The Time Keepers

Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

I T WAS IN THE GARDEN OUTSIDE THE VETERANS HOME THAT Tom opened up to Jack how the Golden Hours came to be. “Its first seeds probably began just before my dad shipped off to go fight in Europe,” he said. He shared how, on that afternoon, his mother gave his father a box with a first-rate military Bulova inside. Tucked within the case, in her perfect, scrolling script, she’d written, I’m keeping time until you return home to me.

But when his dad returned from the Second World War, Harry wasn’t the same man he’d been when he’d left. He’d seen the devastation of the killings and the bombings, not to mention the gut-wrenching photographs taken by fellow soldiers of the camps with the countless corpses of Jewish souls piled high and his own best friend senselessly killed before his very eyes. He was plagued by night terrors.

Tom explained it was his maternal grandfather, Sam, who first noticed Harry gravitating toward broken timepieces after he came home from the war. Sam saw Harry take the old Ingraham clock on the family’s mantel that had sat inactive for years and become fixated in getting the clock to start working again. Harry took it apart and spent hours learning how each piece fit into the next, spreading them all out on their dining room table and filling the surface with a myriad of small, intricate parts: the various wheels and pinions, the elegant numbered dial, and the two brass plates.

Eventually, after checking out several repair manuals from the library and countless hours of trial and error, he succeeded. “I think you’ve got a talent there, Harry,” Tom’s granddad told him.

Having himself served in France during the First World War, Sam knew how important it was to discover a vocation where Harry could drown out the ghosts of war. Those who had never served thought the hardest thing for a soldier was surviving battle. But no one ever spoke about how difficult it was to come home.

Harry’s watch collecting began as a hobby at first. He drove all over Connecticut and as far as Northampton, Massachusetts, harvesting from antique stores old clocks that no longer worked. He studied how to diagnose mechanical issues and read guides on cleaning gears and replacing pins. He bought old books on the history of clocks and educated himself on the different styles and their various details. He took courses in Manhattan on watch and clock repair, learning the trade through hard work and practice.

But it was his night classes in horology that ultimately opened up a whole new world for him. His teacher there spoke about the history of “time collection.” What began with mankind using the sky to mark the periods within a day eventually morphed into sundials, where the stretch of shadows could help calculate the hours. Harry was fascinated by the balance of daylight against darkness, how each minute ran into the next, how hours accumulated to form days. Behind a watch’s face, there was an entire universe composed of metal pins and wheels, all its components engaged in a unique dance to achieve perfect balance and movement. Harry gravitated toward this, for he yearned to put his mind at ease again, to placate what had been altered by the war.

For several months, as he tried to get his footing, Harry tinkered with all the clocks he had acquired until he got them moving again. He found the work restorative, the ability to bring life back to something that had fallen dormant. He was happy to work long into the night rather than lying in bed, unable to sleep. Or worse, to wake up from one of his nightmares.

“The hands of time must always move forward,” he had told Tom from the moment he was old enough to understand. It was the metaphor he used whenever he was faced with a challenge. It always comforted him. And in some ways, he believed it had saved him.

Tom knew it was a natural extension of the Golden Hours to offer Jack a job there. Perhaps learning the craft that had saved his father could help save another veteran, too.