Clockwork
I found the first piece on the day we buried my father.
I’d shrugged out of my black dress into jeans and a fleece, then headed out back to find a shovel and dig up his rhododendrons.
I was teasing the root ball out when I saw it: something small and metallic in the soil, about the size of a bottle cap.
Before I lost it again, I dropped the shovel and dug it out with my nails, holding it in my palm to get a better look in the fading light.
The mud was claggy and wet, sticking to the metal like plaster, but once I’d managed to clear some of it away with my thumb, I could see it was a cog.
Eight teeth spaced evenly around the outside, a single round hole in the middle.
It gleamed dully, like tarnished treasure.
I uncovered a total of eleven pieces on that first day—nine cogs of varying sizes, a metal spindle about six inches long, and a strange four-pronged fork that I later discovered was called a buffer spring.
Two of the cogs still had their spindles attached, one of them with a second row of teeth on another, inner cogwheel.
The entire find fitted onto a small side plate, once I’d rinsed them off and poked out the holes with a cotton bud.
There was no indication of how they came to be there, buried in my father’s garden, or how long they might have lain hidden in the earth.
My father had never been a watchmaker, or an enthusiast of model trains.
I had never seen him enthusiastic about anything much, except perhaps the football on a Sunday, or the anger that would rise in him at some perceived slight or injustice.
He barely knew how to hammer two planks of wood together; in his later years, I doubt he’d even have had the strength to lift the hammer.
Maybe he’d had no idea of what lay silently beneath his rhododendrons, slowly leaching metal deposits into the soil, feeding their roots. Maybe someone else had put them there.
The next morning, once the sun had lifted above the horizon, I went outside and finished the job.
When all three bushes were piled on the concrete patio to burn, I took my garden fork and started to turn the soil, looking to see if there were any parts I had missed.
Within minutes a small pile of metal was growing on the lawn.
The deeper I dug, the more frequent the discoveries became.
Each forkful would turn up three or four pieces—mostly cogs, sometimes spindles or springs, occasionally a thing whose function I couldn’t identify—and I was three feet down before they started to dwindle again.
Midmorning I fetched a bucket to store them in; when that was full, I used two shopping bags.
By lunchtime all three were full to the brim, and I struggled to bring them into the house to clean.
They clattered as I tipped them into the bathtub, the dirt swirling brown down the plughole as the spray from the showerhead hit them.
It was easier work than spraying Father down during those last few years, enduring his abuse, the slaps from his bony hand when the water splashed into his eyes.
The cogs did not brim over with anger and try to dig their nails into my arm.
They did not spit at me as I dried them off with a stained, threadbare towel.
I counted them that night. Two hundred and fifty-six pieces of metal, all curiously well preserved.
The largest cog was as big as my palm; the smallest, barely bigger than the nail on my little finger.
I knew there were more, though, and I went to bed early, conserving my strength for the day ahead. I wanted to find them all.
* * *
The funeral was a small affair. My father was never a popular man, even in his youth. He didn’t make friends easily, and those he did make rarely stuck around for more than a year or two. If you didn’t have to endure his presence, you wouldn’t choose to.
His sister Bea was there, wheeled in by my cousin Frank.
She sat and drooled through the short ceremony, only shifting slightly in her chair when the celebrant—Mr. Dawkins?
Deakins?—started listing my father’s achievements.
She was probably just resettling herself on her cushion, but it looked as if she was lifting herself up to break wind.
I don’t remember her much from my youth, but I do know that she wasn’t particularly fond of him—most Christmases we would receive a card from her and that was all.
I have no idea what he did to sour their relationship, although I can imagine.
I always felt it showed great charity and magnanimity on her part that she stayed in touch with him at all.
When we filed up to view his body I could still make out the seam down the side of his head, from the top of his skull to behind his ear, where they’d inexpertly filled and painted over the gash.
Someone had tried to comb his hair across it, and now it stuck out sideways like he was standing in a wind tunnel.
I resisted the urge to spit in his face.
There was no wake, and once the ceremony was over I was supposed to stand at the door, shaking hands and accepting condolences.
When the time came, I couldn’t face the lies we’d all tell, so I snuck out the back door, walking so fast down the corridor that I was almost running.
I stopped when I came to a junction, and peered through an open doorway.
The room was stark and uninviting, all cracked linoleum and stainless steel, fluorescent lights buzzing like a beehive overhead.
A man stood at the door to the incinerator, his hand poised next to my father’s cardboard coffin.
He looked up, peering at me through thick-lensed spectacles.
“Did you want to say something?” he asked, his voice high and reedy. “Before he goes?”
I don’t know why, but I nodded.
“Tell him he can fuck off.”
I didn’t linger to see his shocked expression, or to watch his finger come down on the big red button that would set the conveyor belt moving, but as I walked out into the sunlight, I imagined I could hear the crackle of the flames as my father began to burn.
* * *
It was on the third day of digging that I dug up the mask.
I’d spent the morning burning his rhododendrons, the smoke puffing skyward in thick black clouds as the greenery smoldered and died.
It smelled like engine grease and rot, the stench lingering on my fleece, perfuming my hair.
Eventually, when the branches and leaves had been rendered to gray dust, I abandoned the ashes and returned to my spade.
The finds had begun to thin, and I was close to taking a break when the blade hit something solid in the dirt.
I’d uncovered a few of the larger cogs this way already, but this sounded different: a hollow ring, like I’d struck a bowl, or the bottom of a buried plant pot.
Dropping to my knees, I used my hands to shovel the dirt away from whatever it was.
A ceramic object of some kind, only a little smaller than a dinner plate.
My fingers found the edge, scraping the soil off in increments, revealing the cracked white glaze beneath.
An ovoid curve to the edge, then a slit, a raised protuberance. Two divots painted like eyes.
I stood staring at the face that looked up at me from the bottom of the pit.
The mask may have once been considered lifelike, but years beneath the ground had rendered it dead, the surface spiderwebbed with tiny cracks, the painted eyes dirty and dull.
There was a single thick line bisecting it from the top of the head to the middle of one side, where my spade had struck it.
As I lifted it from the soil it broke into two pieces, one slightly smaller than the other.
I remember being relieved that it had broken so cleanly.
It wouldn’t be so hard to glue it back together.
The first hand emerged from the dirt later that afternoon, the tip of one finger chipped off and missing, but otherwise intact; the other appeared the following morning, its thumb lying severed next to it, although not due to my spadework this time.
I was being more careful now, using a hand trowel to scrape away the surface, patiently revealing my treasures as I dripped sweat into the dirt.
Two indistinct blocks of clay that I imagined must be feet, intended to be hidden out of sight in a pair of shoes; four long metal rods to form the legs; four shorter poles for the arms. There were a number of smaller, more fragile rods too, slightly curved, and it took me a while to realize they formed the ribcage, protecting the delicate machinery that once lay within.
In places there were scraps of leather still holding them together, but much of it had rotted away.
I laid it all out on the grass, my arms aching from the exertion, and sprayed it down with the hose, washing it as clean as I could.
Then I took them inside and my work began in earnest.
I have no technical training, no engineering degree—I barely have any qualifications at all, my father took that from me—but it’s amazing what you can find on the internet these days.
I joined the AmateurAutomata forum, posting photos of my finds, and within hours the thread was buzzing with eager enthusiasts, in awe of my good fortune.
It was an original automaton, they told me, hand-crafted and bespoke, probably made for a private collection, or a fairground.
They bickered for a while over whether it was late nineteenth century or early twentieth, British or French, but these details bored me.
I wanted to use their expertise for one purpose only.
I wanted it to move again.
* * *