It has been over nine years since the incident, but for some reason it still surfaces at dinner that night. “Your daddy told me he doesn’t see how anybody could have fallen from that height and still lived,” my grandpa says.
He was in his early seventies the year of the fall. He had climbed up an old apple tree, leaning sideways on a hill that sloped straight down. He had lost his balance and fallen straight down to the bottom of this hill. Three weeks later, he was rid of the hospital, but not rid of the fall.
That old tree was cut down. My grandpa was determined to win, to defeat that which had tried to conquer him. He spent the next few weeks hidden away in the garage beside the house. “I’m worried,” my grandma said. “He doesn’t even eat.” When he finally came out, the clock was in his hand. It was a masterpiece, encased in the wood of the old apple tree.
I have sat in the living room completely quiet before, and have heard the lug of the clockwork, thudding out its heavy tick tick ticks from within the tomb of the apple tree wood. My grandfather is losing his hearing. Yet, I have seen him hear the clock before. I have quietly slipped into a room and seen his hand upon his chin. Listening. And his eyes sink back. The wrinkles on his forehead contort, as if the thoughts he is thinking are painful. When I was younger, I denied it, denied what I knew I was seeing. But now I can face it. My grandfather is afraid.
He does not like to lose.The clock is his competition. It tried to take him once and he fought back. Yet it will not relent. Now, it seems, with every tick, to be pulling him back, and he is keeping count, terrified.
