The Clock Winder (6 page)

“I could run over him with my car if you like.”

She smiled, but her attention was still on the turkey. She gave a flick of her switch and the turkey moved away, slowly now, still examining the ground. “What you need is a leash,” Timothy said.

“I can get him to the chopping block easily enough, but then what? I just hate to tell your mother I’m not equal to this.”

“Let him run off,” Timothy said. “Buy one at the supermarket. Mother’ll never know.”

Elizabeth bent one ankle beneath her and sank down to the ground, still holding the switch. The turkey moved a few steps further off. “Is it you that the unicycle in the basement belongs to?” she said.

“Me? Oh, no, that’s Peter’s. I was never one for exercise.
I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used it, though.”

“I was just hoping to
see
it used,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not one for exercise either.”

“Really? I thought you would be.”

“How come?”

“I expected to see you out playing football with the little neighborhood boys,” Timothy said.

“What would I want to do that for?”

“Well, you are the handyman, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, “but that’s got nothing to do with football. I wonder if other people have the same idea? I’ve been getting the strangest invitations lately. Tennis, bicycling, nature walks—if there’s one thing I don’t like it’s nature, standing around admiring nature. I come home feeling empty-headed.”

“Why go, then? Look, your turkey is heading toward the road again.”

The turkey was a good twenty feet off, but Elizabeth merely glanced at it and then settled herself more comfortably on the ground. “I
always
go where I’m asked,” she said. “It’s a challenge: never turn down an invitation. Now, does Peter really know how to ride that unicycle? I mean, bump downstairs on it? Shoot basketballs from it, like they do in the circus?”

“Your turkey!”

Elizabeth looked around. The turkey was picking his way down the shallowest part of the bank, talking to himself deep in his throat. “What about him?” she asked.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?”

“Oh, I thought I was going to give up on him and go buy one from the supermarket.”

Timothy stared at her. “Well, I only said—you didn’t seem—I never heard you make up your
mind
about it,” he
said. So that Elizabeth, for the first time giving him her full attention, wondered why he wore such a jaunty feathered hat set at such a careless angle. He sounded like his mother, who was forever tying herself into knots over plans and judgments and decisions. But his eyes must have been his father’s—narrow blue slits whose downward slant gave him a puzzled look—and she liked his hair, which stuck out in licked-looking yellow spikes beneath the hat. She smiled at him, ignoring the turkey.

“Are you really going to let him just walk off?” he said.

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, and did—rose and brushed off her dungarees, stood on the edge of the bank to watch the turkey cross the road at an angle and start up someone’s back yard. Finally he was only a jerking coppery dot among the trees. “Now I have to go to the grocery store,” she said. “Anything you need?”

“Maybe I could take you there.”

“Oh no, I like to drive. You could get your car off the road, though.”

“Or I might come with you. Is that all right? I’m always on the lookout for something to do while I’m home.”

He hadn’t been home at all yet, but Elizabeth didn’t bother reminding him. “Fine,” was all she said, and she reached under her paint-shirt to pull, from her jacket pocket, a set of keys dangling from Mrs. Emerson’s lacy gold initials.

The car was a very old Mercedes with a standard shift that tended to stick and make grinding noises. Elizabeth was used to it. She drove absentmindedly, keeping the clutch halfway in and watching the scenery more than the road, but Timothy changed positions uneasily every time she shifted gears. He kept one hand tight on the dashboard, the other along the
back of the seat. “Have you been driving long?” he asked her. “Since I was eleven,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t had time to get a license yet, though.” She swerved neatly around an on-coming taxi. The roads here in the woods were so narrow that one car always had to draw aside when it met another, but Elizabeth made a game out of never actually coming to a full stop. She ducked in and out of parking spaces, raced other drivers to open sections of the road and then rolled easily toward their bumpers as they backed to let her by. “I can see that I’m making you nervous,” she told Timothy, “but I’m a better driver than you realize. I’m trying to save the brakes.”

“I’d rather you saved us,” Timothy said, but he loosened his grip on the dashboard. Then they hit Roland Avenue, and he settled back in his seat. “I don’t suppose you know if Andrew’s coming,” he said.

“He’s not.”

“I was afraid to ask Mother on the phone. She can go on and on about things like that. But Matthew will be there.”

“Nope.”

“What, no Matthew? He practically
lives
there.”

“He used to,” said Elizabeth. “Then your mother said he was wasting his life on a dead-end job. Running a dinky country newspaper and getting all of the work but none of the credit. I don’t know why.”

“The owner drinks,” Timothy said.

“She said for him to come back when he got a decent job. He never did. It’s been three weeks now.”

“Matthew is the crazy one in the family,” Timothy said.

“Oh, I thought that was Andrew.”

“Well, him too. But Matthew is downright peculiar: I don’t believe he hears a word Mother says to him. He visits her every week, no matter
what
she’s up to. Brings tomatoes he’s grown himself, stays an hour or two.”

“Not any more he doesn’t,” Elizabeth said. “Will he get another job, do you think?”

“No.”

“Well, what then? Won’t he ever come home again?”

“Oh, sooner or later Mother will give up. Then he’ll wander in again and that’ll be the end of it.”

“I doubt if he’s crazy at all,” Elizabeth said.

She parked haphazardly in a space barely longer than the car, and they climbed out. Standing on the curb she peeled her paint-shirt off, shut it in the car, and brought a curling vinyl wallet from her jacket pocket. “I wonder how much turkeys cost,” she said.

“Let me pay. It was my idea.”

“No, I have enough.”

“Aren’t you saving up for college or something?” “Not really,” Elizabeth said.

The grocery store was vast and gloomy, even under the fluorescent ice-cube trays that hung from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp wood, cardboard, cracker crumbs. They had barely stepped inside when someone said, “Timothy Emerson!”—a sharp-edged woman in a fur stole, one of Mrs. Emerson’s tea guests. “Don’t tell me you’re honoring your mother with a visit,” she said. “Did she recognize you?” She flung out a little peal of laughter. Elizabeth slid past her and went over to the meat counter. “I’d like a turkey,” she told the butcher. “Kind of fat.”

“Fifteen pounds? Twenty?”

“I wouldn’t know. Could you let me hold one?”

He disappeared into a back room. Mrs. Emerson’s friend could be heard all over the store. “…   never known a braver woman, just so sweet and brave. Disappointments never faze her. I said, ‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you sell that big old house and find yourself an apartment now that—’ ‘Oh no, my
dear,’ she told me, ‘I’ll need all that space for my children, if ever they choose to come home.’ “

The butcher reappeared, carrying three turkeys. “This one?” he said. “This one?” He held them up one by one, while Elizabeth frowned and twirled her car keys. “Let me try that last one,” she said finally. She reached across the counter for it and weighed it in her hands. “Wait a minute. I’ll be back.”

“How is your twin brother, dear?” the friend was saying. “I understand he’s in the care of a doctor again. Now, wouldn’t you think he should be in his own home? New
York
is no place for a, for someone who’s …”

“Try this,” Elizabeth told Timothy. “Add intestines and such. Feathers. Feet. Do you think he’s about the right size?”

Timothy, who had lit a pipe, stuck the pipe between his teeth and took hold of the turkey. “Feels okay to
me,”
he said.

Mrs. Emerson’s friend said, “It’s Elizabeth, isn’t it? How are
you
this fine day? Planning for a great many dinner guests?”

“Well, not exactly,” Elizabeth said. “Forget you saw me buying this.” She left the woman staring after her and went back to the butcher. “I like it,” she told him, “but I could do without that piece of metal in his tail.”

“That’s to pin his legs down.”

“I’d prefer it without, anyway,” Elizabeth said.

While he was wrapping the turkey she went off in search of stuffing mix. Timothy by now was coasting down the aisle on the back of a shopping cart. He took several long strides and then hopped on the rear axle, leaning far forward to keep his balance. The pipe in his round face looked comical, like a snowman’s corncob. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he told her when he had coasted to a stop. “Mother
never took us to grocery stores; she telephoned. Up until Margaret ran away with the delivery boy.”

“Telephoned!” Elizabeth said. “Didn’t it cost more that way?”

“Why not? We’re rich.”

He wheeled the cart over to the meat counter, where they collected the turkey. Then Elizabeth went off to find snacks for Alvareen’s sick-days. Timothy followed, pretending the turkey was a baby in a carriage. “Who do you think he favors?” he asked, and he lovingly rearranged a patch of butcher’s tape. Then he hopped on the cart and coasted off again. “I must find Mrs. Hewlett,” he called back. “She has such a consuming interest in little Emersons.” Periodically, in her trips down the aisles, Elizabeth caught sight of him. He whizzed past sober ladies and grim-faced clerks, a flash of yellow hair topped with a red feather. When she met him at the check-out counter he had parked the cart and was carrying a gigantic sack of dog food that hid his face and reached to his knees. All she saw were his hands clutching the sides of it. “I know we don’t have a dog,” he said, poking his head around the sack, “but I can never resist a bargain, can you?” And he turned to put it back again, his knees buckling, staggering beneath its weight, all to make her smile.

But when they were back in the car his mood had changed completely. He sat hunched in his seat, staring out the side window and fiddling with his pipe but not smoking it. “I’d have liked to find a turkey with a couple of feathers left,” Elizabeth told him. Timothy didn’t answer. Then when they stopped for a light he said, “Maybe we could just drive around for a while.”

“Where would you like to go?” said Elizabeth.

“I don’t know. Nowhere. Home,” he said, and he
slouched down in his seat and tapped his dead pipe on his knee all the rest of the ride.

Elizabeth parked in front of the house. The minute the car doors slammed Mrs. Emerson appeared on the veranda, stepping forward and then back on the welcome mat with both hands clasped in front of her. “Timothy!” she said. “What are you—why—?”

“My car is down back,” Timothy said. He climbed the steps and bent to kiss her on one cheek. Mrs. Emerson’s face was tilted up to him, her eyes half closed by the frown she wore, and she kept her hands pressed tightly together. “I still don’t understand,” she said.

“How are you, Mother?”

“Oh, just fine. I’m doing beautifully. I’m managing very well.”

“You
look
well.”

Elizabeth passed them and went into the house, carrying the groceries. As soon as she reached the kitchen she dumped the whole bag in one swoop, stripped the turkey of its wrappings and set it on the counter. Then she put the other items away more slowly and folded the paper bag. Alvareen came in with a scrub pail full of gray water. “Is that
him?”
she asked, looking at the turkey.

“Pretty neat job, wouldn’t you say?”

“Then what’s that other feller doing, running around out back?”

“Oh, Lord.”

Elizabeth went out the kitchen door and found the turkey squatting by a basement window. “Shoo!” she said, and clapped her hands. The turkey moved a few feet off before he stopped again. “Shoo, boy! Shoo!”

Mrs. Emerson appeared on the back porch, followed by
Timothy. “Now, how on earth—” she said. “I thought I told you to kill that thing.”

“I was just getting set to,” Elizabeth said.

“Then what did I see in the kitchen? What is that creature on the counter?”

Timothy handed his pipe to his mother and came down the porch steps. “Drive him this way,” he told Elizabeth. “I’ll be here to grab him.”

“I would rather drive him off again.”

“Explain that, please,” Mrs. Emerson said. “I gave you a perfectly simple chore to do, one that Richard would have seen to in five minutes. The only thing in my life I ever won and you shoo him off like a common housefly. Then try to fool me with one from the butcher. That is what you did, isn’t it? That’s where you and Timothy came in from together, looking so smug?”

Because neither Elizabeth nor Timothy felt like answering, they concentrated on the turkey. They closed in on him tighter and tighter, although the last thing they wanted to do was catch him. The turkey did a little mumbling dance with himself, stiff-legged.

“I can’t trust anyone,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Oh, Mother. What’d you ask her to do it for, anyway? She’s too tender-hearted.”

“Too
what? Elizabeth?”
Mrs. Emerson set the pipe down, in the exact center of the top porch step, and folded her arms against the cold. “It isn’t the turkey I mind, it’s the deception,” she said. “The two of you going off like that, laughing at me behind my back. Conspiring. That naked, storebought-looking bird lying on my kitchen counter.”

Timothy had driven the turkey to a spot directly in front of Elizabeth, but Elizabeth made no move to catch him. She
was watching Timothy, who was growing pinker and stonier but not answering back. He stood so close to her that she heard the angry little puff of his breath when his mother spoke to him.