Tinkers

George Washington Crosby has Parkinson’s and kidney cancer and is eight days from death. As he sits in a hospital bed in his living room, he begins hallucinating: He imagines that the house, which he built with his own hands, is collapsing on him. He thinks that the floor below him collapses and he falls to the basement, and he watches as the two floors above him cave in and land on top of him. He looks around his house and sees evidence of his career as a math teacher and of his post-retirement occupation as a clock repairer. He fixes clocks to make extra money and he has earned enough to help his wife after his passing. Still hallucinating, George imagines that the sky and stars fall on him as well.

George then loses himself in memories from his past. He remembers his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, who was a traveling salesman in Maine. Howard had a wagon that he filled with everyday supplies and sold these to families in the area. Howard was also a tinker; he fixed objects for people and also did various odd jobs, sometimes for money. Like his father, George is a tinker, too, especially of clocks. He started fixing clocks after buying a broken clock at a tag sale, which came with an 18th-century repair manual called The Reasonable Horologist. Knowing that rich New Englanders constantly need antique heirlooms fixed, George makes a small secondary career out of fixing clocks. Interspersed through George’s memories are passages from The Reasonable Horologist that detail the art of fixing clocks. George remembers stretches of his life in a nonlinear manner, from his time as a clock repairperson to life in his childhood home, where his mother, Kathleen, helps Howard with his epilepsy, though they keep it hidden from their children.

As George’s death approaches—he is now 168 hours from dying—he recalls the path of his life that led to the family that surrounds his deathbed. He remembers growing up, becoming a father, and his mother’s dislike of George’s father, Howard. Kathleen made George and his siblings wait for their father to return home before they could eat. Sometimes, they would wait for hours when he was out selling or if he experienced a seizure on the road. The previous spring, George attempts to record anecdotes from his life to share with his family, but upon reviewing the recording, he destroys it, hating the sound of his voice. When Howard is on the road, he tries and fails to sell jewelry; the women around them are too crushed by hard country living. Howard is often belittled by his supplier, Cullen, who believes Howard isn’t a good salesperson.

George edges closer to death—he is now 132 hours from dying. He wakes in the night to absolute silence. He sees his grandson, Charlie, sitting across the room, reading. George realizes the quiet surrounding him is because the clocks around him are no longer ticking. Charlie says his grandmother told him not to wind them because she didn’t want to disturb George. George, who associates the lack of ticking with his nearing death, tells Charlie to wind some anyway. Then, Charlie helps George to get more comfortable before George falls back into his memories.

Howard does odd jobs on the road in addition to selling wares. For instance, he fishes a drowned child from a river and gives a haircut to a man on his wedding day. Every spring, Howard brings supplies into the woods of Maine to a man named Gilbert, who claims to have been a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, even though that would make Gilbert nearly 120 years old. One spring, Gilbert appears with a swollen cheek and an infected tooth, and he convinces Howard to pull the tooth. Howard succeeds, despite Gilbert fainting repeatedly and bleeding profusely. Weeks later, Howard wakes in the night to find a signed copy of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne at his door, as both payment and thanks. Gilbert does not meet him the following spring.

In the present, Charlie reads to his grandfather from a red book he claims to have found in the attic. He assumes George wrote it since the book is handwritten and contains entries that explore Maine’s natural life. When he stops reading, Charlie asks George about his experience of being struck by lightning, and this reminds George of Howard’s seizures. He recalls Howard’s belief that the seizures are like a door opening to the energy of the universe.

It is now 96 hours until George’s death, and he decides that he wants a shave. His grandson, Sam, cuts George as he shaves him, and George ends up bleeding profusely. The family must change his clothes and bedding. Afterward, George looks in the mirror and does not recognize himself. In the past, Howard rides through the forest, and as dusk falls, he daydreams. George, meanwhile, is thirsty, and his daughter, Betsy, tries to help him drink a glass of water, but with George struggling to swallow, she uses a sponge instead. George recalls an entry from The Reasonable Horologist detailing the clepsydra given to Charlemagne by the King of Persia in the year 807, which used water to tell time. After a late spring storm, Howard finds himself at the ruins of an old cabin surrounded by flowers. He buys a box of pins from himself—his only sale of the day—and uses them to weave flowers together. He arrives home late and gifts the flowers to Kathleen, watching as anger turns to joyous surprise on her face.

George is now 84 hours from his death, and he thinks of his life as a pattern of tiles. He wonders what he will mean to later generations in his family. As he thinks about his life, he realizes he wants to find his father, and he slips back into memory. Howard comes home four hours late one night, muddy from a seizure. The children are up past their bedtimes as they wait for him, and as Kathleen helps Howard clean himself up, George takes care of his younger siblings, Joe, Darla, and Marjorie. The parents are keeping Howard’s epilepsy a secret, but when Howard tries to talk to George about it, George dismisses him.