The Waters of Kronos Read online

  There were heavy steps on the stairs. Light rose and fell, spreading into the room.

  “What’s going on in here?” Mr. Bonawitz demanded, lamp in hand.

  “It was getting a little dark,” the old man stammered.

  “Dark, is it?” Mr. Bonawitz said. He was Pennsylvania Dutch but, like most hard-coal miners, spoke with the Welsh-Irish brogue of the Patch. “You ever work inside? Well, then you don’t know what dark is. I don’t care how black it gets up here at night, you can always see a little. Even in the house. Under the ground it’s different. It’s dark already going down the slope. The mountain closes over you and when you get to the eighth level you’re half a mile down. If your lamp goes out and you’re working somewheres alone, you’re lost. You might as well have no eyes. The water drips over you and the rats are waiting to feed on you. You can’t see either one. Everything’s black. You get to thinking there’s no such thing as light left in the world. It’s all gone out.”

  He set the lamp on the bureau, turned it down economically and went on talking about underground workings and abandoned black shafts where the sound of falling water told of abysses far below from which, once fallen into, the victim could never hope to rise.

  When the miner left, the man in bed was conscious only of the precious light, of the tiny yellow flame rising from its brass burner pouring its mysterious substance silently, effortlessly, into every corner. How often when he was sick in bed as a child, this small lamp, or one like it, had been his company and companion. When he partly closed his lids, the light was a star with more points than he could count. If he shut the lids still farther, the points stretched in brilliant golden threads across the room, touching the walls, reaching floor and ceiling, mystical paths brighter than the lamp itself. Opening his eyes wide would bring it back again, but he liked it better with lamp bowl and globe fringed with golden fire as the twigs of a bush are ringed with the sun after a rain.

  The only time the light failed him was once a fortnight when his mother went “to Guild.”

  “Good-by. We’ll be home long before midnight,” she would tell him gaily.

  He knew it would be so. And yet despair seized him even before they left, his father to the store, from where, when it closed, he would call at Guild in time for refreshments and to bring his wife home. Until then the small boy would lie sleepless. He never knew why. Like so many other inexplicable and irrevocable things, it just existed. He knew he wasn’t alone. His brothers were there and Annie downstairs. But the house was a tomb all the same. The number of minutes in an hour, of hours in an evening, appalled him.

  Once eleven o’clock struck, hope in him would start to rise. He would lie listening for the first footfall in the late street. Mrs. Feezer, a little gray woman like a pouter pigeon, always left Guild early, his mother said. He knew her by her very fast steps, pat, pat, pat, down the dark bricks. Now there was silence again. What he waited to hear was his father bidding good night to the Whetstones. His voice a square away was unmistakable, even on winter nights with the window tightly closed, but the child would not let himself wholly believe or rejoice until the front door opened and he heard the other, the indispensable, voice downstairs.

  Then relaxation like a powerful drug bringing with it delectable peace would come over him. It had happened. His mother was home. It was as if she had never been away. In a few minutes her feet would be on the stairs. Shortly she would pass by the door to his bedroom, turning her face to see if he was all right. But almost never did he see her. Even before he heard her hands making pleasant sounds of early readiness for tomorrow’s breakfast he was asleep, and only in the morning would he remember how he had tried to stay awake to see her and hear her special good night in their own secret code. She never thought it strange or queer that when he called, “Good night, Mamma,” he wanted her to answer, “Good night, Johnny,” saying his name with her lips, understanding what he didn’t have to explain to her, that to answer merely “good night” after he had said “Good night, Mamma” would have left their nightly farewell dismembered, unfinished, like a sweet tune broken off in the middle and left to dangle all night in the air.

  The old man lay very quiet after that. It must be her near presence just across the wall, he thought, that brought back the vanished reality. Using the jar that Mrs. Bonawitz had provided, letting the warm liquid pass, he could feel himself as a boy getting up from bed to make his water at night, sleepy, lazy, conscious of family warmth and security about him and the pleasant things that lay ahead on the morrow. He could see in his mind’s eye the wallpaper, not of this room, but of the room across the wall, the green bull-rushes and white water with pond-lily leaves flat on it and a yellow and green frog on every third leaf. How often lying abed had he lived in that wallpaper water, swum in it, hid in the rushes and sunned himself with the frog on the floating leaf.

  Now lying abed again he was dimly conscious of something unseen coming and trying to push the door wider and hold it open so that more of a boy’s world could come in. He scarcely breathed, fearing to lose it and the unutterable sensations that drifted over him like soft enveloping clouds. Those delectable perceptions, how empty of late, how incredibly rich then. He could bring back the certain relish of box scores in his father’s Philadelphia paper, almost to the tasting of ink and wood pulp; the mouth-watering produced by words like candy, gum and ice cream; the savory region of cupboard shelves with the excitement of cinnamon bark and ginger among which eye and nostrils hunted as if for gold. Merely the sight of empty plates set on a fresh table would summon deliciousness, while the sounds and movements of his mother at the kitchen stove around mealtime fanned in him delirious expectation.

  He changed his position in bed painfully. What was the secret of a boy’s transport getting awake in the morning? Could pure joy flow from the simple prospect of shedding confinement in a stuffy house for the endless bright world outside? From the moment of waking, small bursts of light in his brain intoxicated, the sounds of a bird or horse, the glimpse of blue sky through a window, the ample secure look of his mother’s apron at breakfast, the snatched recollection of peaches or chestnuts hanging on certain trees he knew, created for him out of nothing, ripened by sun and season, all without cost, to be had for the taking.

  What astounded him was that he had once taken this whole world of youth and its possessions as natural, common, all these exquisite impressions running along nerve and blood stream. They were ordinary, to be expected and would never cease. That wonderful youth’s staff that came up in him so effortlessly to carry him over bogs and mountains was his own personal nature and property. He had been endowed with it and it would last forever. He questioned it no more than the sun and summer, the freshness of his tissues, his easy conviction that it is, it can, it will be.

  The old man lay scarcely moving, observing the boy in him as a living bird within the shell, marvelling at its sure instinct never to observe itself directly, openly, never to examine, analyze or appraise. When he did that, the joy of being died. When he gave mysterious unseen life the rein again, eyes not shrewd or exacting, but dreamy, receptive to the unseen presence and the way that had been provided, letting the chosen things come instead of choosing and going to them, then the magic reality returned. The sun lying where it shone, the bird flying where it flew, the clouds drifting where they drifted, a thousand green leaves bathing him, all joined in the paean. This was the wisdom of age-old youth and which man lost, never to admit the enemy of life, the adult conceit that pleasure or joy could be created or even improved by man’s cleverness, by taking it apart, measuring it, weighing, judging and comparing it, even thinking about it, only to bar the soul from consummation of all the prepared wonder and delight.

  It was very early when he awoke. A figure stood by his bed. It was Mrs. Bonawitz.

  “You get under!” she scolded him, pulling up the covers. “Ai yai, yai. You’re sopping wet. That’s all Dawdy used to do, sweat, sweat, sweat.”

  “D
o you know the time, Mrs. Bonawitz?” he asked.

  “I know it’s after four. My man just got off to the early miners’ train. And I know you’re a Donner. I’ve been doing the Donners’ wash now for six years. I can tell Harry Donner’s shirts anyplace once he’s wore them. His handkerchiefs, too. His clothes don’t smell like other men’s clothes. You got the same smell.”

  So she had noticed his father’s scent, that peculiar distillation that as a small boy he fancied all men had, a faint tinge of tobacco but more manly, like the resin of some unknown foreign great-girthed tree. He knew his father used nothing but bay rum, something the son never touched, yet Mrs. Bonawitz said that the mysterious scent marked him, too.

  A strong feeling came over him, something like the time as a boy in White Rose Valley he had run four miles home against Gene. By the time they reached the gate his lungs were torn, he could barely move his legs, and he had finished a few feet behind. Just the same when he sank down to the side porch he had felt a clean sense of relief. He didn’t have to run any more. He didn’t have to prove now that as the oldest he was always the stronger. Also the winner, the stronger, was his brother, of the same blood as he. He was beaten but free.

  Now, why should the knowledge that he was after all his father’s son give him a corresponding relief and freedom? Was it his earlier discovery that the son-father-hate legend was fiction, after which it had no more power over him; that he and not his father was the monster; and that with all the dissolution and mortality he saw in himself in the glass, he was still the real and true son of his powerful, ever-living father, the participant of his parent’s blood and patrimony?

  Whether that was it or not, he didn’t actually know, only that he felt peace. He listened. The sound of Kronos’s rising waters had for the moment ceased. He was home or almost home, very close to his own. This was where he had come into the circumambient layer, where as a tireless young animal he had first inhaled the Vale of Union air. Only a wall, the thinnest of walls, separated him from the bosom of his family.

  A rooster crowed and he felt the old boyish joy in the promise of night’s end. He heard the steady beat of miners’ hobnailed boots tramping up the middle of the street. As a boy the sound had troubled him and his dreams. He didn’t know why except it could be the marching, marching, marching, to nothing but blackness underground. Today the rhythmic sound brought back only the pleasant memory of Miss Jones, a summer guest of the Wilberts, who of an afternoon used to sit on the Wilbert porch watching the black-faced men with tin kettles and buckets over their shoulders striding from the miners’ train.

  “I love to see the colliers come home,” she would say in her clipped brogue. “It takes me back to my childhood in Wales.”

  He lay in ease, quietly remembering. “Oh, I’m so comfortable,” he would say to Mrs. Bonawitz when she brought his breakfast. He could hear her coming now and with her step the sound of padding and nail-clicking on the stairs. Then she came with the yellow tray and behind her, his bushy tail slowly waving with each step, was Sandy, the old-time shepherd dog on the snapshot in his pocket.

  “He belongs to the Donners,” she said. “He comes over every morning for something to eat.”

  Before he reached the bed, the big dog stopped. The hair on the back of his neck rose and he growled menacingly. Almost at once they heard a rapping on the front door. Mrs. Bonawitz left, the dog galloping ungainly after. John Donner wasn’t aware when the woman returned. He looked up and saw her there and knew instantly something had happened. There was a look in her face and eyes that women have when their knowledge exceeds yours.

  “It was somebody for you,” she said.

  “My mother?” he asked eagerly.

  “It was a man.”

  “But nobody knows I’m here except Mr. Bonawitz and the doctor,” he protested.

  “You said your name was John Donner. Well, that’s who he said he wanted, the old man, not the boy.”

  The first finger of apprehension touched him.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “He told me he’s come to take you home.”

  Something in those simple words terrified him.

  “Did you tell him I can’t walk?”

  “He says you don’t need to. Don’t you have a machine you came here with? Well, it brought you here and it’ll carry you off, he claims, without your having to do a thing.”

  The old man got himself under control.

  “Was he light or dark?”

  “He was dark,” she said.

  “Did he give his name?”

  “He said you wouldn’t know his name but he has ‘Guard’ printed on his cap.”

  John Donner lay there trying to meet it, to think it through. Somewhere within himself he felt a great yielding, as if the sum and substance of countless hopes, strivings, struggles, answers and resolves had suddenly subsided and grown still. He could go now, if he had to. He had found a part of what he sought. He had learned the identity of the frightener, that it was not his father. He saw the father a little clearer now and that he was his son. As for the rest that he and other men hunted all their lives, was he never to find it? Was it part of the great mystery, of yesterday and tomorrow, of night and the day star, of the nameless and unspoken? Would he never stand again in the room of the photograph with the light streaming under the closed door? For forty years he had wanted to open that door and see for himself what lay beyond.

  Through the wall he heard the strong living strokes of his father’s hammer nailing up some box or barrel intended for the new house in River Grove now denied him. The sound brought back another song of his father’s.

  I’m a pilgrim

  And I’m a stranger.

  I can tarry, I can tarry

  But a night.

  Its words to him had always been mystical and obscure, like the communion hymns in church when men and women moved like sad prisoners up the aisle. When he was very young and his father’s voice came to the lines “Do not detain me, for I am going, to where the streamlets of life are flowing. I’m a pilgrim, and I’m a stranger. I can tarry, I can tarry but a night,” it had been as if there were hidden reservations in his father’s relations to them, secret commitments he was hinting at, that he only “tarried” with them for tonight, wasn’t really someone they knew but a “stranger” whom they could detain no longer, and tomorrow he would vanish from whence he had come, leaving neither trace nor support but only a void and the great enigma.

  Today the mysticism and secrecy had lifted from the words and it seemed the simplest and veriest truth his father had sung. Lying there he was aware of a clarity in something else that had been incomprehensible before. When he was a young man leaving home for his first job, his father had embarrassed him.

  “Before you go, let us pray,” he had said. The young man had had to kneel down with the rest of the family and hear his father go through the long painful formula. He remembered some of the words.

  “Bless the member of this household setting forth from our midst to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Be with him and let thy face shine upon him and be gracious unto him while we are absent one from the other.” The son’s name was never mentioned but it had abashed him all the same. Each time he came home on a visit he had to go through the ordeal again before “setting forth.” He had thought it sanctimonious, unnecessary, that it shamed his young dignity and sensibilities.

  But strangely in memory today, its pious flavor had fled, leaving a ribbed testament of family bonds, an undeclared but indubitable declaration of belonging, a circle of security, protection and love. He had once thought it empty practice. Now he could feel substance in those distant prayers and kneelings. He had thought the transaction born of the church, of the gloom his father carried with him, a dark cloud brought into the room at parting to chill and frighten. Now he could see that the cloud came from elsewhere, from uncontrollable sources, that his father had fought that cloud all his life with what forces at
his command, and they were more powerful forces than the boy had realized, born of the strong fiber and convictions of his time.

  He believed that his father would come and kneel down by his bed if he asked for him. But to be prayed for as an old stranger would not be the same. His mother’s presence would be something else. Her prayers were tender, personal, like the songs she sang, “There were three ships come sailing in,” and “I’ve a letter from thy sire, baby mine.” He couldn’t be a stranger to her. Something in her intimate being would know. She need only come into the room and invisible currents would light up between them. He could scarcely wait. She had promised yesterday that he would see her “tomorrow” and she had never told him a falsehood yet.