Free Enon by Paul Harding

model of the solar system,” Mrs. Hale said. She seemed pleased at the opportunity to instruct somebody.
    “Oh. That sounds wonderful,” I said and smiled, at a loss for the correct response.
    “Yes, it is quite wonderful. What do you think about the clock, Mr. Crosby?”
    My grandfather said, “Well, let’s take a look and see what’s what. Set that ladder right in front there.” I opened the ladder and stood it in front of the clock. My grandfather climbed up and the two of us removed the hood together and I placed it on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. My grandfather looked at the clock’s works and whistled again. He said, “This is it, boy. Boy, is this ever
it
.”
    “I’ll leave you two gentlemen to your work,” Mrs. Hale said. I smiled and nodded and she walked off into the reaches of the house.
    “Open the case and take the weight off,” my grandfather said. He handed me an old-fashioned key he’d taken from the front ledge of the hood before we had removed it. I inserted the key into the keyhole and opened the door. The old air fell out of the clock, dry, held in the cubic shape of the case for who knows how many years until I opened the door and it collapsed out into the contemporary atmosphere, distinct and nearly colonial for a moment and then subsumed, and I wondered how old it was, if it contained any of Simon Willard’s breath. I lifted the lead weight and unhooked it from its pulley wheel. It felt like removing the heavy heart of theclock. I laid the weight on a rug at the foot of the stairs. It thudded onto the wool like an object from another, outsized planet with twice the gravity of our own. A heavy lead heart, I thought. That has to do, too, with the burning ember in the center of the house.
    “Get that flashlight,” my grandfather said. “Shine it down right there and let’s see what’s what with this tricky little
zon of a beetch
.” I stood at the foot of the stepladder with the flashlight held above my head, pointing down at the works and the chains depending from them, while my grandfather fiddled around, pulling and poking and muttering and humming to himself. I looked at the furniture and the paintings and the rugs and the sconces. I tried to see through doorways into other rooms.
    “Hey, who turn out da lights?” my grandfather said in the French-Canadian accent he used for jokes. I had aimed the flashlight beam away from the clock, looking at Mrs. Hale’s house. I pointed the beam back onto the dull, dusty mechanism, which, I noticed for the first time, was especially simple.
    “I let go this bear’s ass, you find out who turn out da lights!” I said and pointed the light back at the clock.
    “Now you hold that steady, Junior, right there, and leave us find out just what the hell …” My grandfather’s voice trailed off. He inserted a long, slim flathead screwdriver into the works and stuck an arm down into the case of the clock and tugged on the chains from which the weight had been hung. The works clicked for a second, but then the chains seized.
    “Ooh, you tricky little
bastard
,” my grandfather said. He spoke to clocks like that when he fixed them—as intimates,as if they were both adversaries and patients against whom he had both pitted himself and to whose well-being he had sworn an oath. My attention wandered again. A window I could not see threw a crosshatched apron of light across the floor at the far end of the hallway through which we had come to reach the clock.
    “Now you just wait one sweet, precious
minute
 …”
    “You got it, Gramp?”
    “Jesus, Leviticus …”
    “Is that it?”
    “Julius, Augustus …” My grandfather used the screwdriver shaft as a fulcrum and bent some part of the works a little and pulled on the weight chains and they didn’t move and so he bent a little more and pulled again and the chains moved and kept moving. He stuck the screwdriver in his back pocket and pulled the chains with both hands like a