Jim Hutchins

I wind and set the brass ship’s clock. My grandfather bought it a century ago, to remind him of his shipboard life. I carry his name.

The clock ties me to my childhood house of sexual tension and thrown objects, where it was the only constant. It chimed on the half-hour, eight bells for the change of watch. One bell a half-hour later. Then two, three, four, back to eight again.

My grandfather and his two brothers left their shattered home in Seattle as soon as they were able and put to sea.

Fifteen years later, on the other side of the continent in 1920 Baltimore, my great-aunt Caroline, called “Catsy,” was swept away by a third or fourth wave of the “Spanish” flu, days before her 25th birthday. Her sister Maude, called “Puss,”  died three months later, just before Christmas, at the age of 22. My grandmother, the oldest sibling, was sent to Tampico, Mexico to stay with her brother Raymond, to avoid the cold damp death of that winter.

There, she met my grandfather when his merchant ship made port. They were married in July 1921 in Houston, where I completed my doctorate. The currents bring us back to the same place, but the water has moved. It’s the same shore, but not the same ocean.

The clock and I am both here because of century-old quarantine. Now, like my grandfather before me, I live aboard a ship, seeing few people, only stopping in port occasionally to take on supplies. The clock and I will see out this quarantine together.