Stopped Watch by Scott Pomfret

“Your mother’s batshit crazy,” said Sister Loretta

“Madam’s not from the Valley, poor dear,” explained Sister Carmel. “That’s the problem. Your mother’s not grounded like we are. My family has lived here forever.”

Sister Carmel selected a cupcake from my tray. She pointed the cupcake at an ancient and rudimentary clock, one of a dozen in the room where the sisters were awaiting their assignations with that evening’s clients.

“You see that?” 

I did.

“That’s the proof,” she said. 

“Proof of what?”

 “My great-great-granddaddy made that in 1648.  With his own hands. He called it a time machine. Everybody else called it a horologue. Or a Johnson.”

“What’s a Johnson?”

“Why that’s my name, dear. My family name. Carmel FunStuff is just for work purposes.  My nom de plume, if you will.” She made a handjob motion to accentuate the plume, so I wouldn’t mistake her reference.

“You Johnsons always thought you were so important,” Sister Loretta complained. “It’s not like the Johnsons invented time.”

“Johnsons put this Valley on the map. Made it the nineteenth-century clock- and watch-making capital of the whole Eastern seaboard and parts of Canada, too, until the Japs–pardon my French–did us in.”

Sister Loretta looked as if she’d like to have disputed the point, or perhaps begrudge Sister Carmel a second cupcake, but instead she stood and performed a back walkover, showing her twat at the apex when her skirts fell about her head.

“Ugh! Sister Loretta, you are a perfect vulgar heathen,” sniffed Sister Carmel, licking the frosting from the cupcake. “I can’t believe Madam ever accepted you into this facility.”

Sister Loretta giggled, covered her mouth and ladyhole with left and right hands, respectively, winked at me, and faked surprise at her own turpitude.

I was twelve years old, a tight knot of raging hormones, but the sight of upended and exposed female loins awakened in me as much excitement as the inner works of the clocks on the parlor walls, which decorative elements were intended to evoke both the Towahannoc Valley’s Nineteenth Century clockmaking fame as well as the brothel’s clock-watch theme. (Have the time of your life was the slogan over the front door.). 

I shrugged at Sister Loretta and turned back to Sister Carmel, who was on her third cupcake. 

“My mother’s not crazy, Sister Carmel,” I said. “She’ll readily admit we arrived late in the Towahannoc Valley, at a time long after the Johnsons were here, but we arrived in style, accompanied by actors and dancers and clowns, the likes of which have never been seen since, but my mother says I’ll know them when I see them, because they’ll look just like me.”

Sister Loretta and Sister Carmel exchanged a glance full of pity, which kindled my youthful wrath in my dear mother’s defense.  

“My mother saved this Valley,” I insisted, repeating word-for-word the drivel I’d been taught as a toddler. “When Japanese competition shut down the watchworks, my mother built this brothel! She invented whores to replace the watches! And whores, as you know, are themselves are a kind of time-telling machine, dispensing their fifty-minute hours. The Valley would be destitute without her intervention. You sisters ought to be grateful.”

“It’s no wonder Madam would try to make the best of her coming from foreign parts, poor dear,” sympathized Sister Loretta.

Seeing my little twelve-year-old head was going to explode and possibly upset the cupcake tray, Sister Carmel draped herself around my shoulders and whispered in my ear. “What a shame God wasted all the handsome on you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for being so handsome, but I know you’re not.”

She stroked the end of my nose with her index finger, raised her eyebrows suggestively, and announced that her client had arrived, so that I must scurry along.

Because I made spare change in after school hours and weekends serving my sisters and their guests and cleaning up the boudoirs and parlors after their clients’ passions were spent, I was the envy of all my classmates. They frequently told me I was the luckiest guy in the Valley, until they realized what an absurd thing it was to say to a boy like me. Having long since recognized me for what I was, my schoolmates said I probably secretly spied on the johns to get my rocks off, and those of my peers who let me suck them off in secret pretended no longer to be my friend.  

“You’ll never have a real life,” explained a classmate who would grow up to be one of my mother’s top earners in the waning days of the brothel’s business. “You can pretend, but you’ll never matter. You may grow up to be a priest or a storyteller, perhaps even a poet or confessor or wiseman. But you’ll never be a warrior. Never the hero. No one wants a pansy at the head of the ranks.”

One of my teacher’s predictions was more blunt: “You’ll be an old man who pisses himself and attempts to snatch at the boys who pass who easily dodge him while he curses their youth.”  

In the meantime, my male schoolmates–even the ones who let me suck them off–paired up with girlfriends, who readily put out and provided Sisters Loretta and Carmel with their stiffest, lowest-price competition.  

The truth is, I did regularly spy on the Sisters. But not for the sake of seeing the johns. To the contrary, I hoped exposing myself to the Sisters’ naked bodies would awaken the lust within me, which to me had become essential to a real future. Showing up with an unrequested towel, I contrived many times to interrupt the Sisters mid-coitus or fresh from the communal shower. But however hard I tried, I failed to see what other boys apparently saw. Objectively speaking, the female figure appeared to be nothing but tufts of hair, unsightly bulges and curves, weak and fleshy arms, and bags of dangling flesh. 

As a twelve-year-old, I had far more interest in the young man my mother paid to keep the clocks wound. He was alternately overzealous (stoutly breaking off many a key in his fist) and indifferent (so that the clocks wound down unevenly telling many alternate times and allowing the whores to cheat the johns on their hour). The young man was said to be so randy, he’d do things for a coin you would be ashamed to ask the most seasoned whore, but I never had sufficient courage to propose so much as a game of Go Fish.  

Made aware of my struggles, Monsignor Bonseigneur, the parish priest at Our Lady of the Sacred Hour, who insisted that anyone who didn’t speak French address him as Father Good God, summoned me one afternoon to the rectory. A benign eunuch who made fierce love to his food, Father Good God reassured me that I’d eventually become reconciled with my overheated condition and accept the solitary and spiritual consolations afforded by a cheesesteak sandwich. 

While he and I debated the relative spiritual advantages of green peppers and onions, Sisters Loretta and Carmel came knocking at the rectory. Refusing to admit them, Father Good God said he had more pressing matters than their tawdry confessions.

“Did you interfere with him?” Sister Carmel asked.

“Of course not,” he said. “I was eating.” 

The Sisters pushed the pudgy priest aside and surrounded me. Bubbling with excitement, they claimed that a young man, indifferent to any whore’s persuasions, had come to town seeking an audience with my mother.

“Your time is come,” they cried.  

My mother met the visitor beneath the Witness Tree, an enormous old oak, which for hundreds of years had served as a signboard for announcements and handbills portending everything from a public hanging to the sale of a mule. The Witness Tree also served as a place to resolve disputes. If the particular dispute was between a man and his neighbor, the disputants faced off, shouted or brawled out their differences, and shook hands. If the matter was between a man and his God, the wives of the Valley sewed a scarecrow to receive the abuse. They filled it with old wedding dresses, winding sheets, buttons on which babies had choked, unlucky underwear, and handkerchiefs wet with tears. The disputant then abused the scarecrow, and all celebrated with a bonfire and ardent spirits. In recent times, a participating whore, high on her liquor, might haul the scarecrow off to Fearing Bluffs and try to charge it the going rate, but such scandals could be policed without need of banning the entire ceremony.  

While ninety percent of the residents of the Valley watched, my mother and the visitor exchanged obligatory complements and pleasantries. With a flattery as empty and pleasant as the wives’ scarecrows, the visitor specifically commented on her fine and ancient timepiece. The watch was but an old thing, long since stopped, showing the right time only twice a day. My mother passed it to the visitor for closer inspection, so he might see the error of his judgment without her having to embarrass him. 

As soon as the visitor’s fingertips touched the watch, however, it ticked. Then it ticked again. Its gears turned for the first time in over a century.

Now, you must understand that my mother, as Madam, was herself a kind of watchmaker responsible for the accuracy of the johns’ fifty-minute hours. Moreover, she believed that every time machine–like every whore–contained its own unique spirit, deposited by the watchmaker. In her view, any particular watch ran faster or slower or skipped time or went dormant according to that spirit, which could be awakened again with the proper stimulus, a secret known only to the maker.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Do you make watches?”

The visitor smiled wryly, as if the long-dead watchmaker had whispered to him in a dream.  

“What ties you to the Valley?” he inquired. “Why do you stay here?”

“For the sake of my son, of course. He needs stability.”

“Your son’s beauty is legendary. There are places where people pay for such treasures.”

“What places? Valleys like this one? No, thank you. At least here, I know my enemies.” 

“Very like this Valley and very unlike, too. Your son will be very popular. We’ll train him in the ways of his people.”

My mother drew a deep ragged breath as if she were trying to decide whether to take the visitor seriously. She asked, “What about his affliction?”

“Oh, don’t utter the word! Affliction! What an ugly notion.”

“What then do you call it?”

“His specialty.”

My classmates, who had watched the encounter at the Witness Tree along with everyone else, jeered. Their parents debated and ultimately agreed what a good thing it would be for me to be away from their children, to whom I was a bad influence. I was a worrisome reminder of a certain looseness in the world’s order that they preferred not to contemplate.

“Bring him here,” the visitor directed.

“He’s a child,” my mother objected.

“Bring him here.”

Sisters Loretta and Carmel obediently set off for the rectory to retrieve me.

“Stay where you are, whores!” my mother cried.

Torn between their instinct and my mother’s command, the sisters froze. Sister Loretta turned and met my mother’s eye. She bellowed, “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you’re batshit crazy, woman.” She continued up the hill toward the rectory, until my mother struck her down with a carefully aimed acorn.

“You wish to be paid?” offered the visitor with an officious air. He unfurled a roll of bills greater than anyone in the Valley had ever seen. He could have bought the brothel a hundred times over and had change to purchase the rectory and a lifetime’s supply of cheesesteaks besides. 

Filled with violence and lust and envy, the crowd stirred. Each of them knew that by the time someone came inquiring after the visitor, every trace of him would long since have been obliterated. The code of silence of the citizens of the Valley in the presence of inquiring strangers was as legendary as my beauty.

Perhaps sensing my mother’s stubbornness, or else the looming threat, the visitor rose, returned the wristwatch, and threaded his way through the crowd. As soon as he was out of sight, my mother’s watch again stopped.

Dodging my mother’s acorns, Sister Carmel ran up the hill to fetch me. She burst through the door without knocking. 

“The visitor’s like you,” she swore. “Like you, exactly.” Carmel related to me all the visitor had said.

“Wait? A Valley? Another Valley?” I asked. “Where?” A thought as heretical as the existence of other Valleys had never occurred to me.

“You’re different,” Sister Carmel reminded me.  “You’ve always been different. You don’t belong here. Come quick, before he gets away.”

I could hardly contain my excitement as we approached the Witness Tree. A trail of gold dust rose from the road headed south, which the visitor must have left behind. I found I was in love with him without once setting eyes on his face.

When it was clear his head start was too much to overcome, I raged at the assembly. At great length, gesticulating and condemning, exulting and crying, packing into one moment all the sadness and injustice of my eleven lonely years, I explained what opportunity had been stolen from me. 

“But it was her,” one of my classmates said, pointing at my mother, on whom I fell with a storm of blame. Nothing would ever change. And if there was no change, there was no time to tell. Time was marked by change. Everybody would have choices but me.  

My mother took pity on me. She placed her arm around my shoulder and led me away, not out of embarrassment about how I might describe the other Valley from which the visitor had come, but because my secret was too precious to spill before ignorant swine, who didn’t recall how we arrived in the Valley in style, accompanied by actors and dancers and clowns, the likes of which have never been seen since, but which I would know when I saw them, because they would look just like me.

“Anything that changes could be a clock, dear,” she advised, “but you have to be at a sufficient distance to read it well and prepare yourself for the next hour and the ringing of the bell. You’re just too young to realize that the conventional wisdom has it backward. Time tells us, not the other way around.”

Scott Pomfret

Image by Susann Mielke from Pixabay – ancient clock