Tinkers

George keeps waking at night to find a young man by his bedside, sitting with him. George cannot see clearly so he cannot recognize this person, but he believes his to be very wise. The man says he feels surrounded by years past because of the books he found and reads from. George gets closer to death—he is now 72 hours from dying—and a nurse friend from church, Nikki Bocheki, comes to care for him. George does not recognize her. A passage from The Reasonable Horologist details the beauty and poetry of clocks, and it describes how their inner workings and rhythms make order out of chaos. George’s house has constant visitors, with friends and family coming through the back door and those looking to have their clocks repaired coming to the front. George’s wife sees his customers arrive, unaware that George is sick, and pay him for the work he did. His prices are high, his skills are niche, and he is very savvy with money. He keeps his earnings in many banks spread out across the region.

George often visits Ed Billings, the manager of the Enon branch of the Salem Five Bank. He fixes the bank’s big clock, which is often broken because Ed, a very tall man, unknowingly bumps into it and unbalances the inner mechanisms. While he fixes the clock, he thinks of his family and all that they struggle through, whether school or marital issues. When he is done repairing the clock, the bank pays him, but he hands the money right back, requesting that it be placed in his safety deposit box.

George’s basement workshop is cluttered and filled with old clocks and their parts. He often forces his grandchildren to come watch him work, boring them as he tinkers away in silence. The only entertainment the children have in his workshop is to stare at the dust that floats through the lamplight on his desk, igniting their imaginations as they see the particles as spaceships.

In an unpublished pamphlet written by Howard, he describes how to build a bird’s nest. It details the way to create the foundation and weave different materials into it. The pamphlet itself is a meditation on the joys of tinkering and creating with the materials available to a person. After Howard leaves Maine, he makes his way to Philadelphia, where he sells his wagon, changes his name, and becomes a bag boy at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. He loves his job and works hard, and he soon becomes the head of produce before ultimately becoming assistant manager. He marries again, and his second wife, Megan Finn, is very different from Kathleen. She talks constantly and is concerned about everything Howard does. Howard has fewer seizures in Philadelphia, and Megan is kind and caring when they do occur. She makes him see a doctor who prescribes bromides, and this helps Howard even more.

Erma, George’s wife, comes and sits with him at night after George asks Charlie to get her. He asks her who has been reading to him and after questioning Charlie about this, she tells George that there has been no one reading to him and that there is no book. Forty-eight hours before he dies, George wakes for the last time after being unconscious for two full days. He begins saying his goodbyes to his family and tells them where he hid his money. He struggles to breathe but is calmed by a grandson who has asthma; he guides George to breathe more easily. An excerpt from The Reasonable Horologist compares the universe to a clock, explaining that just like the circling hand of a clock, the universe revolves, too, constantly spinning to return to where it began.

One night in January 1972, Howard sees a shadow of himself and feels as though he is outside of his body. He believes that the shadow lives its own waking life while he sleeps and sleeps while he is awake. He talks to Megan about it, who is delighted by the notion that a person could have a double; right after, Howard dies in his sleep.

As George dies, the blood withdraws from his extremities and his family begins to mourn. On Christmas Eve, 1953, Megan goes to Pittsburgh to care for her dying mother, and Howard takes the opportunity to visit George. He borrows his friend’s car, teaching himself to drive along the way, and heads for Enon, MA. When he arrives, he does not turn the car off and heads straight for the door.

There is an entry from the book Charlie is supposedly reading about Homo Borealis, documenting the lives of creatures in the north. It details their hard lives as well as their deaths, describing how their bones turn to brass, and are later used to fix objects around them.

As he dies, George remembers Christmas dinner in 1953, when he answers the door and sees his father for the first time since he was 12. Howard stays for a few minutes, introducing himself to his granddaughters and asking George about his siblings. He leaves soon after. This is the last memory George has before he dies.