I had put the forests with their delicate shades of autumn dying feast behind me and the land of my Grandfather into perspective. The stories he had told me as I sat helpless, intoxicated by adventure and a noble spirit inside the frame of a now large man, weathered by time, eaten away by the wrongs he had caused his family, triumphant in the blasts of heroic failures and the conquering of young delusions and milestones, all were lapped up by a young mind powerless to stop the imagination from flooding over in torrents; wave after wave of images that he brought to life with a sensitive and yet commanding air, I now had buried in the forests where the buses refused to go and where the Timber Wolves sit waiting to harvest the dead.

I made my way back to the industrial, the smoke driven and the exhausted, the sound of praise in the distance from the King Street Baptist Church only being drowned out by what I thought was my last pint of independence inside the ruins of my grandfather’s idyll and perfect sepia toned glory. I had time to take in the scene of The Gown and Gavel once more, to sit in the reflection of my own stories that I was building and which criss-crossed his, which was the desert to both his starter and what I found to be his main course. The wood panelling of the bar, the silence of the young woman as she flicked through the magazine that had been neglectfully left behind the evening before, the only company she desired until darkness came and the buzz of a hundred young adults pouring out of their homes in search of dynamite and bombs, of explosive talk and the chance to screw their lives apart in front of their parents; it was a world of choice, of desire and silence.

That silence was everywhere, except where it mattered, it was silence that grew from the moment I left the northern woods and the derailed wealth I saw slowly coming back into focus. Had I been happy there, my short stay in some run down shack, glass broken, the taste of mould hanging heavy in the air as if peeling from the very torn and tasteless wallpaper; the sound of a spider weaving its web as I tried to sleep one that both fascinated my imagination in the dark and terrified me as I thought it was long pregnant, the black and hairy bulbous shape moving, pulsating with spawn, creatures that would in turn devour my skin as they crawled over me, finding their way into every nook and cranny.

The silence was broken in the Gown and Gavel by the off balance blow of Time running slow, of a grandfather clock that had been bequeathed to the bar by my own great grandfather as they found they had no room for it on the truck which was taking them to Montreal and the outbreak of war and insanity across the thousands of miles to Europe’s basin. I had got used to the clock’s annoying habit of being ten minutes slow and as the fading hours of light and shafted innocence, the rumbling of a clock that defied winding, that squeezed every possible just cause out hanging onto the day, the minute in which would eventually leave and with a certain amount of ceremony, I gave my would be jailor a fond salute and cursed its mechanical life with breath low enough to strike back at Time. I put my near empty glass down on the bar near the uninterested barmaid and thanked her for her conversation and warmth. Looking up briefly from the fascinating magazine headline of six things you must know before allowing the customer to leave, she grunted thanks, said see you tomorrow I guess and went back to the stilted and bored.

I made my way down to the Greyhound terminal that would lead me onto Niagara Falls once more, across Rainbow Bridge and down into Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the New Jersey shore line; my mind already clean and desperate, walk on or head back, walk towards a distant shoreline or find the way blocked by the consumed and newly self-governed, to a country run by a man whose hand I shook in New York or to the remains of once frightened childhood.

Nothing truly remarkable ever happens in a story, most of the time what happens is the author finds a million things in their life that might have cool and full of hidden meaning and condenses it into one tale, one narrative of illusion; so it was that my own tale stopped short for several hours but in which as the memory of the broken shack, of the final drink and the wolves that howled at midnight; a sound that even made the near labour induced spider in the corner of the room shudder and nearly wreck its own blue bottle trap, would forever stay in the mind, so it was that I came across the sisters in black and a promise that so far I have kept for a quarter of a century.

The Timber Wolves, those menaces of the northern landscape might have been hundreds of miles away but their cry, their desolate moan of injustice and frenzy carried across the miles like a boat adrift in the stillness of the sea or the tumbling of Empires across Time; these beasts were lost to me now as I had only one forest in my life worth exploring and the sound of the human jungle was one I coped with better and the company, as I was discover between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, was one in which a gentle kiss of thanks would not lead to the fur bristling and the howl of anecdote in years to come.

It was not the Timber Wolves that now startled me, nor the eeriness of the forest and the decay of damp once sharp lush leaves, ones that had for lack of loo paper become an integral necessity in the chronicle of that part of the journey, the seven sisters, the small boy with a scarf round his throat and the stern but legendry stare of a single man leading his party out of the promised land and back to a society that many in the big city either laughed at or found too bemusing to care for; this was the new prospect of enlightenment was more dangerous in its appeal that imagining a wolf would ever stray beyond the mountains and deep carnivorous forests just to get to a young man on the edge of a personal abyss.

I had misjudged the timings of the bus out of town, forgetting that somewhere along the line that Time will always have the last laugh over you if you mock its property and there was several hours to fill before the last one of the day would make its way and skirt Lake Ontario and one of the small moments in which my grandfather’s life held any meaning before he was forced to see the horrors of the Blitz in a small Victorian house in brown leaf, smog filled, fire and bomb damaged Birmingham. If I had mocked Time, if I had mocked the Devil himself then what of this group of travellers that stood before me as if passing judgement from High Council, the damning of the damned spread before their lips and the ridicule of intimidation ready in their own silence.

A stand-off ensued inside the bus station, I would not give into temptation, I had cleared my head of rubbish to the point where only insanity and prevailing winds could pass, they would not ask the salient point of why someone would, in their minds deliberately travel with a hundred litre rucksack attached their spine; if they had ever read the story of The Hunchback of Notre Dame then I’m sure at some juncture it would have silently passed between them, by some form of Amish networking or just plain intuition that the Hunchback with leather jacket and lumberjack torn shirt was indeed just a fool.

I cracked first, their silence as forbidding as a glacier, as strong as the force of nature that stopped the Himaylas from tumbling down into the ocean or the sacred act of the Moon acting as a buffer to the storms of space; these were robustly adept people and in whose silence I found being judged preferable to ignorance.

Wolves only eat you in the end, the circle of life admits that nature will always out, that the beast will win through and the hardy and plump will just end up being a desert as well as a main course, yet as I sat there, the mid November cold starting to bite through the layers, nibbling at my curiosity and snapping at my lack of decorum, I found I forgot to let sleeping Amish lie.

I found one amongst the number for whom the returning fascination was too much to bear, was in a state of apology at not looking me in the eye and the fidgeting of her fingers was getting the rebuke from Heaven; do not speak to the unaware, do not make casual conversation with the man to whom black tight jeans are a symbol of ingratitude and sexual desire; do not, do not, do not…but she did and the wrath of her God was nowhere to be seen.

It was a simple hello, the kind that makes lovers connect over a filled bar and empty glasses, the kind that never leads to a sincere kiss but how I could have done in that moment, how I could have whispered sweet nothings of a life she would not tolerate, of trains, of cinema, of music and the daydreams of imagination; it was the same terminal kiss I would have offered anyone who dared to talk to a boy once described as having the devil in him for having the audacity to declare his atheism in church. It was a simple hello but it was the most genuine sound I had heard in days, weeks even and I loved her for her courage, even if the leader of this travelling troop ship was giving her the evil eye of solid indifference.

I introduced myself, brought up on politeness and manners, despite my supposed lack of moral Christian fibre, and I was never one to turn down a conversation with anyone; a couple of days smoking pot in the wilderness, hell you would talk to the spiders, the plants and the dying of the Moon if you thought they could handle your insecurity and flippant flirting. I looked for a signal, some sort of way in, but she remained painfully shy beyond that first reaching out. I heard a more mature voice say, “I’m Sarah and why might you be here?” I almost hugged her, I knew the people were closed off, that strangers were not welcome and that distrust in the modern age ran in the bloodstream; I adored them for that, it all seemed so simple, so true, as if hearing a Tibetan Monk denouncing processed cheese as a sign that humanity was too close to consumerism.

Despite everything, we talked, whether we were supposed to or not but I believe my time away had taught me one thing, that others will break their own laws and privileges of human nature if they believe in you. We talked, even the old man after a while loosened up and only scowled at every other word that came out of my mouth; I was sure I saw him ask forgiveness of my sins but paid no heed, these were my sins, my own offences and faults to which I hung on to with a sort of opaque pride and naivety.

Pride, I had never understood that damned emotion and yet there I was taking a kind of pleasure from the limited stories they were telling me, that they knew with no one else around the stories were safe, that I would not find my way to their place in the wilds of humanities dark dignity, that from here on they suspected I would join the ranks of the consumed and gratified poor; what was I too them, a mere speck of tolerance in a lifetime of patient lenience, of silence and prayer. I felt a feeling of envy stirring, the howling of wolves now long since discarded, I swallowed hard to keep the envy down, another emotion that doesn’t sit well with me, I looked each one of them in the eye, from dominant father figure to the small and impressionable child to whom I hoped would at least one day and rebel and perhaps own a radio in which to hear The Eagles, Jefferson Starship or at least the joys of static foaming across the world, I looked at each one and in my own private way I said a prayer, the first one in almost fifteen years; I wished them the world, I wished them solitude and peace and I longed for my own cravings to slip away.

Damn them, for they are beautiful. I still see them now, pious, glorious, full of faith and determination, damn them for made a promise to which I will keep and keep forever; till the day when I must finally admit defeat and understand that in the end I too was consumed, that I was eaten by the world and Time, that like the grandfather clock in a small town thousands of miles from where I sit and delve into my own heartache, the woodworm eats me from within and makes me ten minutes late every damned day. Praise them for they are not consumed so easily and whilst in my heart I hope that little boy who looked up at me as if I was a cross between the Devil and some foreign superstar, the myth he will tell his own children in time will sour and spring forth their own journeys, I hope he rebelled, even for one stunning moment and questioned the existence of Time.

I took a photo of them, I took a keepsake of Time in grey to which they huddled round and debated in silence, the odd nod of approval, the sternness of the older patriarch charged with the simple task of keeping souls intact and the small boy looking up at me with the biggest smile, one in which I returned with joy.

I had forgotten the silence within the silence, the hush within the babble of noise and the severe looks of the uncompromising; I had forgotten that the old man could speak and his demand was straightforward, uncomplicated and minimal, it was the demand of Time, my time, Time that must never be erased or found to be wanting and whilst I can write about it now, the result of that demand, of that cautious order by a man in grey and small ego, is safely locked away, it hides forever until the moment when I find the clock is no longer ticking and the only sound is that of the coils and springs losing their value, that Time has simply eaten its self out of my future, to then I shall print that picture, I shall hang with a smile and think about the beauty of an unexpected hello in the dark, of a beam so wide it was possible to believe the world would carry on forever within; of a warning not to publish the picture of seven women, a stern faced man and simple smile on two legs and half covered by an oversized scarf. Time cannot erase this memory, it might try; it might attempt in an act of intolerance and impatience but it will forever glow in the lantern and fires that kept the Timber Wolves from stalking over the vast forests and deep pre-history glaciers; Time was in the developed photograph and I keep it safe.

Ian D. Hall