Beloved Counterpoint

by Larrywomack

An old man lives alone in a small, dilapidated cabin on the edge of a thicket in upstate Maine.  The icy bite of the long, cold winters keeps him inside, except for occasional excursions for kindling.  Once each month a paid neighbor brings food and firewood.  It is his only direct contact with the outside world.  This is how he chose it to be.  The old man moved here three months after his wife died.  They’d been married forty years.

In their last ten years together, they were near inseparable.  He thinks of her much of the time.  His memories go beyond thoughts of special events and holidays.  He thinks most often of their daily routine, of the ordinary things that people do who share their lives as one.

In fact, sometimes he even attempts to relive a complete day of their life together as if she were there.  He will prepare a meal, set a place for her, serve her a portion, move to her chair and eat from her plate.  During these daylong re-creations, he never speaks out loud.  He plays the dialog in his head.

Two ever-ticking, always-chiming, identical seven-day wind-up clocks produce the only sounds in the cabin.  One was a treasured gift from the estate of his beloved grandfather.  The other he and his wife had purchased in a junk shop.  It looked so much like his grandfather’s old clock, they couldn’t resist purchasing it. The clock was in terrible condition.  They took it home and determined that together they’d restore it.  Though he was not mechanically disposed and definitely not inclined to detail, he took charge of the workings, and she the cabinet.  He would study and probe and tinker as she glued, sanded, and varnished.

Side by side, they labored and laughed almost every evening for more than two months and were rewarded with a near replica of his cherished grandfather’s clock.  For about a week afterwards, the clock sat on his workbench as they sought a proper place for the exquisite timepiece in their home.  One day he had a brilliant idea!  He suggested they place the clocks side by side, and that each of them take full responsibility for one of the clocks.  They would keep the clocks wound, adjust the time, and work towards synchronizing the functions of both the lovely seven-day wind-up clocks.  It sounded like fun.

He, though very imaginative, was less industrious than she.  After about a month or so, he lost interest in his responsibility but not the game; that’s the way he had always been.  So she began to wind both clocks, to set the times, and attempted to coordinate the movements of the clocks.  She never seriously tried to synchronize them, just to make them run concordantly in a pleasing and entertaining way; that’s the way she was.  If you talked to their friends and acquaintances about the game, they’d probably say that he not only thought of it, but also kept it going.  That’s the way they were.

When she died, he moved from their home of thirty years and sold everything—the house and the furniture.  And he gave away her clothes and most of his.  Everything they owned was disposed of except the clocks.

Other than those occasional days when he relives the memories of their life together, he spends most of his days in futile attempts to synchronize the clocks.  When she was responsible for the clocks, she was thorough but not exacting.  It was enough for her to coordinate the movements so the chimes would complement one another and the pendulums would occasionally beat in time. Though, more often in syncopated counterpoint.  When she was alive the clocks brought them pleasure.

Now his sole motivation is to synchronize the clocks.  It is his unattainable obsession.  He struggles to make every movement sound as one, to make the pendulums swing in calculated concert, and to fuse the chimes as one indiscernible solo voice.

Though he knows, no two pendulums ever swing the same, no chimes ever truly sing in unison, he continues his all consuming work and deriving little pleasure from it.  He never learned the joy of counterpointed pendulums or the beauty of music in dissonance.

He loved her with the depths of his being.  She may have loved him even more.  He thinks the joy of their relationship was derived from their attempts at synchronization.  She knew it was from the counterpoint.