The Waters of Kronos

by Conrad Richter

  “I’m afraid,” John Donner confessed, “I couldn’t make it alone.”

  “Afraid of what? You can’t miss it. You could close your eyes and you’d run right into it.”

  “I’d like to ride with you, if I may,” the man in the road requested. “I’ve not been too well.”

  “Well, it’s that much more for the team to hold back. But I guess I can take you.” The driver looked at the stranger as at a difficult person, but he made room on the seat.

  As he climbed over the wheel, John Donner glanced back into the wagon box. He saw it filled to the sideboards with the deep product of the earth, the residue of life that had flourished countless years ago. So that was the scent he had noticed standing there, the faint, almost imperceptible, yet unmistakable taint of wet, freshly mined anthracite, a mysterious smell, not quite chemical, yet something as a boy he had often detected in the miners’ trains and even from men with blackened faces trotting home from the station, the odor of a buried world, very difficult to describe, native to the mouth of the Primrose slope and the dripping depths below. He recalled that when the colliery closed down, they had been mining from the eighth or ninth level, each level eighty yards apart, which meant that he was riding now with a cargo drawn from beneath the level of the sea.

  The driver waited till his passenger settled himself on the wooden seat. Then he released the brake and they started down into the chasm.

  At every turn John Donner looked for the road to peter out. He thought they must surely come upon spots scraped by the bulldozer to nothingness, must reach the edge of the water. But the old shale road continued to stretch beneath them and around their heads the soft country dusk sweet with the farming scents of early September. A lantern shone in Blinkley’s unpainted barn as they passed. He could smell cows. A field of corn shocked in the old-time fashion came down to the rail fence. A horse and buggy went by close enough to be touched by his outstretched hand. Then they came out of the hollow to a familiar level stretch.

  This, he knew, was the Breather, where teams coming up the Long Stretch could get their wind before the next grade. And now the lights of the old town were coming into view directly below them, not the bright glitter of electric bulbs but the mildness of oil wicks sending their steady yellow beams among the trees. As a boy he had often coasted to town from here. This was the steepest descent of the Long Stretch, and the horses let themselves into it gingerly, the wagon tongue rising and the horses’ collars thrusting out in protest. John Donner had the feeling he was descending from where he could never return.

  They passed the white Shollenberger house high on its long flight of wooden steps, passed the light and dark brown house of Mr. Kirtz, who drooled on his beard and the green-groceries he sold in the basement of the Eagle Hotel, passed the curious blue house where lived the girl in his school who would never speak above a whisper in class. Years afterward he heard that she had married and had twins, and he had always pictured her in his mind whispering to her children while other Unionville women shouted and threatened.

  The wagon was almost down, crossing the alley which the Uptown boys took going home from school. Beyond, he could see Kronos Street lying peaceful, leafy and unchanged, with snug houses under the trees and the Methodist church and old tannery on opposite corners. The driver took his team and wagon across without pausing for traffic. Looking up and down the old street, the passenger could feel an almost frightening solitude. There were no headlights as far as he could see. Sleepy lights slanted from a few houses, from the post office up the hill and from stores scattered among the dwellings.

  “I’ll get off here, if I may,” John Donner said. The driver pulled up his horses but his passenger didn’t get off. “Are you acquainted in Unionville?” he asked.

  “A little.” The driver took a fresh chew.

  “Do you know any of the stores?”

  “Well, there’s Smith and Reinbold, and Kipps, Donner and Company.”

  At the latter name, the stranger felt a tightening in his chest.

  “Do you know if Harry Donner could still be living?”

  “Living! I didn’t know he was dead! I seen him a month ago up at Primrose delivering in the Patch.”

  Emotion and a certain excitement came up in John Donner. Suddenly he remembered.

  “My coat. I forgot it. I left it up in the car.”

  “You come on the railroad?” And when the other didn’t reply: “Well, first thing I noticed about you was you had no coat and no hat on. A man don’t hardly need a coat this kind of weather, but it’s unhealthy to go without your hat. It chills the brain. Now, I don’t have an extra hat but I have a coat I don’t use much. It was Jake Stroud’s. His widow gave it to me when he died. You can have it till you get yours. If you don’t mind wearing a dead man’s coat. It could turn cold on you overnight this time of year.”

  “Thank you,” the stranger said. “I’ll leave it at Donner’s store for you to pick up next time you come through.” He climbed down over the wheel and waited for the wagon to pass. It moved by with extraordinary slowness. The driver lifted his hand good-by. There was something strange about him, John Donner told himself, but then there had always been something strange about “die leit ivver der barrick,” the over-the-mountain people.

  He started up the Methodist church hill. How incredibly quiet and peaceful it was. Nothing had changed. The sidewalk, moist and slippery as when he was a boy, still shone faintly in the darkness, reflecting unseen light. You had to lift your feet to keep from stumbling over the unpredictable bulges where unseen roots had lifted the bricks in giant mole-like waves. He passed the house of Mr. Nagle, chief clerk for the Markles, who owned Primrose Colliery. It had the peculiar dreamlike look of certain houses when he was young, of importance without and hushed withdrawal from the world within. Across the street the white horse of Dr. Sypher, who had brought him into the world, stood hitched to the buggy, head drooping, perhaps asleep. At the top of the hill was the old post office, tinier than ever in its square boxlike building that had once been a squire’s office. It must be after six o’clock in the evening but the stamp window was still up, with Katie Gerber calmly reading someone’s paper behind the partition of call and lock boxes. No one was visible on the public side. In an hour it would be jammed with townspeople chatting to each other, waiting for the seven-thirty mail from Lebanon to be “changed,” everyone keeping an eye on his or her box not to miss when a letter or paper might be popped in.

  As he went on, someone emerged from the shadows and came toward him, a boy touching the trees as he passed, darting away from the stranger, tagging the post-office tree by sidling around it like a squirrel, then into the post office with the letter in his hand and out again almost in the same motion, returning down the street he had come. He left in the man a baffled feeling. That slender face he thought he had seen before, but where? And what was his name? Even the shirt the boy had on, a design of stripes and colors he hadn’t seen for years, left the man with the strangest sensations.

  He stepped into the post office and waited till the brown eyes of Katie Gerber appeared at the high stamp window, severe at the sight of a stranger.

  “Can you tell me who that boy was?” he asked.

  The brown eyes scarcely changed.

  “I heard somebody but didn’t notice,” she said. Through the partition he saw her go to the mail drop, lift out the last letter, look at it and drop it back without saying anything. What she had learned was for her own information.

  The man went uncertainly back to the sidewalk and down the shadowy street. How fragrant was the air he had grown up in and never noticed, redolent of bark and leaves as of the forest! That was Unionville, he told himself, the combination of town and woods, life going on in these houses under the trees, eating, sleeping, reading, making meals in the kitchen all beneath the giant limbs. He could hear at this moment the faint sounds of a piano and horn from different houses, each pursuing a different tune, reaching him through th
e inexhaustible filter of leaves. He made his way past the brick house built by one of the tannery owners, and the frame house where old Josie Rehrer lived. Across the street stood the white house where his mother used to send him for milk, through the gate and around to the back porch, where he had to wait till his kettle was filled from a crock on the cellar floor.

  They called it the Markle square. You never said block in Unionville. The big Markle house, with a full third floor where the servants lived, gave it dignity. He was coming to Dan Markles’ ornamental iron fence now. The heavy gate led to a rounded portico, shaped like a Christmas cooky. There was another portico on the second floor, a conservatory wing on the first and a wonderful room with deep red leather chairs and walls lined with books enough for a lifetime of reading. The Markle square was a long square, and here in the middle of it, far from the lamppost at either end, all was swathed in muffled darkness but he could smell the rich fragrance of an expensive cigar drifting out from behind those closed yellow blinds.

  And now he felt a rising constriction. Ahead on the far side of the street he could make out the general store of Kipps, Donner and Company, known in the family as “Papa’s store,” with a broad store porch and a dozen steps the width of the building rising from the sidewalk, both store and steps unpainted but tacked with a multitude of tin advertising signs, mostly for tobacco. Faint light filtered from the old-time store windows, crude compared to those of today. Like the post office, the store was still open and would be, he knew, long after Katie Gerber closed the post office.

  John Donner stood under a tree looking across the street. He felt sure he could make out a man behind the counter. When he went over to the other side the man had disappeared but he thought he heard a familiar voice singing. He knew then it must be his father. As a boy he had sometimes wished his father tuneless like other fathers. Or if he had to do something, why didn’t he whistle like many of the Pennsylvania Dutch? He sang incessantly, rousing Sunday-school hymns when he felt good, sad songs when “down in the mouth.” “March on, march on, for Christ counts everything but loss,” was one of the stirring kind, together with “Onward, upward till every foe is conquered and Christ is Lord indeed.” The fervor, that’s what his father liked, so he could let himself go. He used to thunder out “Peal forth the watchword, silence it never.” “True hearted, whole hearted,” was another, and “Speed Away.” It had always seemed incongruous to be with his father driving the slow heavy three-horse team with a load of groceries up the mountain and hear him ring out to the culm banks, “Speed away. Speed away. On your mission of light. To the lands that are lying in darkness and night.” This was the gospel version. Once in a great while he would sing the real words, “There’s a young heart awaiting thy coming tonight.”

  Chiefly his father sang when active, running up and down the stairs, when going to answer the doorbell, while working with his hands. He seldom sang sad songs except at home. An audience enlivened him, gave him power. He liked people, was stimulated by them. He made his son wince by speaking to everyone he met on the street, male or female, young or old. Not only here in Unionville but in Lebanon, where people looked after him curiously. Uncle Dick said his brother-in-law had once cordially greeted a painted-up whore they passed on Center Street in Pottsville. He also embarrassed his son in church. He sang so much louder than necessary. Charley Miner once said he had looked for Harry Donner in a crowd of a thousand men roaring out “The Star Spangled Banner” in the Rajah Temple in Reading. He could hear him, he said, but he couldn’t see him. That was his father to a T. In church the boy imagined everyone staring at them, thinking it was showing off.

  Today outside the store the son recognized the song. Its name he didn’t know but he was startled by the words. It was almost as if his father knew he was there.

  “Lift high the latch, my boy, my boy,

  And wait outside no more.

  There’s love and rest, my boy, my boy,

  Within thy father’s door.”

  Gradually he knew better. He had heard his father sing it too often at home. The meaning in the words then and now was hidden. His father, he felt, had always sung at home in riddles, saying in music what he could never bring himself to reveal in speech. As a boy he had thought these particular words a warning to him to give up his youthful, dissenting ways, his shying from church and people, and enter into his father’s hearty way of life and religion.

  Now his father came back into view behind the counter. At the sight of his unmistakable black mustache and powerful movements, the old restraint the boy felt for his parent came over him. Why, he had asked himself a thousand times, did this stiffness exist between them? Nobody else appeared to feel that way toward his father. His cousin Pol, some few years his senior, adored him. Her brother, Matt, looked up to him, and Matt was no mollycoddle, a member of the bunch that put wagons and buggies in the canal on Halloween. Only he, Johnny, his oldest son, was uncomfortable with him. As a child he couldn’t easily fathom it except that his father was not his real but a foster father and that the constriction must come from his side, which was why the boy resented it so keenly, coming from one who was so open, friendly and companionable with everybody else.

  Once away from his father, he thought he had outgrown and forgotten it. And yet each time they met again, the incomprehensible constriction would rise between them. The stronger and heartier his father, the more stubborn and powerful the feeling would take form in the son. Standing here outside his father’s store after all these years, he could feel it tonight, gripping him without rhyme or reason, holding him back, a grown man, even today. Sometimes he wondered if, whatever it was, it hadn’t been the origin of his interest in books and nature, not born of commendable thirst for knowledge, but from a shying away from his father’s world of enthusiastic sociability with people, which had given him as a boy only difficulty and suffering so that he found relief in freedom and solitude in fields, the forest and the printed page, like an unreasoning moth released from the hand and soaring in air it had never taken cognizance of before.

  He came to himself with a start. Someone was coming up the store steps behind him. Whoever it was must have seen him standing here, peering through the windows. He turned and saw the lynxlike beard of Mr. Paxman, his blue eyes hard as at someone caught spying.

  “You want something?” he asked sharply.

  “I’m looking for—” John Donner began and caught himself in time. He had almost said “my father.” He tried again more cautiously. “I wanted to see if Mr. Donner was here.”

  “He’s gone!” Mr. Paxman informed him.

  “But I thought I saw him through the window.”

  “He’s out of business,” Mr. Paxman said. “He’s going away to study to be a preacher. He sold me his share in the business. You’ll have to talk about business to me.”

  “I don’t want to see him about business,” the stranger said. “It’s personal.”

  The bearded man looked disappointed. His interest evaporated.

  “Well, in that case you’ll find him still here. He was helping me out tonight while I went to supper.” He stood back, waiting for the other to enter.

  Now that he was actually expected to face his father, John Donner froze. He would have retreated, if he could. What could he say that wouldn’t make him out an impostor or a lunatic? He was conscious of Mr. Paxman watching him, questioning his hesitation. He forced himself up the remaining steps to the accustomed stout double door. It still bore the old latch, very low down so a child could reach it, of wrought steel, an arc of metal for the hand and a steel trough above so the thumb could press down and lift the catch inside. This he did. The door opened and he went in.

  Nobody was there. The familiar store room, still more of a dark cave than he remembered, stood empty, the old square and slanted glass showcases cloudy and scratched, with the sediment of sugar in the counter cracks, the shelves loaded with multitudinous objects not to be found on the market today. Tinware hung
from the high ceiling, and sugar, cracker and flour barrels stood below. He breathed an air compounded of age and dampness, of molasses and cloth dyes, of spices and coal oil, of rubber boots and leather shoes, of tubs of overripe butter and cheese, of bananas black and spoiling on the bunch, all these and a hundred other scents mingled to form the whole and familiar blend. Bracket oil lamps cast shadows on the wall, imprisoned flies buzzed on strips of flypaper, and the bare floor was deeply grooved and worn by the dragging of heavy containers.

  Then the stranger heard someone coming up from the cellar, the swift steps he had heard a thousand times, sharp, vigorous, the toe of each shoe striking forward on the steps. The cellar door opened and he saw his father, lamp in hand.

  “Here’s an old man to see you, Harry,” Mr. Paxman said.

  The caller winced. Why, it had been Mr. Paxman and his father who had been old, not he. His father looked no more than thirty-five as he set the lamp in its bracket and wiped his hands on a dirty roller towel. He came forward holding out his hand with that hearty ease he always enjoyed with strangers and which somehow impoverished and cramped his son to see.

  “I don’t think I caught the name,” he said, the same unforgettable smile under his black mustache.

  “My name is John,” the stranger said hoarsely.

  His father’s eyes searched his face while still holding his hand.

  “Haven’t we met before?”

  “Yes, many years ago.” For a moment the son had the feeling that his father was going to recognize him. Then he saw it was only his parent’s inveterate interest in people.

  “You come from around here?”

  “I do, but my people are dead and gone. They’re not even buried here now.”

  “Then you don’t live around here any more?”

  “No, sir. I’ve come a long way, longer than I could tell you.”

  His father nodded politely. He looked up at the wooden clock ticking on the wall. The son saw it was still lettered SALEM THREAD, in black on the glass.