The Waters of Kronos

by Conrad Richter

  John Donner guessed no one would tell that story from the pulpit today. They would tell the more pious ones, how Pap-pa was known to preach with a child in his arms, omitting that Pap-pa disliked crying children in church and had instructed mothers in the congregation to let their very small restless children free on the floor, with the result that the aisles and occasionally the pulpit crawled with tiny tots, which was why he sometimes in self-defense chose to pick up a baby playing around his feet and hold it with one arm while with the other he emphasized his customary “hence we find.”

  There was a stir on the jute-carpeted stairs. The preachers were coming, a whole troupe of them in their black garb, the local clergy followed by important men of the church including John Donner’s Great-Uncles Howard and Timothy, noted preachers and joint editors of the denominational weekly, preceded by the president of the synod with Uncle Peter’s friend from the big Lebanon church, then the bearded head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America walking with the smoothly shaven president of the seminary at Gettysburg. Uncle Timothy, the brother of Mary Scarlett, marched with his face up, an aristocratic man with a sharp commanding nose. Aunt Jess said he had once ordered a servant woman with a wash basket off the Philadelphia streetcar in which he was riding. Uncle Howard tramping beside him would never have done that although Uncle Howard’s wife was a Bartlett from New Hampshire, descendant of Josiah who signed the Declaration of Independence. Uncle Howard wore a slightly raised shoe on one foot and when he walked moved up and down, which gave him a kindly aspect.

  In their wake as if shielded and comforted in their ecclesiastical presence came the mourners, Uncle Timothy’s and Howard’s wives, Aunts Martha and Frederica, supporting between them Pap-pa’s second wife and widow. The stepchildren and grandchildren called her Ma. All the women were heavy from forehead to feet with veils and mourning. Great-Aunt Eugenia, after whom Gene had been named and who was supposed to have been a bit wild before being married off to the Rev. Charles Woolston, couldn’t come from the great distance of Colorado. Right after Ma, as if to protect her if she faltered, walked a composed Uncle Peter, Pap-pa’s only son, an almost jaunty younger clergyman who wore a sweeping mustache of uncertain color to give his bright and merry face a little gravity. With him were his wife, Aunt Sophy, a doctor’s daughter, who considered herself superior to the Morgans and whom they never liked, and the three children, including Myra, the oldest of Pap-pa’s grandchildren, a tall, proud, willowy girl with a tremendous pompadour of pale shining hair. Aunt Jess followed in unaccustomed black veil with Uncle Dick, very thin and stiff. John Donner never remembered seeing him in church before. With them came Matt and Polly and Aunt Teresa, who looked more skin and bone than ever in her ancient and rusty black bonnet drooping with strings and ornamented with what looked like black beetles.

  The old stranger had sat rigid in his back pew and now he could hardly contain his emotion as he caught a glimpse of the womanly figure he knew so well, the large bones, the fairly long thighs that made such a wonderful lap to a child, the ample shoulders and breast he had cried on. But that certain face, so erect and restrained with others while warm and eager to him, was hidden under long black veiling so he could see nothing except the form, like the outline of a memory whose living heart and breast were still barred from him. She moved up the aisle quietly, driving ahead of her the three boys while his father, strong and powerful as always, brought up the rear. Having ushered them into their proper place, he took his seat at the edge of the aisle, vigorous and alert as if to protect them from the contagion of death and all its malignancies.

  Oh, Dad, let me be with you! the old stranger in the rear begged. For a few moments something in him strove desperately to be sitting up there at his accustomed place with his brothers and parents, beloved, guarded over and secure. In the end, repulsed and shaken by the impossible, he came back to his battered self.

  The service was very long, the singing by the middle-aged choir quaint to his modern ears. Uncle Timothy and Uncle Peter’s preacher friend together with the local clergy had left to conduct the overflow services, one in the Sunday-school room, the other in the open air in front of the church, but there were plenty of clergymen left up here. Now, why did preachers look so grim and bloodless in their black dress, their faces fixed as the wooden tops of the tall pulpit chairs they sat on? Through the prayers and readings, each by a different speaker, and the funeral eulogies, all mixed with similar sounds from the other two services, John Donner escaped as when a boy through the open pane of the stained-glass window to the fresh greenery of a tree outside. The world out there was still young, the golden light about it very close to that which later shone in the face and voice of his father when he repeated certain passages with mystical fervor. “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling,” and “Grace be unto you and peace from Jesus Christ our Lord” and “To the only one God, our saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever, Amen.”

  Sitting here among ecclesiastical shapes and symbols, with the strong stone walls of the church about him and the repetitions of faith in his ears, he marveled how pure that emotion from his father could reach him, letting him see how the church might appear not to himself but to the devout who attended year in and out, who here prayed their prayers and confessed their creed, whose families had belonged for generations, who were born, bred, baptized and raised in its shadow, who enjoyed the favor of its ministers and dignitaries, and to whom church, altar, pulpit, Bible, choir, sacraments, clergymen and synod were familiar furnishings of another, richer home, while the brother churches of its denomination were a chain of celestial forts here on earth, so that dying in the faith was almost as being borne into the nations of heaven.

  The service ended and the congregations from the other two services began to file in a bottomless line up the aisle and by the altar to have a last look at the marble face of their old pastor. Those in the upper church were the last to join the queue, and in the end John Donner had to go along like the rest, past the bier and out the door, leaving the family and clergy alone with the body. He was hardly down the stairs when the first clang of the bell startled him, certainly no strange sound, for he had heard it often and never outgrown his fondness for its deep vibrations quivering on the air. Even on Sunday the slow turn of the immense wheel was evident. Whenever he had come back and heard it again so deliberate and timeless that for a moment after each turning one almost believed it had ceased ringing, he thought he knew why most Unionville men preferred not to leave home. But the sound today was something else, the stroke of a man with a hammer, a cruel, barbaric, almost brutal finality to life and hope that reached to his very bones.

  There was such a swarm of people outside the church that he could scarcely make out his mother, just the crown of a woman’s hat as she came down with the family before getting into one of the carriages. As a rule the people started off at once on foot for the cemetery. The services at the grave those days were the crowning act of a man’s life, like the other Elijah going in a chariot to heaven or the town drunkard let down on ropes to eternal hell. But today the crowd remained filling street and sidewalks. John Donner soon saw what the people waited for. They were watching old Mike, a black ribbon tied to his bridle. He stood hitched to Pap-pa’s buggy in front of the hearse. He had turned his head now to watch the pallbearers bring out the long yellow coffin and load it on the hearse. Afterward, Morris Striker said the old horse started off on his own with the empty buggy. Morris was supposed to lead him by the bridle, but he merely walked beside him, and Mike led the procession, turning up Cemetery Road from Kronos Street without guidance. Ma always said she had never heard Mike neigh from the stable again.

  The foot procession formed quickly now, two by two, flowing in a human stream, at first beside the carriages, then swinging out into the middle of the street behind, a long, winding, almost endless tail of Union Vale humanity. Walking along with it, John Donner remembered what his cousin Georgia,
who spent most of her life in Europe, had told him. “I always said I wanted to be in London when Queen Victoria died and in Unionville when Mr. Morgan died, and I had to be in Italy both times.”

  By the time the old man got up the hill, the press was so great around the grave he couldn’t get near. Once or twice the breeze brought a snatch of familiar words, “I would not have ye ignorant, brethren,” “In the evening it is cut down and withereth,” and “O death, where is thy sting?”, then the wail of the choir, who in those days marched summer and winter up the hill to raise their voices over the grave without benefit of organ or pay, sending the traveler with hymn and lament to the other shore. It was more pagan than he realized, John Donner told himself, closer to the Greeks. As a youth he had thought it criminal to torment the bereaved with mournful words and dirges. The feeble efforts to disguise evil with the words, “Asleep” and “At rest,” carved serenely over pits of corruption had angered him. Now that he was older he wondered if he might not have been too thin-skinned and refined. If you had friends and neighbors to climb the hill and raise well-meant words over you at last, why should you prefer paid strangers consigning you to earth or fire?

  He saw finally that the services were over, the multitude dispersing, life withdrawing to its warren, leaving the dead to the dead. Until the crowd was gone, he wandered among the narrow lands of the departed, noting long-forgotten names and the oft-chiseled melancholy words, “Father,” “Mother” and “Our Darling,” far from home and warm bed in this chill stony place. The phrase “He is not here but risen” aroused in him as always an inner rebellion. “Just the same, God,” he spoke grimly, half aloud, “Thou hast missed a wonderful bet if it isn’t true.” What he meant was that the Infinite had overlooked a chance to delight itself and confound the wisest of men by showing them how little they knew, how man was a great deal more than he guessed and creation far beyond any sensible and reasonable conception.

  Wasn’t it curious that now at this gloomy time he should think of some of his grandfather’s funeral stories, especially the one about Manny Keefer, typically Pennsylvania Dutch. He told Pap-pa that when he died he wanted to be buried north and south instead of east and west like everybody else in the cemetery. He didn’t want to have to get awake and sit up to see the sun shine in his face on resurrection morn. He would sooner sleep. That was something he had never had enough of. For thirty years he had had to get up at three o’clock in the morning and walk four miles to town to catch the early miners’ train. He was tired and if resurrection came before he got rested, he’d be “grichlich.” It was a long entertaining story full of Manny’s talk together with what his wife said and what Pap-pa and the grave digger said. John Donner seemed to see and hear his grandfather telling it now with his unreadable face and those peculiar motions of his long arms to relieve his inner enjoyment.

  The carriages and most of the crowd were gone back to town when John Donner started to follow. Near the cemetery gate boys were playing, leaping over tombstones, rolling and tumbling on grassy graves, seeing nothing frightening in this calamitous place. One of them looked up and noticed him.

  “There’s that crazy old man that hollered at Mrs. Flail!” he yelled.

  The cub pack came after him hooting and jeering. In the cemetery there was little to pick up and throw but once they came to the road, shale pebbles showered after him. He remembered how he had seen Mike Whalen trying to maintain his dignity under attacks like this. Aunt Teresa in her red petticoat had been of more help than he thought.

  “Aunty! Where are you now?” he cried.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Source

  He felt a little shaken when he got downtown. His tormentors left off here but a few shale fragments had found their mark and drawn blood. He stared at the sight of red rubbed off on his hand. Well, anyway, he was not an insubstantial figure of the imagination. He was real. He could bleed.

  But now that it was over he felt singularly faint. He noticed that only a few of the teams on Kronos Street had gone. Horses buried their noses in feedbags or in corn-stained wooden boxes. Most of them were farm horses in blinders with the motherly look of a farmwife with glasses whose work was never done. Up the street he found country folk sitting out on the benches and chairs provided in the roped-off square, open baskets by their feet, the younger ones crowding the curb, most of them with fried chicken in their fingers. This was a holy day set aside for the funeral of their spiritual ruler and pastor, a day like Sunday in which “thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates.” At the same time, having paid their respect, they meant now to take advantage of their holiday, enjoy these unaccustomed privileges, talk with relatives and friends, laugh and joke, for the solemnities were over and behind them now, buried like the corpse and not to be exhumed.

  “You can’t live with the dead,” John Donner had heard them say more than once when a widow or widower remarried within the year. And the first remark when one of their own died, hardly waiting for the last breath, was often a matter-of-fact “You got to think of the living now.”

  Standing by the church, he could hear above the murmur of dialect a sound of rushing like the wind in the trees. It was weakness, he told himself, a lack of food. But he thought the roaring in his ears grew louder and on the end knew it for what it must be, Kronos rising in its banks. A kind of terror seized him. Strange that these country folk did not notice. Perhaps they did not want to hear it. They would never believe that where they stood at this moment was to be buried beneath tons of flood and ooze.

  The sound of chaos was plainer now. He remembered he had not as yet got to the heart of the great secret. He had not even spoken to his mother or heard her voice. He had not seen her except at a distance blurred by the impenetrable veil.

  He made hurried steps to the parsonage yard. At the open window he could hear them at the funeral dinner, his grandfather’s table extended by every board, groaning with meat and potatoes, jarred fruits and vegetables, with pies and cakes, with sweets and sours, not a sad occasion but a celebration of victory over life and the grave. He could hear his great-uncles holding forth at the table, striving to be heard above the other, not on their deceased brother-in-law. Due praise and ceremony had been paid him. It was time for the living now. Even Aunt Jess could scarcely get a word in and he didn’t hear his mother try. She would brood most over her father’s passing. She was the youngest, his favorite. The story went that he would let her as a small child play with his hair, sit patiently with his head down thinking about his sermon while she braided the long reddish locks with her tiny fingers. One Sunday evening the church bell had surprised them and not till the congregation snickered at him in the pulpit did he realize that his hair was still plaited. “You, Val!” he had said accusingly, shaking his long finger at her from the pulpit.

  It had started to rain and John Donner pushed in the front door. Here in the hall stood his grandfather’s huge hatrack hung with imposing high hats and other lesser head-gear. He felt the old parsonage atmosphere swimming around him, compounded of woodsmoke and books, of ink and paper, of black horsehair furniture and ancient objects and clothing smells not to be singled out but all contributing their scent to the heavy aroma. Presently he found himself at the dining-room door, and saw them all at the long table before him. These were his own people, his kindred. The blood in the veins of many of them was the same as flowed in his. Most of their forms and faces were familiar as the back of his hand.

  Uncle Timothy’s eagle eye flashed and saw him. His knife and fork went down and his head went up.

  “What do you want, old man?” he called with authority.

  The stranger in the faded coat and unchanged shirt felt like the unbidden guest at the feast.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I was looking for someone.”

  “The name. What’s the name?” Uncle Timothy asked impatiently.

&
nbsp; “There’s no name,” John Donner stammered. “I just wanted to find my mother.”

  “Your mother, old man?” Uncle Timothy glanced across the table for confirmation of his raised eyebrow. “You have hopes of finding her at your age? Well, we can’t help you if you don’t tell us who you are.”

  “I don’t know who I am,” John Donner said. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  There was silence and attention now around the table. He could see his Aunt Teresa, her face all bone and glasses, staring at him.

  “Why, Elijah! Where did you come from? They told me we had buried you today.” She half rose from her chair.

  “Hush, Aunty!” Uncle Peter said, pulling her down. “It’s nobody you know.”

  “But he said we were his dear people and kindred,” Aunt Teresa insisted, although John Donner remembered saying nothing of the sort aloud.

  “You better get him out of here, Peter,” Uncle Dick advised.

  Uncle Peter turned on the stranger his kindly and expansive charm.

  “We’re glad to see you and your smiling face as always, my friend. But we’ll have more time to see you later in the day.”

  “Wait!” Aunt Teresa called. “He asks who he is. Do you remember my ‘Ode to Phaethon’? Howard and Timothy printed it in the Messenger years ago.” Here her voice changed to the high singsong tongue in which she intoned poetry.

  “‘Deep deep in the hills the nest was made.

  Deep, deep in the hills the form was laid.’

  “I think I can recite all twenty-two stanzas. It starts—”

  “Not now, Sister, not now,” Uncle Timothy said hurriedly. “We remember it very well.” He turned to the stranger. “You ask who you are, old man. Your name I don’t know but I can give you a text from Job. The twenty-sixth chapter, I think. ‘He stretcheth out the north over the empty place and hangeth the earth upon nothing.’”