Quote tattoo across upper back

Nobody in the village believed that. They said the clock ran slow because Abel did. He walked the platform the same way every day, one hand on the iron railing, counting sleepers under his boots. When the young porter, Jess Morrow, asked why he never hurried, he only tapped the timetable and said there was time enough for everything that mattered.

The winter the line flooded, a girl came off the last train with a cardboard case and no coat. She had a letter crumpled in her fist and a connection that was not running. Abel took his own coat from the hook and sat with her on the bench beneath the clock. She asked how long until the morning service. He looked at the dial, then at the slow hands, and said, "And indeed there will be time," because that was what his father had said to him on the night the last cart came back empty.

She laughed at him, then stopped laughing. By dawn the water had gone down and the rails shone like wet slate. The girl caught the first train with his coat still on her shoulders, and Abel wound the clock again, four minutes behind the world.