Grandpa was wearing the inevitable pair of blue-jeans beneath his overalls. ‘Jew-pants’, he called them matter-of-factly, a term that all the farmers Clive knew used. Levi’s were either ‘Jew-pants’
or simply ‘Joozers’.
He reached through the righthand slit in his overalls, fumbled at some length in the righthand pocket of the denim trousers beneath, and at last brought out a tarnished silver pocket watch which he put in the boy’s unprepared hand. The weight of the watch was so sudden, the ticking beneath its metal skin so lively, that he came within an ace of dropping it.
He looked at Grandpa, his brown eyes wide.
‘You ain’t gonna drop it,’ said Grandpa, ‘and if you did you probably wouldn’t stop it — it’s been dropped before, even stepped on once in some damned beerjoint in Utica, and it never stopped yet. And if it did stop, it’d be your loss, not mine, because it’s yours now.’
‘What?’ He wanted to say he didn’t understand but couldn’t finish because he thought he did.
‘I’m giving it to you,’ Grandpa said. ‘Always meant to, but I’ll be damned if I’m gonna put it in my will. It’d cost more for the damn law-rights than that thing’s worth.’
‘Grandpa . . . I . . . Jesus!’
Grandpa laughed until he started to cough. He doubled over, coughing and laughing, his face going a plum-purple color. Some of Clive’s joy and wonder were lost in concern. He remembered his mother telling him again and again on their way up here that he was not to tire Grandpa out because Grandpa was ill. When Clive had asked him two days before — cautiously
-what had made him sick, George Banning had replied with a single mysterious word. It was only on the night after their talk in the orchard, as he was drifting off to sleep with the pocket watch curled warmly in his hand, that Clive realized the word Grandpa had spoken, ‘ticka’, referred not to some dangerous poison-bug but to Grandpa’s heart. The doctor had made him stop smoking and said if he tried anything too strenuous, like shovelling snow or trying to hoe the garden, he would end up playing a harp. The boy knew well enough what that meant.
‘You ain’t gonna drop it, and if you did you probably wouldn’t stop it,’ Grandpa had said, but the boy was old enough to know that it would stop someday, that people and watches both stopped someday.
He stood, waiting to see if Grandpa was going to stop, but at last his coughing and laughter eased off and he stood up straight again, wiping a runner of snot from his nose with his left hand and then flicking it casually away.
‘You’re a goddam funny kid, Clivey,’ he said. ‘I got sixteen grandchildren, and there’s only two of em that I think is gonna amount to duckshit, and you ain’t one of em — although you’re on the runner-up list — but you’re the only one that can make me laugh until my balls ache.’
‘I didn’t mean to make your balls ache,’ Clive said, and that sent Grandpa off again, although this time he was able to get his laughter under control before the coughing started.
‘Loop the chain over your knuckles a time or two, if it’ll make you feel easier,’ Grandpa said.
‘If you feel easier in your mind, maybe you’ll pay attention a little better.’
He did as Grandpa suggested and did feel better. He looked at the watch in his palm, mesmerized by the lively feel of its mechanism, by the sunstar on its crystal, by the second hand which turned in its own small circle. But it was still Grandpa’s watch: of this he was quite sure.
Then, as he had this thought, an apple blossom went skating across the crystal and was gone.
This happened in less than a second, but it changed everything. After the blossom, it was true. It was his watch, forever . . . or at least until one of them stopped running and couldn’t be fixed and had to be thrown away.
‘All right,’ Grandpa said. ‘You see the second hand going around all by its ownself ?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Keep your eye on it. When it gets up to the top, you holler ‘Go!’ at me. Understand.’
He nodded.
‘Okay. When it gets there, you just let her go, Gallagher.’
Clive frowned down at the watch with the deep seriousness of a mathematician approaching the conclusion of a crucial equation. He already understood what Grandpa wanted to show him, and he was bright enough to understand that proof was only a formality . . . but one that must be shown just the same. It was a rite, like not being able to leave church until the minister said the benediction, even though all the songs on the board had been sung and the sermon was finally, mercifully, over.
When the second hand stood straight up at twelve on its own separate little dial (Mine, he marvelled. That’s my second hand on my watch), he hollered ‘Go!’ at the top of his lungs, and Grandpa began to count with the greasy speed of an auctioneer selling dubious goods, trying to get rid of them at top prices before his hypnotized audience can wake up and realize it has not just been bilked but outraged.
‘One-two-thre’, fo’-fi’-six, sev’-ay-nine, ten-‘leven,’ Grandpa chanted, the gnarly blotches on his cheeks and the big purple veins on his nose beginning to stand out again in his excitement. He finished in a triumphant hoarse shout: ‘Fifjynine-sizzy!’ As he said this last, the second hand of the pocket watch was just crossing the seventh dark line, marking thirty-five seconds.
‘How long?’ Grandpa asked, panting and rubbing at his chest with his hand.
Clive told him, looking at Grandpa with undisguised admiration. That was fast counting, Grandpa!’
Grandpa flapped the hand with which he had been rubbing his chest in a get out! gesture, but he smiled. ‘Didn’t count half as fast as that Osgood brat,’ he said. ‘I heard that little sucker count twenty-seven, and the next thing I knew he was up somewhere around forty-one.’ Grandpa fixed him with his eyes, a dark autumnal blue utterly unlike Clive’s Mediterranean brown ones. He put one of his gnarled hands on Clive’s shoulder. It was knotted with arthritis, but the boy felt the
live strength that still slumbered in there like wires in a machine that’s turned off. ‘You remember one thing, Clivey. Time ain’t got nothing to do with how fast you can count.’
Clive nodded slowly. He didn’t understand completely, but he thought he felt the shadow of understanding, like the shadow of a cloud passing slowly across a meadow.
Grandpa reached into the pouch pocket in the bib of his overalls and brought out a pack of unfiltered Kools. Apparently Grandpa hadn’t stopped smoking after all, dicky heart or not. Still, it seemed to the boy as if maybe Grandpa had cut down drastically, because that pack of Kools looked as if it had done hard travelling; it had escaped the fate of most packs, torn open after breakfast and tossed empty into the gutter at three, a crushed ball. Grandpa rummaged, brought out a cigarette almost as bent as the pack from which it had come. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth, replaced the pack in the bib, and brought out a wooden match which he snapped alight with one practiced flick of his old man’s thick yellow thumbnail. Clive watched with the fascination of a child who watches a magician produce a fan of cards from an empty hand. The flick of the thumb was always interesting, but the amazing thing was that the match did not go out. In spite of the high wind which steadily combed this hilltop, Grandpa cupped the small flame with an assurance that could afford to be leisurely. He lit his smoke and then was actually shaking the match, as if he had negated the wind by simple will. Clive looked closely at the cigarette and saw no black scorch-marks trailing up the white paper from the glowing tip. His eyes had not deceived him, then; Grandpa had taken his light from a straight flame, like a man who takes a light from a candle in a closed room. It was sorcery, pure and simple.
Grandpa removed the cigarette from his mouth and put his thumb and forefinger in, looking for a moment like a man who means to whistle for his dog, or a taxi. Instead he brought them out again wet and pressed them against the match-head. The boy needed no explanation; the only thing Grandpa and his friends out there in the country feared more than sudden freezes was fire.
Grandpa dropped the match and ground it under his boot. When he looked up and saw the boy staring at him, he misinterpreted the subject of his fascination.