The Clock That Stops the Night Before Someone in Our Family Dies

We have a clock. It is a mantel clock, mahogany, with a moon-faced dial and a slow deep tick you can hear in the next room. It has been in the family since the 1890s and it keeps perfect time, which is the whole problem.

Because four times in my life, that clock has stopped. Not run slow. Not needed winding. Stopped, dead, mid-tick, at a random hour, and each of those four times, someone in our family died within the day.

The first time I was seven. The clock stopped at 3:10 in the afternoon and my mother went white and made a phone call, and that night my great-aunt died two states away, and no one had known she was even sick. The second time I was nineteen. Third, twenty-eight. The fourth was three years ago. Every time: the clock stops, and inside of twenty-four hours the phone rings.

Now, I am a reasonable person. I know how this sounds. And for most of my life I had a reasonable answer ready, which is that a hundred-year-old clock stops sometimes, that people die every day, and that a family this size loses someone often enough that you can always find a stopped clock near a death if you go looking. My grandfather, who owned the clock before me, believed every word of that. He called the family curse nonsense. He wound the clock every Sunday and rolled his eyes at his own sisters, who would not stay in the same house as it.

When my grandfather died -- and yes, the clock stopped, at 6:45 in the morning, and he was gone by nightfall -- I inherited it. And when I finally worked up the nerve to have it cleaned, the old repairman took the back off and found, folded behind the movement where it had sat for over a century, a slip of paper in a spidery hand.

It was, as best we can tell, a note from the clockmaker himself. It was dated 1893. And it did not say what I wanted it to say. I wanted it to say something rational, a warranty, a repair note. Instead it said, in translation, that the clock had been made for my family from the wood of a particular tree, a tree that had stood over the graves of the family in the old country, and that the maker had been asked to build a clock that would keep the family, his words, in one another's company across the distance, so that no one would pass alone or unremarked.