The Waters of Kronos

by Conrad Richter

  He gave a triumphant glance as if to say, does that settle you? but John Donner stood unsatisfied.

  “You talk in riddles,” he said. “My mother would never do that. Would you excuse her and let her speak to me in the hall?”

  They exchanged glances. He could barely see his mother, hidden behind Uncle Howard’s shoulder, but he thought he caught a glimpse of her warm concerned eye.

  “Come back in an hour, my friend,” Uncle Peter said. “We’ll have more time to talk to you then.”

  “In an hour none of us will be here,” the old stranger said. “We’ll be gone forever, never to see each other again.”

  A murmur of protest, almost of horror, circled the table. All eyes were fixed on him.

  “It’s that cracked old man that came to the house last evening!” Aunt Jess broke the spell.

  Uncle Peter pushed back his chair.

  “I’ll take care of him,” he promised and scraped his way behind the chair backs, wiping his mustache with his napkin as he went. At the door he hooked arms fraternally with the old stranger and forced him gently but firmly down the hall toward the kitchen.

  “Don’t send me away,” the old man pleaded. “Not till I see her.”

  Uncle Peter smiled his friendly benevolent smile under his scraggly mustache.

  “Your mother isn’t here, old man,” he testified. “No matter what notion you may have in your head. You must take my word for it. We are rational Christian people. This is our own family. It’s a solemn and affectionate occasion. We are together for a few short hours before going our separate ways. You don’t want to spoil our grief with any untoward act.”

  “I must be going my separate way soon, too,” the old stranger said.

  “Are you hungry, old man?” Uncle Peter asked. “If you come along to the back porch, I’m sure the ladies in the kitchen can fix up a plate for you.”

  “No, thank you,” John Donner said. He would accept no crusts from the back door of his grandfather’s house as did Mike Whalen, Georgie Ellenbaum and other tramps, picking scraps from old plates on the kitchen step. He waited for Uncle Peter to exhaust his badge of kindliness, to be a victim of the Scarlett sarcasm that ran in his blood. Once as a youth John Donner had asked his Uncle Peter a favor. His father had sold Uncle Peter groceries at cost from the store, packing and shipping them in boxes and barrels with his own hands. Later when they had to sell his mother’s sideboard with the claw feet to pay a bill, the boy had secretly written to Uncle Peter, who had a big church in Cumberland County, begging him to find his father a church paying more than four hundred and fifty dollars a year. His Uncle Peter’s letter in reply had been all kindliness except for the final line, “Good-by, John, and remember to keep your nose clean!”

  Now by the peculiar set of Uncle Peter’s mouth under the mustache and by the forced kindly crinkling around the eye he guessed that the Scarlett sarcasm and rebuke were not long in coming. Before they reached the lips there was a movement from the dining-room doorway and Uncle Timothy appeared, unruffled and commanding.

  “Let me handle him, Peter. You remember what Christ said, ‘This kind comes not forth save by prayer and fasting.’ You go back to your dinner and I will try to deliver him.”

  “I am one of your own flesh and blood!” the old stranger protested. “Look at me. Don’t you see the family resemblance? They always said I had your nose—”

  “Silence!” Uncle Timothy commanded, holding out two imperious hands, palms upward, and John Donner remembered how Cousin Georgia in her seventies used to imitate that word and gesture. She and her young friends, she said, would be singing around the piano when their house guest, “Uncle Scarlett,” as she called him, would suddenly appear from the library. “Silence!” he would call imperiously, and when they reluctantly subsided would recite how he and Aunt Frederica had heard Jenny Lind sing at Castle Garden.

  Georgia used to say that Johnny had also inherited his restless pacing from “Uncle Scarlett,” that the man had worn a path through their library and dining room repeating to himself, “It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right, but the bread is stale, stale, stale.” What he meant they were never able to decipher, for the table bread was fresh daily. They thought it must have some mystical or religious allusion, and John Donner used to wish he could remember the uncommon old man more than his bearded photograph and the bold handwriting in several books on his father’s shelves, “Merry Christmas to Vallie’s boys from Uncle Timothy.” Well, here he was in the flesh to be seen and savored.

  “Why don’t you leave us in peace now?” Uncle Timothy suggested. “You may come back and tell us your burdens later.”

  “I can’t,” the stranger said. “The waters are rising to cover us all.”

  “Water?” Uncle Timothy demanded, the Scarlett sarcasm in full flower in his lip. “Do you fancy yourself Noah called by God Almighty to save us from the flood?”

  “No,” the old man told him sadly. “You will never be saved, neither you nor Aunt Frederica nor Uncle Howard and Aunt Martha. Your bodies will be buried in three hundred and ninety-eight feet of water and all they’ll ever find of you to take up to higher land will be a bucket of maggoty dust and a few shinbones.”

  Uncle Timothy drew back.

  “You have a profane and irreverent spirit, old man. Why don’t you go now and leave us in peace?”

  “I will go then,” John Donner said. “But not in peace.”

  Uncle Timothy insisted that he leave by the back door. He himself stood on the back porch to see that the visitor did not immediately return.

  The ejected old man passed through his grandfather’s iron gate. It was drizzling now but the sound of rushing water still deafened his ears. He must go to his mother’s house before it was too late. He had seen little enough of it last evening.

  For a long time he stood under the crisping fanlike leaves of the horse chestnut, saluting the old double house with its warm yellow clapboards. Intimate boyhood smells rose to his nostrils, the dank odor of bricks that seldom if ever dried out, the sharpness of sulphur from some kitchen coal stove, the musty scent of the nearby alleyway that never saw the sun. But it was the odor of wash water in the little gutters down the alleyway and across the sidewalk that affected him most, bringing back a long-forgotten memory of being carried back here as a child, from where he did not know, but suddenly feeling safe when they reached these certain reassuring smells of family and home. Inside of him something melted, tensions buried so deep he doubted they had been unknotted since he left this place.

  He started up the front steps. It was the same old porch, narrow, shoe-scarred, without a break or partition between the two houses. He peered in the front window under the half-drawn shade. It was like looking into an old-time Easter egg at a scene so faithful and real he could almost step into it, the golden-upholstered parlor chairs and sofa, the silken-lined memento catchall on the wall, the framed engraving of the battle of Waterloo, the crokinole board against the arch and in the second room the mahogany-veneered sideboard with claw feet that had come down to his mother when Ma had brought her own furniture from the Forge.

  He could hardly keep from pushing open the front door. Over the threshold would be the reddish Brussels hall carpet with an extra square on top for wear in front of the door; the lesser hatrack and umbrella stand; the cannonball door-stop that Pap-pa had picked up on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg after the battle.

  When he looked again, far up the street people were streaming out from the parsonage. It gave him a sense of added excitement and suspense. His family would be coming now. He became aware presently that he leaned against the house, that he couldn’t stand erect, that he was slipping and couldn’t stop. It was like something he had once seen old Carson Rarick do in his father’s store. It had been the old man’s ninety-third birthday and he had tramped over town with his crutches to celebrate with his friends. Now while leaning against the counter he had started to sink. He went down slowly, al
most imperceptibly, smiling, without a sign of alarm or request for help so that no one held out a hand to stop him. It was as if he were doing it himself, on purpose, was tired of being on his feet and wanted to rest a little on the floor where he presently found himself, his head propped up against the lower part of the counter, still fully conscious, smiling and content as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to be lying on a store floor.

  John Donner did not go that way. He wasn’t smiling and he felt himself losing consciousness. His last thought was relief that his father couldn’t keep him out of the house now. He would be lying at the doorstep when they came. They would have to take him in. Then he must have blacked out, for he didn’t hear a sound when he fell.

  Shortly afterward he became aware of people carrying him with difficulty into the house. Even with his eyes closed he recognized the old-time presence around him. A great peace drifted through his veins. He was home at last, back in his father’s house with his brothers about him and his mother at his side to take care of him and of every problem that rose, as when he was a child.

  Then he opened his eyes and bitter disappointment seized him. He was still outside the longed-for place. The woman gazing at him with black eyes was not his mother but Mrs. Bonawitz, pronounced Boonawitz in Unionville, their neighbor on the other side. For years she had done the Donner wash.

  “How do you feel now?” she asked sharply, as if he had committed some uncalled-for act at her door.

  “I must go,” he said and tried to get up.

  “Lay still,” she ordered. “It’s lucky my man stayed home from the mines for the funeral. He’s gone for the doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” he protested.

  “Wait till he comes before you talk so big,” she told him. “My father fell like that when he had his first stroke and he had to have the doctor till he died.”

  She went on relentlessly, telling him all the intimate and depressing details of sickness, which, especially when fatal, obsess the simple and primitive. His only defense was to close his eyes as if asleep and not open them until he felt a practiced hand on his wrist and looked up into the familiar face of Dr. Sypher, bearded, calm and unreadable. These were the same grave eyes that had watched his grandmother and grandfather leave this world and himself brought into it, not in the house next door but in the north front room of Aunt Teresa’s brick house on Mifflin Street. The doctor’s eyes were fixed away from him, on the face of his large gold watch in his hand. He pocketed it presently and laid his hairy head with its prophylactic drugstore smell on the chest. Then he sat back and gazed at his patient speculatively as with all the time in the world.

  “Is there any house around here where you could be put to bed?”

  John Donner thought carefully.

  “No, sir.”

  “Nobody around Unionville know you?”

  Yes, the stranger wanted to say, one did, an old horse, but he better not say that. He had been called mad already.

  “I wouldn’t like to ask them,” he explained.

  The doctor mused.

  “If I let you go home, how long would it take?”

  Home? Why, it would take only a minute. But no, the doctor must mean his other home, the one that seemed unreal today, clouded with mist and very far away, somewhere in the morning fogs of the Western Sea.

  “I don’t remember now,” he put him off.

  “Could we telegraph your family to come and get you?”

  The older man kept silent. How could they do that? How long would it take a telegram today to reach his family tomorrow? The house and street address did not even exist as yet. How could they ever find him here?

  “What you ask is impossible,” he said.

  “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” Dr. Sypher asked. “Would I know your name?”

  “I’m a Donner,” the stranger said reluctantly.

  The name produced instant reaction.

  “Any relation to Harry next door?”

  “Distantly,” the old man murmured. “He doesn’t remember me. I saw him at the store last evening.” He felt his weak position, almost that of an impostor. “I’m a little more closely related to her.”

  “She was a Morgan,” the doctor said. “I didn’t know of any Donners on her side.”

  “Yes, there were three or four of us Donners related to her,” the old man insisted. Then suddenly: “I wish I could see her. Do you think she would come?”

  “Just how are you related?” the doctor persisted.

  The old man sank back.

  “It was such a long time ago.” He closed his eyes. It was no use. It was all so difficult, complicated and painful to explain the simplest reality. He heard the doctor speak to Mrs. Bonawitz.

  “You might ask Mrs. Donner. But I’m not sure he knows. He’s pretty weak and his memory’s affected. I shouldn’t like to move him today. Could you possibly give him a bed tonight? He may come around and remember who he is in the morning. Then we can telegraph and get him home.”

  Mr. Bonawitz protested.

  “She’s had too much sickness already, Doc.”

  “You wouldn’t put him out on the street,” she said angrily, turning on her husband. “He reminds me of Dawdy. He was out of his head a little at the end, too.” She turned to the doctor. “I’ll keep him for one night.”

  With the doctor helping, they half lifted, half pushed and drew him up the narrow stairs. In the back room they undressed him, then pulled down over his head a starched nightshirt such as he had seen his father wear. They laid him on the rope bed and left.

  He lay there quietly enjoying the clean sheets, listening to the rain on the roof, the slow drip to the alleyway below. He remembered as a small boy standing at the front window next door watching raindrops such as these exploding in a sidewalk puddle that wasn’t really a puddle but a sea with waves, winds, a distant shore and Christ asleep in the boat. That afternoon he had gone with his brothers to paddle in the river brown with flowing soil, the water warm from its passage over the warm earth, the air rank with the smells of river and banks. Their clothes lay in a dry spot under the trees. It must have been soon thereafter he had lain sick in bed one day aware for the first time of the wide rain system advancing, the thickening clouds, the rain starting, increasing, the parched patches of hairy moss in his mind drinking and greening, the dried-out bogs reviving, the forest mold soaking, the bark of trees blackening and rainy-weather springs flowing. Ever after he had been a spectator of the cosmic forces bringing sea change to the dying earth. Why couldn’t man, he wondered, observe so dispassionately the advance of other cosmic forces, those of the greater change, noting first their signals, then their approach, feeling their nearness, their presence, their strong arms not made with hands carrying him out of reach of the power of man’s mind to know or understand?

  The low ceiling here was exactly like the ceiling in the back room across the wall, sloping a little toward the rear, with the paper stained over the back window where water had once seeped in. But there were two beds over there. Gene and Timmy slept in the other and one night after he was asleep they had taken the shepherd’s crook from the wall and “stirred apple butter,” he being the kettle. Waking, he had tried to kill them, throwing with all his might the silver-lead rock Uncle Dick had brought from Colorado, missing them and mutilating his mother’s picture, The Wedding Procession by Delacroix that she had got from Larkin’s.

  “It’s the Scarlett temper,” his father had said, although he had something of a temper himself without benefit of Scarlett blood. Uncle Howard said the Scarletts had been French, very sensuous and high strung, and Cousin Myra, who was ambitious, believed that they had noble blood, which was what made them so high-minded and demanding. She said she had heard of an old document in which the name was spelled Scarlatti. John Donner knew later that this was an Italian name. He suspected that Myra had been duped and sometimes doubted he had French blood at all, but he never doubted the Scarle
tt temperament and wildness, the sudden rush of desire to let go, come what may, to do the violent and forbidden. He remembered an overwhelming impulse as a very small child to jump on a moving coal train, and when a little older to “borrow” a neighbor’s twelve-gauge shotgun to shoot quail he had seen crossing the road. He had begged, wept, demanded of his mother. The quail were in Mr. Ulrich’s meadow right now waiting to be shot. She daren’t stop him. The world would come to an end. Compelling pressure rose in him like flood water tearing at a dam. His will couldn’t be thwarted.

  His mother had understood. She knew just how to calm and gradually check him. He had seen the same fire at rare times in her, the head up, face alive, the usually calm gray eyes shining with the deviltry of some witty rejoinder or daring enjoyment. Most were agreed it came from the Scarlett blood but all had a different name for it. Aunt Teresa called it “the lambent flame of the Scarletts”; Uncle Timothy, “the Scarlett genius”; Aunt Jess, “going off on a Scarlett tangent” or, when she felt kindly toward the inheritor, “the Scarlett mind.” “You’ve got the Scarlett mind,” she had told her nephew after he had written his first book. He wasn’t sure if it was irony or a compliment, and came to the conclusion it must be both, chiefly the latter with just enough of the former to keep him from getting a “swelled head.” His mother seldom, if ever, spoke of the Scarletts. She just said “Mother” or “Grandfather” or “Aunty” and you knew whom she meant.

  “Is there anything you want?” Mrs. Bonawitz asked suddenly, coming into the room.

  “I’d like,” he said in a low voice, “if I could see my mother.”

  “Yes, I guess all of us would,” Mrs. Bonawitz told him.

  “I’d like,” he persisted, “to see Mrs. Donner.”

  “You asked that once before,” Mrs. Bonawitz reminded. “If I see her in the yard I’ll tell her.”

  “Will you ask her,” he begged, “if she’d let me see the house? Tell her I’ve come a long way. Tell her I’d be very grateful. I wouldn’t be any trouble. Tell her I used to live there once.”