Whatever Hour It Strikes

I. The Grant

The Dorchester County courthouse in St. George has a clock tower, and the clock in it has not told the correct time since the autumn of 1979. This is the first thing a visitor notices and the last thing a resident does. The hands sit wherever the last person to climb the tower left them, which for most of the past year had been twenty to twelve, and the bell strikes whatever hour it feels like, four in the small hours of a wet October night, ten on a bright April morning when the sun says half past six, and the people of the county have long since stopped setting anything by it, and have also, in the way of people who live beside a thing, stopped hearing it, except when it strikes in the middle of a sentence and everybody in the room looks up and then looks back down.

In 1979 the county hired a man to fix it. His name was Aloysius Fenwick and he had a shop on King Street in Charleston and had serviced every tower clock from Georgetown to Beaufort, and he came up on a Tuesday in his station wagon with a case of tools, and went up the tower stairs at nine in the morning, and came down at twenty minutes to ten the color of a sheet of paper. He did not speak to the county administrator, who was waiting at the foot of the stairs. He walked past the man to his station wagon and got in and drove back to Charleston, and when the administrator called the shop that afternoon Mr. Fenwick’s wife answered and said he had come home and gone to bed, and that he had asked her to tell the county, with his regards, that he would not be back, and that the county could keep the tools.

The tools were still in the tower. Nobody had carried them down.

Since then there had been four others. A man from Columbia in 1986 who lasted an hour. A father and son from Augusta in 1994 who went up together and came down separately and did not, by the son’s later account, speak on the drive home. A woman from Atlanta in 2008 who had restored the clock at the Georgia capitol and who came down the tower stairs, sat on the courthouse steps for forty minutes smoking, and then told the administrator, very calmly, that the clock was in excellent condition and did not need her. And a young man in 2019 who had driven from Greenville and who went up, and came down, and said nothing at all to anyone, and was later found to have left the trade entirely and to be selling insurance in Spartanburg.

The county had stopped trying. It was cheaper. The bell struck when it struck, and the hands said twenty to twelve, and the county got on with the business of being a county.

Then came the grant.

It was a historic-preservation grant from the state, eighty-one thousand dollars for the restoration of the courthouse exterior, and buried in the application that somebody in the county administrator’s office had copied from a template was a line item for the clock. And it happened that the subdivision called Ashley Preserve, out on Dorchester Road, had by then some four hundred households in it, nearly all from somewhere else, and that the people in those households drove through St. George on their way to Summerville and looked up at the courthouse and saw a clock that was wrong, and found it, in the way of people who had moved to the South for its charm and were still learning what charm cost, unbearable.

They got up a petition. It had three hundred and twelve signatures. It asked the county council to use the grant money to restore the courthouse clock to working order so that it would, in the petition’s language, “serve as a functioning civic landmark and a source of pride for all residents, new and longstanding.” Pam Gerlach of Ashley Preserve had signed it in March, before the Grits Festival, and had told Marla since that she would be happy to explain that, if anyone asked, and that so far nobody had.

The council took it up on the first Monday in June.

Marla sat in the back of the council chamber with her notebook and watched the county do the thing it did best, which was to agree to something it did not want in a way that let everybody go home feeling they had resisted. The council was five men and a woman, and they listened to the Ashley Preserve delegation, which was earnest and well-prepared and had a slide, and they listened to Odessa Ayers, who had come down from Reevesville in her church hat to say that the clock had been fine the way it was for fifty years and she did not see why some people couldn’t buy a watch, and then the chairman, a soybean farmer named Rudy Infinger who had sat on the council since Clinton, cleared his throat and said that the money was there and the state had earmarked it and the county could not very well send it back, and that he supposed they would have to hire somebody.

“If we can find anybody,” said the councilwoman, who was from Ridgeville and knew.

“We’ll find somebody,” said Rudy Infinger. “Put it out for bids.”

They got one bid.

It came from a shop in Savannah called Herndon Horological, which was one woman and a cat in a storefront on Whitaker Street, and the woman’s name was Josephine Herndon, and she was thirty-four years old and had trained in Pennsylvania and London and had restored the tower clocks at two Georgia county seats and a cotton exchange, and her bid was eleven thousand dollars and a letter, which the administrator read aloud to the council with a certain reluctance, because it ended:

I am aware of the clock’s reputation. I have been told about it by two people in my trade who declined to bid, and I have read what the Post and Courier wrote in 1979. I do not hold with reputations. A tower clock is a train of gears and a weight on a cable, and if it is running wrong there is a reason, and the reason is mechanical. I will find it. I will need three nights in the tower, uninterrupted, and a key.

The council gave her the contract on a vote of four to two, with Rudy Infinger abstaining, which was not a thing a chairman could do under the rules, and which nobody pointed out.

She arrived on a Sunday evening in the second week of June in a white panel van with her name on the side, and checked into the Quality Inn out at the interstate, and on Monday morning at eight she was standing on the courthouse steps when the administrator came to unlock the building, a tall woman in work pants and a gray T-shirt with her dark hair cut short and a canvas tool roll under her arm and the plain, uninterested face of a person who had come to do a job and did not intend to be talked to about it.

Marla was there too. She had asked, and the administrator had allowed it, and Jo Herndon looked at her and her notebook and said, “You’re the newspaper.”

“Marla Jenkins.”

“I’d rather you didn’t come up.”

“I wasn’t going to. I’d like to talk to you when you come down.”

Jo Herndon considered that. Then she said, “If I come down the way the others did, you can have whatever I’ve got,” and turned and went in through the door and up the stairs, and the administrator looked at Marla and Marla looked at the administrator, and up in the tower, as the two of them stood there in the lobby under the old brass light fixtures, the courthouse clock struck three.

It was eight-oh-six in the morning.

II. The Tower

She did not come down the way the others did. She came down at a quarter to one, hungry, with grease to the elbows and the expression of a person who has found a puzzle and is irritated by how good it is, and she walked across Main Street to Kirk’s Barbershop because Marla had told her it was the only place on the block that would feed a stranger, and she sat in the third wooden chair, which was Tobias Quinn’s and which he surrendered without comment, and ate a pimento cheese sandwich that Carl had made in the back, and when she had finished it she looked at Marla and said, “All right. Ask.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing.”

Marla waited.

“It’s a Seth Thomas, 1912, number fifteen movement, which is what you’d expect for a courthouse this size in that year. Cast-iron frame, four-legged gravity escapement, two trains. The going train drives the hands and the striking train drives the hammer on the bell, and they’re independent, which is normal, that’s how tower clocks are built. Each has a weight on a cable that somebody has to wind up once a week. The weights are what make it go.” She wiped her hands on a shop rag Carl handed her. “I’ve seen maybe forty of these. This one is in better condition than any of them. Better than the one I did at the Georgia capitol. The pivots are clean. The oil’s fresh. Somebody has been winding the going train every week for—” she looked at the ceiling “—I’d say since it was installed. The pendulum’s beating true. I timed it against my phone for two hours and it’s within three seconds a day, which for a clock that age is as good as they come.”

“Then why are the hands wrong?”

“Because they’re not connected to it.”

Ellis Kirk, in his chair, said, “Hah.”

“There’s a rod,” Jo said, “that goes from the movement up through the floor to the dial works, the gears behind the four faces that turn the hands. It’s called the leading-off rod. There’s a pin where it couples to the movement. Somebody pulled it. Not broke it. Pulled it, cleanly, and set it on the ledge of the case where the next person would see it.” She reached into her shirt pocket and set something on the counter beside the cash register. A tapered steel pin, two inches long, brown with old oil. “And left this with it.”

She set a square of paper beside the pin. It was yellowed, folded twice, and in pencil, in a careful draftsman’s hand, it said:

Leave it. A. Fenwick 10/79

Nobody in the shop spoke. Carl looked at the note. Tobias looked at the floor. Ellis took a sip of coffee and set the mug down with the care of a man who had just heard a name he had not heard in forty-seven years.

“So the clock’s been running,” Marla said slowly, “this whole time. Keeping perfect time. And the hands have been sitting there disconnected since 1979 because the man the county hired to fix it decided, for some reason, that it ought to stay broken.”

“That’s half of it.”

“What’s the other half?”

Jo Herndon picked up the pin and turned it in her fingers.

“The striking train,” she said. “The one that rings the bell. It’s got no weight on it.”

“No weight.”

“The cable’s there. The drum’s there. There’s nothing on the end of the cable. It’s hanging loose in the weight shaft with the hook empty, and has been, from the dust, for about as long as the pin’s been on the ledge.” She set the pin down. “A striking train with no weight on it is a dead train. It can’t move. There’s nothing to drive it. It’s like a car with no gas, you can turn the key all you want.”

“It struck three this morning,” Marla said. “We heard it. In the lobby.”

“I know. I was standing next to it.” Jo’s face did not change, but something behind it did. “I had my hand on the frame. At eight-oh-six the count wheel turned and the hammer lifted and it struck three, and the train ran through its cycle and locked, exactly the way it’s supposed to, with nothing driving it. I’ve been doing this sixteen years. I know what a train looks like when it’s running and what it looks like when it’s dead, and that train was running, and there was nothing on the cable.” She picked up the shop rag again and folded it very precisely in half, and in half again. “I went and sat on the stairs for a while.”

Carl Kirk said, quietly, “That’s where Mr. Fenwick sat. Daddy saw him. On the stairs, with his face in his hands.”

“How long?” Jo asked.

“Twenty minutes, then he left.”

“I stayed four hours,” she said. “I’m not him.”

She had used them, she said, to take the striking train apart as far as she could without removing it from the frame, and to look at every pivot and every tooth, and to find nothing, which was the problem. There was no hidden weight. There was no spring, no motor, no second cable, no electrical anything; the courthouse had been wired in 1931 and the wiring did not go above the second floor. The train was a train. It was gears on arbors in a cast-iron frame, and it ran, and she could not say what ran it.

“And the count wheel,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the part that tells the train how many times to strike. A notched wheel. The notches are spaced one, two, three, up to twelve, and the train runs until the lever drops in the next notch, and that’s your hour.” She looked at Marla. “The one up there has the wrong notches.”

“Wrong how?”

“Wrong in that they’re not one through twelve. There are more than twelve. I counted twenty-six before I stopped, and they’re not evenly spaced, and some of them are deeper than others, and some of them—” She stopped. “Some of them look new. The brass is brighter. One of them, I’d swear, was cut in the last year.”

The shop was very quiet. Out on Main Street a truck went by. In the end chair Ellis Kirk had closed his eyes, and might have been asleep, and was not.

“I’m going back up tonight,” Jo said. “I’m going to sit with it. I’m going to write down every hour it strikes and what time it strikes it, for three nights, because that’s what I told the council I’d do and because I don’t know what else to do. And then I’ll know something, or I won’t.” She stood up. “Mr. Kirk, thank you for the sandwich.”

“Take the key off the hook by the door,” Carl said. “Shop’s open to you. You get hungry up there at two in the morning, come down. Lights’ll be on.”

She looked at him.

“They always are,” he said.

At the door she stopped and turned around, and for the first time since she’d got out of the van her face looked like the face of a person who was thirty-four years old and a long way from Savannah.

“The ones who quit,” she said. “Fenwick and the others. Did any of them ever say what they saw?”

“Mr. Fenwick told Daddy one thing,” Carl said. “Daddy was cutting his hair in ‘eighty-one. He’d come up for a funeral. Daddy asked him, and he was quiet a good while, and then he said—” Carl looked at Ellis.

Ellis opened his eyes.

“He said, ‘That clock’s keeping somebody else’s time, Ellis, and I ain’t the man to take it from them.'” The old man closed his eyes again. “Then he asked for a little off the top. Never came back to the county.”

Jo Herndon stood in the door with the key in her hand for a long moment. Then she said, “I don’t hold with reputations,” and went out, and across Main Street, and in through the courthouse door, and up.

III. The Notebook

She came down at seven on Wednesday morning with two nights in a green Rite in the Rain notebook and the look of a person who has not slept and has decided not to mention it, and she walked across to Kirk’s, where the lights were on and the coffee was made and Marla was waiting in the third chair with Carl standing over her pretending to sweep. Jo sat in the first chair, the customer’s chair, and opened the notebook on her knee.

“Here’s what I have,” she said. “Two nights, dusk to dawn. Every strike, the number of strokes, and the actual time by my phone. Monday night it struck nine times. Tuesday night, eleven.” She turned the notebook so Marla could read it. The hand was small and square and completely steady. “I’ve put the strokes in the first column. The real time is in the second.”

Mon. — 4 strokes, 11:40 p.m. — 3 strokes, 3:12 a.m. — 4 strokes, 4:02 a.m. — 10 strokes, 6:19 a.m. — 1 stroke, 6:52 a.m. — 4 strokes, 11:40 p.m. (again) — 2 strokes, 1:15 a.m. — 7 strokes, 5:30 a.m. — 3 strokes, 3:12 a.m. (again)

Tue. — 11 strokes, 11:40 p.m. — 3 strokes, 3:12 a.m. — 4 strokes, 4:02 a.m. — 1 stroke, 12:30 a.m. — 10 strokes, 6:19 a.m. — 6 strokes, 2:00 a.m. — 3 strokes, 3:12 a.m. — 9 strokes, 9:00 p.m. — 4 strokes, 11:40 p.m. — 8 strokes, 8:15 a.m. — 12 strokes, 12:00 midnight

“It’s not random,” Jo said. “I thought it was, the first night. It’s not. The same strikes come back at the same real times. Three strokes at three-twelve, both nights, twice on Monday. Four at four-oh-two. Ten at six-nineteen in the morning, both nights, to the minute. Four strokes at eleven-forty at night, which is not even an hour, four is not eleven-forty, but it does it every time, like it’s striking one clock’s count at another clock’s time.” She tapped the page. “And some of them are only once. Nine o’clock Tuesday it struck nine, which is the only time in two nights it’s struck the right hour at the right time, and I nearly fell off the stool.”

Marla was looking at the page and not saying anything.

“The count wheel’s got twenty-six notches,” Jo said. “Twenty-eight, actually, I got up on a ladder with a light. I think each notch is one of these. I think the train goes around and drops in a notch and strikes that count, and then it skips, somehow, to the next one that’s due, and I think some of them are due every night and some only once in a while. It’s like—” She searched. “It’s like a clock that’s been set for a lot of different times at once and is trying to keep all of them.”

She closed the notebook.

“I know what the times are,” she said. “Some of them. I asked at the Quality Inn and the girl at the desk looked at me like I’d asked her bra size. So I’m asking you. You’re the newspaper. Eleven-forty at night. Three-twelve in the morning. Four-oh-two. Six-nineteen. What are they?”

Carl had stopped pretending to sweep.

Marla sat for a moment with the notebook in her lap. Then she took a pen from her purse and, in the margin beside the first column, in her own hand, began to write.

Beside 4 strokes, 11:40 p.m. she wrote: April 29, 1961. The Impala went into the Edisto at Givhans Ferry at eleven-forty. Four is how many days Hollis Weathers stood on the ramp.

Beside 3 strokes, 3:12 a.m. she wrote: Carl unlocks this shop. Every night. The ones who come, come at 3:12.

Beside 4 strokes, 4:02 a.m. she wrote: October 2026. The steel door behind the bank. Lila Mercer. Four years.

Beside 10 strokes, 6:19 a.m. she wrote: Sunrise at Folly Beach, April 30, 1961 and April 30, 2027. The grits tent at ten. Hattie Lemacks said she’d be there.

Beside 1 stroke, 6:52 a.m. she stopped, and looked at Carl, and Carl said, very quietly, “Charlie Nix. Jessup found him at ten to seven.”

She wrote it.

Beside 9 strokes, 9:00 p.m., the one right hour at the right time, she wrote: Tuesday night. Nine o’clock. The Dorchester bell rang Tuesday night in October at nine and a letter came the next morning about a boy on a boardwalk. Nine is the only hour anybody in this county ever got to in time.

She wrote beside eleven of the twenty entries. Some she did not know. 2 strokes, 1:15 a.m. she did not know. 8 strokes, 8:15 a.m. she did not know, though Carl, reading over her shoulder, went still at it and did not say why, and she did not ask. When she had finished she handed the notebook back, and Jo Herndon read the margin, slowly, all the way down, and then read it again.

“These are—” Jo said, and stopped.

“They’re hours,” Marla said. “They’re hours somebody in this county is still standing in. Tobias Quinn has been standing at eleven-forty on the twenty-ninth of April for sixty-six years, and he’s standing there right now, this minute, up in his kitchen on Pine Street, and he’ll stand there till he dies, and that clock knows it. Hollis Weathers stood on that boat ramp four days, and he’s dead, and the clock’s still striking his four. Lila Mercer’s mother stood at four in the morning behind a yellow tape. Carl’s daddy stood up in bed at ten to seven in 1977 and said ‘that’s the Dorchester bell.’ It’s not keeping time, Jo. It’s keeping them. Every hour in this county that somebody couldn’t walk out of.”

Jo Herndon looked at the margin for a long time.

“Twenty-eight notches,” she said.

“That’s a small county.”

“And one of them’s new.”

“Yes.”

“Cut in the last year.”

Marla looked at Carl. Carl looked at the middle chair, with the crack in its headrest, where a young woman with reddish-brown hair had sat in October and not blinked and asked whether she had ever known.

“There’s been a lot in the last year,” Marla said.

Jo closed the notebook and sat holding it. Outside, a school bus went by on Main, empty, going to the barn, because it was June. The clock across the street was silent. It had not struck since eight-fifteen.

“Fenwick pulled the pin on the hands,” she said slowly, “so the face would be wrong. So nobody would ever look up and think it was telling the time. So they wouldn’t try to set anything by it.” She looked up. “He wasn’t leaving it broken. He was leaving it honest.”

“Something like that.”

“And he took the weight off the strike so that if it struck anyway, everybody would know it wasn’t him.” She shook her head, slowly. “That’s a horologist. That’s exactly what a horologist would do. He couldn’t fix it and he couldn’t leave it looking fixed, so he made it so that nobody could ever mistake what it was.”

She stood up. She put the notebook in her back pocket.

“I’ve got one more night,” she said. “I told the council three. I’ll do three.”

“You don’t have to,” Marla said. “You’ve got enough for the report.”

“I don’t have anything for the report. I’ve got twenty hours in a notebook and a newspaper editor’s handwriting in the margin and a dead man’s note.” Jo stopped at the door, as she had the first day, and did not turn around. “And I’ve got a question I haven’t asked, which is what the two strokes at one-fifteen are, and the eight at eight-fifteen, and the other nine you didn’t know. Because if it’s keeping every hour in this county somebody couldn’t walk out of—”

She did not finish. She went out.

Carl Kirk watched her cross the street. Then he went to the sink and rinsed his comb, which did not need it, and with his back to Marla he said, “Eight-fifteen. The morning of August the eleventh, 1988. I was a deputy. That’s the time I signed the evidence log with a line through it.” He set the comb down. “I never told you that.”

“No.”

“It’s in your drawer.”

“I know it is, Carl.”

“Well,” he said. “Now it’s up in the tower too.” He turned around. “That girl’s going to sit up there tonight and it’s going to strike something for her. You know that.”

“I know it.”

“You going to warn her?”

Marla thought about Aloysius Fenwick on the stairs with his face in his hands, and about a woman from Atlanta smoking on the courthouse steps for forty minutes, and about a young man from Greenville who sold insurance now in Spartanburg and would not, she suspected, be able to tell you why.

“No,” she said. “She doesn’t hold with reputations.”

IV. The Third Night

The clock room was at the top of a hundred and four stairs, a square chamber of brick and heart pine with a louvered window on each side and the movement in its iron frame in the middle, like a thing on an altar. Above it, through a hatch, was the bell. Below it, through the floor, hung the weight shaft, a brick well going down three stories into the dark with one cable in it and one hook, empty. The room smelled of oil and dust and the particular dry sweetness of old wood that has been warm for a hundred years. Aloysius Fenwick’s tool case sat against the north wall where he had left it, open, with the tools laid out in their rows the way a man lays out his tools when he intends to come back.

Jo Herndon had brought a thermos and a folding stool and the green notebook and a bag of boiled peanuts from the stand on 78, and she had brought, because she had not been able to make herself leave it in the van, her father’s watch.

It was a steel Seiko on a stretch band, and it was on her left wrist, and it had not run since a Tuesday in 2011. She had wound it once, the week after, and it had gone four hours and stopped again, and she had understood then that it was not going to run and that she was not going to let anyone else try, and she had been a horologist for sixteen years and could have fixed it in an afternoon, and had not. The hands said ten minutes to three. She looked at it sometimes the way other people look at a photograph.

The first strike came at eleven-forty. Four strokes. She wrote it down. Tobias Quinn. Hollis Weathers on the ramp. She had looked up Tobias Quinn that afternoon, had seen him in fact, an old man in a tie going into the barbershop with a magazine, and she had thought: that man has been standing in a river for sixty-six years, and the clock across the street has been standing in it with him so he wouldn’t be alone, and that is either the saddest thing I have ever heard or the kindest, and I have not decided which.

Twelve-thirty. One stroke. She did not know whose. She wrote it down.

One-fifteen. Two strokes. She did not know whose. She wrote it down, and looked at the cable hanging in the shaft with nothing on it, and the train ran through its cycle and locked with a sound like a dropped bolt, and she found that she was no longer afraid of it, exactly, and that what she felt instead was something closer to what one feels in a hospital corridor at night, when every door is somebody’s.

Two o’clock. Six strokes.

She poured coffee. The louvers let in the sound of the town, which was almost none: a dog, a truck on 78, the freight at two-ten that she had come to expect, the glass in the louvers humming and going still. She ate a boiled peanut. She thought about Fenwick sitting on the stairs with his face in his hands, and about what he had seen that she had not, and she thought that perhaps he had simply understood it faster than she had, in forty minutes instead of three nights, because he was better, or older, or had more hours of his own, and had known at once that the clock would get to him.

She looked at her father’s watch.

Thunderbolt, Georgia, is a shrimping town on the Wilmington River below Savannah, or was, and Earl Herndon had run a boat out of it called the Josephine for thirty-one years, a white wooden trawler with green trim and outriggers that his daughter had learned to climb before she could read. He was a big quiet man who could take a diesel apart with his eyes closed and put it back together better, and who had given his daughter, when she was nine, a broken alarm clock and a screwdriver and told her to find out why, and had gone back to the boat, and had come home that evening to find it running. She had never once, after that, wanted to do anything else.

On a Tuesday in October of 2011, when she was eighteen and in her first semester at a school in Pennsylvania that taught people to fix clocks, the Josephine had gone out of Thunderbolt at four in the morning with her father and two hands, in weather that the Coast Guard had called marginal and that Earl Herndon had called a Tuesday. A squall had come up off Wassaw Sound at mid-morning. The boat had been found at dusk, turtled, eleven miles out. One hand had been picked up. One hand and Earl Herndon had not.

The Coast Guard had called the house in Thunderbolt at ten minutes to three in the afternoon. Her mother had answered. Jo had been in a classroom in Pennsylvania with a Vienna regulator open in front of her, and had felt nothing at all, and had gone on cleaning the pivots, and had not learned until that night, and had not forgiven herself, in the fifteen years since, for the fact that at ten minutes to three on the worst day of her life she had been happy.

The watch had come back with the boat. It was in the wheelhouse, on the hook where he hung it to work. It had stopped at ten minutes to three, which was not when the boat went over; the boat went over in the morning. It had stopped when the Coast Guard called. She had never been able to account for that, and had stopped trying, and had worn it on her left wrist for fifteen years, and had fixed every clock in Georgia but that one.

Three-twelve. Three strokes. Carl Kirk unlocks the shop.

She looked out the south louvers and could see, three stories down and across Main, the lights come on in the barbershop, front to back, and a figure in a white coat move to the middle chair. She watched for a minute. Nobody came. She looked away, because it was not hers to see.

Four-oh-two. Four strokes. The steel door.

She refilled the coffee. She ate the last of the peanuts. The louvers had begun to show gray. She wrote in the notebook 6:19 expected and sat with the pen over the page waiting for ten strokes and the sun at Folly Beach, and felt, for the first time since Monday, something that was nearly peace; she had the shape of it now, the clock and the county and the hours, she would write the report in the morning, she would reconnect the hands or she would not, and either way she would drive back to Savannah on Thursday and be a woman who had seen a thing and not quit.

At six-nineteen the train did not run.

She sat up. She looked at her phone. Six-nineteen, six-twenty. The count wheel sat where it had locked at four-oh-two. The hammer arm lay still. Nothing.

Six-twenty-one. She stood up off the stool. In two nights it had not missed six-nineteen. It had not missed anything. She went to the frame and put her hand on it, the way she had on Monday, and felt the going train beating under her palm, steady, three seconds a day, and felt nothing from the strike train at all.

And then she heard the count wheel move.

Not forward. Back. One notch, with a click she felt in her teeth, and then another, and then it ran, not through a strike cycle but through something else, a thing she had never seen a count wheel do, turning under her hand past six and five and four and the whole row of notches she had counted on the ladder, past twenty-eight, to a place on the wheel where there had been, on Monday, nothing but smooth brass, and where there was now, she could see it in the gray light with her face six inches from it, a notch.

A new one. Bright. Cut so recently there was a curl of brass still on the lip of it.

The lever dropped in.

The hammer lifted.

The bell struck once.

She looked at her phone. It said six twenty-two. She looked at her wrist. She looked at the Seiko that had not run since a Tuesday in 2011, with its hands at ten minutes to three, and as she looked at it the second hand moved.

One tick. Then another.

It ran. It ran on her wrist with the sound a Seiko makes, a small dry whir, and the hands went on from ten minutes to three for the first time in fifteen years, and she stood in the clock room at the top of the Dorchester County courthouse with her hand on a hundred-year-old frame and watched her father’s watch go to eleven minutes to three, and twelve, and thirteen, and understood that it had not stopped when the Coast Guard called. It had stopped when she had. It had been waiting in the wheelhouse of the Josephine on its hook and then on her wrist for somebody to come and stand in that hour with her so she could leave it, and the somebody, in the end, had been a Seth Thomas number fifteen in a courthouse in South Carolina that had, overnight, cut itself a twenty-ninth notch.

She sat down on the floor.

She did not put her face in her hands. She had told Marla Jenkins she was not Fenwick, and she was not. She sat with her back against the frame and her knees up and her father’s watch running on her wrist, and she wept the way a person weeps who has been carrying a thing for fifteen years and has just been told, by a machine, that she may set it down.

At ten strokes past the hour, late, apologetic, the train ran again, and struck ten, for the sun at Folly Beach.

She was still sitting there when Marla Jenkins came up the hundred and four stairs at a quarter to eight, because Carl had seen from the shop that the lights in the tower had not gone off, and because Marla had decided that whatever Jo Herndon held with, somebody should be on the stairs this time who did not leave.

“It struck one,” Jo said, from the floor, without looking up. “At six twenty-two. There’s a new notch. It cut it last night.” She held up her wrist. “And this runs now.”

Marla sat down beside her on the heart pine. She did not ask what the watch was. She had been editor of the paper for twenty years and had a drawer, and she knew what a watch was when a woman held it up like that.

“Twenty-nine,” she said.

“Twenty-nine.” Jo wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at the frame, at the count wheel, at the bright new notch with its curl of brass. “It wasn’t keeping somebody else’s time, Marla. Fenwick was wrong about that, or he only had half of it. It’s not keeping. It’s holding. It holds the hour with you until you can let go of it, and then—” She stopped. “I don’t know what then. I don’t know if it cuts the notch so it can strike for you or so you can stop. I don’t know if it’s the same thing.”

“Does it matter?”

Jo looked at her father’s watch for a long time.

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe it does.”

V. The Fix

The report was two pages. Jo Herndon wrote it Thursday morning at Bud Rawls’s desk, because Marla had offered and because the Quality Inn had no desk, and she wrote it in the same small square hand as the notebook, and when it was done she read it aloud to Marla once, and Marla did not change a word.

It said that the Dorchester County courthouse clock was a Seth Thomas number fifteen tower movement of 1912 in excellent mechanical condition, that its going train kept time to within three seconds a day, and that the dial hands had been disconnected from the movement in October 1979 by the removal of a single coupling pin, which the undersigned had recovered and reinstalled, so that the four faces of the courthouse clock now showed, for the first time in forty-seven years, the correct hour. It said that the striking train had been found to be running without a driving weight, by means the undersigned could not determine after three nights of continuous observation, and that it struck according to a count wheel of nonstandard configuration which the undersigned had examined and documented and did not recommend altering. It said that the undersigned had reviewed the work of Mr. Aloysius Fenwick of Charleston, who had examined the clock in 1979, and concurred with his assessment. It said the clock did not need repair. It gave the county a bill for eleven thousand dollars, as contracted, and it was signed Josephine E. Herndon, Herndon Horological, Savannah.

The council met on it the following Monday.

The chamber was fuller than it had been in June. Word had gone around, the way it does, and the Ashley Preserve delegation had come back with a second slide, and so had Odessa Ayers in her hat, and so had Earline Pruitt in her chair, and Carl Kirk had closed the shop at six, which he did not do, and was standing against the back wall with his father in a folding chair beside him, and Tobias Quinn was three seats down from Marla with no magazine and his hands folded on his knee.

The administrator read the report into the record. There was a silence after it of the Dorchester kind.

Then the councilwoman from Ridgeville said, “So the hands are right.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And the bell’s still going to do what it does.”

“That’s my understanding.”

The man from the Ashley Preserve delegation stood up. He was a retired engineer from Michigan, a reasonable man with a reasonable face, and he said that he appreciated the horologist’s work and was pleased about the hands, but that the petition had been for a functioning clock, and a clock that struck four at midnight was not functioning, and he did not understand how a bell could ring with no weight on it and did not think the council should accept a report that said so without explaining it, and he would like to know what the county proposed to do.

Rudy Infinger looked at Jo Herndon, who was sitting in the front row in a clean shirt with her father’s watch on her wrist.

“Ms. Herndon. Can it be fixed? The strike.”

“Yes, sir.”

A stir in the room.

“How?”

“Hang a weight on the cable. Replace the count wheel with a standard twelve-notch wheel. I have one in the van. It’d take an afternoon.” She looked at the Michigan man, and then at the council, and then, briefly, at the back wall where Carl and Ellis were. “And then it would strike twelve times a day at the hours on its face, like any clock in any courthouse in the country, and nobody driving through would ever look up at it twice.”

“And the other thing,” Rudy Infinger said. “The way it does now.”

“Would stop.”

“Would stop for good?”

Jo Herndon was quiet a moment. “I don’t know, sir. I don’t know what it is. But I know what it’s doing, and I don’t believe it would keep doing it with a twelve-notch wheel. I think you’d have a clock.”

“Just a clock.”

“Yes, sir.”

The chairman sat back. He was a soybean farmer who had been on the council since Clinton and had abstained in June on a vote he could not abstain on, and he looked now at the room, at the Michigan man and the Ohio people and the hats and the chairs and the old man and the barber at the back, and at Tobias Quinn with his hands folded, and he seemed to Marla to be doing a kind of arithmetic.

“Mr. Gorski,” he said to the Michigan man, “how long have you been in the county?”

“Three years in September.”

“My people came in 1790.” He said it without pride, as a fact about soil. “That clock struck seven the morning my brother’s tractor turned over on him in 1971. Seven. I was eleven years old and I was in the kitchen and I heard it, and I’ve heard it strike seven at the wrong time of day about twice a year for fifty-five years, and I never told a soul what it was till right now, and I’m telling you because I want you to understand what you’re asking this county to vote on.” He looked down the table at the councilwoman from Ridgeville, who had gone very still. “Annette, I expect you’ve got one.”

“Two,” said the councilwoman.

“Jimmy?”

The councilman from Harleyville said, after a moment, “Nine-thirty,” and did not say what, and nobody asked.

Rudy Infinger nodded. “Mr. Gorski, I don’t doubt you’ve got hours too. Everybody does. The difference is yours are in Michigan and ours are up in that tower, and I don’t know how to put that in a resolution, and I’m not going to try.” He picked up his gavel and set it down again without striking it. “The hands are right now. That’s what the grant was for. The county thanks Ms. Herndon and accepts her report. The petition is received and filed. We’re not going to put a weight on it.”

“I’d like that on the record as a motion,” said the Michigan man, “and a vote.”

“You can have the vote.”

It was five to one. Then, before the clerk had finished writing it, Pam Gerlach stood up from the Ashley Preserve rows with her folio against her chest and said, in a voice that carried, that she would like it noted that she had signed the petition in March and was withdrawing her signature, and that she had come to understand, since the Grits Festival, that the county had a process, and that the process worked, and that she had been in HR for thirty years and knew a working process when she saw one, and that she would ask her neighbors to consider doing the same. And she sat down. And Odessa Ayers, three rows back, said “Well,” in a tone Marla had never heard her use about a person from off, and Earline Pruitt reached over and patted Pam Gerlach once on the arm.

Across the street, as the room emptied, the courthouse clock struck nine. It was nine o’clock. Its hands said so. The whole chamber heard it and the whole chamber looked up, and then, as they had always done, looked back down and went home.

Jo Herndon left Thursday morning. She loaded the van on Main Street at seven, and Carl Kirk came out of the shop with a sandwich in wax paper for the road, and Ellis came to the door in his cardigan, and Tobias Quinn came up the sidewalk from Pine Street in his tie and stopped a few feet off, and did not say anything, and then did.

“Ms. Herndon. The four strokes at eleven-forty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s me.”

“I know, sir. Mrs. Jenkins wrote it in the margin.”

He nodded. He looked up at the clock tower, at the face that now said five past seven, and he stood looking at it for a while in a way Marla, who was watching from the shop door, thought she had never seen him look at anything, not even the river.

“Is there a way,” he said, “to know when it’ll cut one?”

Jo closed the van door. She turned her wrist so the Seiko caught the light, running, and looked at it, and then at him.

“No, sir,” she said. “I don’t believe you can know. I believe it knows.” She hesitated. “But I’ll tell you what I’d do, if it was mine. I’d quit standing at the window when the river’s high. I’d go on down there and look at it. I think it cuts the notch when you’ve stopped needing it to hold the hour for you. I think you have to go first.”

Tobias Quinn thought about that. Then he put out his hand, and she took it.

She drove out 78 toward the interstate with the sandwich on the seat. Marla did not hear from her for a year. Then, the following June, a postcard came to the paper with a Savannah postmark and a picture of the Thunderbolt waterfront, and on the back, in the small square hand, it said: Hands still right? Strike still wrong? Good. Watch still runs. — J.H. And under that, as a postscript: Tell Mr. Quinn I asked.

Marla put it in the drawer.

The courthouse clock in St. George keeps the right time now. The hands say what the hour is, and people driving through from Ashley Preserve to Summerville look up and see that it is twenty past four, and are satisfied, and drive on. The bell does what it does. It strikes four at eleven-forty at night, and three at three-twelve, and ten at six-nineteen, and there are twenty-nine notches on the count wheel, one of them bright, and the county has agreed, in the way it agrees to things, not to notice, except that Rudy Infinger, when it strikes seven at the wrong time of day, stops what he is doing in the field and stands a minute, and nobody who works for him asks why.

Marla sat in Kirk’s on a Thursday in July with the paper’s morgue in her head and the drawer on Parler Avenue full of what the county had not said, and she asked Carl Kirk, with Ellis asleep and nobody else in the shop, the question she had carried since the clock room.

“The new notch. The one cut in the last year. Before Jo’s.”

Carl did not stop cutting.

“Was that the young woman in the blue blouse?”

He finished the sideburn he was on. He brushed the neck. He said, to the mirror, “Not yet, Marla,” the way he had said it to his father in October, and she understood that it was not a refusal but a time, and that the clock across the street would strike it when it came, and that she would know it when she heard it, and that she had, after a year of living beside it, finally learned how to wait.

End of Dispatch.