eventually, he stopped needing to.

He knew every word.

In October, the town council voted to install automatic lighting around the clock face.

Mayor Brooks called Walter to ask his opinion.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she said, “if people could see the time at night?”

Walter looked through his kitchen window at the darkening street.

“I suppose.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

“Nothing wrong with seeing the time.”

“Then what’s bothering you?”

Walter thought about it.

“People spend an awful lot of their lives looking at clocks.”

“Well, Walter, that’s what clocks are for.”

“No,” he said gently. “Clocks are for telling you how much time you have. They can’t tell you what to do with it.”

The mayor was quiet for a moment.

Then she said, “I’m putting that in the newspaper.”

“Please don’t.”

She did anyway.

The lighting was installed in November.

On the first evening it was switched on, nearly a hundred people gathered in the square.

Children chased one another through the fallen leaves. Couples stood with their hands tucked into coat pockets. Earl Pritchard told a group of teenagers that the courthouse had once been used as a lookout station during the Civil War, though the building hadn’t been constructed until 1911.

Walter arrived just before dusk.

He took his place on the bench beneath the maple trees.

At six o’clock, the clock face lit up.

The crowd applauded.

The mayor made a short speech that became longer when she found a second page in her coat pocket.

Then someone suggested Walter say a few words.

He stood slowly.

For a moment he looked at the clock, its great white face shining against the November sky.

“I don’t have much to say,” he began.

Several people laughed. Walter had never been known to have much to say.

“I fixed watches most of my life. Sometimes folks brought me one that hadn’t run in years. They’d ask if it was worth repairing.”

He looked down at his hands.

“I always thought that was a strange question.”

He paused.

“If something still has time left in it, seems to me that’s reason enough.”

Nobody laughed at that.

Walter sat down again.

The mayor wiped at her eye and blamed the wind.

At seven, the bell rang.

People began drifting toward their cars and homes, promising to do this again next year, though nobody was entirely sure what this had been.

Walter remained on the bench.

The square grew quiet.

He looked up at the illuminated clock and thought of Ruth, of all the ordinary evenings he’d spent with her, and of how many he would give anything to have back.

Then he stood, tucked his hands into his pockets, and started walking.

He passed the florist shop, the hardware store, and the little bakery where Ruth used to stop on Saturday mornings.

There was a light on inside.

The new owner, a young woman named Sophie, was taking trays from the oven.

Walter knocked on the glass.

She opened the door.

“Mr. Finch? We’re closed.”

“I know.”

“Can I help you?”

Walter glanced toward the trays.

“Any chance you’ve got an apple turnover?”

Sophie smiled.

“Fresh out of the oven.”

“I’ll take two.”

“Expecting company?”

Walter considered the question.

“No,” he said. “But I might invite some.”

And for the first time in eleven years, when he got home, Walter gave the porch swing a push.