The Waters of Kronos Read online

  “When was that?” Mrs. Bonawitz asked suspiciously.

  “It was a long time ago,” he murmured, slipping back.

  He could see rank disbelief in her eyes.

  “Now you go to sleep,” she told him.

  He tried to do as she said, aware how dependent the old were on the younger, how they must submit, put will behind them, let things take their course. Through his dozing he could hear voices downstairs, first one then the other, sometimes mingling, going on and on, hers sharp, short, sarcastic, his deeper, heavier, ominous. It sounded like quarreling but John Donner knew his townspeople better. Once he had asked his returning Grandfather Donner, “How’s everybody in Reading?” “I don’t know everybody in Reading,” his grandfather had snapped. And yet he had one of the softest hearts in Unionville. No tramp dare go away from his door hungry. John Donner’s own father would sound angry and embroiled at a distance talking to the boy’s mother at home. If in the midst of it the doorbell rang, he would compose himself for a moment, then go to the door singing a cheerful hymn to correct any wrong impression on the caller.

  Just the same there was something in those voices, in the harsh Pennsylvania German tone and testiness, that aroused deep down in John Donner a kind of terror. It reminded him of something, something monstrous, of some other voice, one that gave him a feeling of indescribable fear and repulsion. Whose voice it was buried down there he didn’t know. Perhaps if he knew he would know why he had come back and what he sought.

  Lying there with closed eyes, he tried to find some clue to the identity of the frightener. He let the remembered horror hang over him, not too painfully, just enough to bring back figures and faces that moved through the back of his brain, shadowy forms, but he thought he recognized them well enough. He must have been very small the first time his mother had taken him to the butcher shop but he could still see the wolfish grin on the man coming out of the door who told him, “You better watch out they don’t keep you and cut you up with the meat.” For several years he couldn’t see meat chopped up without feeling his own thighs and breast under the chopper with the thighs and breasts of the harmless beasts of the field.

  He was a little older but not much when he went with the other boys of his Sunday-school class to see Tuck Helwig the day before his funeral. They didn’t call it viewing then. Something in him dreaded moving closer to the small active body he had known so well, now lying cold and still in the terrifying small white casket. When he shrank back, an old man, probably not as old as he was now, had chided him in the dialect, “Sei net so bong. Er schtinkt net.” It wasn’t the rebuke but the coarseness to his young friend that troubled him and to this day he couldn’t smell the overpowering sweetness of carnations without faint nausea.

  Now other faces were floating into his mind. As a boy he had found something manly in Pennsylvania Dutch outdoor men, like Cap Ridenour marching at the head of Company C, Fourth Regiment, down Kronos Street in his broad white stripes, or Guy Hains and Frank Grebble, noted hunters, pigeon fanciers and dead shots, who knew every foot of the Shade Mountain. He had looked up to them admiringly till he went to a pigeon shoot across the railroad and saw Frank Grebble tear out the eye of a live pigeon before putting it into the trap, burning its rear hard with his lighted cigar so it might fly erratic with pain and be the harder to bring down.

  But the face that hung darkest in his mind was that of the woman on Canal Street where you came down the bridge over the railroad, a dark dried-out face with eyes even blacker than Mrs. Bonawitz’s, eyes that took hold of you like flypaper and wouldn’t let go. Townspeople had seen her turn into a black cat and go through a knothole no bigger than your thumb. When old Mose Brant had shot his cow that wouldn’t give milk, Dr. Sypher had had to pick shot out of Katarina Messer’s buttocks. One morning her neighbor on one side heard her talking to her neighbor on the other. “I dreamt you hung yourself last night,” she said to Mrs. Trumbo, who had seen much trouble, and two days hence Ray Trumbo, who lived in Turkeytown, had to cut down his mother from a rafter. Most of the young people hated to pass Katarina’s house, especially at night or even in the daytime when they knew she was sitting at the window watching them. There was one way to protect yourself, the orthodox exorcism, “Kissmice,” and hardly a boy or girl in Unionville who didn’t say it aloud or under the breath and keep saying it religiously, “Kissmice, kissmice, kissmice, kissmice,” until he or she was safely past and free.

  The old man saw Mrs. Bonawitz come into the room with a yellow wooden tray. She propped him up with a heavy quilt folded behind the bolster. On the tray were greasy pannhas, which the uninitiated call scrapple, fried potatoes, plain bread and brown coffee boiled in the customary pot seldom emptied of grounds till no more could be added. He remembered what his mother would bring him as a child when bedridden, a soft-boiled egg, delicately browned toast and cambric tea.

  “Feed me, Mamma!” he would say and she would put the sulphur-tarnished spoon with some egg to his wide-open mouth, this in compensation for being sick, giving him with each bite an indescribably warm shining look of the eyes.

  “Now you got to eat,” Mrs. Bonawitz said bruskly, “if you want to stay out of the bury hole.”

  There was the sound of a door downstairs and of voices, then Mr. Bonawitz’s heavy tones in the dialect from the kitchen.

  “I guess you don’t understand Dutch,” she told him. “When I was out back I told Johnny Donner you were related to his mom and wanted to see her. My man just called that Johnny’s over now. I told him to send him up.”

  “Johnny Donner?” the old man asked, struggling to sit erect, his one thought how he would look.

  She seemed amused.

  “You don’t need to mind. He’s only a boy,” she said.

  He heard indistinct sounds in the hall below, then steps on the stairs, coming closer and closer, two or three treads at a time. Could it be, he wondered, that he had ever had a step so light and effortless? A boy rounded the door jamb and stood in the doorway. His eyes fled from the strange old man to the woman.

  “I told her, Mrs. Bonawitz. She said she couldn’t make it any more today on account of the funeral and company but he can see her tomorrow.” He said it quickly, almost as one word, and moved to go.

  “Wait!” the old man called hoarsely and the boy turned with uneasy reluctance. Was it possible, the man thought, that he had once been slender, fair-skinned and light-minded as this, his blood vessels new and pliable, his eyes like spring water, his face fresh as a girl’s? “Speak—say something!” he enjoined himself, then aloud, “How is your mother?”

  “She’s all right,” the boy said as if with surprise that the old man would ask about her.

  “Does she still bake your favorite graham bread and baked beans?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?” the man said. “Don’t you know? Don’t you like it?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s all right.”

  “And the lamp in your room? Does she still keep it lighted for you at night?”

  The boy stirred uncomfortably.

  “Yes, sir,” he said and started to turn.

  “Wait!” the stranger begged.

  He must be careful, he told himself. He daren’t frighten him away. A hundred things he would like to say. Did he appreciate his mother, his youth? If not, for God’s sake beat the ancient method of the zodiac, the slow unwieldy scheme of awareness after deprivation, the cruel system that taught you most beautifully and effectively when it was too late. On second thought, badgering would do no good. You didn’t learn the issues of life by being taught, threatened, reminded, coaxed. You could so learn the lesser arts and graces that never entered your real being but were a kind of mark on the forehead that gave you entrance to doors in life and in the end mattered nothing, like wooden beads on the abacus that never actually counted anything but zero.

  What he wanted, he mustn’t forget, was the secret, the final answer to the search. Now was his extraordin
ary chance. If anyone knew, it must be the child, himself, back here at the source.

  “Will you listen, boy?” he asked hoarsely, earnestly. “I want to ask you something. Will you promise to think?”

  “Why, ye-ss,” the boy said uneasily, staring at him.

  “Do you ever have nightmares? Don’t answer me. I know you do. What I want to ask you is did you ever hear voices—after you’re awake? I mean—that remind you of something, perhaps somebody in your nightmare?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” the boy stammered but there was fear in his eyes.

  “You’re surprised that I know? You needn’t be. Just tell me something—have you ever had a notion whose voice it is?”

  “No, sir,” he stammered.

  “But you don’t like the voice?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re afraid of it—of the person?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you don’t know who it is?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I think I’m sure.”

  “Then sometimes you think you know?”

  “No, sir,” the boy said, but he whispered it.

  “You mean you have no idea at all?” the man persisted. “You never had an idea who this person is? Not even the faintest idea? Not even now?”

  This time the boy did not answer.

  “Then you have some idea who it is,” the man declared. He leaned forward, trembling violently. This was the moment of revelation. “You must tell me now who this person is. I command you.”

  “I can’t,” the boy cried and turned and ran down the stairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Sea

  The old man sat there. He must compose himself. He dare not look at Mrs. Bonawitz. She must think him a madman, a fool, or both. He felt rather than saw her take the tray, heard her shoes on the stairs, then snatches of what she related caustically to her man in the kitchen.

  The guttural of their distant voices troubled him again, rising and falling, reminding him of the hidden enemy. Who was this undisclosed foeman whose heavy tones had the power to chill his blood, to suck light and color from the day? The boy had given no clue to his identity, had refused to answer, and yet it was obvious that he knew him. The one they both feared and hated was not far from here.

  Through the walls for a moment he heard his father’s voice, impatient, tinged with gloom. No, it couldn’t be he, John Donner told himself. Why, no man was liked more warmly over town and countryside including Broad Mountain. His jovial hackneyed sayings that the sons groaned over were hailed in other households, welcome everywhere.

  “Good night, don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he’d call after young and less young folks on their way to bed. “I’ll see you in the morning, in the morning by the bright light, when Gabriel blows his trumpet in the morning.” How often had John Donner heard that! No guest was more welcome at another’s table or strove harder to earn his keep. His father would sit pleased as Punch at his place, his napkin tucked into his collar, his plate attacked with gusto, his praise for food and hostess without stint or sparing. He had a well-used phrase for every occasion. Let his hostess ask if he wanted water, and he would answer heartily, “Water for me, bright water for me and wine for the trembling debauchee,” and when she had put down the glass in front of him, “Your kindness is only exceeded by your good looks.” When he could eat no more he would decline with a beaming “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, any more would be a superabundance.” Aunt Jess, as well as Matt and Polly, thought “the world and all” of him.

  And yet John Donner remembered his father a different man at home. As a boy he had never given it much thought. After all, there was little need for company manners among your family in your own house. He could see his father in his mind now, a dogged figure sitting at the head of the kitchen table, speaking little, insulated, stern, preoccupied with heavy thoughts. Once or twice he had insisted they had forgotten to say grace.

  “We didn’t pray!” he rebuked them after they had started to eat.

  “We did!” the family protested but he silenced them with a look seldom seen on fathers today, the glance of authority and reproach that said, “Do you mean I pray and don’t know it, like the heathen?” Propping his right arm again on the table, he lowered his forehead to his hand and waited for them to lay down forks and spoons and dutifully hear him go through the familiar phrases once more. As a guest in another’s house his prayer was elaborate as befitted a Sunday-school superintendent aspiring to the ministry, filled with Biblical phrases, “handy with preacher talk,” as Annie used to say of him, the supplication closing with the words, “Bless these bounties prepared by kind hands, feed us with the bread of Heaven and at last save us. We ask it in His name, Amen.” At home there must have been no special bounties or need, for the end was shortened simply to “Bless this food and us to thy service, Amen.”

  There was a difference also in his father’s singing at home and abroad. Standing by the piano at Aunt Jess’s or in some other house, his favorite, “Tired, Oh, Yes, So Tired, Dear,” was just a musical performance, a “rendition” as it was politely called in Guild circles.

  Tired, oh, yes, so tired, dear.

  The day has been so long.

  Sweet smiling faces thronged my side

  When the early sunshine shone.

  But they grew tired long ago

  And they softly sank to rest

  With folded hands and brow of snow

  On the cold Earth Mother’s breast.

  At home the same words by the same singer poured out feelingly to his own ears seemed a personal confession, a weariness with life, bringing the odor of grave clothes into the house.

  There was another of his father’s favorites that troubled the boy:

  Near, near thee, my son,

  Stands the old wayside cross,

  Like a gray friar cowled

  In lichens and moss.

  The rest of the family paid it scant attention. It was just the Lichens and Moss Song. But to the child, John Donner, there was something else. Lear, a play he read with more liking as a boy than a man, didn’t have it. But when in later years he read Sophocles he recognized a fellow doomsman in Oedipus. Oedipus would understand how he felt, the omen of the unfavorable words, the foreboding chorus, the fateful way his father drew it all out, the inescapable doom that lay close ahead, the dread of which would evaporate only in the sunlight of tomorrow morning.

  Tomorrow morning was a long way off tonight. Already shadows were taking over the room.

  “Mrs. Bonawitz? Could I have a light?” he called.

  There was no answer and he called again. Where in God’s name was that woman? As a younger man he would have leaped up and got a light for himself. But as a younger man the dark wouldn’t have bothered him. Why was it that baseless anxiety attacked age and childhood, least able to fend for themselves? It was one of the miscalculations of creation, or was it? Could there be any trouble next door, he wondered. Might Mrs. Bonawitz have been called to his mother? He remembered as a boy seeing her there during the mysterious attacks his mother had suffered much of her life. As the oldest son he had more than once sent Gene for the doctor and then sat with her, letting her grip his hands against the pain. When he held her wrists he noticed her pulse very fast. Every few beats it fell like a wounded doe. The doctor had called the attacks acute indigestion. John Donner guessed they would be heart attacks today, perhaps something else tomorrow.

  “What’s the matter?” he shouted bitterly. “Why doesn’t somebody answer me?”

  After a moment he heard a harsh voice repeating the impatient words in his ear. He listened and his flesh crept. It was the voice he had feared since childhood, had sought and never found, heavy, ominous, dragging up with it intimations of terror from the deep. Now, how had the voice of the frightener come into this room? Surely it was not his own that he heard, still hanging in the air? Why, they always sa
id he had a voice like his father’s, a rich singing voice, a lot of vibrant timbre in it, a speaking voice that “carried over ‘long distance.’”

  He struggled to sit up in bed. Through the gloom he could see a face staring back at him through the mirror of the oaken bureau. Could such be himself, this monster, the hair cruelly thin, the skull revealed, the coarsened smear of a face, the confusion of features once so indubitably his own, now run together as if returning to primordial chaos, the thickened shapelessness of cheeks and jaws, he who had been such a slim youth? At the same time he thought he could see staring back at him from the face most of those ancient kinfolk he had known as a boy, in person or hanging in heavy frames on the wall, the thick short neck of his choleric Grandfather Donner, the trap of a mouth of his Great-Grandmother Stricker, his Great-Uncle Timothy’s arrogant nose, the bitter look in the eyes of his Grandmother Morgan who had to die before she had her children raised, and all the other grim, forbidding features of ancestors he couldn’t name but who had looked aged at forty. He had thought them long since dead, buried, disintegrated. Instead they had lived on, endured. They were the real survivors. So long as his flesh had flourished, his vitality had kept them down. Now that it had waned, they had come up out of him like a den of turtles swarming over a rock.

  He remembered again how the boy had looked at him when asked the identity of the frightener. So that was why he wouldn’t reply! It was the great deception practiced by man on himself and his fellows, the legend of hate against the father so the son need not face the real and ultimate abomination, might conceal the actual nature of the monster who haunted the shadows of childhood, whose name only the soul knew and who never revealed himself before the end when it was found that all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth. Even the creator of the hate-against-the-father legend must in his bitter later years have guessed the truth.