The Clockmaker and the Boy

In a mountain town where the winters were long and the light was short, there lived an old clockmaker who took on, in the last year of his working life, a single apprentice. The boy was thirteen and had been sent to him by an uncle who did not know what else to do with a child who could not sit still.

For the first three months, the clockmaker gave the boy no clockwork to touch. He gave him a broom. The boy swept. He swept the workshop, he swept the workshop stairs, he swept the street outside the workshop, he swept, on Sundays, the small chapel next door. By the end of the third month he had begun to hate the broom with a completeness that surprised him. He asked, one evening, when he would be allowed to make a clock.

The old man looked at him for a long time and then took him upstairs to the room where the great clock of the town hall was being restored. He opened the back of it. He pointed inside. 'Do you see that small brass wheel?' he asked. The boy saw it. It was no bigger than a coin. 'That wheel,' the clockmaker said, 'turns once every four minutes. Nobody in the town has ever seen it. Nobody in the town knows it exists. If it stops turning, the hour hand does not move, the bell does not ring, the market does not open, the children are late to school, and the priest cannot end the service. That wheel is the whole town.'

The boy stared at the wheel. 'Then why do I sweep the floor?' he asked.

'Because,' said the clockmaker, 'you are that wheel. Nobody in the town knows you are here. Nobody in the town has thanked you for sweeping the chapel. But if you had not swept it, dust would have gathered in the hinges of the door, and the door would have squealed, and old Mrs Halloran, who is deaf but who feels vibrations in the wood, would not have known that the service had begun, and she would have been alone in her house on a Sunday morning, which is the thing she is most afraid of. The chapel opens because you sweep. The town runs because that wheel turns. The world is made of small wheels turning where nobody can see them.'

The boy went back down to the broom. He did not immediately love it. But he swept differently after that. He swept as if the chapel door depended on him, because he now understood that it did. In time he was given a file, and then a lathe, and then, in his twenty-fifth year, the great clock itself when the old man had died. He restored it. He put a small mark on the back of the little brass wheel with a punch, so that whoever opened the case in a hundred years would know that someone had once known it was there.

There is a kind of work in every life that nobody sees. Nobody thanks you for the invoice you filed cleanly, the crib you assembled at midnight, the difficult meeting you smoothed with one careful sentence at the end. This work is not glamorous. It will not be listed on your obituary. And yet if you stopped doing it, the hour hand would not move.

Sweep the floor. Turn the wheel. Put a small mark somewhere only you know about, so that on the days when the world does not thank you, you can walk past that mark and be, quietly, thanked by yourself. That is often enough. It has to be, for the wheels that keep the town running.