The Clock Winder Read online

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  “It’s simple,” said Elizabeth. “That stump is the chopping block. There’s the axe. And there sits the turkey, wondering when you’ll start. What else could you want?”

  “If it’s all that simple why ask me to do it?” the boy said. He was standing beside her in the toolshed doorway, looking at the turkey in its crate. The turkey paced three steps to one side, three steps to the other, stopping occasionally to peer at them through the slats.

  “Look at him, he wants to get it over with,” Elizabeth said.

  “Couldn’t we call in a butcher?”

  The boy was a college senior named Benny Simms—pleasant-faced, beanpole-thin, with a crewcut. He lived two houses down, although his mother was beginning to question that. “He lives at your place,” she told Mrs. Emerson on the phone. “Every weekend home he’s out visiting your handyman. Handywoman. What kind of girl is she anyway? Who are her people? Do you know anything about her?” Elizabeth had heard of this call, and other mothers’ calls just like it, from Mrs. Emerson, who reported it in a voice that tried to sound amused but came out irritated. “This is one problem I never had with Richard,” she said. “I find there are drawbacks that I hadn’t foreseen when I hired you.” She was still trying to switch Elizabeth over to housekeeping, which was probably why she sounded irritated. She tapped her fingernails on a tabletop. “I don’t know, people surprise me more all the time. ‘Above all else, be feminine,’ I used to tell my daughters, and here you are in those eternal blue jeans, but every time I look out the window some new boy is helping you rake leaves.”

  “Oh, well, the leaves are nearly gone by now,” Elizabeth said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “I’ll be indoors more. They won’t be stopping by so much.”

  “It’s more likely they’ll just start invading my kitchen,” Mrs. Emerson said.

  Benny Simms picked up the axe that was leaning against the toolshed. He ran a finger down the blade and whistled. “I just did sharpen it,” Elizabeth told him. “I guess you did.”

  “Did you know the Emersons have a whetstone wheel? The old-fashioned kind, that works with a foot pedal. I found it in the basement.”

  “Nothing about the Emersons would surprise me at all,” Benny said.

  “I like things like that. Things without machinery to them. Machinery is something I don’t understand too well.”

  “I would’ve thought you’d know all about it,” Benny said.

  “No. Yard work now, or carpentry, or plumbing—things that you can see reason to right on the surface …”

  “Then why can’t you kill the turkey?” asked Benny.

  “Well.”

  He handed her the axe. Elizabeth turned it over several times, studying the glint of the blade very carefully but moving no closer to the turkey. She was wearing what Mrs. Emerson called her uniform—moccasins, dungarees, and a white shirt, and a bulky black jacket with a rib-knit waist now that the weather had turned cool. A wind from the east was whipping her hair around her face. She kept brushing it back impatiently without lifting her eyes from the axe. “I’m not too certain about that bevel,” she said. “It looks a little bluish. I hope I didn’t go and ruin the tempering.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Benny. “What’d you take this job for, if you can’t kill turkeys?”

  “Well, how was I to know? Would you expect that to be a part of my job? First I heard of it, in she walked yesterday carrying the crate by the handle. Passed it over to me without even slowing down, walked on through the house peeling off her gloves. Said, ‘Here you are, Elizabeth, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving dinner.’ Tomorrow! I didn’t know what to say. I suspect,” she said, setting down the axe, “that she planned it all on purpose, to turn me to housekeeping.”

  “Most people get their turkeys from the supermarket,” Benny said.

  “Not her.”

  “All plucked and wrapped in plastic.”

  “Not Mrs. Emerson. She won it at a church bazaar.”

  “Oh, is that what you win? I’ve heard of prize turkeys before but I thought they’d have their feathers off.”

  “Nope. You do it all yourself.”

  “Do you know how to pluck them?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth. “The feathers and the innards, that’s no problem.”

  Benny was brushing his crewcut on end, over and over. “Innards. Jeepers,” he said, “I’d forgotten them. You’ll have to fish out all those half-made eggs.”

  “I tend to doubt that,” Elizabeth said. She smiled suddenly and shut the toolshed door, dropping the wooden crossbar into place. “Oh, well, I don’t know why I asked you anyway. If you can’t, you can’t.”

  “I’m awful sorry.”

  “That’s all right.”

  They started up the hill toward the front yard—Elizabeth ahead, with her hands deep in her jacket pockets, Benny still brushing up his crewcut as he walked. “What I stopped by for,” he said, “was to ask if you wanted to come with me this afternoon.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “I’m going—don’t you want to know where you’d be coming with me to?”

  “Where am I coming with you to?”

  “I’m going out to the country for my mother. Picking up some pumpkins for pumpkin pie.”

  “Oh, good,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe I’ll get Mrs. Emerson a pumpkin too. Big as a footstool. Drop it in her lap and say, ‘Here you go, take care of this, will you? Have it ready in time for Thanksgiving.’ ” She laughed, but Benny didn’t.

  “I don’t know why you stay with that woman,” he said. “Couldn’t you find someone else to work for?”

  “Oh, I like her.”

  “What for? The whole family’s crazy, everyone knows that.”

  Elizabeth had stopped to empty bits of leaves from one moccasin. She shook it out, standing one-legged in the grass. “Other people have said so too,” she said, “but I don’t know yet if they’re right. So far I’ve only seen Mrs. Emerson and Matthew.”

  “Matthew. Well, he’s okay but Andrew is stark raving mad. Wait till you see him.”

  Elizabeth bent to put her moccasin back on, and they continued toward the street. Squirrels were racing all around them, skimming over the grass and up the skeletons of the trees. “Lately we’ve got squirrels in the attic,” Elizabeth said. “No telling how they got there, or what I do to get rid of them.”

  “When I was little Mrs. Emerson used to scare me to death,” said Benny. “Also Andrew, and Timothy a little too but that might have been just because he was Andrew’s twin. I wouldn’t even come in for cookies, not even if Mrs. Emerson called me herself with her sweetie-sweet voice. I’d heard stories about them since I was old enough to listen. That Andrew is violent. And do you know that Mrs. E. went to pieces once because she thought her first baby got mixed up in the hospital?”

  “I hear a lot of people have that thought,” Elizabeth said.

  “Maybe so, but they don’t go to pieces. And they don’t try and give the babies back to the hospital.”

  Elizabeth laughed.

  “I wonder if my mother would care to hire you,” Benny said.

  “It’s not too likely. Besides, I believe I’d like to stay and meet these people.”

  “When would you do that? Some don’t come home from one year to the next.”

  “Well, one’s coming today, as a matter of fact,” Elizabeth said. “The one here in Baltimore. Timothy. That’s what we’re killing the turkey for.”

  “I could ask my mother if she needs any carpentry done.”

  “Never mind,” said Elizabeth. She tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Go on, now. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  “All right. I hope you manage that turkey somehow.”

  “I will.”

  She climbed the steps to the veranda, unzipping her jacket as she went. Inside, the house was almost dark, filled
with ticking clocks, smelling of burned coffee. The furniture was scarred and badly cared for. “Mrs. Emerson,” Elizabeth had once said, “would you like me to feed the furniture?” Mrs. Emerson had laughed her tinkling little laugh. “Feed it?” she had said. “Feed it what?” “Well, oil it, I mean. It’s drying out, it’s falling to pieces.” But Mrs. Emerson had said not to bother. She had no feeling for wood, that was why—the material that Elizabeth loved best. The hardwood floors were worn dull, black in some places where water had settled in, the grain raised and rough. In a house so solid, built with such care (six fireplaces, slate in the sunporch, a butler’s pantry as big as a dining room, and elegant open inserts like spool-bed headboards above every doorway), Mrs. Emerson’s tumble of possessions lay like a film of tattered leaves over good topsoil, their decay proceeding as steadily as Mrs. Emerson’s life. Strange improvements had been tacked on—a linoleum-topped counter, crumbling now at the edges, running the length of the oak-lined breakfast room, dingy metal cabinets next to the stone fireplace in the kitchen. In the basement there were five separate servants’ rooms, furnished with peeling metal bedsteads and rolled-up, rust-stained mattresses; on the second floor most of the doors were kept shut, darkening the hall; on the third floor there was an echo, the wallpaper was streaked brown beneath the shuttered windows, the floor outside the bathroom bore a black ring where someone had long ago left a glass of water to evaporate, unnoticed. The two attics off the third-floor rooms were crammed with playpens, cribs and potty-chairs, bales of mouse-eaten letters, textbooks no school would think of using any more. There was a leak beside one chimney which only Elizabeth seemed concerned about. (Periodically she was to empty the dishpan beneath it; that was all.) Mrs. Emerson, meanwhile, set antique crystal vases over the scars on the dining room buffet and laid more and more Persian carpets over the worn spots on the floors. The carpets glowed richly, like jewels, calling forth little sparkles of admiration from the ladies who came to tea. Elizabeth hated Persian carpets. She wanted to banish all their complicated designs to the basement and sand the floors down to bare grain—something she knew better than to suggest to Mrs. Emerson.

  She climbed the stairs, creaking each step in turn, trailing her hand along the banister. In the hall she stopped a moment to listen to Mrs. Emerson, who was in her bedroom talking to the maid. “Now, Alvareen, if Mr. Timothy gets here by lunchtime I don’t want you serving any bread. He’s gained fifteen pounds since he started medical school. Heart disease runs in the family. Give him Ry-Krisp, and if he asks for bread say we don’t have any. Can you understand that? Meanwhile, I want to see a little cleaning done. I don’t know how things have been allowed to slide so. The baseboards are just furry. Do you know what Emmeline used to do? She ran along the baseboard crevices with a Q-tip, down on her hands and knees. Now that’s cleaning.”

  “Yes’m,” said Alvareen.

  “Are you out there, Elizabeth?”

  Elizabeth crossed the hallway to the bedroom. Mrs. Emerson was sitting at her little spinet desk, wearing a dyed-to-match sweater and skirt and a string of pearls, holding a gold fountain pen poised over a sheet of cream stationery. She looked like an advertisement. So did everything else in the room—the twin beds canopied with ruffles, the lace lampshades, the two flowered armchairs that turned out to be shabby only if you came up close to them. It was hard to imagine that Mr. Emerson had lived here too. He had died of a heart attack, people said, in one of the twin beds—almost the only Emerson to do things without a fuss. Now the beds were neatly made and there were little satin cushions arranged at the heads. The only thing out of place was Alvareen, a black hulk of a woman in a gray uniform, standing beside Mrs. Emerson with her hands under her apron. “Mrs. Emerson, I’ll be going now,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, go on. Elizabeth, have you taken care of that turkey?”

  “Not yet,” Elizabeth said.

  “Why not? I can’t imagine what’s holding you up.”

  “I was just going to fetch an old shirt,” said Elizabeth. “I don’t want to get all bloody.”

  “Oh. Now, I’m not interested in the details, I just want him seen to. At one o’clock tomorrow I want to find him stuffed, trussed, and ready to carve. Is that clear?”

  “Who’s going to cook him?” Elizabeth asked. “Not me.”

  “Alvareen, but I’m having to pay her double for the holiday. No one else will do it.”

  She smoothed the lines between her eyebrows, looking tired and put-upon, but Elizabeth didn’t offer to change her mind about cooking. One piece of housework, she figured, would turn her magically into a maid—and just when Mrs. Emerson was getting used to her as a handyman. At teas, catching sight of Elizabeth as she climbed the stairs or passed a doorway, Mrs. Emerson would cry, “Wait! Girls, I want you to see Elizabeth. My handyman, can you imagine?” And the ladies would round their mouths and act surprised, although surely the news was all over Roland Park by now. “Oh, Pamela, I swear,” one of them said, “you always find some different way of doing things.” Mrs. Emerson beamed, setting her cup soundlessly in its little fluted saucer.

  “I’ve brought you in some firewood,” Elizabeth said, “and later I’ll drive out for the stuffing mix. Would you like a big old pumpkin?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A pumpkin. I’m going out to the country with Benny this afternoon.”

  “Now, what would Alvareen know to do with a pumpkin? She can barely warm up a brown-and-serve pie. I don’t remember giving you the afternoon off.”

  “I did a full day’s work in the morning,” Elizabeth said. “Carried in the firewood, caulked three window frames, mended the back porch railing, and sharpened all your tools. Also I oiled the whetstone.”

  “What whetstone is that?”

  “The one in the basement.”

  “Oh, I never knew we had one. Well, Richard worked five full days a week. Morning and afternoon.”

  “Richard wasn’t on hand round the clock whenever you called for him,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, never mind that, can’t you just stay? Timothy’s coming home.”

  “I won’t take long.”

  Mrs. Emerson rose and went to her dresser, where she began going through a little inlaid box full of bobby pins. She dug out bobby pins and put them back in and dug out more, as if some were better than others. Then she began shifting hairbrushes and perfume bottles around. “I don’t know what I depend on you for,” she told Elizabeth. “You’re never here when I need you.”

  Elizabeth said nothing.

  “And the country, all these trips to the country and anywhere else that comes to mind. Washington. Annapolis. Lexington Market. The zoo. Any place you’re asked. It’s ridiculous, can’t you just stay put a while? Timothy said he might be here by lunch. I was counting on your standing by to help me.”

  “Help you do what?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Well, maybe we’ll need more firewood.”

  “I just got through telling you, I brought some in. MacGregor delivered a truckload this morning.”

  “What if we burn more than you’d planned on? Some problem will turn up. What if we need a repair job all of a sudden?”

  “If you do, I’ll see to it later,” Elizabeth said. “And Timothy will be here.”

  “To be truthful, Elizabeth, it’s nice to have things thinned out a little when just one of my children is here. Somebody to lighten the conversation. Couldn’t you stay?”

  “I promised Benny,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh, go then. Go. I don’t care.”

  When Elizabeth left, Mrs. Emerson had started opening all her bureau drawers and slamming them shut again.

  Elizabeth’s room was across the hall from Mrs. Emerson’s. The air in it smelled heavily of cigarettes—the Camels Elizabeth chain-smoked whenever she was idle—and there was a clutter of paperback detective stories and orange peels and overflowing ashtrays on the dresser. In the lower drawers were odds and ends belonging to Margaret, who had li
ved in this room until she left home. Her Nancy Drew mysteries were still in the bookcase, and her storybook dolls lined one wall shelf. The other children’s rooms were stripped clean; Margaret’s was different because she had left in a hurry. Eloped, at sixteen. Now she was twenty-five, divorced or annulled or something and drawing ads for a clothing company in Chicago. “And moody, so terribly moody,” Mrs. Emerson said. “The few times she’s been back I’ve wondered if she’d go into a depression right before my eyes.” Mrs. Emerson had a way of summing up each child in a single word, putting a finger squarely on his flaw. Margaret was moody, Andrew unbalanced, Melissa high-strung. But coming from her, the flaws sounded like virtues. In Mrs. Emerson’s eyes anything to do with nerves was a sign of intelligence. Other people’s children were steady and happy and ordinary; Mrs. Emerson’s were not. They were special. On the bookshelf in the study Margaret’s pale, pudgy face scowled out from a filigree frame, her lipstick a little blurred, her lank hair a little mussed, as if being special were some storm that had buffeted her. In this pink lacy room she must have seemed as out of place as Elizabeth, who sat on the satin bedspread in her dungarees and scattered wood chips across the flowered carpet whenever she was whittling.

  Wood chips marked the doorway to the room, and trailed across the hall and down the top few stairsteps. “You must think you’re Hansel and Gretel,” Mrs. Emerson once said. “Everywhere you go you drop a few shavings.” She had seen Elizabeth’s carvings—angular, barely recognizable figures, sanded to a glow—and not known what to make of them, but apparently they had settled her mind. Before then she kept asking, “What are you going to do, in the end? What will you make of your life?” She liked to see plans neatly made, routes clearly marked, beelines to success. It bothered her that Elizabeth had just bought a multi-purpose electric drill that would sand, saw, wirebrush, sink screws, stir paint—anything—which she kept in the basement for her woodworking. “How much did that thing cost? It must have taken every cent I’ve yet paid you,” Mrs. Emerson said. “At this rate you’ll never get to college, and I have the feeling you don’t much care.” “No, not all that much,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. Mrs. Emerson kept nagging at her. That was when Elizabeth showed her the woodcarvings. She dragged them out of her knapsack, along with a set of Exacta knives and a sheaf of sandpaper. “Here you go, I’m planning to set up a shop and make carvings all my life,” she said. “Are you just saying that?” Mrs. Emerson asked. “Or do you mean it. It’s a mighty strange choice of occupations, and I never knew you to plan so far ahead. Are you just trying to quiet me?” But she had turned the carvings over in her hands, looking at least partly satisfied, and after that she didn’t nag so much.