Anne Tyler: The Clock Winder

“You making this up?”

“No.”

“Can’t be anyone to cook as bad as that by accident,” said Alvareen. “Must be she wants to discourage your appetite. She’s tight with a dime.”

“Elizabeth?”

“Just going,” Elizabeth called up the stairs.

“I thought you’d have left by now.”

“Just on my way.”

She waved a hand at Alvareen and walked out the front door, crossing the veranda briskly but slowing as she reached the yard. There wasn’t a person in sight, no one to offer to help. She dragged her feet all the way to the toolshed. When she opened the door the turkey rushed to the back of his crate with a scrabbling sound. Elizabeth squatted and peered inside. “Chick, chick?” she said. He strutted back and forth within his three-step limit, his wattle bobbing up and down. Away from the light his wings lost their coppery sheen. He looked drab and shabby, his feathers a little ragged, like someone who had slept with his clothes on. “Well, anyway,” Elizabeth said after a moment. She untwisted the wire that held the crate shut and reached in, carrying out a set of motions that she had rehearsed in her mind. One arm circled his body and pinned his wings down, the other clutched his legs. He struggled at first and then relaxed, and she straightened up with the turkey tight against her chest. “You surely are a big buster,” she told him. There by the chopping block lay the axe, right outside the toolshed door, but it would take her a minute longer to get herself prepared. She set the turkey down. He was too fat to run far. He ambled out the door and down the hill, jerking his neck self-righteously with each step, while Elizabeth followed a few feet behind. She could still grab him up if he started running, but neither of them seemed in any hurry. They walked single file through the trellis, past the blackberry bush, under the rotting roof of the gazebo that showed squares of sky between its warped shingles. Then back again, toward the toolshed. That turkey had no sense at all. He circled the chopping block twice, and still Elizabeth let the axe stay where it was. He headed back through the trellis. They walked like two people filling time, sauntering with exaggerated carelessness, trying to look interested in the scenery. Then the turkey started speeding up. He didn’t run, just took longer and longer steps, never losing his dignity. Elizabeth walked faster. Trees and shrubs and the second trellis skated past them, perfectly level. Then they reached the end of the yard and Elizabeth suddenly darted beyond the turkey and skidded down the bank into the alley, heading him off. A car screeched to a stop not two feet from her. The turkey became interested in something on the ground and stayed there, just at the edge of the bank, pecking unconcernedly.

The car was a dirty white sportscar. The driver was a round-faced blond boy wearing an Alpine hat with a feather in it. When he climbed out he bumped his head against the doorframe. “I wish you would watch where you’re going,” he said.

“Sorry,” said Elizabeth. She couldn’t give him more than a glance because she had to keep her eyes on the turkey. Without looking around she reached toward a bush behind her, snapped off a switch, and started up the bank. “Shoo, now, shoo!” she said.

“Out walking your turkey, I see,” said the boy.

“I’m getting up nerve to kill him.”

“I see. Are you Elizabeth? My name’s Timothy Emerson. I knew we were going to have a turkey dinner, but Mother never mentioned it was still on foot.”

“It may be forever on foot,” Elizabeth said. “This whole business is harder than it looks.”

“Can I help?”

But he wore a plaid sports coat and wool slacks, much too good for killing turkeys in, and even the effort of climbing the bank after her had turned his face pink. “Just stay where you are, keep him off the road,” Elizabeth told him. “That’s all I need.”

“I could run over him with my car if you like.”

She smiled, but her attention was still on the turkey. She gave a flick of her switch and the turkey moved away, slowly now, still examining the ground. “What you need is a leash,” Timothy said.

“I can get him to the chopping block easily enough, but then what? I just hate to tell your mother I’m not equal to this.”

“Let him run off,” Timothy said. “Buy one at the supermarket. Mother’ll never know.”

Elizabeth bent one ankle beneath her and sank down to the ground, still holding the switch. The turkey moved a few steps further off. “Is it you that the unicycle in the basement belongs to?” she said.

“Me? Oh, no, that’s Peter’s. I was never one for exercise. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you used it, though.”

“I was just hoping to see it used,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not one for exercise either.”

“Really? I thought you would be.”

“How come?”

“I expected to see you out playing football with the little neighborhood boys,” Timothy said.

“What would I want to do that for?”

“Well, you are the handyman, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, “but that’s got nothing to do with football. I wonder if other people have the same idea? I’ve been getting the strangest invitations lately. Tennis, bicycling, nature walks — if there’s one thing I don’t like it’s nature, standing around admiring nature. I come home feeling empty-headed.”

“Why go, then? Look, your turkey is heading toward the road again.”

The turkey was a good twenty feet off, but Elizabeth merely glanced at it and then settled herself more comfortably on the ground. “I always go where I’m asked,” she said. “It’s a challenge: never turn down an invitation. Now, does Peter really know how to ride that unicycle? I mean, bump downstairs on it? Shoot basketballs from it, like they do in the circus?”

“Your turkey!”

Elizabeth looked around. The turkey was picking his way down the shallowest part of the bank, talking to himself deep in his throat. “What about him?” she asked.

“Aren’t you afraid he’ll get away?”

“Oh, I thought I was going to give up on him and go buy one from the supermarket.”

Timothy stared at her. “Well, I only said — you didn’t seem — I never heard you make up your mind about it,” he said. So that Elizabeth, for the first time giving him her full attention, wondered why he wore such a jaunty feathered hat set at such a careless angle. He sounded like his mother, who was forever tying herself into knots over plans and judgments and decisions. But his eyes must have been his father’s — narrow blue slits whose downward slant gave him a puzzled look — and she liked his hair, which stuck out in licked-looking yellow spikes beneath the hat. She smiled at him, ignoring the turkey.

“Are you really going to let him just walk off?” he said.

“Sure,” said Elizabeth, and did — rose and brushed off her dungarees, stood on the edge of the bank to watch the turkey cross the road at an angle and start up someone’s back yard. Finally he was only a jerking coppery dot among the trees. “Now I have to go to the grocery store,” she said. “Anything you need?”

“Maybe I could take you there.”

“Oh no, I like to drive. You could get your car off the road, though.”

“Or I might come with you. Is that all right? I’m always on the lookout for something to do while I’m home.”

He hadn’t been home at all yet, but Elizabeth didn’t bother reminding him. “Fine,” was all she said, and she reached under her paint-shirt to pull, from her jacket pocket, a set of keys dangling from Mrs. Emerson’s lacy gold initials.

The car was a very old Mercedes with a standard shift that tended to stick and make grinding noises. Elizabeth was used to it. She drove absentmindedly, keeping the clutch halfway in and watching the scenery more than the road, but Timothy changed positions uneasily every time she shifted gears. He kept one hand tight on the dashboard, the other along the back of the seat. “Have you been driving long?” he asked her. “Since I was eleven,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t had time to get a license yet, though.” She swerved neatly around an on-coming taxi. The roads here in the woods were so narrow that one car always had to draw aside when it met another, but Elizabeth made a game out of never actually coming to a full stop. She ducked in and out of parking spaces, raced other drivers to open sections of the road and then rolled easily toward their bumpers as they backed to let her by. “I can see that I’m making you nervous,” she told Timothy, “but I’m a better driver than you realize. I’m trying to save the brakes.”