Because there, resting in the hollow beneath the pendulum, wrapped in soft cloth, were two things, and a letter, and my hands shook as I lifted them into the light.
The first was money, a careful lifetime of it, saved a little at a time. The second was a pocket watch, old and gold and beautiful, that I recognized from a single faded photograph as belonging to my grandfather, the father of my father, gone long before I was born.
My father had hidden his own father pocket watch beneath the pendulum of the clock, three generations of a family keeping the time, and he left it to the one child of his who wound the clock beside him on Sunday mornings, the one who loved the old things and would keep them alive.
The letter explained what none of us ever understood, why he left the clock to me and not to my brothers.
Your brothers are good men, he wrote, but they would sell the clock, or let it wind down and stop, and the old watch would be lost, and with it the last of your grandfather. You were the one who cared. You wound the clock with me. You asked about the watch in the photograph. So I give them both to you, keeper of our family time.
I sat down on the stairs beside the clock and I wept, thirty-nine years of winding it every Sunday, never knowing that beneath the pendulum lay my great-grandfather watch and my father whole faith in me.
He was right about my brothers, gentle as it pains me to say it. They would not have known what they had. The clock would have stopped, and the watch would have vanished, and three generations of our family would have ticked away into nothing.
They did not stop. They will not, while I am alive to wind them.
I took the pocket watch to be cleaned and set right, and the old clockmaker who did it turned it over in his hands a long while and told me they do not make them like this anymore, that it was a fine thing, cared for by people who loved it. I told him it had been. Three generations of us. He nodded like he understood, and I believe he did.
I carry that gold pocket watch now, on the special days, and I feel the weight of all of them in it, the men of my family who wound and carried and kept the time before me. And every Sunday I wind the clock, the way my father taught me, the way his father taught him.
Thirty-nine years the clock chimed in my hall, keeping a secret in its base along with the hours. My father chose the keeper of the family time, and he chose right. One day I will teach a grandchild of my own to wind it, and I will show them the hollow, and the watch, and the letter, and the keeping will go on.