V
Two rings were all anybody in town heard.
The town hour chime, so flawlessly accurate for as long as anybody could remember, had become stuck at two from the afternoon Doolan and I had climbed into the tower. The clock hands froze in place too, right at the stroke of that 2 p.m.
It became quite the talk of the town within hours, and the local newspaper was quickly on the case the next day. The first story was just a little back-page blurb under the headline, "City Chime Forgets Time," which breezily took note of the quirk and reported that the courthouse custodial staff was trying to figure out what went wrong and would soon have it fixed.
Within a couple of days the lack of the public timepiece grew into a source of irritation to many of the townspeople, who has taken the clock and bell’s hourly accuracy for granted for so long. Speculative gossip began swirling about the streets.
"A pigeon got caught in the works."
"The bell tower supports were was loose, and look out, it may come crashing down and kill someone."
"It was prank pulled off by a rival high school football team, probably some hoods from Deptford."
"The mayor shouldn’t have hired his cousin to take care of the clock because, you know, I hear he drinks."
Some supposed it was a nefarious communist plot, and some suspected it was the Democrats.
The newspaper -- curiously called the Times -- glossed over the street speculation and took the matter to a higher level. The next day’s story made Page One under the headline, "Stopped Clock Baffles City Hall," and quoted the mayor as saying he still didn’t have an answer, but he would have the landmark timepiece back in running order within a couple of days. He apologized to the bus drivers, churchgoers, store owners and everyone else who depended on it, and remarked that he himself never knew how much he depended on it until the chime was hushed and the hands were stilled. The story gave some history about the clock, saying it had been manufactured in Germany in the late 1800s, shipped overseas and hoisted into the newly built tower of the county courthouse. The bell had been cast in a foundry in Philadelphia just seven miles away and ferried across the Delaware River and hauled to Woodbury by train and horse-drawn wagon.
Unable to get comment from the clock-keeper, who had been told by his city hall bosses not to talk to the press because they’d probably get it all wrong anyway, the newspaper then indulged in some of its own speculation. It quoted a mechanic at the Esso station in town as saying that after all the years of grinding away the time, the gears in the clockworks were probably worn just like an old car’s transmission and needed to be replaced. A jeweler on Broad Street said dirt and hardened grease may have lodged in the works somewhere and gummed things up. About the only thing that wasn’t blamed for the 2 o’clock freeze-up was ghosts, and that was odd because a number of people around town swore they still heard the gongs from the town bell even though they knew it was stuck fast at 2 o’clock.
People told the Times that they would swear they’ve heard bells, and when they looked at their watches to check the time, it was always right on the hour. And it’s always just two gongs, said the manager of the Broad Street 5 & 10. But it wasn’t just people in the newspaper saying this because I heard people say it myself. Not that I ever asked the question because I didn’t want anyone to know I had ever been in the bell tower. Besides, I had a theory myself, one that was validated when the Times broke a big Page One story that explained what had gone wrong under the headline,
"Mystery Coin Froze Hands of Time."
The mayor had called a Times reporter into his office to lay out all the facts as he understood them from the clock’s maintenance man, a German immigrant named Karl Schutz, who stood in the room as well but had evidently been told not to utter a word unless asked. The mayor, a retired chemist named Henry Cobb, chose his words carefully.
"While performing his weekly maintenance, which includes winding the piece and checking its gears for lubrication, Mr. Schutz discovered an object lodged in one of the main gears," Mayor Cobb said. "Mr. Schutz was able to remove it after spending some time removing portions of the machinery, some gears and drive spindles and what-not. Now we have found the problem, but it will take some time to reassemble. And first, we’ll have some of the gears retooled, so it could be several more days before the clock is back in order. Any questions?"
"How long will it take?" asked a reporter, a young woman just out of college.
"Week, maybe two. We hope people in the city will be patient, but we have found the problem."
"How did it stop the clock and bell?"
They mayor glanced at Mr. Schutz for a moment., then answered, "The clock gears, when they come into contact at a certain point, spin a shaft that triggers an electrical charge to the motor that runs the bell. Am I right Mr. Schutz?" The janitor, tall, gray-haired and wearing city workers’ coveralls, nodded in the affirmative.
There were a few more questions, technical in nature, before the reporter asked, "And what was the object, the thing that caused this gear jam-up?"
The mayor looked at Mr. Schutz, paused and then took a deep breath before giving his answer. The last question was the best question, and it was at the top of the story in the next day’s paper.
"Rev War Soldier’s Button Stopped Clock," the headline said.
"One mystery was solved, but another one surfaced as city officials explained what stopped the county building clock works," the lead paragraph proclaimed. "The hands were stopped cold at 2 when a button said to be from a Revolutionary War-era uniform found its way into the gearbox," the story went on. "But how the pewter button, which was inscribed with markings known to have been commonly used on Hessian uniforms, got into the works was unknown, Mayor Cobb said."
The front-page story went on to tell how the object was first thought to be a coin, but upon closer inspection Mr. Schutz could see it bore no dates or other markings from minting. He dutifully turned the disc over to the local historical society, which found it to be quite similar to the pewter buttons attached to the waistcoats worn by the Hessians who had fought at Fort Mercer in 1777 – and had actually encamped in Woodbury. The button had been decorated with a black-painted eagle, further identifying it as a German military insignia. The history sleuths had even identified a worn-down peg on the back of the button, through which thread had been looped. But the examiners could not understand why the letters S-W-E-I had been etched into the pewter. Mr. Schutz could offer only one answer: "It means ‘two.’ " But his explanation never made it into the paper.
Like just about everybody else in town, I read all of the stories with top to bottom, mainly to see if anybody remembered seeing two boys walking through the county building just before the clock stopped. To my relief, there had been no such report, but I wasn’t really surprised because no one seemed to pay any attention when Doolan and I breezed through the hallway to the tower. One of the articles even raised the possibility of mischief or vandalism of some sort, but the mayor brushed it off as highly unlikely.
That didn’t convince my father, who slapped the newspaper down one night after reading about the clock mystery and mumbled, "Kids, that’s what it was." Dad was settled on his verdict. Then he walked over and turned on the TV.
"Right," I told him. "Probably kids."
I went up to my room and pulled out the old paper Doolan had given me while we were making out last getaway from the clock tower. It was written in something foreign, I thought German by the looks of the letters, and portions of the leaf were splattered with dark brown residues of dried oil or water.
I could hear the muffled sounds of the TV downstairs as I held the paper up to the light to see what letters were printed under the stains. As I focused, a crash and thump jumped me to my feet, almost blinding me with fear for a second. I took a deep breath and looked around. Moments later, Dad was pounding up the steps to see what was going on.
"What? What?" was all I could seem to say. Dad peered around the room and quickly figured out what had happened. A window in my room had come crashing down after dried and frayed ropes holding the counterweights inside the sash gave out.
"This is odd," said Dad. He paused. "One breaking, I can see. But two at the same time?" He held up the broken ropes for me to see, and smiled. "Just a coincidence I guess."
He examined the ropes, one at a time, and blew the dust off the ends where they had given out.
"Two at the same time," he repeated. "You see it happen with light bulbs, you put two in at the same time, they give out the same night." He paused again. "Strange. I’ll fix it this weekend."
I was still catching my breath as he walked back downstairs to see his game on TV. Then I heard his voice again.
"Hey, who changed the channel? I thought I was watching the game on 6." I knew it wasn’t my mom. She was out shopping that night.
