I finished the last letter of my father on the dusty floor of the clock tower, and by then the light behind the great white face had turned to amber. Tyler, the young foreman, had quietly gone down the stairs to give me privacy. I sat with my back against the brass gears and the paper trembling in my hands. Somewhere below, in the town where I had spent sixty five years, my phone buzzed on the seat of my car. It was a number with a long string of digits at the front, and I knew, without knowing how, who was calling.
His name was Magnus Holm. He spoke careful English, with the soft rolling accent I had heard in the voice of my father whenever he was tired. He said he was at the Minneapolis airport and would drive down in the morning, if I permitted. He said he had written to our father in September and had been told, by a neighbor, that the old man had died in July. I could hear him swallow. “I am sorry,” he said. “I am so sorry. I was only two months too late.”
He arrived the next day in a rented gray sedan, a tall man of sixty seven with white hair and the long hands of my father. We stood on the porch of my house for a full minute without speaking, looking at one another, two old people trying to find the same face. Then he held out a worn photograph of a young woman on a pier. Annika. I took it and brought it close, and there, in the corner, in handwriting I knew by heart, was an inscription from my father: For the boy, when he is old enough.
A clock wound faithfully for forty five years keeps the time of grief until the one who was lost walks back in.
Over tea at my kitchen table, Magnus told me the part the letters had never known. His mother had died in 2004. His uncle Erik, the brother of Annika, had not drowned in the harbor in 1958. A fishing crew pulled him out of the black water half frozen, and he spent a year in a hospital in Gothenburg. He was alive. Eighty nine years old now, living in a small house on the coast, and he had spent his whole adult life looking for the man who ran. “He is not angry,” Magnus said. “He never was.”
The truth of that night was simple, and it was sadder than my father had ever imagined. Erik had been mixed up with smugglers at the docks, and the police were coming for him. He had told his friend Nils to take his sister and get on a ship, and then he had gone off the pier himself in a fight. Nils saw him go under. He believed he had caused it by not pulling harder. He had carried that belief across an ocean and up eighty eight iron stairs, every Sunday, for forty five years.
I cried then, finally, at my own table, with a stranger who was also my brother. I cried for the young man on a freighter with a false name. I cried for my mother, who never knew, and for the little boy in Sweden who had grown up believing his father was a coward. Magnus put a hand on my shoulder, quite stiffly, as though he were not used to the gesture. Then, to my astonishment, he began to laugh softly through his own tears. “We are both terrible at this,” he said.
Two days later, the demolition crew was told to wait. I had called every person I could think of. The mayor of Red Wing, the local historical society, a woman at the state office who looked after old buildings. It took one phone call to the developer. He was a decent man, as it turned out, and when he heard the story of the clock he paused for a long moment and said he would find another way to build his condominiums. The courthouse would not fall. Not that autumn.
On the third Sunday of October, at nine in the evening, Magnus and I climbed the eighty eight steps together. He carried the leather bag. I carried the keys of my father. We stood before the great iron crank, the two of us, and Tyler, who had asked to come, held the flashlight in the dark. Magnus put his hands where the hands of my father had been, and I put mine over his, and together we turned the heavy wheel, ninety seven turns, until the whole machine groaned and the pendulum swung.
We mailed the first letter that week. It went to a small house on the coast of Sweden, in a plain white envelope, and I wrote on it in my own hand. The letter said that Nils Engstrom had loved his sister every day of his life, and that he had wound a clock every Sunday to keep time for her. Four weeks later, an answer came back, trembling, in old looped script. It was only three lines long. Tell my friend I forgave him in 1958. Tell him to rest. Come visit.
I went in the spring, with Magnus, on a plane over the gray Atlantic. Erik was waiting in a doorway, very small and bent, in a gray cardigan. He did not say a word. He looked into my face for a long time, then held out both hands, and I put into them the gold key to the tower of the courthouse. He pressed it against his heart. Back in Red Wing, the clock keeps perfect time. And on Sundays at nine, someone climbs the stairs to wind it.
