Town officials gathered on the courthouse steps as I walked toward the entrance, and the county supervisor saw me coming and got a look on his face I will remember.
They had a problem and it was eleven forty.
The program said the bell would ring one hundred and fifty times at noon. It was printed on the invitation and it had been in the paper twice.
Here is the thing the vendor out of Columbus did not put in his proposal. The digital controller runs the hands. It cannot run the bell. The strike is a separate train of gears driven by a four-hundred-pound weight on a cable, and that weight is cranked up by hand, and it runs out on Thursday every week and has for a hundred and twenty-eight years.
Nobody had wound it since the Monday they took my keys.
The new man had been up twice with a laptop and could not find a thing wrong, because there is nothing wrong with it. It is a machine that is out of the thing that makes it go.
I did not make anybody ask twice. I said I needed forty minutes and somebody to open the tower door.
It takes a hundred and sixty turns of that crank to bring the weight up, and it is not gentle work at sixty-eight. A young deputy came up and did the last forty and I let him.
There is a log kept on the back of the clock room door. Not a county record. Six names in a hundred and twenty-eight years, and every man wrote the date he took it over and the date he handed it off, and I am the sixth and I had not written my second date yet.
At the top of it, in ink gone brown, is what Ansel Fetters wrote in 1897.
This clock does not keep time for the courthouse. It keeps it for the men in the fields who cannot afford a watch and the women who have to know when the school lets out. Wind it Monday. If you cannot come Monday, find somebody who can, and write his name under mine.
It struck a hundred and fifty times starting at noon and took eleven minutes and forty seconds. The square was quiet the whole way through, and I stood up in that tower with my hands on the rail because I did not want anybody looking at me.
The county put the winding back on a contract in December. Sixty dollars a week, which is about the same as insulting me, and I signed it anyway.
The supervisor apologized in a hallway in a way that cost him something.
The digital system still runs the hands and I have no complaint. It is better at the hands than I am.
I have a young woman training now. Twenty-six, works at the library, has the arms and the patience. In about a year I will write her name in that log under mine and put the date beside my own.
They told me digital systems do not need traditions. They were right. What they needed was somebody to turn a crank a hundred and sixty times on a Monday, and nobody thought to ask what that was for.