The screw on the back of the brass cylinder was stripped completely flat, and I knew before I even touched it that my grandfather had forced it with the wrong size driver back in nineteen-fifty-four.<\/p>\n
I shouldn’t have been messing with it at all. The kitchen was already dark except for the amber light over the stove where the pot of beans was starting to spit, and my back had that sharp, familiar ache right between my shoulder blades from standing at the cutting board since four this morning. But that little tinny clicking sound had been coming from the bottom of the sideboard drawer every time I pulled it out to grab a dish towel, and it was driving me out of my mind.<\/p>\n
“Leave the old junk alone,” my husband Roy had told me three days before he packed his trunk and drove his Ford up to his brother’s place in Meridian. “You’ve got enough things broken in this house that actually matter.”<\/p>\n
He wasn’t wrong, of course. Roy never was, which made living with him about as comfortable as sleeping on a pile of pine knots.<\/p>\n
I set the music box down on the oilcloth table runner and reached into my sewing tin for the smallest flathead I had. It was a greasy little thing with a red plastic handle that was chewed up at the end where my dad used to bite it when he was trying to pry open paint cans. The screw gave way with a tiny, dry squeak that made my teeth itch. The brass plate on the bottom dropped right onto the wood with a dull clink, and inside, tucked underneath the rusted comb and the tiny brass pins, was a scrap of yellowed ledger paper folded four times over.<\/p>\n
I didn’t open it right away. I just stared at the greasy smudge my thumb had left on the corner of the tin case while the stove burner clicked off and on by itself.<\/p>\n
My mother had handed that box to me on the porch of the old house in Citronelle the day before I moved out with Roy, back when the air still smelled like turpentine and hot pine needles. She didn’t say much about it. She just shoved it into my laundry basket between two heavy flannel shirts and told me to keep the lid shut tight so the dust wouldn’t gum up the teeth.<\/p>\n
“It plays the tune your grand-mama taught me when the river rose up over the porch floor in nineteen-twenty-nine,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron while she looked down the gravel road for Roy’s truck. “Don’t go winding it too tight or you’ll snap the spring.”<\/p>\n
That was all the history I got. No lectures, no crying, just a little tin box with a cracked enamel lid and a tune that nobody in our family had ever given a proper name to.<\/p>\n
I unfolded the paper with the tip of the screwdriver because my fingers were stiff from the damp. The handwriting was cramped and spidery, written in that purple ink they used to sell in glass bottles at the five-and-dime down by the depot.<\/p>\n
*June 14, 1941. If Clara ever asks why the second bar is flat, tell her the teeth were filed down after the fire.*<\/p>\n
My name isn’t Clara. My mother’s name wasn’t Clara. My daughter, the one who hasn’t spoken two full sentences to me since she walked out of this kitchen three years ago over a pile of half-baked wedding china, her name is Clara.<\/p>\n
I sat there at that table until the kitchen went pitch black and the pilot light on the stove was the only blue thing glowing in the room.<\/p>\n
“You’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” I told myself out loud, just to hear a human voice in the quiet. But the voice sounded thin and raspy, like an old radio station fading out under a bridge.<\/p>\n
The next morning I drove the twenty-two miles out to Clara’s place on the edge of the county road, past the abandoned sawmill where the kudzu had already taken over the rusted skeleton of the old Caterpillar tractor. I didn’t call first. If I had called, she would have told me she was busy with the laundry or running down to the Piggly Wiggly for milk, anything to keep from sitting across a table from me while I tried to figure out how to put twenty years of awkward silences back together.<\/p>\n
Her sedan was parked under the carport with a thick coat of red clay splashed halfway up the driver-side door. The house was one of those square brick numbers the county put up in the seventies, all low ceilings and narrow hallways that smelled permanently of floor wax and fried grease.<\/p>\n
She opened the door about three inches, just far enough for me to see the chain lock pulled tight across the frame like a metal grin.<\/p>\n
“I’m right in the middle of dough,” she said. Her hair was pulled back with a yellow plastic clip that had one tooth missing, exactly like the one my mother used to wear when she was canning tomatoes. “If you’re here about the insurance papers, I mailed them yesterday.”<\/p>\n
“I’m not here about the papers,” I said, holding the music box out toward the gap in the door like an offering to a stray dog. “I found something inside the bottom plate. Something your grandmother wrote down back before you were even a thought.”<\/p>\n
Clara didn’t reach for it. She just looked down at the scratched brass case, then up at my face with those same gray eyes she got from my side of the family, the ones that always looked like they were trying to calculate how much you owed them.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want your junk, Mama,” she said. Her voice didn’t even shake. That was what hurt worse than the shouting ever did. When Roy yelled, you knew where you stood; when Clara went quiet, she built a brick wall right in front of you while you were still standing on the porch. “Keep it. Or throw it in the trash with the rest of the stuff from the estate.”<\/p>\n
“It plays the lullaby,” I said, and my voice sounded small, smaller than I wanted it to. “The one you used to listen to when you had that bad ear infection in eighty-eight and wouldn’t let anybody else touch your pillow.”<\/p>\n
She stared at me through that three-inch slit for a long, heavy minute while a logging truck rattled down the county road half a mile away, shaking the glass in the front window.<\/p>\n
“The spring has been broken since I was ten years old,” she said quietly. “You told me yourself that nobody in this town knew how to fix those tiny brass gears.”<\/p>\n
“I fixed it yesterday,” I told her. “I used a watchmaker’s file I found in your uncle’s old tackle box. It wasn’t even hard once I got the dirt out of the teeth.”<\/p>\n
She didn’t move for another five seconds. Then the chain slid out of its slot with a sharp *clack*, and she pulled the door open just enough for me to step over the threshold, though she didn’t offer to take my coat.<\/p>\n
The kitchen smelled of yeast and sour dishwater, and there was a metal bowl of flour sitting on the counter with a wooden spoon stuck straight up in the middle of it like a grave marker.<\/p>\n
“Let me hear it then,” she said, crossing her arms over her blue cotton apron. “Let’s hear how it sounds now that you’ve got your hands all over it.”<\/p>\n
I set the box down on her formica table, right next to a pile of unopened grocery store circulars, and gave the brass key three careful turns. It clicked twice, three times, then the cylinder caught with a little metallic hitch that made my stomach drop.<\/p>\n
The tune came out high and thin, rattling off the walls of that cramped little kitchen in a way that didn’t sound like music at all, but like someone tapping fingernails against a windowpane during a hard freeze. It was out of tune. The second bar dragged and the third one jumped right over a note like a cracked record.<\/p>\n
Clara stood there watching the little brass pins turn, her mouth tight and flat, her eyes fixed on the rusted corner where the solder had given way twenty years ago.<\/p>\n
“You got the pitch wrong,” she whispered.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t have the right tools,” I said, reaching out to touch her sleeve, but she pulled back before my fingers even brushed the cotton.<\/p>\n
“You always did think you could fix things just by forcing them hard enough,” she said, and she reached down, picked the box up by its bent hinge, and dropped it straight into the metal trash can under the sink among the eggshells and coffee grounds. “It’s ruined now. It was the only thing she left us that didn’t sound like a lie, and you had to go and take it apart just to see how the wheels turned.”<\/p>\n
I stood there in her kitchen with my hands hanging down by my sides, listening to the small, hollow thrum of the metal box hitting the bottom of the empty pail.<\/p>\n
“I just wanted to hear it play,” I told the linoleum floor.<\/p>\n
“Some things aren’t meant to be wound up again,” she said, turning her back to me and picking up the wooden spoon from the flour bowl. “Now close the door behind you on your way out. The draft makes the dough skin over.”<\/p>\n
I walked out to the truck and sat in the cab for twenty minutes with the engine off, watching the rain start to gray out the windshield, waiting for some kind of anger to rise up and fill my chest the way it used to when Roy walked away. But there wasn’t any anger left. There was just the cold steering wheel under my palms and the sound of that flat, broken tune playing over and over in my head like a stuck clock that wouldn’t ever run down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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