The Waters of Kronos

by Conrad Richter

  “Mr. Paxman said you wanted to see me?”

  The stranger nodded. He saw his father waiting and knew what he waited for, but how could he tell him what he had come to see him about when he didn’t know himself? What could he say at all that wouldn’t lead to difficulties and suspicion? He told himself he should never have approached the store. He saw his father watching him intently. In the end he exchanged a meaning look with Mr. Paxman.

  “Well, I have to be going down the line,” he said.

  Panic seized the stranger. He dare not let him go.

  “Is the family well?” he stammered.

  “Why, yes. Pretty well, thank you.”

  “You have two other boys, don’t you?”

  “Three,” his father corrected. “Three boys. My wife hoped the youngest would be a girl.”

  “They’re all right, the boys?”

  “Tiptop,” his father said. The son remembered it was one of his favorite words.

  “And my—I mean, their mother? Is she all right?” Anxiously.

  “You know my wife?”

  “I knew her once long ago. I don’t know if she’d remember me now.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “John,” the stranger said again.

  “And your last name?”

  “Donner,” he said, mumbling it.

  “How?” his father asked sharply. His father had always said “How?” instead of “What?”

  “Donner. The same as yours.” The stranger felt his Adam’s apple strain. “When I was young I thought we might be related.”

  He expected his father to be taken by that, at least struck by the coincidence and mention that his oldest boy bore the same name. But he passed it off in the way of a strong man holding off those who would impose on him.

  “There’re lots of Donners in Pennsylvania. No connection that we know of. My father had only one sister in this country and an uncle who went to Texas fifty years ago. We never heard of him again. You say you came pretty far. You didn’t come from Texas?”

  “No, sir,” the stranger said regretfully.

  “Well, I guess we aren’t connected then.” His father spoke definitely, finally, cheerfully, settling any excuse for the call, closing the matter. He turned away.

  How often had the son seen him turn like this from those who took too much of his time, who came to the store or the house and hung on him, talking too much or too little, staying on and on. But never before had he seen his father turn away from him. Why, his father had always paid him too much attention, despite his shortcomings, his shyness, his inability to feel comfortable with people, to make small talk.

  In his mind’s eye he could see his parent now in the yellow lamplight of an unearthly night hour. He was standing in his nightshirt in the middle of the back-bedroom floor, holding up with one hand a sleepy small nightshirt-clad boy, with the other hand a white chamber pot while he made endless noises with his lips. “Psssss,” he’d say encouragingly. “Pssssssssss,” trying to induce the boy to make his water in this safe receptacle and avoid wetting the bed. How many times must his father have done that, crawling out from warm covers night after night, an impatient man patiently conspiring until what he sought had been accomplished. And now he was turning away from one of those same boys. What had happened to him, to them both, to the unsought relationship he had once fancied fixed and unchangeable between them?

  His father came out from behind the counter, putting on his hat and coat.

  “Well, good night, George,” he said to Mr. Paxman, then a civil good night to the old man.

  The latter watched helplessly. He was going away without him, down the street to the house the son knew so well, to the red hanging lamp in the hall and the yellow hand lamp in the kitchen. There was no place in the world he would rather go this early September evening. Strange that he had never wanted to go home at night as a boy, when the door had opened to him as a matter of course, when his mother had waited up till he came, and, if late, one of them would come looking for him. But none would come looking for him this night when he needed that house and the people in it more than he had ever needed them before. No one would wait up for him until he came.

  His father was outside now, going down the steps, lighting a cigar as he went. He had already forgotten the old man in the store. It is only the young who forget, the latter was thinking. He remembered how the same parent had never let him escape as a boy, calling him to strangers he didn’t give a hoot about. “Johnny, I want you to meet these people. This is my son,” he’d say proudly as if introducing an important person, putting on a beaming face and tone almost never used at home. It had irritated the boy. He couldn’t understand it. Even after he had grown up and left home, his father’s letters seldom failed to add, when mentioning people, “They asked about you,” or “They wanted to be remembered,” although the son well knew it had been his father who had spoken to them about him so he would be remembered.

  There came back to him now the time his father had visited him in Albuquerque. It was while they lived in the adobe house with the blue patio gate. His first book had just been published. The manager at Fred Harvey’s had told him of an enthusiastic reader who had praised the book and bought five or six copies at different times to send to friends. One went to England, another to Germany. The author had felt flattered and pleased. Then suddenly he had thought of his father.

  “Dad,” he had said sternly at dinner that evening. “Have you been buying my book at the depot?”

  He would never forget as long as he lived the guilty hurt look of a small boy that came to his father’s face. The son wished he hadn’t spoken. He would have given him what books he wanted, had he known, but his father had followed his own counsel, gone in secret to the bookseller, praising the author and spending his own scarce money for copies.

  At the memory, a melting and yearning for his father swept over him. He wanted desperately to run after, to walk down the street with him, to put his arm in his, a gesture that would embarrass his father today as it would have the son years ago, to express perhaps a word of affection he couldn’t recollect ever speaking or even implying. But it was too late. He stepped out of the store. Far down Kronos Street he heard the distant footsteps of his father retreating into the night.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rust

  For a long time the stranger stood on the store porch steps listening to the dying footsteps in his ear. Then they ceased. His father had gone where he could not follow. He should have sought home first, he told himself, while his mother was there alone save for his two brothers. Or were there three? The problem confused him. Never mind. His mother was all that mattered. If he were old as Methuselah with a long white beard, he believed that she would still know him.

  Now he had missed the great chance seldom granted mortals. For a moment he had the feeling it was over, that the waters would come. He waited but nothing happened. Only the tree crickets beat their throbbing night pulse into his ear. The town remained. The silent streets and sidewalks of old Unionville continued to lie undisturbed around him. Down Wington’s hill he knew he had a place of refuge still to go to, the house of her in whose companionship he had felt the nearest to his mother after she had died. He descended Union Street, past the smell of ancient straw from the old stables at the alley, past Leshers’ butcher shop. As he turned the corner under the big Lesher ash trees he could see ahead the outline of the house that was his second home.

  The family tale had it that his Great-Aunt Teresa had once owned the large valuable lot on Kronos Street at the corner of Union. Wily Chester Troutman, national head of the P. O. S. of A., had persuaded her to trade it for his smaller and less valuable piece of ground on Back Street. On her lot he had built a huge three-story brick pile topped by a cupola, and on his lot she had built this modest yet substantial home in which John Donner had been born. It still belonged legally to Aunt Teresa, but was known as Aunt Jess’s house, and Aunt Jess paid the ta
xes.

  The old man stood across the street drinking in the intimate scene, the remembered red brick walls with their white woodwork and green shutters, the side lot encircled by a fence of wire-enclosed pickets he had once helped Uncle Dick to paint green. In the soft gloom he could make out the small-paned windows of the pleasantest basement kitchen in Unionville, the Maiden Blush apple tree whose fruit he hadn’t liked too much, and the small, roofed side porch with a long French window leading into the parlor, a porch with two facing white benches sweet in May with locust blossoms. Soft yellow light flowed from the sitting-room windows above the basement kitchen, and red light from the hanging hall lamp through the transom over the front door.

  On the front porch he had to restrain himself. Why, he had never knocked on this door in his life, or rung the bell, but tonight he turned the crooked handle and waited.

  By the slow answering sounds that came from far within the house, and by the long time required for an answer, he knew who was coming. Already through the door he could feel her presence, a big woman filling the narrow hallway beside the stairs, bearing up powerfully over her “game” leg, rising up and down on one side as she went, like the side-wheel drive of a locomotive. It was a painfully slow gait for a boy to slacken himself to on the way to church, no more than a mere crawl, but he had often done it. “Wait for the halt and the blind,” she would say playfully, or in the house, “Will you run upstairs for me, my love and my dove? Your legs are younger than mine.” Her smile at such times was light, little more than a momentary movement of the facial muscles. But to outsiders she would smile gaily and poke fun at her affliction, telling the story of the Pennsylvania farmer who on meeting her with his buggy at the station had greeted her with, “My stars, but you’re lame!”

  It’s lucky that Jess has a sense of humor, her friends said. The group around her at Church Guild was often the liveliest and her “take-off of grand opera,” if she could be induced to “perform,” the high point of the evening. She would seat herself reluctantly at the piano, lay mute hands on the keys as if getting into the mood for some prayerful opus, then go off into a burlesque of wild soarings and passionate tootlings you would never suspect from so noble a face and bearing, all the while giving her voice a very elaborate and intricate running accompaniment on the piano. She could play the most difficult music on sight. Cousin Rose, who had a salon in Vienna frequented by the great of her time including Brahms, had told Aunt Jess she could be making her thousands instead of pennies had she gone to Europe to study. But Aunt Jess had married Dick Ryon instead, a gentlemanly Irishman, a railroad conductor when he worked, and had supported him most of her life, giving lessons to the stubby young Pennsylvania Dutch fingers of town.

  Not that she ever bit the hand that fed her. She received her Pennsylvania Dutch neighbors like old friends, which they were, in her kitchen (they would never come in any other way), asking their advice on cooking, gardening and money matters, careful to be “common” as they. The only admission she ever made of a difference in their stations was to her own friends and family when she would use their pronunciation. “Are you very bissy?” she would ask ceremoniously in calling, or, if one of her friends used language not befitting a lady or gentleman, “Now Pappy Graef. You better behafe!” invoking the name of a local church pillar. She had a whole vocabulary of her own. Once she heard an exaggerated pronunciation from parlor or pulpit, she never forgot it. “Pleazaunt” and “experiaunze,” both accented on the last syllable, were two of her favorites together with “d’yew” and “juty,” reminders not to take too seriously what at the moment she was saying.

  Now the door opened and there she was as he remembered her when a boy, the deep lines he knew so well already forming in her face. Many the time he had seen her go to the door in an apron. This evening she had on a somber black dress with glittering black beadwork, her hair done up severely, her face grave.

  “Yes?” she said as to the veriest stranger.

  He had to work hard to control himself. He wanted to cry out, “Don’t you know me, Aunt Jess?” He dare never do that. He must be wary.

  “I guess you don’t remember me, Mrs. Ryon?” he said.

  She looked him over carefully with those keen eyes. His heart sank. Her face never changed. Were there no vestiges of his youth remaining?

  “I can’t say that I do. Should I know you?”

  “I met you once when I was younger,” he explained.

  “I meet a great many people,” she told him. “My father was a minister.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. May I come in and talk to you a little?”

  A shadow crossed her face.

  “I was just about to go out. My father—Reverend Morgan—is to be buried tomorrow. Perhaps you can come some other time.”

  “No,” he said hoarsely. “I might not be here some other time.”

  “Well, I’ll be sorry to miss you,” she said formally. “But I must go. I’m late now. Next week if you happen to be in town, do come and see us.”

  Politely she began to close the door. Alarm rose in him. He couldn’t let her do that. Why, she had been his favorite aunt. She had always welcomed him as one of her own, had been mentor and encourager, filling his ears with stories of the “family,” including the Scarletts, the good ones, the bad ones but all cursed or blessed with “the Scarlett mind.” As a child it had embarrassed him, made him want to escape. But when as a young man he had tried to write for publication, she had stood by him like a rock. “Charles Appleby Seibert writes,” she told him authoritatively. “He even writes books. If he can, so can you. You’re his cousin.” Never did she say, “He is our cousin.” It was always “you,” although she was closer to him than he. Not only his worldly but spiritual welfare had been her concern. “Whatever happens in life, you must always love Jesus,” she would remind him. Even when he was a child it had struck him as unreal that Aunt Jess, gay, spirited, almost irreverent one moment, could be so pious and religious in another.

  He played his last card.

  “Won’t you let me come in just for a minute and talk to you about Johnny Donner?”

  “Johnny?” she repeated, widening the door. “What about Johnny? He isn’t in trouble?”

  “All of us get into trouble sooner or later,” he said.

  “But he’s only a boy!” she cried. “He was in here not twenty minutes ago.” Her eyes suddenly stormed. “I don’t know what you are trying to get at, but I won’t thank you for coming here and trying to run down our Johnny.”

  She started to close the door again, now firmly in his face, and would have done it if an unmistakable cracked voice of another day and age hadn’t stayed her.

  “Jessie, who is it? Somebody to see me?”

  “It’s nobody to see you, Aunty. Who it is I don’t know except that it’s nobody who’s very much.” Then Aunt Jess shut the door.

  It was almost immediately opened and the caller saw peering out at him his Great-Aunt Teresa, poetess, teacher and “lover of children,” grimacing in what was meant to be a welcoming smile, a woman in her eighties, her flesh eaten up by the vitaminless years until all that remained was an impression of hair, bones, skin and glasses. She reminded him of nothing so much as a scarecrow from the fields done up in castaway clothes and somehow living and breathing. He remembered how she would run off from the house in those ancient clothes, humiliating Aunt Jess. Even in her last year or two when she was virtually dying, she would escape like a wayward child, sally over town and countryside, her once active and sparkling mind now lapsing. But she never forgot a tribal face and stopped most every man, woman and child to tell them accurately enough what family they belonged to and some anecdote connected with the clan, preferably bringing in her father, a squire, soldier and hotelkeeper for many years, who knew all the dark secrets of the community. To listen to Aunt Teresa, he had practically won the War of 1812 singlehanded, and Brother Timothy had saved the Union against the Copperheads. Her memory was prodigio
us. She could still give in detail Brother Timothy’s debate with Vallandigham in Springfield, Ohio. Her causes were numerous, her defense vigorous. He remembered how embarrassed he was as a small boy to find her in the alley he had passed tonight, protecting drunken Mike Whalen from a gang of yelling and stone-throwing boys, calling down the wrath of God on them and counseling the great brute of a tramp to overlook their infamy. The pair had made an unforgettable picture on his young mind, the lady and the beast. What particularly shamed him was that Aunty had worn no skirt, only an old red flannel petticoat. He looked down now and found she had the same garment on today. Well, he reflected, she had probably come to his rescue tonight much as she had Mike Whalen’s, out of pity for the downtrodden.

  “Come in.” She grimaced. “You know, ‘Come in the evening or come in the morning. Come when you’re looked for, or come without warning.’” She peered at him. “I wondered how you were and what you have been doing.”

  He tried not to look at Aunt Jess as he made his way down the hall after Aunt Teresa into the sitting room, to be swallowed up in the past, in a distillation of feelings, slow time and the genes of mortality that few houses have today. It was as it had always been, the yellow oak chairs and buffet, the deep windows, the cubbyhole closets and the door that led out to the children’s schoolroom. There were the same smells, of old leatherbound books, of cigar ashes, of the Rayo lamp and from the kitchen below. On a chair by the lamp sat Uncle Dick, thin, stiff and faintly contemptuous as ever, the Evening Bulletin that had come on the six-o’clock train up defensively before him.

  “Be seated,” Aunt Teresa said, as to her charges in school, and when the old stranger had slipped down to the stool he had liked to sit on here as a boy, she beamed. “Low-seated and high-minded! How is Palmyra? Why isn’t she with you?”

  Uncle Dick lowered his paper to glance significantly at Aunt Jess.

  “She thinks he’s your father!” he said.

  At Aunt Teresa’s words, John Donner had felt a queerness pass over him. Somebody had recognized him, given him a place in the family at last. He answered gratefully,