Timepiece (4 page)

“It is a pleasure meeting you, sir.”

Lawrence bowed. “It's my pleasure, ma'am.”

“Gentlemen, if I may be excused.”

David nodded and MaryAnne stepped away, shutting the door behind her.

“Where's Miss Karen?” Lawrence asked.

“It has been a while since you have been around. Her mother took ill and she went back to Georgia.”

“She was a nice gal.”

“Yes. She did not think much of Negroes, though.”

“Her upbringin',” Lawrence said in her defense.

“You are kinder than you ought to be,” David said, reclining in his chair. “What have you brought to show me?”

Lawrence lifted a gold pocket watch by its bob and handed it to David, who examined it carefully, then held it out at arm's
length. “Look at that,” he said beneath his breath.

“It's a fine piece. Maybe the finest I seen. French made. Never even been engraved. Belonged to a Mr. Nathaniel Kearns.”

“Gold plate?”

“Solid.”

“How much does Kearns want for it?”

“Mr. Kearns don't want nothin'. He's dead. The auctioneers askin' seventy-five dollars.”

“Is it worth it?”

“Sixty-seven dollars, I'd say.”

“I will purchase it,” David decided. “For sixty-seven.” He stood up. “Would you care for something to drink?” He pulled a crystal decanter from a cabinet against the west wall.

“Shore I would.”

David poured Lawrence a shot glass of rum. Lawrence took the glass, then leaned
back while David walked back to his chair.

“How long this MaryAnne worked for you?”

“About six weeks.” The corners of his mouth rose in a vague smile. “She is rather special.”

“I can see that,” he said. “Called me ‘suh'.”

David nodded, then glanced over to the door to be certain it was closed. “I have a question for you, Lawrence.”

Lawrence looked up intently over his glass.

“What do you think of me marrying?”

“You, David?”

“What would you say to that?”

“Now why you askin' me? I ain't ever been married.”

“I value your opinion. You are a good judge of character.”

Lawrence fidgeted uncomfortably.

“Come now, Lawrence. Speak freely.”

Lawrence frowned. “It's my way of
thinkin' that some folk shouldn' get themselves married.”

David grinned. “Some folk? Folk like me?”

“I'm jus' sayin' someone shouldn' take a perfectly good life and go marryin' it. Seen it happen my whole life, someone has the good life. Plenty to eat. Plenty of time to jus' do nuthin', then a woman comes ‘long and ruins it all.”

David began to laugh. “Lawrence, you have a clarity of thought I envy.”

“There someone you be thinkin' ‘bout?”

“Yes. But I think she would be rather astonished to know of my intentions.”

Lawrence glanced back toward the door and smiled knowingly.

“You do have a clarity of thought, my friend,” David said.

Lawrence stood up. “Well, I best be off so you can be ‘bout your business.” His face stretched into a bright smile. “Whatever that business may be.”

David grinned. “Thank you for bringing the timepiece by, Lawrence. I will come by this afternoon with the payment.”

Lawrence stopped at the door. “Ain't no woman goin' to like all those clocks ‘round her house.”

“The right one will.”

Lawrence opened the door and looked out at MaryAnne, who glanced up and smiled at him. He turned back toward David, who was examining his new timepiece. “You have an eye for finer things.”

“So do you, Lawrence. So do you.”

Lawrence was a novelty in his neighborhood and the children of his street would wait patiently for his daily, slow-paced pilgrimage to the Brigham Street market, then scatter like birds at his appearance. No child could visit the area without hearing the boast from the indigenous children, “We got a Negro in our neighborhood.”

His home was a ramshackle hut built behind a large brick cannery, and all in the neighborhood knew of its existence, despite the fact that it was well secluded and Lawrence was as inconspicuous as his skin allowed him to be.

Lawrence's last name was Flake, taken from the slave owners who had purchased his mother in eastern Louisiana in 1834. He had seen war twice, once in the South, and once in Cuba, and had grown old in the military, his black hair dusted silver with age.

He was tall, six foot, and broad-shouldered, and though he had a thick, powerful neck, his head hung slightly forward, a manifestation of a life of deference. His skin was patched and uneven from exposure to the elements, but his eyes were clear and quiet and said all that society would not allow spoken.

He walked with a limp, which increased with his age. The adult spectators of his daily march called it a Negro shuffle,
ignorant of the Spanish bullet still lodged in his inner left thigh, a souvenir from the Spanish-American War.

Lawrence had belonged to the Negro Twenty-fourth Cavalry, a “buffalo soldier” so named by the Indians who feared the black soldiers, convinced that their black, “woolly” hair and beards were evidence that they were mystical beings: half men, half buffalo. He had come to Utah when the Twenty-fourth was transferred to Fort Douglas, cradled on the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley, and remained behind when, four years later, the cavalry was re-stationed in the Philippines.

Lawrence's entry into clock repair was happenstance. He had been the army's supply and requisition clerk, and, naturally gifted with his hands, had a knack for repairing rifles, wagons, and whatever the post required fixing. On one occasion, he repaired a pocket watch for one of the officers, who, in appreciation, made Lawrence
a present of a manual on clock repair and nicknamed him “the horologist,” a title Lawrence clung to, as it made him feel scientific.

Salt Lake City had few horologists, and as word spread of Lawrence's expertise, civilians began bringing him their timepieces as well.

When he left the cavalry, his clientele followed him to his new shop. His clock-cleaning-and-repair business grew into a trading post of sorts, as people left notes of clocks they wanted to acquire or sell, and estate auctioneers found Lawrence to be a good wholesaler of their wares.

David met Lawrence through the purchase of a Black Forest cuckoo clock and instantly liked the man. There was a calmness in his motion; the temperament of one suited to repair the intricate. “Slow hands,” David called it. But there was more. There was something comfortable in his manner that reminded David of earlier days. Growing
up in the womb of the Eureka mine, David had worked and lived with black men, listened to their stories of injustices and enjoyed their company. In the depth of a mine, all men were black, and he had learned to appreciate people for their souls. The two men spent hours talking about clocks, California, and the cavalry.

Though both were fascinated by clocks, they were so for vastly different reasons. Where David saw immortality in the perpetual motion of the clocks' function, Lawrence was fascinated by the mechanism itself, and for hours on end, he would lose himself in a brass clockwork society—a perfect miniature world where all parts moved according to function. And every member had a place.

As the falling sun stretched the remnant shadows of the day, David rapped on the door of Lawrence's shack.

“Lawrence?”

A soft, husky voice beckoned him in.

David stepped inside. Lawrence sat on a cot in the corner of the darkened room, a single candle cast flickering slivers of light across the man's face. In his hand was a smoldering pipe, which glowed orange-red.

“Sit down,” he said. “Sit down.”

The dwelling consisted of one room divided by function: the living quarters toward the east and the shop toward the west, separated by a plethora of clocks and a heavy table covered with clockwork, candles, and dripped wax.

Lawrence was proud of his humble furnishings: a small, round-topped table, splintered and worn in parts with odd-lengthed legs to hold it steady on the shack's unlevel floor. Around the table were three chairs, each of different manufacture. His bed was a feather mattress set on a home-built wooden frame and covered
with the thick wool army blankets and roll he had slept on for nearly forty years. In the corner of the room, a potbelly stove sat on a stone-and-concrete platform. Where the room wasn't illuminated by the stove, it was lit by kerosene army lamps that hung from the rafters.

There were no windows, though they would have been unusable, as Lawrence had stacked firewood across the outside wall of his home.

David sat down on one of the chairs near the round table. “I brought the money for the pocket watch.” He laid a wad of bills on the table.

“Thank you.”

“Who was that woman I passed on the way around?”

“Big woman? Tha's Miss Thurston. The preacher's wife.”

“What did she want?”

“Same thing she always wants.”

“Which is?”

“Wantin' to get me out to the colored church.” Lawrence shook his head in wonder. “Woman gets talkin' and soon ain't talkin' to me no more, but like she preachin' to a congregation. Gets herself all riled up about sinners and heathens and their sorry souls. I think it must make her feel good. Like she talked some sense into me.”

“Did she?”

Lawrence frowned. “Don't rightly know what to reckon of it all. S'pose there is a heaven, I wanna know what kinda heaven it be. Is it a heaven for white folks? Or is it a different heaven for colored folk and white folk? What you make of it?”

David shrugged. “I am not an expert. I have only been to church on a few occasions. It seems to me that people who spend their lives dreaming about the gold-paved streets and heavenly mansions of the next life are no different than those who waste their time dreaming about it in this life. Only with a poorer sense of timing.”

Lawrence responded in low, rumbling laughter reserved for when he found something particularly amusing. He clenched down on his pipe. “Never thought of it that way,” he replied.

“The way I see it, it's not about what you are going to get, it's about what you become. Divinity is doing what is right because your heart says it's right. And if that puts you on the wrong side of the pearly gates, seems you would be better off on the outside.”

Lawrence took in a long draw on his pipe. “You could've been a philos'pher.”

Just then, in the dancing radiance of the candles, David noticed something he had never seen before, despite his many visits. Across the room, amidst the squalor of metal springs, and the shells and corpses of clocks, was what appeared to be a shrouded sculpture slightly protruding from beneath a cloth sheet.

“What is that in the corner? Under the cloth?”

Lawrence lowered his pipe. “Tha's my angel. Jus' this mornin' had some help and we brought her up from the cellar.”

“Angel?” David walked over to the piece.

“Real Italian marble,” Lawrence said.

David pulled a floor clock back from the sculpture and lifted the drape, exposing a stone sculpture of a dove-winged angel. Its seraphic face turned upward and its arms were outstretched, raised as a child waiting to be lifted. David ran his fingers over its smooth surface.

“This is a very expensive piece. Probably worth a hundred dollars or more. Is it new?”

“Had it for nearly six years, jus' never take her out of the cellar.”

David admired the sculpture. “How did you come by this?”

“Right after I left the cavalry, I did some work for a minister. Fixed his church's steeple clock. Took me ‘bout the whole summer. Problem is, before I got done, the church treasurer run off with all their buildin' money. So the minister asks me if I won' take this angel for payment.”

David stepped away from the statue, rubbing his hand along its surface once more.