Earnest Thiessen’s clock

Earnest Thiessen’s clock is both a family inheritance and the focus of a lasting injustice: Peters takes it from Earnest by declaring clocks irrelevant to a life measured in eternity, then keeps it in the room where he conducts colony business. Earnest’s persistence in remembering the theft, even after senility erases much of his past, gives the clock a significance beyond its function as a timepiece. It stands for a conflict over who has the authority to define time, value, and what may be taken from another person.

Inheritance and the meaning of time

Earnest’s father leaves him the family clock when he dies. Of all his children, Earnest is the one most fascinated by the nature of time, making the inheritance especially suited to him. The clock is not merely a practical household object: it carries family memory and gives material form to an interest that Peters’s religious argument dismisses.

Peters insists that time in Molotschna is eternal, that earthly life flows naturally into life in heaven for those pure in God’s eyes, and that clocks are therefore irrelevant. His claim turns a disagreement about a physical object into a struggle over competing accounts of time: the measurable hours registered by the clock and the eternal time invoked by the bishop. Yet Peters does not leave the clock unused or discard it. He takes possession of it.

Peters’s seizure and the clock’s new place

Peters requires Earnest to hand over the heirloom. Months later, it is discovered in Peters’s study, where he plans sermons and conducts colony business. The clock that Peters calls unnecessary has been installed in the very room from which he exercises religious and administrative authority. The contrast makes the seizure concrete: his dismissal of clock time does not prevent him from claiming the clock for himself.

The theft sits within a wider pattern of Peters policing what counts as worldly influence. On a Sunday, he holds up Earnest’s organic farming manuals before the congregation as evidence of such influence; the elders discipline Earnest and forbid him contact with colony members for eight weeks. During that period, Earnest roams the country roads and sleeps in the tack room attached to the yearling barn. This episode does not concern the clock directly, but it shows the authority under which its removal takes place and the consequences Earnest faces when Peters and the elders judge his possessions or interests unacceptable.

The memory that remains

In old age, Earnest is senile. He cannot remember how many children he has had or whether his siblings are alive or dead. The clock’s theft, however, remains fixed in his mind. The narration presents this one injustice as having expanded until it occupies almost all of his memory: Earnest seems to have become the keeper of the grievance even as other parts of his life fall away.

Whenever he sees Peters, Earnest asks when the clock will be returned. His question keeps the original act unresolved. Peters’s seizure has not become harmless through time, nor has the bishop’s explanation persuaded Earnest to forget it. The clock survives in the story less through any description of its workings than through the repeated demand for its return.

The clock and other material records

The women’s meetings also take place in Earnest’s hayloft, though he is oblivious to their use of it. In that space, Ona asks August to write the women’s pros and cons on brown packaging paper and proposes keeping the sheet as an artifact for others to discover, despite the women’s inability to read it. The clock and the paper record have different histories: Peters removes the family object from Earnest, while the women deliberately preserve a written trace of their deliberations. Together, these episodes make material things bear witness to what people remember, take, or try to leave behind.

August later gathers his notebooks and the minutes and runs back to the ladder, asking Salome to give them to Ona. Salome points out that Ona cannot read them. The exchange underscores the problem of preservation without assuming that a written record is transparent or accessible to everyone it concerns. Earnest’s clock presents a starkly different kind of record: its continued place in his memory testifies to a wrong that the colony’s authorities have not made right.