The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

I did not ask him what the music was to him. I am ashamed of that. In eleven years of him sitting on that porch, I never once sat down on the step beside him and asked.

Here is how it went.

It was the second Tuesday of October, eleven years ago. Tobin was twenty-six. He had worked in the shop since he was fourteen, and for the last four years, full time, at the bench beside mine. He was better than I had been at his age, and I knew it, and I had never said so.

I remember the weather because I always remember weather. A dry fall, soybeans coming off early along County Road 400 South, dust hanging over the elevator at the edge of town. The shop door was propped open.

Hollis Brandt from the feed store stood at my counter waiting on a pocket watch of his father’s, and Opal Strawn sat in the chair by the window with a cuckoo clock in her lap that had stopped calling her hours.

Tobin put down his tweezers and said, “Dad, I need to talk to you.”

I should have taken him in the back. Instead, I kept my eyes on the movement under my loupe. “Talk.”

He said that a man named Odell Meeks, who ran a studio in Nashville, Tennessee, had heard some of his songs and offered him a job. Playing on other people’s sessions, writing a little, learning the work.

He said he would take it for a year and see, that he would be home for holidays, and that if he did not try it now he would spend the rest of his life wondering.

He said it all in one breath, in front of Hollis and Opal, because I had not given him anywhere else to say it.

And I said, “A man who will not learn a trade is just noise.”

I want to be accurate about this. Tobin had learned the trade. What he had not done was take the certification exam, because he kept putting it off and I never pushed, and now I was using that as a stick.

I knew it was unfair while I was saying it. I said it anyway, in the voice I used for estimating repairs. Level. Cold.

Opal Strawn looked down into her cuckoo clock. Hollis Brandt looked at the ceiling.

Tobin did not shout. He was not a shouter. He stood there at his bench with his hands open, and I watched my words go into him like a nail into soft pine.

“I know what noise is, Dad,” he said, very quietly. “I’ve been listening to forty clocks my whole life. I know the difference.”

Then he unclipped the shop key from his belt loop and set it on my counter, next to Hollis’s father’s watch, and walked out the front door. A minute later I heard his truck start at the curb.

Through the window I could see the guitar case strapped down in the bed, and it came to me that he had been carrying it for days, waiting for the right moment to tell me.

The truck turned onto Main and went north past the bank. I stood at the bench. And because Hollis and Opal were watching me, I picked up my tweezers and went back to the movement.

I finished that repair. It was Hollis’s father’s watch, and it ran beautifully.

He called the first Sunday. Delphia took the phone in the kitchen and I went out to the garage and found something to sand. He called the second Sunday and the third, every Sunday at four, and every Sunday at four I was in the garage.