Grandfather's Watch Runs Backward at 4 A.M.

My grandfather's pocket watch stopped at the moment of his death, or so the family always said — 4:04 a.m., the hour he passed, the watch in his waistcoat pocket ceasing as his heart did, and never running again through forty years in a drawer. A lovely, probably embellished family story. When my grandmother died and the watch came to me, I had it looked at, expecting to be told the movement was seized.

The watchmaker found nothing wrong with it. Cleaned it, oiled it, and it ran perfectly — had, he suspected, only needed winding all those decades, the 'stopped at his death' romance being just an unwound watch and a grieving family's need for meaning. Fine. I chose to wear it rather than shelve it; it's a beautiful thing and I liked my grandfather.

It keeps flawless time. Except at 4 a.m.

Every night — I know because it woke me the first time with a sensation I can only describe as the watch getting my attention, a tug at the pocket where it sat on the nightstand — at 4 a.m. exactly, the second hand stops, hesitates, and then runs BACKWARD. Smoothly, deliberately, counter-clockwise, for exactly one minute, dragging the minute hand back with it, until at what should be 3:59 it stops again, hesitates, and resumes forward as if nothing happened, having lost and regained the same sixty seconds. Every night. I've filmed it. The film is deeply strange to watch — a mechanical watch is not SUPPOSED to be able to do this; the watchmaker, whom I showed the footage, said the movement is not geared to run backward, that it should physically bind and damage itself, that what the film shows should not be mechanically possible without stripping the train, and that the watch, when he re-examined it, is pristine.

Four in the morning. The hour of his death, or the hour of it plus a few minutes of family myth. And for one minute each night, the watch reaches back and un-runs the same sixty seconds — the minute, I've come to think, in which he died — as if trying, uselessly, mechanically, faithfully, to give it back.

I've stopped finding it frightening. I set an alarm now, some nights, to be awake for it, and I hold the watch in my palm and watch the second hand walk backward through his last minute, and I think about him, and then it walks forward again into a day he never saw, and so do I. It's the most I ever get to spend with him. I wouldn't trade it. I just wind it every night, and wait for 4 a.m., and let him have his minute back.