Free Enon by Paul Harding Page A

deckhand hoisting a sail.
    “Ha
ha
!” he barked. Mrs. Hale reappeared almost as if on cue.
    “Have you met with success, Mr. Crosby?” she asked.
    “I can’t say for sure,” my grandfather said. “But I think we are
cop-a-cetic
.” He patted his forehead with a folded tissue. “That clock is something else. I’d have hated like hell to take it apart.” In fact, he’d have loved nothing more than to have taken the works home and mounted them on one of the six-foot wooden frames he used for repairing tall clocks, for the sheer pleasure of having such a rare—in truth, unique—piece in his home for a month or six weeks. But he also knew that this was not an artifact with which to trifle, and the less fiddling with it, the better. “We’ll leave it for now and see howit does. If it stops, you just ring me and we’ll come back and take another look.”
    I put the tools back in the physician’s bag and folded the stepladder and rehung the weight in the clock and replaced the key on the ledge of the hood.
    “Between this clock and those jacks and that orrery, I suppose you know you’ve got a regular museum here,” he said to Mrs. Hale.
    “You may see the orrery, if you like,” Mrs. Hale said. She and my grandfather looked at me.
    “Oh, I’d love it,” I said.
    The orrery stood on an oak dais in the middle of a room that had been the study of probably eight generations of Mrs. Hale’s forefathers. Four brass legs supported two horizontal brass dials connected by vertical posts, in between which was a series of coaxial shafts, stacked with telescoping gears, and a long brass hand crank with a wooden handle. A kettle-sized brass sphere, set above the middle of the upper dial, represented the sun. Its surface was so polished and reflective it not only threw the room’s light back out, as if generating the glow itself, but also seemed to possess depth, as if one might be able to plunge into its fish-eyed fathoms, into another brassy room. The planets and their moons were made of proportionally sized ivory balls. Each was fixed at the end of a brass arm. My grandfather and I stood looking at the marvelous machine in silence.
    Mrs. Hale said, “Master Crosby, you may turn the handle once or twice if you’d care to.” I looked at my grandfather.
    “That means you,” he said. I stepped forward and grasped the handle.
    “Clockwise,” Mrs. Hale said. I turned the crank and there was a pleasing resistance against it and as I found the right amount of pressure to use, the wheels and gears began to revolve. The machine was nearly silent. Its precision was such that the planets tilted and turned on their axes and their moons spun around them and all of the arms revolved around the diameter of the disks with a fine, low whir so apt I thought I could hear it harmonizing with the roar of the real universe. The earth and moon turned on a third disk, into which had been etched the seasons and night and day and the moon’s phases. As the arms and disks and spheres turned, I looked at my reflection in the brass sun and thought, This is a part of it, too—the ember in the pit, the clock’s lead heart, the brass sun in its corona of wires and gears and ivory moons.
    “I suppose Harvard or some such place would like this someday,” Mrs. Hale sighed. She seemed about to say something else but left off. “What do I owe you for the clock?”
    Every time I hiked past the house I imagined the old clock and orrery and the fantastic rooms. With Kate or by myself, I imagined sun-drenched salons with open double casement windows of leaded glass, some panes stained to pale summer tints that took up the tendrils of light twirling through the draperies of the linden trees outside; walnut libraries with first fires lit more against the idea of autumn frosts than their actual nick, in order to please and add comfort to the contemplation of books; hibernal innermost parlors at the heart of the house, with deep chairs set before